3/19/2019

Episode 21: My Goodness, My Guinness

Top of the morning to ya! In honor of St. Paddy’s day, we’re Dublin down on this week’s theme: Guinness! Listen to find out why nitrogen is “an obvious gas”, how the t-test was invented by a Guinness employee, and how “factual fisticuffs” inspired the Guinness Book of World Records!

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This episode was written and hosted by Emily Costa, Rob Frawley, and Noah Guiberson. The episode was produced and our theme was composed by Anthony Antonelli. Our logo was designed by Mike Zolla.

Thumbnail photo: William Sealy Gosset, the statistician currently known as “Student”. (Wikimedia Commons)

Bonus resources/content:

A scan of the full text of Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observations on the Habits of Social Hymenoptera, which reads more like the personal diary of an insect enthusiast than a methodical record of scientific observations.

An exceptionally delightful passage from pg. 284:

My bees sometimes ceased work at times when I could not account for their doing so. October 19th was a beautiful, sunshiny, warm day. All the morning the bees were fully active. At 11.25 I brought one to the honeycomb, and she returned at the usual intervals for a couple of hours; but after that she came no more, nor were there any other bees at work. Yet the weather was lovely, and the hive is so placed as to catch the afternoon sun.

The oddly futuristic Railton Mobil Special, driven by John Cobb in 1947 to break his previously held (and Guinness Book-documented) land speed world record from 1939:

And, of course, the Guinness World Record-breaking performance for solving Rubik’s cubes while juggling. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this video is priceless.