Ideas Worth Exploring

Mark McDonald

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Science is the best way we have for understanding how the world works. And you know what makes science better? Puns! This podcast is meant to introduce a variety of scientific topics in a way that is approachable for people without a scientific background and entertaining even for the nerds who think they know everything.

12 THG 1

Optimization algorithms and the life lessons they taught me

Optimization is about maximizing or minimizing something. The math behind how you do that has taught me some important life lessons, including: (Gradient descent) Incremental progress with regular course corrections will eventually get you where you want to go. (Soft constraints) Giving yourself some wiggle room can help you avoid black and white thinking. (Local minima) Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. (Multi-objective optimization) Managing the tradeoffs between multiple conflicting goals can help you reach both goals better. (Overfitting) Optimizing too hard can actually make you worse off, and so it’s important to know when to quit. Links: Joggling: https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/being-the-best-in-the-world-is-easy Exchanging money for time: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cvDtmPNCyrkpg4d4F/units-of-exchange https://www.clearerthinking.org/tools/value-of-your-time-calculator Russian internet trolls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades

31 phút
15/12/2024

The secret to getting rich is to be boring

I’ve been interested in investing recently, the idea that if you have money then you can use it to make more money. This is a really important topic that I wish my past self had understood better, and so I’m going to break the usual rule of only doing science so that I can dive into this other thing that interests me, which is figuring out what the evidence says is the best way to invest money.

24 phút
29/10/2024

Climate Change Part 3: The solutions to global warming and what they have to do with cows

If we want the globe to stop warming, then we need to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Methods to reduce emissions include: renewable energy, electric vehicles, feeding seaweed to cows to stop them from burping so much, turning poop into jet fuel, and resurrecting the mammoths. We’re also going to cover what individual people can do to make the most difference in the fight against global warming. Also, here are just a couple of the sources I used while researching this: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-land-use-drives-co2-emissions-around-the-world/ https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/electric-vehicles https://rmi.org/press-release/evs-to-surpass-two-thirds-of-global-car-sales-by-2030-putting-at-risk-nearly-half-of-oil-demand-new-research-finds/ https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/four-lifestyle-choices-most-reduce-your-carbon-footprint https://clearpath.org/tech-101/steel-101/

36 phút
01/09/2024

Climate Change Part 2: Blind octopuses and lonely turtles

Climate change will cause droughts, floods, heat waves, and might even make our vegetables less nutritious. In this episode we will talk about some of the consequences global warming will have on animals and humans, and how much of an impact we should expect. This is the second of a 3-part series on climate change. A couple sources: World Economic Forum data https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Quantifying_the_Impact_of_Climate_Change_on_Human_Health_2024.pdf IPCC Report on Extreme Weather Events https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter11.pdf TierZoo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hNb0sD7bD8 Octopus blindness https://www.ucdavis.edu/blog/warming-ocean-could-harm-octopus-vision

34 phút
25/08/2024

Climate change part 1: Your car is a greenhouse

Cow burps and car emissions are making the atmosphere heat up. This is the greenhouse effect, and it’s the same thing that turns your car into an inferno in the summer, with some nuance added. In this episode, we will discuss the physical science behind global warming. This will be the first of a 3-part series on climate change.

38 phút
27/06/2024

Game Theory part 2: playing chicken with potatoes

If you ever encounter a situation where you think “who’s going to give in first?” it’s probably a game of chicken. This is the dynamic that shaped the arms races of Cold War, much of modern politics, and probably also quite a few of your interactions with other people. The game of chicken can be analyzed using game theory, and we’re going to start that discussion with a Reddit story of a guy who ruined his relationship by pretending not to know what a potato is.

33 phút
10/06/2024

Game Theory Part 1: Society is in a prisoner’s dilemma

What do tic-tac-toe, international politics, and animal grooming behaviors have in common? Much more than you might expect. In this episode we’re going to talk about game theory, a field of economics that lets us analyze social interactions by treating them as multiplayer games, and then using math and science to understand the best strategies to win those games. This episode is the first part, where we will focus on four games: cake-cutting, the ultimatum game, coordination games, and the prisoner’s dilemma.

33 phút
13/04/2024

Oh no! Polymers are taking over the world!

Polymers are everywhere. There are dozens of types of plastics, but there are also biological polymers such as DNA and proteins, and together, most of the materials you use every day are made of one of the two types of polymer. Even I’m made out of polymers! Let’s talk about what they are and why they’re taking over the world.

31 phút

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Science is the best way we have for understanding how the world works. And you know what makes science better? Puns! This podcast is meant to introduce a variety of scientific topics in a way that is approachable for people without a scientific background and entertaining even for the nerds who think they know everything.

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Mark McDonald
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2022 - 2025
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Ideas Worth Exploring