You're watching Venus... Right?

less than 1m read

·Nov 3, 2024

Hey, it's me Destin. Welcome to Smarter Every Day.

So, if you are a Smarter Every Day subscriber, I know for an absolute fact that right now you are watching the Venus transit, or as I like to call it, the Venutian eclipse.

Anyway, so here's what I want to know. How are you watching it? Are you kind of weird, and you maybe, oh, I dunno, you have a Chinese food box balanced on a chair, and you're letting the sun shine through that aperture that you created with a kitchen knife in your Chinese food lid, and you're looking at it that way? Or are you doing something crazy elaborate with a telescope?

So, let's use this opportunity to learn about telescopes. I'm very, very, umm... I'm very, very interested in what you're doing, especially if you're on the other side of the world from me.

So let's, ah, get our video responses ready, and then I'm gonna post some stuff that I learned from the US Space and Rocket Centre. I just went up there.

And I want to see what you're doing. So when I post that video, please give me a response so I know what you're doing. That way we can figure out how we can use this information to study more about where we live, on Earth.

Anyway, I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day. Get those video responses ready. Thanks.

Marmots of Olympic National Park | America's National Parks

How to Stay Focused For Long Periods of Time (even on boring things)

View All

Thinking About Lockdowns

[voice from the audience] Hey! Hey. Where’s the Q&A? [Grey] Oh… right. I lost track of time. [confusedly] What… year is it? [retro video game sounds] How are you and Lady Grey doing during lockdown? We’re fine. Though we have become real little home…

Ruchi Sanghvi Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015

Good afternoon everyone! I’m so excited to be here today. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to such a large audience of female entrepreneurs and technologists before. This, I think, we need to give ourselves a huge round of applause! Woo! I’m so inspired by …

The Urge To Jump

Have you ever stood near the edge of a cliff, with only a short fence separating you from the chasm below? As you held on tightly to that fence, did you feel a sudden urge to throw yourself off the cliff? Have you ever been driving and imagined what it wo…

Lord of the Rings Mythology Explained

The Lord of the Rings has lots of different kinds of people: Elven people, dwarvin people, tree people, half-sized people, even people people. There’s, like, a million pages of background explaining this world that goes much deeper than the books or the m…

Recognizing quadratic factor methods part 2

In the last video, we looked at three different examples. It really is a bit of a review of some of our factoring techniques and also to appreciate when we might want to apply them. We saw in the first example that it was just a process of recognizing a …

How adding your phone number and 2-factor authentication helps protect your account

All right, Guemmy, so sometimes sites ask for, like, a phone number for security purposes, and I’m always actually afraid to give my phone number. One, I just don’t want random people calling me all the time. But how do you think about that? When is it va…

You're watching Venus... Right?

More Articles