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Hey, did you know that the new Mars rover is really cool? Its eyes see crazy different colors! It shoots out a helicopter drone! It can vaporize rocks with a laser! Plus, Perseverance traveled more than 292 million miles through space, so that makes it just about the best gadget ever.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior correspondent Adam Rogers joins us to talk about all the wild tech built into Perseverance and what the big deal about Mars is anyway.
Read Adam’s story about the cameras on the Perseverance rover. Watch the video of the landing and read about it here. Read Gilad Edelman on the health benefits of cheese. Preorder Adam’s book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern, here.
Adam recommends granite tile drill bits for drilling through metal. Lauren recommends Vigorous Innovations massage gun. Mike recommends the tech news website Rest of World. Gilad Edelman crashed the show to recommend cheese.
Adam Rogers can be found on Twitter @jetjocko. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
LG: Mike, if a billionaire offered you a ticket on a spaceship to Mars right now, would you take it?
MC: Yes. I would say if it was a free ticket, and if it was a round trip ticket, I would take it.
LG: I think the second part might not be a guarantee at this point, but we do know that we can send car sized robots to Mars and it's pretty wild. And that's what we're going to talk about on today's show.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music]
LG: Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
MC: And I'm Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
LG: And today we are tapping our science desk. We're joined by WIRED senior correspondent, Adam Rogers, who has been covering all things coronavirus, color spectrums, and today, super cool Mars rovers. Hey Adam.
Adam Rogers: Hello. That's right. If you can't send a person, send a Dalek.
LG: That's right.
AR: That's the rule.
LG: So by now you likely all know that on February 18th, NASA landed the Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. Its mission is to hunt for signs of alien life, and generally just collect as much information as possible and send it back to us here on little old earth. And to do that, it's been outfitted with this array of high-tech gear. And this is going to allow us to learn about this planet in profound ways.
So we're going to do today's show a little bit out of order. We're going to talk about some of the tech that this rover is equipped with first. And then later we'll talk about the broader implications of this mission to Mars and why we even want to go there in the first place.
So Adam, let's start with a couple notable things about this rover. One, it's collecting audio. And two, you just wrote a story on WIRED.com this week about the cameras on Perseverance and how they actually perceive imagery much differently than we do. Tell us about this and why this is significant for this mission.
AR: Well, there's something almost philosophical that you have to address if you're going to send not people to explore another planet, but robots, which is you're trying to acquire sensory information. Some of that can be quantized. It can be sent back as data, the numbers for certain analysis that you can send an instrument to do. And I can talk about some of that, but some of it is you want to send a robot that can look at stuff, that can hear stuff in this case, they can sense this world. And then that information goes through the sensory organs, the mechanical sensory organs, the technology that you send, the microphones and the cameras and the sensors, the instruments, and then it has to get home. It has to get back to us, somehow. "Us," not WIRED reporters, but the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
And then there's a whole vast team of humans who process all of that through their own machinery. And then it becomes something that they can look at. It's this arc of how data becomes information and then becomes knowledge. So we humans send these robots to Mars to some extent, to learn how to send better robots to Mars. A lot of the instruments on Perseverance, that's the rover that's there now, are versions of instruments that went up on other missions, and now the scientists at JPL and all these universities, NASA, know how to make them work, to do more of what they want to do, which is to look at their surroundings in ways that we humans would be able to identify easily as looking at stuff to see things in the colors that human eyes also see if we were standing there.
And also to look at them multispectrally, hyperspectral and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that a human eye wouldn't perceive, but the eyes of this rover, "the eyes" that I'm making on a screen, even though this is an audio medium, so that's not helpful at all, but I can see it. The eyes of this rover can see a little bit into the ultraviolet partway, into the infrared and also can see X-rays and are using a laser to project light outward to obliterate some bits of rock and see what happens when you do it. And to listen with microphones that might be more sensitive than a human ear might be. But then, all of those things get reduced or transformed or changed in some way into meaningful knowledge, so that we can understand more about what's on this other planet, where humans have never been, but humans have sent a lot of our stuff.
MC: You were saying that each rover that has gone up to Mars, at least the ones that we've sent have had progressively better technology on them with each version. And I think it's interesting that this rover that just went up now, Perseverance, is essentially the first rover of the iPhone era. Curiosity launched in 2011 and it was designed for a period of five or six or seven years before that. So the imaging technology on it is very representational of that time in imaging technology. The imaging technology that we have now, and the imaging technology that we have on perseverance is, pardon the pun, astronomically better than the tech that we had 10 years ago. I mean, if we think about how bad your Instagram photos were in 2011 and how fantastic they can be now, then you can see just like, as far as mobile technology goes and just imaging sensors, the leap has been huge.
AR: It's a really interesting observation. I think that's right. Although I will also say, one of the instruments that I wrote about it's called the Mastcam-Z. And so it's this binocular camera, two cameras linked together, a left and right eye on top of the tower that's on the rover. So it sits up a little bit high and the Mastcam-Z, the Z in it is for zoom because there was a mast cam on Curiosity, the Z has a zoom capability. And it does a bunch of stuff. It's there to identify targets of potentially interesting scientific value, and also to be able to look around, and navigation, and take pictures and do a whole bunch of other stuff. The CCD the charge-coupled device, the optical sensor, the two in Mastcam-Z are off the shelf, Kodak CCDs.
And they have in front of them, the bare pattern of pixels that I'm probably going to get this wrong, but like the red, green, green, blue, I think. That would be familiar that if you could look into your phone, you would see it. But what Mastcam-Z does, what the experiment does, the instrument is take advantage of some capabilities that our phone cameras don't really do, to do much more because the CCD also can see into the infrared a bit. And so if you put the right filters in front of them, you can do even more science with them. There is some sense that we sent up a camera that would be the same camera that a lot of people have in their pockets right now they're sitting on their desk.
I can get derisive about it, but there's something important I think in the pictures that are starting to come back already, that include parts of the rover itself. And people will describe those as selfies, as Mars selfies, camera taking a picture of itself. And NASA among all agencies is very, very good at its own promotional work. It's saying, here's the picture of the thing we're doing? There are pictures or there's video of the landing, which was so dramatic, but also the video of the landing is there to be video of the landing. It has engineering value, but also publicity value.
But I think calling it a selfie also includes the recognition of it's not personhood because of course, it's not a person, of the machine hood, of the individuality, of the humanness of the technology that that we sent that has to do a thing there. That's doing technological work and seeing Mars through a filter that's a kin to, but slightly different than the filters that if Mike, if you took that billionaire ticket up to Mars how you would see it through the visor of your VAC suit.
LG: OK. So talk about the color correction that NASA is doing to this imagery and why that's important.
AR: This is typical problem of pictures from space generally, and also pictures from Mars. This has been an issue that research teams have had to deal with and figure out how to deal with every Mars mission for a bunch of reasons. Any picture that you have ever seen from the Hubble, those wonderful pictures of star fields or star nurseries that the Hubble space telescope took, any of those things. A lot of these instruments collect data in parts of the spectrum that the human eye doesn't see. And so then those come back as essentially numbers, as databases. And then you have to decide if somebody has to decide. A research team, a science team has to decide, "OK, well, how do we represent that color that's not a color that the human eye would see as a color in the image that we want to produce?"
So one of the things that they sent up with Perseverance there's targeting stuff, there's calibration, color swatches, little Pinterest boards that they send up on the rover so that the camera can look at those and then also see out and they can go, "OK, well, I know what color that thing is, that calibration board is really what color that would be on earth. And so I can adjust the other colors to make sure that the colors are right in terms of that calibration." Here's the thing about that. The light that's coming down through the very, very thin looks like one percent of the atmosphere that earth has, but there's very thin atmosphere on Mars. It's the same starlight that we get on earth. Because we're in the same solar system, same Sun.
You've all seen that. But less of it hitting Mars, because Mars is farther away from the Sun and on Earth, that light is going through a relatively thick atmosphere, full of water. On Mars, it's going through a relatively thin atmosphere full of red dust, iron oxide. So the light actually hitting the surfaces is different. So you have to make a decision, at that point. Do I want to see it as it would look on Earth, or do I want to see it as it would look on Mars? Do I want to see it as it would look on Mars to the rover, which is a bunch of different ways, or do I want to see it as that would look on Mars to a human? Do I want to see it as if it was on Earth? Right? So all those colors ... Which is the real image? Well, there isn't. There isn't-
LG: Does that mean, you're making a judgment call essentially as to how it should look?
AR: Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's good judgment. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. It's just you're making active decisions about that. So if you're trying to do other science, instead of looking out to see what the vistas are, which are amazing, there's an instrument on the arm that Perseverance has called pixel which is sending X-rays basically to try to analyze the chemical structure, the actual molecules that it's looking at in the rock surfaces or whatever the arm is pointing at. We humans don't see those as colors at all. The X-rays do make those different minerals, fluorescent different ways. That information comes back as just numbers. And then when they publish the eventual paper on it, they'll make a map, a false color map of those colors and the woman who runs that team, a really a renowned field geologists and planetary scientists named Abigail Allwood.
She said, yeah, we fight about that all the time about what color is the false maps should be, because it can lead you astray when you look at the false color map and you can say, oh, well, that area is red because it's iron oxides or whatever, but it's not red. It's just some numbers. She says the image they get back, the pixel instrument does about a postage stamp size field of view at a time with 6,000 individual pixels on that each, I think 1,000 microns apart or something. She says the data comes back as a hyperspectral data cube, which is made of the size of the postage stamp. And then each dot that it's looking at has multiple spectra accounts for each of those dots. And I just really like the phrase "hyperspectral data cube."
LG: You just wanted to get it in there for this podcast.
AR: I just wanted to say.
LG: I appreciate you, Adam.
MC: I put one of those in my coffee each morning.
[AR and LG laugh]
LG: So the super thin atmosphere on Mars that you're describing, that makes all of this image capture pretty challenging. It also makes sound wave capture really challenging. I was joking the other day on Twitter that throughout the pandemic, we've been hearing podcasters say, "Oh, it's so hard to capture audio at home. I'm home. I don't have the best equipment, I'm in my closet. There are street noises." Right? And then you have Perseverance, who's basically like, "Hey, I'm dealing with some really challenging conditions here." And sound waves are really effected by the atmosphere. And we tend to hear lower frequency sounds from Mars better than higher frequencies. Also it's incredibly windy there. So talk about how the rover is capturing sound, and also what we hope to learn from those sounds.
AR: Sound also travels as a wave, but unlike the waves in the electromagnetic spectrum, which are waves fluctuations in electrical fields and magnetic fields, waves in an almost virtual sense sound is a wave that we'd understand better as just as waves move in water, waves also move in air and atmosphere. And the sounds that we perceive on Earth are really just waves and fluctuations in the pressure of the air that impinges on our eardrums. And microphones, like the ones that all of us are talking into right now do kind of an equivalent of that and translate those fluctuations in air pressure, into electrical signals in our ear they're translated into neuro electrical signals. On Mars because the atmosphere is so thin, there's less air for those fluctuations in pressure to move through. Same reason you'd have to be wearing that VAC suit, Mike.
And also it becomes in a way easier for the low frequencies to move in the same way that the bass goes through a wall better than the treble does. So scientifically, what do you capture? Well, you can capture meteorological information. We'd like to know things, again, I say we as though it's the WIRED office, no, scientists would like to know things.
LG: But we'd like to know.
AR: We'd like to know too, in a less professionalized and more interested way. Yes. Scientists would like to know things about the Martian atmosphere and how it would work. What it would be like if somebody was there and what's happening on it, how dust moves through it, what those fluctuating conditions will be like. I think there's also, again, an emotional completely valid reason that gives you more of a presence. The wider you can expand the sensorium of the robot up there, the more we humans can understand what it would be like to be there. I think that the sound of the wind there, that's some real Ray Bradbury, Kim Stanley Robinson stuff to think what that must be like to hear.
LG: Can we actually hear that? Boone, Can we play a short clip of that?
[Low, rumbling sounds of wind on Mars]
LG: That of course is courtesy of NASA. So it just sounds really windy, but you're right. You're like, wow, that is Mars.
AR: It's interesting too. NASA describes the sensors because it has chemical sensors as being akin to taste and smell. Those are described for humans as the chemical senses. As a robot, there's not enough intelligence on that robot to translate that taste and smell into the primary indexicality of being in a place and sensing the things around you. But it's a sensory package that becomes similar in many ways to the ones that we move through our world with, it has sight. It has two microphones, so it has binaural stereo sound like we do. It has something like taste and smell. I don't know that it has much of touch because there's not the same kind of tactic haptic feedback, to understand how rough or how smooth it is, although you'll get a sense of some bumpiness, I suppose from the wheels.
MC: That's OK. I mean, we've all been living without the sense of touch for the last year anyway.
AR: Yeah. That is a good way to think about that. I really do keep thinking about all of this as our separate journeys on our own little individual generation starships with occasional intermittent comms with each other. It does feel like that.
MC: It's funny how you said that getting all this data back and the visual data mixed with the audio data, can give us all a very emotional connection. The thing that I found was most striking is, we all grew up with images of space travel from the images shot on the first moon landing in the late 1960s through the Skylab grainy 12 frames per second, video of space walks in the 1970s, space shuttle stuff. But the video that we got back from the Perseverance landing was just incredible. It was like HD, perfectly clear. It looked hyper real in a way that I have never seen space footage look before. It really felt like you were there looking down at the surface of Mars, which is just bananas when you think about it.
AR: Do you know what struck me about it? I've been thinking about this, especially because in my house we've been rewatching some '90s science fiction TV, for reasons I can articulate, but you don't care. And one of the things that is really striking about it is how the special effects were just not good, because they weren't ready yet. They were trying. And the difference between that, and when you watch the expanse now, and it's essentially, like, oh they really look like they shot that in space. It's perfect because they have enough money and these effects have just gotten that good. And the video of the Perseverance descent had the dust blowing up, and the sky crane moving away in the dust. And really, it's a terrible thing. I try not to do the, it looked like a movie thing because that's just weird and distancing and it makes you less present in a lot of ways in your life.
But I was struck by like, oh, that looks like ... I remember when James Cameron movies used that dust stuff to obscure that the effects weren't that great. So there'd be dust in the field and like aliens and a lot of the shots of aliens and in Terminator there's a lot of dust in the same way like Ridley Scott used to use a lot of rain in his effects shot, so you couldn't see the wires pulling the spinner up in blade runner or whatever. And it was like, oh, it turns out that was more accurate, like Cameron was right, space is dusty.
LG: All right, we're going to take a quick break. I do want to mention that WIRED also ran a super awesome story about a Los Angeles musician who helped design the microphone that is on the Perseverance rover. It's a really cool story about how just a conversation with a friend from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory over drinks led to this incredible collaboration. And to Adam's earlier point, I mean, some of the stuff is really off the shelf. It's like if Fry's did still exist, we might be able to go there and get these microphones. But check that out on WIRED.com, we'll link to it in the show notes, and we'll be right back.
[Break]
LG: So Adam, there have been five US rovers that have successfully landed on Mars. And each one has been more technically advanced than the last and therefore capable of collecting more and more diverse information. But all this kind of begs the question, why are we doing this? People like Elon Musk say they want to colonize Mars, but the planet is obviously uninhabitable to humans. Are people actually going to live there someday?
AR: I think that I agree with Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction writer and frankly political theorist who wrote one of the great trilogies about how human beings would go to Mars. Even he has changed his mind since he wrote these books, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars about human beings permanently settling on Mars. He now says, he thinks it's going to be more like Antarctica, which is to say that there will be a permanent science outpost there. So there will be humans there probably year round, but there won't be cities. It won't be surfing in the Utopia Planitia or whatever. As I think, Elon Musk and other would be colonizers would like to say. I think the fact that they use the word colonize is a pretty ... That's them telling on themselves I think.
It is an uninhabitable environment. And even the people who really think far ahead about whether you could terraform Mars disagree pretty mightily on whether even the resources are there, that you could turn into a livable biosphere. And it is very hard for me as a science reporter to think about that kind of stuff. And imagine what sort of people Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk think would be worthy of going versus those who wouldn't as we are in the process, not of terraforming Mars, but of area forming Earth and making it less and less of a friendly place for human beings and other things to live on. Because the biosphere on Earth will adapt to what we do to it. There will still be living things. It just will be harder and harder for more and more people.
And more and more of the things that we like living with, like the food that we grow, and the animals, plants that we like. So I'll put it this way. I don't think that's a reason to study Mars. There are very good scientific reasons to study Mars. And one of the things that the main objective of Perseverance is not so much to find, for example, living thing, to find Martians on Mars now, but to see if it can find evidence like we find on Earth for ancient life here. For life three or four billion years ago, to find similar evidence there on Mars. These specific shapes and structures on a micro scale of the geology combined with the right kind of mineralogy in a material called stromatolites to see if they can imagine that there had once been billions of years ago microbial life on Mars, when Mars was a warmer weather, more friendly to life place like Earth is now.
MC: One of my great fears is that they're going to discover some vast stores of cobalt on Mars.
AR: Right? Well, the idea of mining asteroids or some material that is of obvious capitalist financial value on Mars, that then makes it worthwhile to send people there to get it. I mean, I suppose that's imaginable. One of the things that Perseverance is trying to do is figure out how to make oxygen there as a way of putting materials in place in advance of sending humans at some point. I think a lot of what the planning ... For example, NASA has a planetary protection office whose job it is to keep things from invading Earth, but also keep Earth things from invading other places. And they've had a lot of controversy over what the rules are, for what you can send in where you can land things on the moon and on Mars.
And for some missions, the people studying Mars have intentionally avoided places that might seasonally have liquid water, for example, because that might be a place where there could potentially be something living there now. One of the things that we know about life on Earth is that basically, wherever there's water, there's something alive here by and large. Even in the most unfriendly, the highest salt levels, highest metal content, highest temperatures, the extreme of fire life that lives on earth. So in some cases, we humans have tried to avoid that, go onto the places where things wouldn't be living on Mars, because we don't want to mess it up. Not even worrying about bringing it back here, but not messing it up there in ways that we've messed up a lot of places on this planet. We've made them less friendly, less habitable, more poisonous. It'd be nice to not do that everywhere we go.
MC: Agreed. So the place that we landed this month is essentially what they believe to be a dead ocean, right?
AR: Lake. River leading into a lake. As one researcher said to me, not everybody agrees with that, but he said, "If there's a place that's likely to have the signs that something once lived there, this is that place." It's a crater that was the delta of a river. There was a river that then spread out and came over the sides of these canyon walls and laid sediments down. And it's in those sediments that researchers had found the science of ancient life here on earth and that they hope to find it there in these different colors and layers that they can identify, both visually and by texture and by their mineralogical constituents.
LG: So Adam, what would that science outpost look like on Mars and how would we build the structure to make it habitable?
AR: Yeah. That's such a cool thing to think about. You'd like to not have to take everything that you need with you, because it's really hard to move things from a gravity well into space, it costs a lot. Weight is the issue, mass. So it would be really great to be able to use the materials that are there to transform the soil or the rocks there into the structure. You can imagine digging down into the ground, into the regolith, maybe in one of the canyons, because part of the problem with not having an atmosphere is Mars is just positively lit up with ionizing radiation, everything from sunburn to cancer. So you want to be out of that as much as possible, be shielded from it and be nice to not have to build shielding to do it. It'd be nice to have a place where there was already water.
There seemed to be places where there's frozen water there now. Those would also be places where there might be living things, so you don't want to mess that up. But if there wasn't, if they were sterilized, but there was liquid water, you could use the ice that was there. You could use chemical processes to transform carbon dioxide in the regolith, into oxygen potentially. That's something that there's instrumentation on Perseverance to try to learn how to do. And then all of that would then be studded with science doing stuff in the same way that South Pole Station is, or any of the other Antarctic stations that different countries have to study the weather. To look outward, to have a telescope there that you could see through a thinner atmosphere and not have to deal with the bad seen conditions that happen here on earth.
You could imagine doing the kind of geological mining for potential resources, even again, getting them home is difficult. They have to be so valuable that it's worth sending the rocket and then sending the rocket home somehow. Maybe that's possible. And I think I sometimes have this rueful joke that one of the things that the international space station studies is how to have an international space station. And I don't know if that's ... OK, so are there going to be more stations? Is there going to be better station, bigger stations? What's that for? Why do you need to learn how human beings live in space if human beings aren't going to live in space, there's no place to go. So I don't know. Do you need a Mars outpost to learn how human beings live on a Mars outpost?
The gravity is a lot less. It's not like when they show Mars in the movies, people don't bounce around, but I actually years and years and years ago rode The Vomit Comet, the NASA airplane that does the parabolic arcs and that at the top of them there's free falls. So that you feel what it's like to be in zero G. The Vomit Comet is appropriately named, because I did. But also they can adjust the shape of the parabola to simulate different kinds of freefall. So they do a couple of arcs. When I did it, they did an arc that was the moon and an arc that was Mars.
And it doesn't feel like just walking around. So even just being there will be quite uncomfortable. I guess you get used to it. I mean, people stay on the ISS for a year or more, but would not be easy living. You can't grow food in that soil. You have to take all that with you or you have to take the TV dinners that astronauts eat. The inside of that early station would look a lot more like a space station than it would look like the Lars family vaporator farm on Tatooine, at least initially.
MC: All right, Adam. Last question for you. Would you go to Mars?
AR: At this point in my life, though it pains me to say it. I probably would not.
MC: Why is this point in your life different from any other point in your life?
AR: Because I have responsibilities to other humans here on the ground.
MC: You mean like credit card debt?
AR: Whoa, whoa, whoa. You mean I could get out of that if I go to...? No, that'll be the one thing that works. Comms will be like, "No, your bill showed up." It's online billing. So you can ... I mean that, I think that the risk of that trip for a very long time, even from now, even when we start to send humans, the risk of that trip will be so high and I feel strongly that like, no, I have a family here and I want that to be a priority. I think my partner probably would do it though. Not because she feels differently about this, but because it's Mars, because she's compelled by it. It's like, yeah, but no, that's the thing, you get that chance you take it. And I understand that too. I do.
MC: I seen it on the TV. It looks great.
AR: I mean, I'm not the only one watching those old '90 science fiction shows in my house. That's a family thing.
MC: Right? Well, I look forward to her #Marslife Instagram posts.
AR: Man, she'd be a great astronaut.
LG: Aww. All right, let's take a break and then we'll come back with recommendations and a special guest for recommendations.
[Break]
LG: OK. So as I mentioned, we have a special guest this week who is joining us just for the recommendations portion of the show, which is unusual for us. Our regular listeners will know this person for his absurdly simple recommendations that Mike and I really enjoy making fun of. And he has another great one this week. So we just had to bring him on. Gilad, are you there?
Gilad Edelman: I'm here.
LG: All right. Tell us your recommendation.
GE: My recommendation this week is eat cheese.
LG: Tell us about this.
GE: Well, so as we've discussed on the show, I love egg and cheese sandwiches for breakfast. Calore and I have even back channeled about it to some degree about preparation methods. So anyway, as I was making my egg and cheese a couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the package of cheddar cheese that I had in my hand. And I noticed something I had never noticed before, which is that the number of calories in the cheese wasn't actually that high, it was like 110 calories per ounce, which is pretty similar to all the stuff that I have in my pantry. Whether it's crackers or cereal or whatever. And as somebody who's pretty nutrition conscious and tries to watch my weight. I just found that curious because everybody, or most people have it in their head that cheese is a fattening food.
This sent me down quite a rabbit hole, where I started Googling. First I looked up cheese consumption by country per capita. And then I compared that to countries rated by BMI. And I noticed that the countries where people eat a lot of cheese are Northern and Western European countries where people are a lot less fat than they are here in the United States. And then I started looking into the research on the core actual, what do we know about the link between eating cheese and weight gain, and obesity. And I was stunned to find that all the vast weight of the research, if you will, finds at worse, just no correlation between eating cheese and gaining weight.
LG: I have to say when Gilad first told me via Slack a few weeks ago, that he was going to write about this, we made some pretty cheesy jokes about it. I was trying to poke some holes in his cheese theory. And I was like, come on, manchego this doesn't sound like a gouda story.
GE: Lauren, why would you advertise that you did this? There's not like a disclosure rule for a podcast.
LG: Because I love making dad jokes and we should just have a podcast of dad jokes, obviously.
MC: There's something about-
AR: Whoa, wait, wait, wait, I'm sorry. I got to step in. You call that a dad joke right now? I mean, I love those kinds of jokes too, but I even I'm resisting making those jokes right now! And I'm the dad on this thing right now so-
LG: OK. So in fairness, took a lot what he ultimately presented as evidence kind of, ahem, melted my brain.
[AR sighs heavily]
GE: Very good.
[Long pause]
GE: Do you have a question Lauren or...
[Everyone laughs]
LG: Well, I was just going to ask you, what's your favorite kind of cheese?
AR: At long last croque monsieur, have you no decency?
GE: You want to know my favorite cheese? You don't want to know the science? We've got Adam Rogers in the frigging studio right now, one of the premier science writers, and you're asking me for my favorite cheese. Fine. I'm glad you asked. It depends on the context. So cheddar is a great melting cheese. Unmelted, I could take it or leave it, but if I'm having an egg sandwich with melted cheese, cheddar's really fantastic. If we're talking about cheese in a salad, I am a devotee of feta, which crumbles really well, and is super salty. And then just like gun to my head, I get to eat a bite of cheese right now. What's it going to be? Probably a French goat cheese with a proper rind on the outside.
LG: And where do you get your cheeses?
GE: The store?
AR: Cows or goats, mostly, Lauren. Buffaloes, sometimes-
GE: I actually like I like beaver cheese.
[General laughter]
GE: They're a mammal!
AR: No, that's true. You're right.
LG: All right. In fairness, I asked for this, I basically kicked off the segment saying we enjoy making fun of Gilad and he has successfully turned the tables on me. So good job Gilad.
GE: Thank you.
LG: Actually, it's always a pleasure having you on the show now that you have that fancy new microphone that somebody really cool on staff sent you. We'll have to have you on more often.
GE: Yeah. I was going to say my second recommendation this week is work at a place where half of your colleagues do consumer tech and then a subset of them are really nice because then somebody like Lauren Goode will overcome her fears of the UPS store and ship you a spare microphone across the country from California to Washington, DC. So you can come in, in crystal clear audio and talk about cheese.
LG: I go to FedEx and UPS and USPS on very rare occasions these days, only for people I really like. So you're welcome Gilad.
GE: Thank you.
LG: All right, Adam, as our actual guest this week—Gilad stick around—Adam, what's your recommendation?
AR: I have two recommendations. My one recommendation is to follow Gilad's recommendation and eat cheese, because he's absolutely right. My second recommendation is I'll tell the story super fast. My children both have been doing a lot of blacksmithing during the pandemic. They're both taking blacksmithing because you can do that outside. These pay. So my youngest broke one of his store-bought knives and mora knife really good. And he said, "Oh, I want to make this into a folding knife." But that required that we had to drill through this hardened steel blade to put the pivot in which after going through about six different kinds of drill bits, because I don't have a drill press yet and I'm just seeing a handrail and it would, I only got about a 1/32nd of an inch through this thing every weekend we'd go out there and fail again and again.
Finally, I went on this engineer Slack group that I'm part of and just asked for help. And they pointed me to a granite tiled drill bits. The drill bits that you use to drill through tiles for tiling and walk or whatever. I got some of those off McMaster-Carr and finally was able to drill through the hardened steel mora knife blade and make a perfect, good little hole for this folding knife. So I recommend granite tile drill bits.
GE: Answering the question everyone was wondering.
AR: Says the cheese monger over there! You're going to come at me for my recommendation after recommending cheddar? I mean, at least I'm up in here with like Cotswold, with the chives and the onion, the Cotswold. It's delicious, a slice of that on a cracker.
GE: Mmm, that does sound good.
MC: "My children have been taking blacksmithing lessons."
AR: Yeah. Yeah.
MC: Berkeley, man.
AR: [laughing] Berkeley, man.
LG: Berkeley. All right, Mike, what's your recommendation?
MC: Well, it has nothing to do with blacksmithing, but I am going to recommend a website that I think everybody who is interested in stuff that we talk about on this show would also be interested in, it's called RestofWorld.org. It's a relatively new website. It's a couple of years old and it's technology news, but it's technology news through a very different lens than what you're used to. If you read, say WIRED, or if you read The New York Times or Washington Post or any of the big tech publications, like The Verge. It is a website that looks at technology in non-Western countries and in countries that normally don't get reported on for their technology scenes. Just looking at the homepage today, there's a fantastic story, which I shared widely earlier this week on Twitter about the trend in big Chinese cities, towards small golf carts instead of cars.
And instead of scooters, they're not really legal. They're not really safe, but people are flocking to them because they're that cheap and they are easy way to get around in China. There's also a really fantastic story about the Indian version of basically parlor. It's called Koo, it's a social network built on the tenant of free speech. And of course all the right wingers in India are flocking to it. There's also another fantastic story about a Mexican Instagram star who is married to a politician and she's using her platform on Instagram to campaign for her politician husband which is also maybe not allowed, really fantastic stuff. It's a non-profit and they publish pretty regularly. Make it a stop in your news diet. It's called RestofWorld.org.
LG: That's great. And our former colleague, Louise Matsakis, is now writing for them.
MC: Oh, that's right. I completely forgotten. Thank you for reminding me.
LG: Yeah. So go check it out.
MC: What's your recommendation, Lauren?
LG: Mine is going to be so lame compared to everybody else's here, except maybe it's better than Gilad's. Or you may need one of these, if you take Gilad's recommendation. I'm not really sure. So for Christmas this year, one of my brothers sent me a massage gun. He did not send a Theragun, which is I think the brand most people recognize at this point and they're incredibly expensive. This is an off-brand, it's called VI, and it stands for Vigorous Innovations and it's $140. It's a quiet percussion massage gun. And it's designed for athletes or anyone who feels like they want to give themselves a massage. And I like to cycle and run. And so my IT band is very, very grateful for this off-brand, much less expensive, percussion massage gun, and I'm quite happy with it. So that is what I'm recommending this week.
GE: How do you point a gun at your own back?
LG: Well, as I mentioned Gilad, if you were listening...
GE: Sorry, what?
LG: I don't use it on my back, use it on my IT band. So I basically use it on my legs.
GE: OK. I was listening, and I didn't know what an IT band was.
AR: I thought that was the people who you ask for help if your email's not working. I get really ... And they play music on the--
GE: And they answer in song.
AR: [Laughing] Thank you, Gilad.
LG: Right. Most journalism outfits have actually gotten rid of the IT departments, leaving us all to our own devices, quite literally, to figure shit out. So no, it is not that IT. It is the IT band that runs up and down your leg and like, yes, it's painful to massage it, but it can get very tight. And then, it's also once it's very tight, it's painful to exercise with a tight IT band. And so the massage gun really helps that quite a bit.
AR: It's true though, that using it on your back or parts that you can't reach would be hard because of course, guns don't massage people, people massage people.
LG: Right, right. You can do it on your lats, but then you're never fully relaxing. But yeah.
AR: I keep thinking that those would be good to shoot a massage at someone else from a distance. Like you could get a sniper massage gun.
LG: Yeah. Adam have you heard of this thing? It's called Covid-19, not sure if you're familiar with it, but probably not a good idea in certain situations to let someone get that close to you at this point in time, or we may be getting close to that.
AR: But that's what I'm saying! Like a remote, like one on a really long tripod mount with a long arm 10 feet away getting massage at 300 yards.
GE: Yeah, I can picture this, I'm with you.
LG: All right. Let's put NASA on this. This has to be their next mission. Instead of a giant mass with a laser blaster, we need a frickin' massage gun on a robot arm. OK, this has gone off the rails and I'm happy about that. Thank you so much to Adam and to Gilad for joining us for this episode. And Adam tell people where they can buy your new book.
AR: Well, the book is Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. It comes out May 18th. That'll be on all of the electronic places that sell books from the Amazon. So the bookshops to the independent bookstores, who you want to keep in business for when we can all leave our homes and go browse once more. And I promised to put more links up in places like Twitter, where I'm @jetjocko.
MC: And if you email Adam, he will mail you one.
AR: [laughing] Damn it Gilad!
LG: Yeah, email Adam directly, he loves that. And Gilad, where can people acquire a selection of your fine curated cheeses?
GE: I am glad you asked. I just decided while you were asking that question, I'm going to start my own cheese subscription service. So it's called, Mongo.r, like M-O-N-G-dot-R. And you sign up, you give them your credit card information. And then I just sometimes mail you a cheese.
MC: Just in an envelope. By itself.
GE: Just like with a slice of brie in a regular envelope with a $0.50 stamp.
AR: There'll be like a chat and a social function to where everybody gets on to the network and eats the cheese together obviously.
GE: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
LG: Wow. What a time to be alive.
GE: I think it's easier to acquire a fine curated selection of my cheese thoughts. You can read my article "Cheese Actually Isn't Bad For You" on WIRED.com. Shouldn't be too hard to find it. It's right above Adam's article on the most read.
AR: [laughing] Goddammit.
LG: All right. Thank you everyone for listening to this wild show. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter, just check the show notes. And like we said, Adam really enjoys emails. So just send them lots of email. This show is produced by the excellent Boone Ashworth. Goodbye for now. We'll be back next week.
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