Never Be Bored
15 January 2021
Neverbeboredology
Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything, documentary show. SciShow YouTube channel; Ologies podcast by Alie Ward; What If? book and webserial by Randall Munroe.
This blog is about connections between media—if you like this song off this album, try this webcomic; if you like the aesthetics of this movie, you might enjoy this tv show; if you love this podcast, you can learn more from this book. Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything is a Netflix documentary show hosted by Latif Nasser that explores connections between science and technology.
This series goes around the world—exploring dating app algorithms in France, fish health in Sweden, rainfall in South Africa, art forgery investigations in the US. It's the kind of show that makes you amazed at how wonderful and weird our world is, how much we've learned about it, the things we do while living in it, how much we still don't know. This show got me emotional learning about how ancient fish fossil dust from the Sahara gets blown over the Atlantic and is a major player in Amazon rain forrest ecology.
There's so much out there to know! There are so many people who have studied so many things, and there's still so many interesting questions left to answer. How wonderful!
For short n sweet science videos that will teach you something, try SciShow on YouTube. Started by Hank Green, this channel has over two thousand videos on all kinds of topics, from astronomy to zoology to breaking science news and science history. There's something for everyone here, no matter what you're interested in. And one thing SciShow does really well is explaining why the subject of the video is important—not just handing you some cool facts, but also talking about why scientists care about studying that subject in the first place.
If you appreciated Latif Nasser looking wide eyed in wonder at a scientist explaining some natural phenomenon and then just cracking a dad joke, then you might like the Ologies podcast, whose tagline is "ask smart people stupid questions." In each episode, Alie Ward interviews an expert in a field—like volcanology, or paleontology, or horology—and gets them talking about how they got started, what they're working on, what they're most passionate about, and if their work ever causes them existential dread.
Sometimes questions aren't possible to answer via real-world experimentation. But that doesn't mean they can't be answered at all! In What If?, Randall Munroe uses existing research and mathematical modeling to try and figure out what would happen if you drained the oceans, or took a swim in a spent nuclear fuel pool, or replaced the Moon with a black hole of the same mass. What If? was originally published online and was later turned into an excellent book.