Aphids and Nature's Wonders

Well he's probably riding around on a Mongolian pony all day, you know, get you start thinking about infinity as you get bounced around on there you're wrong about the show where we are celebrating Pride Month with rainbows and Lulu Miller. Lulu Hello. You are a great legend of podcasts and A bisexual seagull right here with us. That is my bio. I held out a fry and he flapped right over. Exactly. You shown a French fry on the moon. And here I am because a couple prides ago we did the we did the very homosexual and bisexual seagulls whichich it's actually a good timeway that everyone should listen to So I thought yeah, I could bring you some more queer weres in the form of A rainbow And you know, I feel a little sheepish about rainbows because I'm like I feel like part of what's so lovely about you're wrong about is, you know, you get into these like Dark. twisted corners and maybe everyone thinks rainbows are just gonna be puffy, frivolous candy. But we're big fans of puff and candy. Okay, but don't worry because I would argue rainbows much like rats are maligned and misunderstood. Inevitably, you know? Yeah. L for example I feel like I'm larrying. tonight, rainbows. Do they really have a pot of gold at the end? or is it all a bunch of hokeum? Let's listen to Leon and Des Moines So well first first of all, what what are your associations with rainbows? An any and all quick gut? I frreaking love rainbows. and you know, the other day and I don't think I even said this to you, I was driving to my mom's house and I saw a rainbow and then I realized it was a double rainbow and it was also storming and there was a U what's the noun for a piece of lightning? A bolt of lightning. Oh my go, Sarah. And I saw a little lightning bolt next to the frickaking rainbow, Lulu. Wow. that I mean ye, the power, the luck. It was really cool. It was like driving into a Led Zeppelin cover the amount of atmospheric things Yeah, that's great. That's great. Okay, so for you, I don't know. when when what do you I don't know, what do you What do you think about with rainbows? Where do you usually you see them in the wild? What do they stir in you Well I I just think they're great. and I think they often create a feeling in me of like, what did it feel? Because I was raised by two parents who lik to explain things to me and generally did a pretty good job. So with rainbows, they're like, well, it's because the, you know, there's like moisture in the air and it acts as a prism and it makes this big rainbow. And then you could have that demonstrated to you by the fact that You know, you I mean, we didn't have this when I was a kid, but today, you know, you have the like shimmery window film that makes little rainbows or like a, you know, piece of nicely cut glass, you know, like a sun catcher or something, I guess. U So it was like something that you could observe as a kid be like, yes, I understand this is happening on different scales and having that information available, as opposed to like it always makes me think now of like what was it like for people before we knew the science of like you know thunder and rainbows and stuff to sort of deal Yeah with these kind of weather events, especially when your ability to survive was so dependent on what the weather was doing generally Absolutely. Well,'s a great that's a great place to start. So maybe we'll go back to at least some of the Cultural associations, the indigenous cultural associations, the legends about rainbows before we had, you know the sort of more modern physicist take. But I will say like culturally, you know, I'm just realizing there's a rainbow on the you're wrong about Lgo, isn't there? Yeah. No, there is. Yeah, exactly. It's the Rainbow showh. How did that get there No it was something that Mike came up with back in the day. It was like probably like twenty nineteen or something. because our previous logo, Real Oes will remember, was just like a stock image of like a hand giving the thumbs down on like a salmon background and it was meant to emulate like I didn't know that Joc in Phoenix in Gladiator, I think, which I haven't seen But where he' a little gay boy who wants to execute hot men or whatever And we had the logo for a while and at a certain point we were like, we might be out growing. Yeah The slgo. Yeah, which looked more like it was I don't know I don't know. And so the rainbow was like this I think this idea that we both kind of intuitively recognized, I'm assuming, as like feeling more expansive and optimistic and that it's crucially going up, you know? And this idea. I always interpreted it as like, you know, if you have more information, it's like a positive thing because it helps you grow as opposed to being like, a wrong You know, right? likeike Anna you dum Yeah, I love that. Okay exppansive. put a put a pin in that word. We'll circle back. Oh gosh, fun fact about rainbows. they're actually fully circle they're not just an arch, it's just the horizon gets in the way. You know, I've seen a couple where you're like, you can kind of see it. Have you seen that? I've never seen it, but I guess if you are in an airplane, you could see it or like on a mountain, you'd be able to see a little bit more. Yeah, I feel like I've seen a couple rainbows maybe when I was at an elevation that are like where you can kind of start to see that circle happening. Yeah. ye. But like I guess I guess just culturally, I mean, they're often, I think they have become You know, unicorns, my little pony, you see them on a cereal box. They're a little like frivolous vibes. Well, and we also had the twenty teens when interestingly we had the sort of like unicorns and rainbows coded sort of wave of I guess aesthetics. And yeah, it's hard to even define in retrospect. It's kind of like we kind of said something it was unicorn if it was just like magenta Yeah, which is interesting. But like Lisa Frank, Trapper keeper. Yes. ye. The littleittle girl aesthetic and a big part of stickers, of course, as well. is And the what what else? Of course the the best section in Fantasia with the Pegasuses, Oh yeah and everybody they had the like rainbow falling in the water and then it colored the different parts of the water, different colors and you could like dip them up, which was so cool and very disappointing to not be able to do. Yeah, I think they're just yeah, they become like a part of cartoon aesthetic too. And a little, but a little. I think frivolous, a little, you know, girlish, sugary sacarine. Yeah. well, anything associated with little girls is considered to be dumb in American culture because of our view, yes, of young women.. Okay, so but rainbows historically were these things of huge power. So like interestingly in all kinds of cultures, you know, before they were connected A rainbow was often seen as some kind of bridge. It is brid shaped. It's bridge shaped and it's, you know kind of goes from sky to earth or looks like it does. And so in Norse mythology rainbows were seen as like a literal bridge that you could, you know bridge from the gos you could you could like the gods could walk down to Eth or you could walk up to the gods Like the Tiuaha of New Guinea side as a bridge to the dead to the sort of afterlife. In Greek myths, Iris, the messenger for the gods, maybe like a handbaid toahera would pass usually messages, but usually warnings down the rainbow. Well yeah, I mean, that's just practical. And I guess when you see a rainbow in the distance like you do 'Cause of course, when I was a kid, you know, my dad would be like, Ohh, Sarah, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And then he'd be like, Ohh my Godd, it looks like it's ending in our house. And then you'd be like, yes. Yeah. And then you're like, whereere didd it go? And you're like, I don't know. I guess it was in another house. and you're like, ah, these rainbows They're hard to track. Yeah. They're pesky. They're of course The Lprechaun, the pot of gold, though the leprechaun myth, I guess sort of was originally back in the eighth century. it was like a Celtic tradition of a water sprite. Wow. Yeah. That's a long timeline for leprechauns, but they're so small, they live longer. Yeah. And they, I guess were originally much more like the horror movie Lrechaun. They were like very sinister. like their origin was in trying to drown a king But then therere in the nineteent century there. Well maybe he had it coming, you know? I don't know. Oh, I'm sure he did. I mean, a Celtic king in the seven hundreds probs. But then he like got more sort of softened in the nineteenth century and his pranks became less deadly and more like, you stole the bacon or like See like an anti Yeah, ye. sureure. Like a brownie helps around the house and he does a little mischief around the house. He's like an little Irish polter guy. Yes, totally. And but then there was this sort of I guess the idea of the pot of gold really kind of blossomed like when sort of Irish Americans were facing poverty and it was this idea that like maybe you could get some luck, like this like need for pot of gold. if you see the rainbow, you might have some gold. You're like, where's that fucking lepreun? Yeah. So it's the idea that when there's a rainbow, there's a leprechaun nearby and you gott to find him and get his pot of gold somehow? That's yeah. All right. Is pot the best way to carry gold because it feels like the pot is already a little heavy. That's a great question. Already pretty heavy You know, he should have had He was originally he was a cobbler, so like he could have had a shoe bag. Right or quote.. But but sorry, that was my leprechun digression. But the point is like, yeah, that was for a long time you know, For cultures all over the world, a rainbow was like a very powerful thing And it could mean, you know, storms ahead or some kind of divine intervention. It was often a bad omen Yeah. well, that makes sense because I feel like it happens when like crazy weather is on the way a lot of the time. Yeah. And then another weird thing was like again in all in a lot connected indigenous cultures, there was this idea that if you pointed out a rainbow, your finger could rot off. Oh no. Yeah. and just this idea of like I think the point is like it's a powerful sacred thing. Be careful of how you interact with it. Right. And so I just I just loved finding that out. Maybe don't put it on all those stickers. Yeah, because we've totally like we've like drained that power out in a lot of ways and like stopp thinking about how they actually occur in nature, which you're right often is around a storm, a very powerful, often deadly thing. Okay, so that's kind of this idea that they were like this powerful bridge between worlds. Yeah Well, they really they are really. And also between the present moment and the next, and I imagine they also occur sometimes. before weather events where people die. so, you know Okay, so meaning obviously is what you make out of it. that depends on your culture or experience. We are here. I want to move to the substance, the material of a rainbow because Regardless of what it means to you, there have been a lot of people, a lot of scientists, philosophers over the centuries trying to really pin down what it is Yeah. whichich would be very difficult back in the day, I would imagine. Yeah, without a lot of tools and they are these weird things because they're not quite like a tree But they're not like they're out there because you can both point at it, but like But then they're a little like it's very hard to understand like are they basically one of the debates was they is it out there or is it in here? Like is it a product of the mind? Oh, like a mirage or like even like a dream or is it like a tree? but then it's not like a tree because you can't like It was like this pesky, people just weren't sure. Right Now that you ask that, I'm like, well, what is it actually? Because it is like light whichich is a product of the sort of range in which we see So Yeah. It's totally tricky. So that's I'm going most of what I'm going to tell you today is gonna to kind of buildu us toward answering that. Great Okay, what is it exactly? What's a frreickaking rainbow? What is a frrein rainbow? Okay, so one of our first earliest heavy hitters to weigh in on the matter was Aristotle. Of course. Hello Aristotle. Yeah. And he was big team exOestin Greek for, it's out there. like it's out there. I think it's I think it is matter. The rainbow is out there. The rainbow's out there. Was Aristotle Socrates a student? Does it go Plato, Socrates, Aristotle Sarah, you're probably gonna to know that more than me. I do know that he was publishing on rainbows in like the mid three hundred BC. es Good for him. That's great. What was I doing back then? Practically nothing. Now I need to know. I don't know the order. always Okay, ye look it up for me. I got a cat here. Yeah, it was Socrates then Plato, then Aristotle. So Aristotle's w the baby. So Socrates taught Plato Plat Aristotle and then like nice isn't one of them or something I don't know. Okay. I gu just know to quote real Genius in the immortal last words of Socrates. I drank what J insert a little rim shot there. Okay Okay so student of student Aristotle. Yeah H basically his idea was like importantort Greek dude. Port Greek dude was like, okay I think here's what a rainbow is I think that I think sunlight is a pure white substance and that Sh it hit a patch of Impurities in the air like mist or dust or something, you know an impurity of some sort. Yeah, that the light gets tinted or muddied into these colors. And so for him, basically the idea of like you see a rainbow after rain because there's all this mist in the air. And so the pure white light gets muddied and like disguised and tinted. I mean, that seems basically accurate to my understanding. I think I'm on the same technical level as like A very smart person living over two thousand years ago. Yeah s my relationship to science. It's a very good guess and like it's devil in the details of the way in which he's gonna be off is like the difference between so much of our modern technology. So he is close. Right. because it feels like there's like these concepts that recur in these kinds of, you know, periods of science where you're like, well You're right about the outcome, but the logic by which you think that happened is a product of your times. So is that accurate for this? Yeah. Oh absolutely. I mean, it's a stunning guess for the times. It's a totally great guess. Yeah Like I guess we read Little House on the Prairie and there's a part where everyone gets malaria. Yeah. and then Someone is like, everyone who got malaria ate a watermelon. That's how this malaria spread. And it's like, well, yeah, no, but I mean, how are you gonna know? But how are you gonna know? I know yeah. just take out the melon part And maybe when you go to go eat watermelon, you get bitten by a mosquito, you know? Yeah U, so that was his idea. It was like tinted, muddied, changed, dirtied, something like that. It's been adulterated. Aulterated, adulterated light. And so then, you know, through that kind of, that idea is going to stick for centuries for a long time. That's pretty much the right. But there was a person who doesn't get as much read it in the rainbow history as I think he should who is a medieval Persian scholar, Nasir Aldun Altusi And This guy was like Da Vinci P Da Vinci, like he was an intellectual giant and you could do a whole' wrong about him. I don't know a ton, but I just did kind of like a deep dive. Oh, I would love to do a mathi wrong about. I would be so out of my depth. But this guy is like, okay, let me send you, can I send you just what he looks like ' he was cute too. On the seven hundredth anniversary of his death, he got an Iranian stamp And u He just uh yeah, well, let's just picture him because he's okay let me u He's so smart and so ahead of his time. and it's just I just w to like consider him for a brief moment. Okay. So let's give him a face And I'm kind of thinking about this guy for a totally different reason right now, which will be worth the digression, I hope. Oh yeah, I'm always willing to try. Well yeah, he looks like Michael Gambone or like u he he looks like u u Wait, who's the main Roy? Logan Roy. Roy Roy. Oh yeah, he's got Logan Roy. Yeah Totally. Yeah, but maybe a little younger. He looks exactly like Logan Roy Oh fabulous beard. he's whichich yes is very hot to me. Look. Everyone knows that Brian Cox would be sexy to go on a Rubber boot hunting weekend which we all know this Yes, okay. so have you seen him as Hannibal Lecter? It's like the most overtly gay portrayal of Hannibal Lector, which I think is saying something. In my opinion, o. I will take other analyses. Okay, so So okay, so I'll do Nir al douna Altusi. So he was born in twelve o one. And like he is gonna to basically become the forefather of trigonometry. And then he's also going to be huge in astronomy. He publishes all these star charts, these astronomical atlases that will be used for hundreds of years. And he's like also does all this stuff on ethics. So' just he's just inventing math right now. Yeah, he's just inventing math and he's doing it by watching the world. Like he figured out a lot of this stuff by watching stars and observing them. That's really cool And you know what? I always kind of liked trigonometry. Doid you like trigonometry at all? I think that's a fun one. I did I was gonna say I did. What did you like about it Well, I guess that it's like And An actual thing that I care about, which is triangles and how tall things are. Yeah. And it was like it felt like a secret c. It was like puzzle vibes. It was just like, you do this, you do this and then it works. There's something satisfying.. Whereas Calk suddenly got so abstract that it started to short circuit me. And I never got that far. Yeah. That was when my school let you quit math. And I was like, thank you, good night. Cool, G, loveve of hypotenuse. It's been fun. Yeah U Okay, so he's just this like incredible thinker and he's doing it at a time of incredible upheaval. So he's like for about a decade, he's working in this place that sounds incredible. It's like an intellectual castle. It's like a library across of the castle called Alamut and there's all these visiting scholars and he's teaching. And then becomes the Mongolian invasion. Yeah. And they smash it, they smash the castle. And it's at this point Gengis Kan's grandson. Lego And anyway, And but okay, it's making me think about institutions getting absolutely smashed by like Yeah, like dal. Yeah. Okay, okay. so like science getting like totally smashed. So. But so then instead of just like crying and bemoaning the state of the world. This guy, our guy, Aldin Al Tusi, our astronomer What does he do He joins 's army. He like joins the army, but then he ends up getting really close to him and convincing him to build an even fancier scientific observatory castle thing. God, how did he work that though? How do you like sign ele and be like, hey, I mean, I realize it would take a while. Is it like a Dread Pirate Roberts type situation Yeah, and yes. And he like, I guess stroked his ego enough to be like, this will be such a good, like you built it anyway. So then he built an even better. But so just instead of being like, you hate science, he was like, I think you really love science. And then he built this incredible observatory and that's where he observed all these planetary movements, which helped him Write this thing called the two se couple, which like talks about how a circle moves within a circle looks like a line. I'm not quite sure, but that helped him pave the way for the realization that the Earth is not the center of the world. And those observations, many scholars believe, made their way to a guy named Copernicus. Yeah. Okay, so this is a man who is like not afraid to look at the scary like just the hard to understand stars, things like that. He's like, listen, Geigis Khan, you can't stop science. You can't. None of us can. Yeah But what are we talking about today? Rainbow. So he also, you know, he's this like, I'll think about anything, stars, cool, trigonometry, great, math, cool. Colors. let me take on colors. And he basically starts like flirting with this idea that maybe there are actually Infinite colors And because like infinity is this notoriously hard concept. Yeah. I don't know. I feel terror when I think about it, but so do a lot of people. Yeah. You know what I've always thought about when I think about infinity is No tell me this quote from I think in Amy Tan book about one of her characters as like a sixth grader being terrified by the thought of infinity and also being equally terrified by The antithesis of it, which she envisions is like the universe coming to an end and the image is something like like a frraid tennis ball bouncing off a wall. Oh yeah, right? There's something really dreadful about that here's what I think about a lot and I kind of mentioned it before on this show, but I like really love two thousand one of Space Odyssey. I really love it when movies are boring, which to be clear, I think it is trying to be on purpose. God bless it. I really love the Dawn of man stuff. and I love the middle part, which I think I for one did not really remember until I watched it more recently, which is like this man traveling boringly on a commercial flight to the, you know airport just outside the moon, the mooon base, and then traveling to the moon. And the thing that he's dealing with is a secret project because they found this monolith on the moon, which is the same one that we saw in the first sequence, which shows up and then, you know, early man or you know, Lucy figures out how to use weapons and it's like this big moment as you would imagine. And it's also like interesting on the subject of innovation because I feel like as you're talking about this, like there's this very sort of like American history book way and also I'm sure, you know, very British way of teaching history that's like, and then one man out of all the men, one man who happened to be well bred and well educated and well connected thought of something and he thought, Bike Jinx And that's how science works as opposed to like a lot of people in different places noticing things you know, often somewhat simultaneously or you know, innovation sort of layering on innovation in a way where like nothing is entirely one person's idea, I think, most, if not all of the time But you know, but this is how it works with the apes. Yeah in the movie. Yeah, what I like about the boringness of it all is, well A, I just think that it's kind of nice to be Forced to sit and look at things for that long. It's not that long, but it feels longer. And that also that the middle part is then we're going to the moon to see this monolith. where these guys in space suits like stand in front of it and take cheesy pictures of this monolith they found. And then this like high pitched ringing starts. And the premise of that apparently is that which I don't think you could necessarily figure out, I guess by watching it, is What if The monolith is like a baby gate that's been placed there on the moon to tell the aliens or something, somebody God, question mark, aliens, God. Same diff as far as the movie's concerned, that humans have like figured it out enough to get to the moon and that we're ready for the next thing. And I I don't know. love that idea for some reason because it implies the sort of like I don't know. this idea of this almost, if I would keep calling it a baby gate, it's because I'm envisioning it as like, alien mommy out there being like, look at you and like watching humanity grow? Like you think you've traveled so far. Right. And we've just gotten to the bottom of the stairs and we're still at the bottom of the stairs And there's also something so nice about that because Earth is really special and it's where all our stuff is. and there aren't really other planets like it that we're ever going to be able to get to before we destroy this one, you know? And so I don't know. I think it's just like we have there's a sort of maybe like spasming capitalist idea right now of like, well, we'll just got a new hotter, younger planet. You know, it'll all be fine. And it's like, no We're little babies, we barely understand the universe we're in. like we're so we're at the baby gate and we need to really you know. Yeah. I don't know. I just think it's so nice that everything is so much bigger than us. I'm at a moment in my life where humanity is behaving so badly that I'm like, it's so great that we're that we were so that we know so little about the shape of things. Yeah. So in that way, does the concept of infinity, this greatness of space and time and even knowledge, like comforting or what's your? You know what I think is that I think infinity is scary because it so eludes our perceptions. And maybe at this moment, I'm like, it's so great There is so much truth and reality out there that eludes our ability to perceive it because our perceptions as humans, we're really having so much trouble. Yeah. Like our intentions keep like returning us to the same messes. If the universe were within our perceptionses, it would be really Tiny. Yeah, tootally. Yeah. ye. Yes. or something. I don't know. It's just nice. and it's humbling and I don't know. anyyway, that's my digression. Everyone Give two thousand one of space Odyssey a try. It's also as my mom and my ninth grade English teacher wouldould have, you know, a movie that can envision no role for women in the future aside from being stewardesses. And that's also very true. Mbe maybe that ape was a girl. Probably not, but I can think so. Can I do one more digression in the digression in the digression? Yeah, yes, Al. Okay, so you talked about the tennis ball thing and this is what's called the Glden mean. Yeah, okay so The fear of the opposite infinity of infinity, which is like the teensiest speck of everything, maybe you could argue is that? Yeah. And that that reminds me. I just wanted to read a poem by Marie How. Yeah. Because she writes about that it's often called like the spec, It's often called the singularity, which is just like before when we were this infinite thing, we were like everything pressed together and I just think it's a really beautiful reframe of that terrifying. opposite of Okay so I'm just going gonna read it. Yes. It's not very long. Okay. so Marie Ho, it's how it's called this it's called the singularity Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were So compact, nobody needed a bed or food or money. Nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you There was no nature, no them tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf or if the coral reef feels pain Crashed oceans don't speak English or Farsi or French Wood that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean and before that when Earth was sky and animal was energy and rock was liquid, and stars were space and space was not at all Nothing beforefore we came to believe humans were so important for this awful loneliness Can molecules remember it? What once was? Before anything happened, can our molecules remember by No no we, no one And it was No verb, no noun a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny dot Brimming with is, is, is, is, is. All everything home Oh that's so much. Ist that beautiful Yes, that's so beautiful Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know. I feel that And like I don't what if because like there's all these things that kind of as you're telling the rainbow history that started off as folklore and then you know, and often to you science is like, no, that's insane. Right Right. But often as well there's But often as well there's, you know, some kind of finding where it's like, yeah, this thing that people always said and often that like indigenous people always said and that then, you know, colonizers were like, no, that's silly. We're going to act in ways that will kill us and all of you too. And that of course science then later supported as having, you know as being proven by things that we didn't have the ability to conceive or analyze. Sarah donon't steal my ending. Oh, I won't, I won't, I won't. I sh't. I'm backing away. I recently touched an electrified fence without really thinking about it. It was very low voltage. It was around a bunny paddock, but I was looking right at a sign that said, Do not talk to electric. and I was like, who's gonna rest my hand Hest I would not have blasted long in the past U What did you feel? Very little. okay, you know, but enough enough to jump back I was like, oh shit. that's the feeling of I'm not supposed to be touching that. Okay But anyway, but my thought hear my thought hearing that poem and this is like me bearing my soul to you that that's what, you know this show is about is But way What if in some far off scientific finding there's evidence that You know, love is not just a pro social impulse that we need to feel in order to raise young and etcetera and protect ourselves from predators and each other. And also I think us talking about coyotes, I've thought about that a lot and really come to the conclusion that like as much as we like to visualize ourselves as being alone, we really thrive in packs. and I think a lot of our trouble has come from not knowing group we belong to or having any group that we belong to. Yeah. and craving a group, missing it Yeah and then creating groups out of, you know hate or whatever or where whatever we can find and apparently, you know, mutual fear is like will put quite adhesive quickly, but then, you know, but then the goals that you have will be destructive and the sort of Anyway, that's a hole conversation Wait, but were are you saying love? what if love wasn't about lions? But what if love, what if love is like not just all those sort of practical things that of course makes sense, but also this sort of like collective atomic memory of this time when we were all one thing. You know? That's so beautiful. Why the heck not? It might be. It might be. and that that feeling of reunification, like those little molecules glimmering and Wlcome each other back I like it I like that I'm thinking a lot lately about just sort of like what it means to approach life as a universalist and to see all religions as like Yeah, you know, because like I think that like The same way that we can't conceive of the universe, it's, you know Any kind of faith that isn't based on controlling other people, I think is you can see them all grasping the same thing. Yeah. that might be getting too much into my personal spiritual journey that But we're talking about rainbows. I mean, it's inevitable probably that we get here. No, but I think that like, I mean, I personally have had In the last five years or so a massive like absolute change in what I think the job of a reporter is, which was going into it. I mean, now admittedly going into it, I didn't have any journalistic training and I came into it through a weird side door of loving stories. So for a long time, I was like, the goal is to find a story, find an amazing story, find a story, find the story, make it And then like as I came to come up around incredible reporters and people who really kind of didn go to J school and do think about it. In other ways, I came to see how like story is often the enemy because, you know, stories about like cutting off details and disfiguring reality to make a nice narrative. and that actually like I do think increasingly my job and I'm not good at it, but what I'm at least trying to do now is to like capture more and more complexity and then just like present that in a digestible way. So obviously there's but I do think and that's why I like to go back to You know, just like what have religion said? What have traditions said? L science doesn't have a monopoly on truth. To really do good science, let's look at all kinds of different things. And so I do think You know, people always talk about braiding indndigenous wisdom and I think that's just such a profoundly amazing way to like get a deeper and more accurate understanding of nature and science. So so I think your you you church Dreams your universalist vibe is is all it's like it's not just good for spirituality, but I think it's very good for science. like very, very good. Oo. yeah. nice. Okay. But so okay, but so but the concept of infinity is where we kind of left off. So this idea of like A lot of people, especially before we even had it weed termed linguistically and mathematically, like it was this idea that was that was frightening. Like, you know, Aristotle, I guess, apparently like absolutely rejected the idea of an actual infinity He believed you could count forever. Like he was like, okay, maybe there are infinite numbers, but I think the universe is finite. So he was like a strict, as I understand, a strict finetist. And there's just this idea of like thinking about infinity has really broken a lot of people. Yeah. Ands there's a very famous case of this scientist George Cantor he like was obsessed with a certain kind of infinities, this idea of like infinite infinities. And he basically glimpsed that truth. he published on it, but it really broke him. Like he went mad. This is like when before acid had been synthesized and he had to just do it yourself over years of study Yeah, you just you just had to think about. and there's it's sort of apocryphal that he took his life. It looks like he probably died of a heart attack, but in in an asylum Well, and also there's so many other things to, you know, drive a person beyond the point of no return if there's, you know no real mental health availability. but Infinity doesn't help. It doesn't. And the George Canter thing like a while I actually couldn't find these notes, but a while back, I looked into him and I did. I was like, I'd watched this documentary called it was a BBC documentary called Dangerous Knledge. And it was about like knowledge that drove scientists mad. How many people watched that thinking it would be about sex somehow, and then it was a math documentary Yeah, no and not at all. And that's that one, that documentary kind of makes it a little bit too much look like it was a suicide. And I think that was a misstep. But then I looked into the stuff and it's like He was try he was writing these letters like trying to he's like, I want to stop thinking about this. It is but I can. And so I think there was like The heart attack may have done him in, but he really ended up in an asylum and thinking about infinity was really a torment but like an addiction. So anyway, my point is think about infinity as hard Yeah. Aristotle didn't want to do it George Cantter went mad, but our guy back Nessir L Dinl Tusi was just like, bring it on. I want to think about it. Well, he's probably riding around on a Mongolian pony all day. you start thinking about infinity as he got bounced around on there. You do. and you look at the stars. So he was, I think, really ahead of his time. Not only did he like predict the Copernican shift or pave the way for that idea He also was like, I think that there are in colors, there are like infinite pathways of mixing them and he just was like more into this idea of sort of there might be infinite colors in the rainbow. And but the idea it didn't really take off. It didn't get traction. Aristotle with this idea of like This a more kind of rigid idea about light and rainbows hold for a long way, but he was, I don't know. I just want to give him his due because he was a ton of ahead of his time. So So then We jump ahead. We're gonna to get there. We're coming to the end of our scientific story. Don't worry. look, I'll go on whatever. I'll go on like an Indiana Jones itinerary of scientific story. don't worry about it. Great. All right. well, pull out your rope because we are swing in two sixty five, England a plague sweeps the land and everyone kind of had to go into lockdown I don't know if you remember anything about that? You know, we we had our cable and stuff that It was different that they didn't. They did not. Yeah. And so a young man named Isaac Newton, not yet a sir. I knew Newton was gonna turn up. Hello. Here he comes. Here he comes Walking down the street Just the busiest irgin. that shvered me Hey's Isaac Newton. An apple didn't fall on his head Here comes Isaac Newton. Don't try and jump in his bitin. I'm sorry to make so many jokes about him being a virgin. I gu just don't know that much about his life. I'm feeling like he probably was at this time. He's a young man. He's crashing for lockdown. He goes home as many a millennial did to live with his parents. Yeah. in the English countryside It's hard to picture him without a wig. It is hard. I wonder if because we've only seen him in a big cur wig. Newal. What did he look like? He was very attractive from what I remember of depictions of him. White the Bro. I wonder if the milkmaids were all over Isaac Newton and he was like Go of me. He kind of looks like u you know, more like kind of like Kate Winslet as a young, as a young as a young. anyyway. But so he yeah, okay. so he's just like in the English countryside, no yeah, no cable, no Tiger King for him to watch. So he just is like, I don't know, I picture him like tinkling the harps oford and playing that gamon. And one day he is just fumbling around with a prism. I would imagine so. No, did you BYOP did get a prism. and wait, I think U Not to name names because I didn't see which cat might have done this, but I think Verner probably knocked it off the table. So wait, let me real quick. Classic. Okay, here it is. This is like a classic triangular prism. Great Yeah, K Now can you, I don't know if you have a window in your room Yeah, I'm right in front of I'm right in front of Ondo. It is a very cloudy day though. Okay. So we might not get it, but see if you can just angle it for a second and see if you get any action or just describe what you see. Yeah. Well, I get I'm not able to like bounce light through it right now, but if I just sort of like look into it I can just sort of see little reflections of details of my surroundings with little rainbows all over them. Oh, great. Really You know what I mean? Good. Okay. Well, not like rainbows all over them, but like this sort of this cast of like rainbow color, like I'm looking into it and I can see the tree that's outside my window through it and there's like Rainbow colors in the sky that I can see through the leaves. That's great. Okay, you know, faintly. Yeah, it's very cool And I don't know if that's sort of, you know historically accurate, but that's okay. Well when you say rainbow colors, what colors if you had to like name them, what do you see? Well, I've had a little practice in there yet. And I would say descending from top to bottom, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. kind of subtly some Royje Bibbing around. Okay, got it. Okay. Didn't we add or remove one or something though? You have been you are hallucinated. you have been sold alive,, young Sarah Marshall. Okay, but we'll get to that. So okay, but but Yeah. Myth busted, myth about to be busted. But okay, so Isaac he was very violent thing. Yeah, was he was doing that. and he saw those colors and then he eventually twisted it in such a way and it was a bright enough direct sunlight day that he also got those famous like Just little rainbows on the wall, you know, like a little rainbow. Y Yeah, I haven't been able to do that with this one, but it was probably, you know, sunnier Yeah at the time. So okay. so many by the time Isaac Newton has done this, many people have seen, you know rainbows come out of prisms or chunks of glass. And the theory, again of why went back to Aristotle, this idea that the prism like the mist, was tinting, changing, muddying, what was your word? O adulterating. ye. Yeah, adulterating, dirtying pure sunlight And so that the rainbows on the wall, they were evidence of chang they were evidence of impurities of the light being changed or disguised. And he thought, okay, well, if that's true, then if I take a second prism And I pass the rainbow parts through a second prism, you'll get even more tinted lights. So maybe you'll get different colors or darker color. I'm not sure what exactly, but it will change it even more. Why does he have prisms? Do we know, what are they for is like a household item or is it a school thing? Oh, that's a great question. I don't know. I have no idea. That's interesting. All right, we'll return to that in a future The listener can write in and tell us. So ye. So he does so he takes a second one And again, if Aristotle's right, it should get tinted even more, but then what happens? Any guesses? Oh Oh my God, I don't know. Does it make a Does it cancel it out? Yeah. Yeah, it goes back inside. The rainbow disappeared. Interesting. And so what he the first man in nineteen hundred years to put two prisms next to each other Yeah Although I guess that glassmaking is a relatively recent thing anyway. Yeah. So basically what he realized is, look When I see the colors of the rainbow, this is not evidence Of impurities, this is evidence of the light's ingredients These are the colors that make up beam array ofure what appears to be pure white sunlight but for some reason isn't. Like when those when those all smoothie together, they make white light. Yeah. God, that's cool. Yeah. it was a really great And that's like and that is a wild leap to make too. Totally, tootally. And like the way that I've he he has not yet figured out that it's waves, but just to jump ahead for a second, like the way that I've heard it described is that like what a prism does or what a little raindrop does up in the sky, which is how you get rainbows, is that like the lights coming down. it has all these different colors inside. Red is kind of these slower waves, violet are these faster waves medium greens and stuff yellows and they're all kind of like a shopping cart is like the ray of light is like a shopping cart full of colors. And when that shopping cart that's so cute. hits a corner, like hits a prism, hits a curb All the ingredients just kind of the oranges and the at Red Apple, you know, whatever, they all toss out. They just like, wow they break out because they different speeds like spill out at slightly different angles. That's wild that we can do that. Yeah, you know, who think that you could use a piece of glass and disrupt a light wave to that extent. And then put it back put it back in. Yeah. Yeah. And so he. So he this like will eventually, I mean, this will pave the way for massive breakthroughs in technology, development of lasers, fiber obptjects, even telescopes get all kinds of things will get better But there's one lastess thing he needed to do, which was count the colors in the rainbow which you already you did for us. And so what he eventually he kind of at first was like maybe five, No, no, I think it's seven. And that's how we get Roy D Biv, red, A yellow, green, blue, indigo violet But the thing the little like, my favorite part of this is like he didn't there because he was like closely squinting through a magnifying glass or using rulers. He just was like Seven's a really pretty number Because that is so him. It's so classic Newton So he because there's how many notes in a traditional Western classical scale Oh D me fusle Lati Is that seven? Seven. And at the time, there were seven known planets. and there were seven known metals. Gld, silver mercury, copper, iron tin, lead now there's over ninety, but in Newton state. There were how many days in a week? Seven Oh my God. how many ents were not like called at that time seven. So it just said seven. How many seas at the time There seven? Yeah. And so it was like this science it was like this nature this mystically pure number. like he just there wass just this idea that there were like these accordances, like things move in sevens And so he was basically like musical scale seven Cor seven that feels good. That feels it's got to be seven. It's got to be seven. And that thing like was just pressed into textbook. I mean, like I was taught Royin for sure. Oh yeah if I was taught it in school, but it was like my parents taught it to me as like basic human knowledge. Yeah. and that it just is, those are the seven colors that make up The rainbow that make up lightase closed. case not closed. Oh my God, we gotta reopen the case. So we did a terrestrials about for kids about these concepts. They weren didn't go into all this stuff. But we did, Alen, my amazing collaborator and friend and musical genius, made this little thing about R Biv. Okay, so I'm just gonna play you this. Okay, so this is the moment of discovery. and this is like the industrial lie getting printed into our minds Rd orange yellow, green, blue, indigo violet, red orange yellow green of the rainbow. All the colors of the rainbow. Red orange yellow green, blue, in the go of violet, Red orange, yellow, green, blue in the go of violet. Are these all the colors of the rainbow? Red orange yellow, green blue, And it go violence, red orange yellow green blue, and it go violence red orange yellow green blue, it go violence, red orange yellow, green blue Are these all the colors of the rainbow? All of them. all of them. Are these all the colors of the rainbow? R or green, blueo viot, green Blueo violet Yellow, green, blue, Iigo violence, re orange yellow, green blue, Iigo vioolence. Are these all the colors of the rainbow? of the rainbow yellow ra. Is J ino vience point is it got like it was this handy way to remember colors in the rainbow that was maybe so handy it just like got Sometimes things are too handy. Yeah, Yes. because the truth is sometimes less catchy. Also I was never totally clear on the difference between indndigo and Violet if I'm being honest here. Same. I think that's a big, I think Indigo is like a bit of a emperorss new clothes, like There's other thing. But but so So this goes on and it's kind of this idea that like light has been we have cracked the rainbow. We've literally cracked it open, seen its insides. It's seven colors, cool painters and poets and like stoners all over the world who weren't fully convinced that this was accurate. So Keats very famously wrote this poem like being like D L like he basically accused Newton of having killed the magic of the rainbow. Oh And there's a line about how he like dared to quote unweave a rainbow by like reducing it into these cold colors and then Gete like had all these kind of poetic theories about like, well when I feel the purple is different than the purple. I see like no colors come from feelings and then Turner the storm painting guy like painted all these rainbs with all these tons of colors as kind of like a F And just people being like, how do we know my blue is your blue? and are we so sure like colors are concrete? and like really how is my blue? your blue? These are worthwhile questions. R sure. Yeah. And the only way we can determine is by describing our blues to each other probably. one hundred percent. And so then along comes another bro, a big bro of ten kids in a British family. He's a med student named Thomas Young. another Bit and he's like You know, doing your classic, he's dissecting the eyeball of an ox as you do. And he's wondering about like how eyes focus and process light for science or if you're Salvador Dali, either one. Yeah, exactly or no. Bin well, who did the eyeball slicing maybe. I don't know. Ooh, one of those dudes. One of those Yeah, but wondering like what's the connection between Of course a painter would wonder that, what is the connection between the colors out there and what I perceive? And this eye seems to be the medium, you know through which the interface through which all those things happen. It was both of them. They both did the eyeball movie. Good talk. Thomas Young eventually devices absolutely ingenious experiment that we are not going to go into because that is too complicated. It's the double slit experiment, which is a whole quantum mechanics realizing that light is both a particle and a wave. and it's like a total universe changer, but a long yeah, come back and explain that one to me on another show because I would like to hear more about how light works and stuff. Yeah, I would too, but you might need somebody else because I've done like a whole piece about quantum mechanics and I still don't understand it. But light is not just part what you need to know is light. behaves like a particle and like a wave, like an ocean wave, like a sound wave, like a wa wa. And that's The big insight there is that rainbows, that the colors within a beam of light coming from the sun are oscillating at all these different waves. And the way that our eyes process those waves and send information to the brain is that we like perceive those wavelengths as different colors. And so the low long slow waves, we tend to see as red, the middle kind of medium waves we see as greens and the really fast ones we see as violet, but also on every rainbow on either side is light we cannot see ultraviolet, infrared microwaves, things like that. That's just like. And where we divide it into colors, Like the waves are just like the ocean. They're just like some big ones, some medium ones. whereere we divide it depends on the person, where we draw the line. And so the poets, the painters, Nasir al Dun al Tusi, our guy, this idea that Like the lines are subjective. L there aren't seven concrete colors. There are really There are really infinite. colors in the rainbow. God damn. And so sort of like what colors we see, where we divide the lines, which ones appear strong, which ones we happen to see maybe because of associations or moods, like the little conclusion there is that, you know that all those long ago traditions were right that like the rainbow, it is a bridge. It's out there and it's in here. It's like a bridge between worlds. It's a bridge between an inside and outside kind of being like a thing, which I think is why they they are so like slippery and wonderful. Wow. So that the that's the story of the rainbow U L, that was so good. And once we figured out that the rainbow, that the colors of light that are waves and are these kind of infinite colors, then we could like discover new elements based on what frequency of waves they were emitting or refracting. so like helium, thallium, gallium, Cesium, and we could discover new things in space because we figured out stars emitted radio waves that we couldn't see, we could invent like the radio ten passing information over radio waves, technologies like LSx. So like once we figured out that, there's just been, you know, it's like so much that we can do. Wow. And I think in a real way, like you know, this rainbow, again, that we see is so frivolous was like the site of serious scientific contention that finally like rumbled and built to insight that truly like really, really freaking transformed our world just by people wondering what that pretty thing was in the sky And this phenomenon that we being confronted with and trying to understand and that drove us toward all these other realizations, maybe. Yeah Yeah, that's so cool. Yeah. So that's my rainbow. Okay, I have to end end, I have a choose your own adventure of three options. Okay. o my gosh. Okaykay. Okay, option one is like So this I don't know if you are experiencing this, but in I got into radio because I hate like visual judgments. I think it's a sacred thing to just be voices, but increasingly' like make videos, post Instagram reels and do things. I will never find it necessary for people to see my face while I'm saying something Yeah for them to listen to me say something, you know. Okay, but I've been like fighting, fighting, fighting that, but then I finally on this piece, I gave into to like a music video about the concept of infinite color so I could show you that. It's a minute long. Well, that's a really good reason to give on into something. Yeah. I was like, you can't beat them, let's really join them. So there's that that's door number one. Door number two is we could do a little Pride coda just about the rainbow becoming on the flag, the rainbow being theide the gay Pide flag, the queer pride flag. Or we could do a butterfly coda of just that boy butterflies Shady as hell All right, well, I want to have a link to the infinite color video and I think we have to end on Pride cota and then if we have time I want just one little tiny butterfly fact on top, please, perhaps. Okay, perfect. Okay. Okay. Okay. so the Pide coda is like how did this How did this rainbow become part of the queer Pride flag, become the queer Pride flag? So there have been You know, different emblems of queer pride throughout the era. There was, you know a time where the pink triangle, which was on the Nazi uniform was reclaimed as like a gay pride thing. There was, I guess Oscar Wilde had a whole green Carnation situation. There were other things. But in nineteen seventy eight We're in San Francisco And Harvey Milk asks his friend, Gilbert Baker, a gay activist and also someone who's very big into tailoring, seamstressing. What is a male seamstress S Semster, I guess. Sester And a female teamster is a team teamstress So there's going to be a big gay pride parade. It was called like the gay Freedom Day parade and he was like Gilbert, you love fabrics. you always make, you're always sewing things for our drag Queen friends. Like can you just make some kind of fun flag for a banner basically for the parade. And I guess he'd made banners for Harvey Milk before that were just like, you know whatever, gay rights now, just like that kind of thing. And he was like, but can you make us like a thing And so Gilbert Baker worked with this woman who would call herself the tie dyie queen, Lynn Sogerblum who was very good at like colors and fabrics and they came up with the idea of, well, let's use a rainbow. and The reason why was, yes, it's beautiful and also it represents the diversity of sexuality and genders in the queer experience. but mainly The fact that it was found in nature because queerness is natural and this idea that it's like this thing that encompasses the beauty, the celebration and the diversity and naturalness of queerness. And so each color had its originally it had eight colors. It now has six, but it also used to have like this great pinky magenta pink and a very cool turquoise, which they then took out because of like it was hard to reproduce those with dyes or something. But each color had its own like its own symbolic thing for like something it expressed about the queer experience. So pink was like for hot sex or just sex, but you know hot sex. Indigo was about serenity and they each I can do all the colors if you want or not, but they each had a different thing. That's beautiful. Yeah. And so with Lyn Sgerblum, they he felt very strong that he wanted all the des to be natural, organic dies. And so they did this like extensive dying practice and they had something like thirty people working on those first few flags. And they stitched them all together. And Gilbert Baker was like, oh, I don't wan to make this in my house. I want to go make it in this queer community center because it's like the day it will be born And he didn't know it was going to catch on. There were other flags, other things, but it caught on and I think really took on big power because it was only a few months later that Harvey Milk was assassinated. and like he had been the one to request, you know, let's have these flags, let's have a parade. So then it just it really took off and then you know, and I think some people are like, A rainbows tacky. I don't care, but And then it just continues to evolve in twenty seventeen in Philly, they added for for a queer Pride parade there. they added the black and brown stripes for LGBTQ people of color who had like are sometimes left out of the experience. And then a year later, it became the Progress Pide flag, which you've probably seen, which has that like arrow, which also has white, blue, pink, and black and brown stripes also for trans individuals, communities of color. And I'm sure it will continue to evolve and it's still like, you know, again, we think of rainbows as like cheesy and happy, but it is this Apparently Gilbert Baker, when he made it, he had been noticice a couple years before had been the American bice Taniil been in nineteen seventy six. And and so there were American flags everywhere and he had been really thinking about flags and how they express like hood and a power and I was just I don't know if you saw this news, but a year ago, like there was a ordinance that came down from the federal government to like paint over Oh rainbow roads and sidewalks and the the big like Rainbow Road outside the Pulse Nightclub, which had been this memorial got in the middle of the night got painted over black. And I feel like it's just this It's still a symbol like The flag is evolving and I'm sure it'll continue to evolve and All kinds of people, I've heard people be like, oh, we need to redesign the rainbow flag, it's ugly or whatever. But I think it's like, I don't know, just the power, the cruelty of that act and then the sort of resistance of people kind of gorilla painting the rainbow back in Orlando is is a beautiful thing and u That's the rainbow. Yeah Yeah, and it it is, I mean You know, and of course, I think for a lot of people and You know maybe more Biden administration years, there was this feeling of like Yes, it's so great that we're painting pride flags on things in a way to avoid, you making Re real infrastructural change, but then I think like when those got taken away. Yeah, right. the rainbow washing. Yeah. ye. It was like, wait right No Don't stop doing that. Yeah. Let's not walk it back even farther. That was my feeling. I would take rainbow washing over rainbow blackening out, right painting over. and I feel like kind of I don't know, a common and and, you know, I don't The side coming from many different motives, but I feel like people have also complained like, oh, if you put like so much on the flag then at a certain point, like isn't it just sort of I don't know, this kind of gripe that I feel like I've seen of like, at what point is there too much inclusivity? I don't think that people are really saying that out loud, but sort of, I don't know, acting as if there's a little bit of absurdity to it. And I think what you're saying is making me realize that that's exactly the point is to like have a flag that is trying to have so much stuff on it and an acronym that, you know, is I don't know. againain, like I feel like people have been making this joke since the nineties. They're like LGBTQ, too many letters. It's like, but that's the point is that it's too many letters. Yeah is that there's too many letters to say. And that's a good thing to be attempting to say too many letters. You know? And that like a lot of the resistance to the change in the flag is like,, but it wasn't that way. It's just change, change. We don't like change. Right. We keep finding more colors. I even had a little of reaction. I was like, oh the rainbow it was so simple But then like if you really well yeah, because everybody gets attached to things they remember and that's okay. But yeah. But then if you really look at it, it's just like, I do like how it's like this like it gives it a little arrowhead. It gives it some like like yes, the beauty of nature but also like We got to fight. Yeah. and the work is not done. Yeah. And I guess it's like if your symbols are getting busier, then that means that you're trying to embrace more, you know? And that's to I don't know, to I think that like The American lefteft is like a complicated thing to be a part of because there's a lot of young people coming from pretty fundamentalist backgrounds who have yet to get out of the mindset of purity and punishment. And you can see, you know, and Portland is famously a place where If you want to have one of the worst experiences of your life, like live with a community organizer is the joke. And it's you know, I think there's a lot of truth to it. And right? like there's a lot of like lefty communities that I have lived in and experienced the gossip of. And yet would like I would always pretty much choose them over any alternative, you know, because I think that the kind of There's a lot of toxicity that emerges inevitably just in human relationships between people who have been through a lot. And yet if you have sort of a basic social goal of like ultimately coming back to wanting to be more expansive and wanting to embrace more and wanting to challenge yourself and wanting to build community rather than find ways to police it and who gets to have one than like I don't know. I think it's okay for people especially who have changed their minds about a lot of things in life, which is difficult work to do to like struggle with how to live those values. like it's inevitable that people are going to struggle with that. And yet it's it's It better to struggle to live good values than to just embrace horrible ones. No one's ever gonna to convince me of that. I have been a proud resident of Portland, Madison, and West Philly. all right? Irretrievable. Yeah. No, totally. Yeah. And like I do think, but I do think inclusivity, which was the original rainbow and which we have now learned is inherent in the rainbow, infinite ways, infinite colors. and is the move in the prorogress Pide flag like it or not aesthetically, L it is just about showing, making sure All of the colors are shown and represented. So maybe really what the flag needs, if we really were to respect the rainbow, maybe it just needs to be a sequence And it's like reflecting all the infinite colors of the light. A QED, beautiful He, you're so great. I love you. I love you. You're so great. Thank you. What are you up to and where can people find you? And what kind of stuff are you making for the folks? Well, definitely come check out Terrestrials, which is the podcast I make for kids and families. You don't have to be a kid or have a kid to listen, as long as you don't mind me occasionally singing. And it's all about nature. We did do a rainbows episode, that's called The Bridge, But another one the queers might like is one we just put out called The Forest Fery that stars a certain indigo girl named Amy Ray Talking about aphids. veryery cool. That one's really cool. She was incredible and it leads us to like all the kind of secret harmon. It leads us to something about it leads us to the fact that plants are talking, which is incredible. And yeah, so I do that podcast about nature. And then I also am on radio lab where we are doing science stories all the time And I'm working slowly chuggking away at a second adult book that's all about biomimicry. That's so exciting, which may be finished someday or may not But either way, you, I don't know. I think that the work you do reminds me and so many people So often just kind of like what kind of a world we're living in in the best way possible, you know? Oh, and I asked you for a little butterfly fact, may I have one? Oh yes, okay, let me decide. Or I take an aphid fact as well, actually now that those have come up. Aphids are so cool. Oh, okay,'ll give okay, I'll give you an aphid fact that is great Um So you know how we're often taught that you need a male and a female to have a baby They're trying to legislate that one, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Aphids can reproduce without males. They can make all female societies where they reproduce. and that is called Both the no Genesis, where the females in a pinch or just like for most of the year, they just they can just reproduce without males. They basically like shoot out clones of themselves and become these big wonderful communities of daughters and sisters and cousins and grandmas and hang out. And some of them dance, the ones we're talking about wooy aphids are also called booooky woogie aphids and dance And I just think what I love about that is like Nature is's what you were saying with infinity. It's so much wilder than we think. It's like, yeah, in many species, you do need a male or female, but like you don't have to. And we've seen that in the California condor and we've seen it in certain snakes. like in a pinch, there is a pathway to create new life. L that is, I think more people need to be talking about parthinogenesis. like fact that can happen? Yeah. That alone is amazing. Like the pathway is there evolutionarily. Yes in bugs, yes, even invertebrates, in vertebrates, in birds and in reptiles. and so I just think like That is so wild and like I just why is everyone not just like around every morning like Carcinogenesis can happen So that's your aid fact. I mean, I know some people who are doing parthenogenesis. you just have to pay a doctor a bunch of money to give you some hormones and harvest your eggs and stuff, but it's, you know, it's So we're getting there And I'm just I'm just so excited for everything that you're doing and too. I love being on this planet with you Thank. I love being on this planet with you. Thank you. I can't wait to hear whatever is coming from here next. that isn't me Okay. Bye, Sarah bye The original music you heard in this episode was brought to you by Magpie Cinema Club, featuring Brendan Lu We have a new bonus episode coming soon also on Patreon and Apple plus, where Chelsea Weber Smith and I are gonna read your doll mail. emmails you sent us about the things you've made dolls out of, to be clear, not mail from dolls Although I cannot be certain that any of those emails were not sent by dolls now that I think about it Thank you to the people who help make this show. Miranda Zigler is our producer and editor. Nicole Ortiz is our administrative assistant Thank you to our amazing guest, Lulu Miller Please check out all of her work wherever you can find it especially on terrestrials You can find her website and more information about her books in the show notes And most of all Thank you for listening We'll see you in two weeks