ASM037 Blowing on Video Games and Garbage In Space

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blowing on video games and garbage in space it's a miniature edition of ask sciencemic

[Music]

okay hi friends it's uh gonna be a short edition of the show this week it's really early in the morning and i'm in a hotel room in orlando recording on my iphone i almost didn't do an episode of the show this week but i didn't want to break our streak the show's been going a long time without missing any episodes but my dad actually had a stroke yesterday so i ran out of the house i didn't have time to grab podcasting equipment so just so that your monday is not completely empty and so that we uh continue the streak of science mike i'm going to answer two questions from twitter no notes just kind of off the top of my head and we'll have a show this week but if you're a person that prays i would appreciate if you pray for my dad he's a very strong person mentally and physically and right now he's half paralyzed now he could recover fully we don't know it's too early this only happened yesterday but if if you're a person who prays i would appreciate it if you prayed for my dad this week with that let's get it started [Music] so the first question comes from eric l anderson on twitter who asks would organic garbage rot in space and then he includes a reference to an article from mcsweeney's which critiques the design of the trash compactor and the death star in star wars which is hilarious because it's a pretty effective critique now what's interesting about decomposition of organic matter is it requires several things one it requires water two it requires oxygen and that's because decomposition is carried out by microbial life it's bacteria it's fungus it's all sorts of small little critters microflora and fauna that decompose organic matter and space is going to present a serious threat to this problem one space is incredibly dry there's no liquid water out there and so the first thing space is going to do is leech the water out of something effectively freeze drying it the second problem is there's no atmosphere in space so there's no catalyst there's no material for organic life to use to metabolize anything even anaerobic decomposition is going to be a problem that's decomposition without oxygen because of the aforementioned lack of water effectively uh garbage in space is going to be freeze-dried like the astronaut ice cream you may have had when you were a kid or in the case of something like a body it's going to be mummified rapidly now that doesn't mean it's going to stay whole and safe space is a relatively hostile place if we launch garbage into a low earth orbit for example its orbit would quickly decay back into the earth if we put it just a little bit higher in an earth orbit that's where there's so much micro debris from discarded satellites and other human detritus and so there's going to be lots of collisions and that garbage is going to get pulverized into even more space junk so it's a terrible idea for us to get rid of our garbage and low earth orbit now you could put your garbage further out into space into some stable orbit maybe at lagrange point or into its own independent orbit of the sun at which point it would last a really really really long time there'd be the occasional collision with micro meteors and the sun would do its work to slowly kind of cook it in a traditional way no organic garbage would not rot in space and that reminds me i actually saw a link recently from nasa that indicates that discarded waste from the space station occasionally makes for little shooting stars little brown shooting stars so if you've just seen the international space station pass overhead and a few minutes later you see a meteor maybe you aren't wishing upon a star our next question comes from preston phillips on twitter who asks what is the science behind my nes games not working unless i blow in them ask science mike so if you had a nintendo as a kid you may have seen a phenomenon where you would take a game cartridge put it in the system turn the system on and then you would get these alternating colors on the screen instead of the game you wanted to play and that's because the contacts the the electrical connections between the cartridge which was a set of microchips and memory chips not uh media like we have in modern game consoles interface with a set of spring loaded pins in the receiver the slot inside the video game console and that was a forced base connection so the force required to make that connection actually slowly wears down the connector on the game and that means that sometimes when you put the game in the connections don't line up exactly and you don't have the correct electoral continuity for those circuits in the cartridge to interface with the circuits in the nintendo itself and you have no game no ability to play a game and so somehow through gamer lore people decided that if you got the dust off these contacts it would fix it now there's some merit to this idea because dust can be hostile to electronics and often if you take in a computer or anything to be serviced by a professional one of the first things they'll do is grab a can of air it's called canned air and they'll spray out the device and get rid of all the dust so they can work on it because dust can get into connectors and cause problems but that air is electrostatic safe it doesn't cause static discharge in whatever it's working on the air that's expelled from your lungs which is very humid also can be electrostatically active so every time you blow out you're blowing out air molecules maybe some other nasty germs every time you blue on your nintendo cartridge you're actually making it dirtier and not cleaner and it almost certainly had a detrimental effect over time on the game cartridge itself so you may ask why did it work it worked because of confirmation bias the actual remedy here was simply removing and reinserting the cartridge until there was continuity but when people associated success in their eyes they were gathering evidence by blowing on the cartridge they made the assumption through confirmation bias that it's blowing on the cartridge that fixed the problem and this is why science is so difficult we as a species have a tendency to accept bad evidence in support of our claims and that's why we have to do double-blind experiments that's why we have to have large sample sizes and good statistical analysis on our results in order to do science because one person working alone their cognition is full of these these biases like confirmation bias and they may come up with bad conclusions like blowing on a nintendo cartridge makes it work again well thanks for listening to a super short episode of ask science mike we'll be back next week with a full-length episode recorded on a proper microphone sorry if this one was a little rough to listen to but those actually were two really fun questions on twitter i have noticed people are using hashtag ask sciencemic more and more on twitter so that's becoming a way that people submit questions you can do that as well you can also go to ask sciencemike.com and drop a question there that also lets you put in a voice question so people can hear you read your question and i'm not just monologuing like a super villain the whole time thanks for listening guys and i'll catch you next week [Music]