Are there more carnivores in the ocean than land? Yes! But... why? And what does that teach us about how we study ecosystems? And what constitutes a collection? Well it goes way back in time, and can cover anything and everything interesting, and maybe even teach us about ourselves and each other.

Images we Talk About:
Giraffe
Biomass Pyramid 1
Biomass Pyramid 2
Dolphin
Tiger
Purple Otter Skull

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:30) The Marine Carnivore Conundrum
(00:56:33) Collecting
(01:51:34) Outro

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Join our Discord!

We also learn about: Oh yeah that topic’s gonna hit, only 5% of fish are herbivorous compared to 30% of terrestrial animals, zoopharmacognosy, carnivora is not all carnivores and not exclusively carnivores, hypercarnivores eat 70% or more meat, polar bears are some of the most carnivorous animals we know of, grizzly bears only eat 10% meat, osteophagia, suckin on bone, trophic levels, Ella’s clearly an apex predator but are all humans, trying to beat the trophic level high score, let us know your level in the discord, average trophic levels, humans are 2.2 on average, trophic jorg, lopsided biomass pyramids, there are simply less plant diversity in the oceans, land predators hunt animals with at least 45% of their body size whereas whales do .01%, oh yeah aquatic animals don’t have paws or storage, aquatic carnivores have homodont  dentition, trophic cascades, sea urchins can turn otter bones purple, hunter collector society, don’t pre-empt my question, the earliest collection we know of is from 105,000 years ago, shell collectors were just like me fr, coin collecting was a hobby of kings, a quick detour for the worst pope, but maybe Pope Boniface VIII is just like me for real, I like collecting 50 and 100 dollar bills actually, the wunderkamer or cabinets of curiosities, the industrial revolution ignited collecting, Americans turned British spoons into collecting, Ella’s love spoon, say the line Ella, this is really a “what’s wrong with Ella” topic, Edward Wharton-Tigar’s cigarette card collection and incredible quotes, David Attenburough convinced him not to take his cards with him into the 8th ring of hell, you’ve activated my trap card, magpies don’t collect shiny things and may have neophobia, animal collection, the cursed bug katamari, it’s like if I collected cards with boobs AND HE JUST LIKE ME FR, pack rat brain activation, a pack rat piss detour, amberat, collections represent our ability to abstract and think of the future, and that’s why I should get another spoon, Freud’s toilet hypothesis for collecting, Baudrillard on collecting, collecting builds yourself, They Collect What? baggers, I now collect banana friends.

Sources:

So, once again there are actually too many sources to fit here, it literally won't let us put them all here hahaha so please find the sources at https://www.letslearneverything.com/105-sources

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

Caroline's Frogs campaign and our improv class were some of our favorite bonus episodes we've done, so we wanted to share a sample of what they sound like!

If your interest is piqued, you can hear the rest AND support the show at www.LetsLearnEverything.com/join

Sources:
JSTOR: Portmaneau Origins

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

Folks we're halfway through the MaxFunDrive! And to keep the celebration we have Tom chatting behinds the scenes with other Max Fun hosts!

For all the details about MFD perks, the livestream, and how to support the show, go to LetsLearnEverything.com!

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:26) Casters on Casters

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

What is the Anthropocene? No really, who came up with it, when does it start, and why does that matter? Well it involves nuance, scientific beef, and a surprising amount of freaky little guys. And we all know of some sound effects we love, but what is their history, where are the weird places they've shown up, and what can they teach us about art?

Images we Talk About:
The International Chronostratigraphic Chart
Opabinia
Graptolite
Sound Effect Rooms
Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
Picture 4
Picture 5
Picture 6

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:05:37) The Anthropocene
(01:21:57) Sound Effects
(02:16:15) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: The human dominated geological time frame, this is actually a geology topic, let’s get our rocks off, the geological timescale, clues in the rock layers, the geologic calendar, the international chronostraographic chart, Eons Eras Periods Epochs Ages, GSSPs are physical places, a long cambrian tangent, the burgess shale was a rare cambrian preserver, trilobites are the alpha male body plan, opabinia had 5 eyes and one claw, hallucigenia actually makes Tom recoil, index fossils, Ella just loves these little freaks, Ella literally has a graptolite fossil, the SPICE extinction, title drop halfway through the topic, wait nvm we have to talk about the holocene, in 2024 they declined the anthropocene proposal, are we covering the anthropocene or the 24 years of its proposal? Jan Zalasiewicz ignobel lick, heavily acronymized science beef, a person dabbing is the anthropocene GSSP (or fossilized air bubbles in ice), Jan vs Jan, maybe the anthropocene is just an Event, insects are the canary in the mass extinction coal mine but they’re also not in the record, humans make up a third of the mass of large vertebrates - and the rest are mostly things we eat, a t-rex wishes to be the most abundant species and a monkeys paw curls, chicken bones in the fossil record, we’ve pushed back the next ice age 50,000 years, don’t clip me dabbing at nuclear weapons, when does the anthropocene start? 1952 with the plutonium shift, there was a most popular album at the start of the anthropocene, era dates are changed all the time, a spicy retirement letter, did you ask him about the email - I mean I did, rocks are political, we’re not in the anthropocene but let’s see what happens, make this design juicier please, sound effects can be realistic or symbolic, the siren whistle slip sound, the real sound of bald eagles, sound effects are treated more like a commodity than an art and a history, we don’t know if ancient mesopotamians beatboxed, Ella shredded so hard on the thundersheet she bled, sound effect started in plays, shakespeare and kabuki pioneered realistic and symbolic sound effects, tsuke, the first radio sound effects from the 1921 world series broadcast from Jersey, the walking surfaces at the BBC, 1920s sound effect rooms, sound effect records, who would buy this? ME!! what do you mean you survived the great depression traveling america for sound effects, 2 headed turntables designed for vinyl sound effect DJs, Jack Foley, the Bristol Old Vic thunder machine’s audio tricks, stealing John Dennis’ thunder, canning laughter from the Red Skelton show, this isn’t a real game, fine it was a good game and I win, recreating pacman with waves, pacman’s noise is so icon it created an onomatopoeia, Ben Burtt also loved the lightsaber, that was a great buzz, sound effects are both the truth and a lie, freesound.org, male_thijs_loud_scream.aiff

Sources:
Folks, we have so many show notes and sources that we literally hit the character limit, which is a first!
So please find the sources at https://www.letslearneverything.com/104-sources

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

IT'S THE MAX FUN DRIVE!!! We kickoff with a crossover "Casters on Casters" with Ella chatting behinds the scenes with other Max Fun hosts!

For all the details about MFD perks, the livestream, and how to support the show, go to LetsLearnEverything.com!

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:40) Casters on Casters

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

Why aren't mushroom animals? Why is this mushroom growing out of a frog?? WHAT KIND OF MUSHROOM IS TOAD?!?! Well Sage the Bad Naturalist is here to answer all our festering fungus questions!

Things we Talk About:

Sponge Lifecycle
Fungus Lifecycle
Mushroom Growing out of Frog
Bunashimeji Mushroom
Blewit Mushroom

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:06:50) Why Aren't Fungi Animals
(00:24:55) This is Planet Chitin
(00:30:01) The Frog Mushroom Mystery
(00:52:47) Questions for Sage
(01:19:16) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: Maybe some day I’ll get to be on this podcast, don’t ask scicomm dad! fungal anatomy, mushrooms are just the short lived fruiting body, fungi don’t have seeds or leaves or photosynthesize, Fungi were just the weird plant for a while - just Jerry, fungi don’t have vasculature their more spongy, fungi are genetically closer to animals so why didn’t Jerry come to our family? coral are animals, coral and fungal reproduction cycles, you’re going to learn so much in this one Tom, “that’s cant be the reason why”, consequences of the divergence aren’t the reason - the divergence is the reason, we should have been wrong more right!, this is planet chitin, dark fungi, fungus is made of bug, oh we’ve found the thing that actually makes me want to throw up on the podcast, protect our chitinous brethren, the mystery of the mushroom growing out of a frog, sage’s frog theory whiteboard, no one has ever seen this before, first time we’ve seen it does not mean first time it’s happened, mucusy coincidence, the return of amphibian chytrid fungus, the scientists have moved on but Sage hasn’t, botanical anarchy, slowly dropping out of grad school, odd jobs, its fucked up that make up affects views, Toad is a bunashimeji, remember toad with legs is made of bugs, blewits are underrated, drawing on the artist’s conk mushroom.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

Why are there so many vitamins, what even IS a vitamin?? Well Tom finally understands, and takes us on a tour through their infuriating past. And how did the cheerful fairy we know and love today, evolve into its current form? Well we'll only tell if you can answer our riddles three and- or you can just listen to the episode.

Things we Talk About:
James Lind Scurvy Painting
The Various Vitamin Bs
Vitamin Map
Brownie
First Fairy Image
Cicely Mary Barker Fairies
Cottingley Fairies 1
Cottingley Fairies 2
Illusion Spinners
Bitterbloom Bearer

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:05) The Vitamin Saga
(00:57:54) The Evolution of Fairies
(01:48:20) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: Will vitamin c cure me or murder me? more people died of scurvy than combat on the seas, Lind’s biblical scurvy experiment painting, vitamin Pee, maybe oranges are the fifth humor, beri beri, the gelatin comission, come onnn man it’s the 1800s give me a break, we know proteins carbs fats and minerals but something’s missing, STUDY MINERALS THEY SAID - YOU’LL WIN A NOBEL PRIZE THEY SAID, vital amines but they’re not amines, wait are vitamins like fish?? drop the e just vitamin, *mymymymy* all the vitamins are completely different?, some vitamins only exist for a few picoseconds in a supercollider, a bunch of vitamins got pluto’d, Vitamins are like a title, vitamer, VITAMIN D IS A HORMONE, wait maybe hormones are vitamins too, we haven’t talked about how vitamins work because they do Too Many Things, “we’re trying our best but sometimes our best isn’t good enough”, lifting the shadow of death, fitnessgirl250 actually has a PhD, food science is an applied science, the LLE supplement has all the dropped vitamins, vitamins are perfect for capitalism, there is not silver bullet, you can’t supplement your way into a healthy life, an appearance from she/her Caroline, the rainbow magic fairy books, we support evil fairies, the fickle house brownies, realizing fairytales are fairy tales, both high and low class could blame fairies, dressing boys as girls to protect them from the fae, booktok loves hot Rumpelstiltskin, American leprechaun traps, fae - fatah - the fates, when did fairies evolve wings, distinguishing from angels through insectification, fairies may have shrunk to be less threatening, Tom doesn’t know what a panto is, Victorians established the modern fairy, fairies went from robbing cribs to being trapped in the nursery, Cicely Mary Barker’s flower fairies, the collectability of fairies, 350 fairy books in 5 years, the Cottingley fairy hoax, fairies went from being about protecting sons to empowering girls, spelling fairy or faerie, Evyn Fong’s insectoid fairies, the review corner riddle, weaponizing review corner to talk to us.

Semba: The Discover of the Vitamins
Royal Museums Greenwich: Scurvey
Science History Institute: Scurvey
Beriberi Review through Chinese Medical Literature
Drummond's Naming of Vitamins
Nobel Laureats in the History of Vitamins
Semba: On the Discovery of Vitamin A
SciAm: What Vitamins Really Do

---

Wiki: Parī (Peris)
JER Journal: Peri and Persian Mythology
Book: A Dictionary of English Folklore
BBC: Fairies, Leprechauns and Changelings: Ireland's Darkest Folklore
Blog: Fairy versus Faerie, and other names for the Fae
Harvard University: The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
This Is Gendered: The Fairy
Blog: An Overview of How Faeries Were Portrayed During Different Literary Periods
Edinburgh University: A Need for Belief: The Victorians and Fairies.
Book: Trolls: From Scandinavia to Dam Dolls, Tolkien, and Harry Potter
BBC: When Britain was Gripped by 'Fairy Mania'
Blog: The Surprising Magic of Bad Books
Oxford English Dictionary: Fairy

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

For episode 101, we're challenging ourselves to make a technically family friendly, swear free episode! Why is the sky blue? Well it turns out it took a lot of science to understand why! And what is speech disfluency? Well it's like... um... you'll see!

Images we Talk About:
Green Flash
Sunset

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:06:43) Why is the Sky Blue
(00:54:28) Speech Disfluency
(01:40:45) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: it’s like playing mozart for children, mystery spires, atmospheric optics is responsible for all the bangers, they didn’t have a word for blue but they could perceive it, davinci and newton were on the right track, and thus the liberal lie of the greenhouse effect was born, Tyndell was just trying to clean an air sample and saw it turn blue, Baron’s used to be useful at least, Tom’s mind gets rocked by Rayleigh scattering, why isn’t the sky purple, When was the sky blue? the great oxidation event, sky is atmosphere, why is the sun so tiny OH ITS FAR AWAY, Ella pulled a Tom at the intro, Ella’s filler montage, no swearing no fillers challenge, there’s no fillers in the speech we watch on TV and movies, we actually um-dope our podcast in post, people used filler words in the past too, it’s found in poems and the earliest recorded sounds, the valley girl like, natural language corpuses, the 2 genders are uh and um, fillers in other languages, parasite words, uh is almost universal, the function of filler, backchanneling, measuring um reaction times, a visit from Gretchen, um is like a swiss army knife, like as quotation marks or hedging, right *slaps knees*, the power of saying something which technically means nothing.

StellarNet: A Brief History of the Sky’s Blueness
Blog: The bizarre myth that Ancient Greeks couldn't see blue
2023 Paper: Revisiting the question “Why is the sky blue?”
Wiki- John Tyndall
The Conversation: John Tyndall: the forgotten co‑founder of climate science
Wiki: Rayleigh Scattering
NASA: The Electromagnetic Spectrum
Scientific American: Mirages
IFL Science: Orange Sky
The Great Oxidation Event: How Cyanobacteria Changed Life
Royal Museums Greenwich: Why Is The Sky Blue
Mars in a Box: Martian Sunsets
---
Wikipedia: Filler (linguistics)
Thought Co: Definitions and Examples of Filler Words
The Register: Why Do We Say Um?
Paper: Listeners' Uses of Um and Uh in Speech Comprehension
New York Times: So, Um, How Do You, Like, Stop Using Filler Words?
University of Colorado Paper: We, um, have, like, a problem
Guardian: Why Do People Say Like So Much?
NPR: Why Do We Say Um So Much?
BBC: Teen Slang
Paper: Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders
Cambridge: Hidden Use of Fillers
The British National Corpus 2014
Language Hat: The Mystery of Fillers
The Atlantic : “Men Say 'Uh' and Women Say 'Um'”
Language Log: Men and Women’s Use of Words
JStor: Filler Words and Floor Holders
THE CALIFORNIA STORY 1906 By Thomas A. Edison

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

Tom & Ella are out sick! So enjoy this recast of when Tom was healthy and on SciShow Tangents!

OR enjoy our 2 hours on the Project 4 Awesome livestream, basically a video podcast!

OR check out all our other stuff at https://www.LetsLearnEverything.com/

Thanks for your patience y'all! - Tom, Ella, & Caroline

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

You asked, and we finally answered, today we are Finally, actually learning everything! Something that is definitely possible and easy to do. Caroline covers infinity, which can include basically anything, Ella covers what everything is made of, and Tom does the rest! Simple, right?

Images we Talk About:
Cantor's Diagonal Argument
The Bullet Cluster

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:28) Infinity
(00:49:09) What's Everything Made Of?
(01:29:52) Everything Else
(02:08:54) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: 

Infinity is the amount I love you guys - oh I made such a noise of disgust, my infinity could beat your infinity, quoting The Fault in Our Stars, ancient Greeks had a horror for the infinite, Euclid refused to use infinity, we have no physical proof that any item can be infinite, turning water into wine and counting to infinity, next time someone says I love you infinity plus one call them a number annihilator, pre-scowling, we ask Caroline a million questions about sets, sets offer a new language for math, “actually Ella they use the word transfinite”, Caroline rage baits Ella, Ella loves Cantor’s diagonal argument but people at the time HATED it, Cantor was a “corrupter of youth”, the universe is everything, god dammit is there more than matter, pigeons and pizza and Ella’s giant gengar plush are made of quarks and leptons, ordinary matter is just 5% of the universe, 26.8% is dark matter and the rest is dark energy, dark energy and matter are not interchangeable - dark just means we can’t observe them, your MOM is massive, 1933 dark matter is theorized to make the math work, dark matter is not a theory it is an observation of missing mass, the differing mass of the bullet cluster, halos of dark matter around galaxies, red shift in every direction, don’t @ me about the accelerated expansion of the universe, dark energy is the mysterious force that keeps the universe expanding, heat death or re-contraction, dark matter and dark energy are warring siblings trying to pull everything together and apart and we’re stuck in the middle, list of all wikipedia pages, OH NO IT’S INTERESTING, monk stuff, the exclamation mark came during the humanist era of the renaissance, oh no we printed the ironic bible! inverted exclamation marks, exclamation mark haters, old comics had exclamation marks for periods! Making Beowulf Scream, Lo! per my last email, our show didn’t start with an exclamation mark - it snuck its way into being beloved, no one is sure how the exclamation mark ended up in programming languages, DO anthropomorphize the exclamation mark, please don’t be disappointed we didn’t stop the podcast, We Didn't Stop the Podcast.

We Didn't Stop the Podcast Lyrics

Sources:
Wikipedia: Infinity Symbol
Wikipedia: Infinity
Polytechnique: A (Very) Brief History of Infinity
Britannica: Infinity
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Infinity
1983 Paper: The Realization of Infinity: On the Philosophy of John M. Anderson
Scientific American: Some Mathematicians Don’t Believe in Infinity
2017 Paper: Actual and Potential Infinity
Schechter: Potential versus Completed Infinity
Medium: Infinity Isn’t Just a Number — It’s a Mind-Bending Universe of Paradoxes
Youtube: minutephysics
Youtube: Jim Fowler
Blog: The Math of Dr Who #4.2
---
Etymonline: Etymology of Everything
Wikipedia: Everything
NASA: What is the Universe?
EBSCO: Leptons
Harvard: What is the Univer Made Of?
ESA: What is the Unvierse Made Of?
Astrobites: ΛCDM
NASA: Building Blocks
ESA: Dark Matter and Dark Energy
Angela Collier: Dark Matter is Not a Theory
NASA: Dark Matter
Forbes: Who Really Discovered Dark Matter
Harvad: Dark Energy and Dark Matter
NASA: Bullet Cluster
ESA: Gravitaional Lensing
ESA: Redshift
ESA: Comsic Microwave Background
---
Wikipedia List of All Pages
Florence Hazrat's "An Admirable Point: a Brief History of the Exclamation Point"
Florence Hazrat Interview
The Irony Mark
Stan Lee on Comic Book Exclamation Marks
Marvel End of Exclamation Mark Announcement
Making Beowulf Scream
History of Factorial
Figuring out the Origin of ! in Computer Science

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

The author, historian, and person of many fascinations Iszi Lawrence teaches us how to get into ancient Egyptian heaven! Plus we learn about a bit of everything else from dinosaurs to medieval almond milk!

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:06:14) Getting Into Ancient Egyptian Heaven
(00:45:31) Questions for Iszi
(01:08:59) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

Images we talk about:
Anurognathus
The Tring Tiles

We also learn about: Todays question is how to take on two attackers, “I really recommend violence if you have neurodiversity”, Ma’at, getting into the Egyptian afterlife is an escape room, why Egypt was geographically perfect, I’m going to put a mastaba on my mastaba, there were ancient Egyptian archaeologists of ancient Egypt, you don’t think with your brain that’s weird, Allan’s mummified body in the King’s College London library, the mummification industry, dodgy ibis mummy dealers, pyramids were a giant sign that said “ROB ME IM RICH”, King tut also packed too much underwear, Anubis guides you through a video game level of challenges, the hall of two truths and a lie, weighing your heart in court, Ammit has the head of crccodile body of a tiger legs of a hippo my perfect woman, your heart has to way no more and no less than a feather, the scarab is a pay to win heart silencer, pubs were public houses when you brewed too much beer and it was women’s work! almond milk was around during the medieval times, we are story brained and we pay attention to the weird things not the boring ones, he showed me his whip scorpion, nanotyrannus, why do you like dinosaurs - why do you like eating? Anurognathus, toddlers comes from drunken walking, sad means not sober, the suffragette jiu jitsu dojo, the tring tiles was teen jesus.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's MaxFunDrive! Still want to get in on the action? Follow this link to support this show (and get in on our limited-time keychain sale to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights): https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn