WEBVTT

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So, last month, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced

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that it is going out of print

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after 244 years, which made me nostalgic,

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because I remember playing a game with the colossal encyclopedia set in my hometown library

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back when I was a kid,

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maybe 12 years old.

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And I wondered if I could update that game,

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not just for modern methods,

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but for the modern me.

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So I tried.

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I went to an online encyclopedia,

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Wikipedia, and I entered the term "Earth."

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You can start anywhere, this time I chose Earth.

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And the first rule of the game is pretty simple.

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You just have to read the article

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until you find something you don't know,

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and preferably something your dad doesn't even know.

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And in this case, I quickly found this:

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The furthest point from the center of the Earth

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is not the tip of Mount Everest, like I might have thought,

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it's the tip of this mountain: Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.

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The Earth spins, of course, as it travels around the sun,

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so the Earth bulges a little bit around the middle,

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like some Earthlings.

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And even though Mount Chimborazo isn't the tallest mountain in the Andes,

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it's one degree away from the equator,

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it's riding that bulge, and so the summit of Chimborazo

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is the farthest point on Earth from the center of the Earth.

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And it is really fun to say.

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So I immediately decided,

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this is going to be the name of the game,

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or my new exclamation.

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You can use it at TED.

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Chimborazo, right?

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It's like "eureka" and "bingo" had a baby.

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I didn't know that;

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that's pretty cool.

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Chimborazo!

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So the next rule of the game is also pretty simple.

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You just have to find another term and look that up.

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Now in the old days, that meant getting out a volume

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and browsing through it alphabetically,

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maybe getting sidetracked,

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that was fun.

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Nowadays there are hundreds of links to choose from.

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I can go literally anywhere in the world,

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I think since I was already in Ecuador,

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I just decided to click on the word "tropical."

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That took me to this wet and warm band of the tropics

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that encircles the Earth.

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Now that's the Tropic of Cancer in the north

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and the Tropic of Capricorn in the south,

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that much I knew,

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but I was surprised to learn this little fact:

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Those are not cartographers' lines,

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like latitude or the borders between nations,

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they are astronomical phenomena caused by the Earth's tilt,

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and they change.

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They move; they go up, they go down.

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In fact, for years, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn

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have been steadily drifting towards the equator

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at the rate of about 15 meters per year,

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and nobody told me that.

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I didn't know it.

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Chimborazo!

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So to keep the game going, I just have to find another term and look that one up.

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Since I'm already in the tropics, I chose "Tropical rainforest."

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Famous for its diversity, human diversity.

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There are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet.

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They're all over the globe, but virtually all of them live in tropical rainforests.

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This is the only place you can go nowadays and not get "friended."

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The link that I clicked on here was exotic in the beginning and then absolutely mysterious at the very end.

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It mentioned leopards and ring-tailed coatis and poison dart frogs and boa constrictors and then

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coleoptera,

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which turn out to be beetles.

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Now I clicked on this on purpose,

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but if I'd somehow gotten here by mistake,

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it does remind me, for the band, see "The Beatles,"

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for the car see "Volkswagon Beetle,"

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but I am here for beetle beetles.

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This is the most successful order on the planet by far.

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Something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet,

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including plants, are beetles.

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That means the next time you are in the grocery store,

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take a look at the four people ahead of you in line.

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Statistically, one of you is a beetle.

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And if it is you, you are astonishingly well adapted.

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There are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums.

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There are predator beetles, that attack other insects

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and still look pretty cute to us.

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There are beetles that roll little balls of dung

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great distances across the desert floor to feed to their hatchlings.

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This reminded the ancient Egyptians of their god Khepri,

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who renews the ball of the sun every morning,

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which is how that dung-rolling scarab

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became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

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Beetles, I was reminded, have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom.

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Fireflies are not flies, fireflies are beetles.

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Fireflies are coleoptera, and coleoptera communicate in other ways as well.

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Like my next link:

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The chemical language of pheromones.

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Now the pheromone page took me to a video of a sea urchin having sex.

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Yeah.

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(Laughter)

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And the link to aphrodisiac.

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Now that's something that increases sexual desire,

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possibly chocolate.

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There is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine

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that might be an aphrodisiac.

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But as the article mentions,

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because of enzyme breakdown,

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it's unlikely that phenethylamine will reach your brain if taken orally.

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So those of you who only eat your chocolate, you might have to experiment.

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The link I clicked on here,

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"sympathetic magic," mostly because I understand what both of those words mean.

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But not when they're together like that.

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I do like sympathy. I do like magic.

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So when I click on "sympathetic magic,"

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I get sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls.

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This is the boy in me getting lucky again.

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Sympathetic magic is imitation.

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If you imitate something, maybe you can have an effect on it.

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That's the idea behind voodoo dolls, and possibly also cave paintings.

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The link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind.

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I would love to see Google maps inside some of these caves.

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We've got tens-of-thousands-years-old artwork.

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Common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands,

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usually the left hand.

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We have been a dominantly right-handed tribe for millenia,

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so even though I don't know why a paleolithic person would trace his hand

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or blow pigment on it from a tube,

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I can easily picture how he did it.

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And I really don't think it's that different form our own little dominant hand avatar

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right there that I'm going to use now to click on the term for "hand,"

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go to the page for "hand," where I found the most fun and possibly embarrassing bit of trivia

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I've found in a long time. It's simply this:

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The back of the hand is formally called the opisthenar.

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Now that's embarrassing, because up until now,

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every time I've said, "I know it like the back of my hand,"

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I've really been saying, "I'm totally familiar with that,

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I just don't know it's freaking name, right?"

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And the link I clicked on here,

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well, lemurs, monkeys and chimpanzees have the little opisthenar.

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I click on chimpanzee, and I get our closest genetic relative.

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Pan troglodytes, the name we give him, means "cave dweller."

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He doesn't.

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He lives in rainforests and savannas.

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It's just that we're always thinking of this guy as lagging behind us,

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evolutionarily or somehow uncannily creeping up on us,

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and in some cases, he gets places before us.

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Like my next link, the almost irresistible link, Ham the Astrochimp.

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I click on him, and I really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice, in fact.

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He's born in Cameroon,

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which is smack in the middle of my tropics map,

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and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles.

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In between those two landmarks in Ham's life,

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he flew into space.

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He experienced weightlessness and re-entry

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months before the first human being to do it,

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Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

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When I click on Yuri Gagarin's page,

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I get this guy who was surprisingly short in stature,

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huge in heroism.

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Top estimates, Soviet estimates, put this guy at 1.65 meters,

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that is less than five and a half feet tall max,

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possibly because he was malnourished as a child.

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Germans occupied Russia.

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A Nazi officer took over the Gagarin household,

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and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut.

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Years later, the boy from that cramped mud hut

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would grow up to be the man in that cramped capsule

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on the tip of a rocket

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who volunteered to be launched into outer space,

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the first one of any of us to really physically leave this planet.

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And he didn't just leave it,

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he circled it once.

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Fifty years later, as a tribute,

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the International Space Station, which is still up there tonight,

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synced its orbit with Gagarin's orbit,

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at the exact same time of day,

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and filmed it,

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so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes

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of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride,

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possibly a lonely one,

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the first person to ever see such a thing.

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And then when you've had your fill of that,

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you can click on one more link.

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You can come back to Earth.

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You return to where you started.

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You can finish your game.

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You just need to find one more fact that you didn't know.

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And for me, I quickly landed on this one:

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The Earth has a tolerance of about .17 percent from the reference spheroid,

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which is less than the .22 percent allowed in billiard balls.

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This is the kind of fact I would have loved as a boy.

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I found it myself.

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It's got some math that I can do.

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I'm pretty sure my dad doesn't know it.

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What this means is that if you could shrink the Earth to the size of a billiard ball,

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if you could take planet Earth, with all its mountain tops and caves

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and rainforests, astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees, voodoo dolls,

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fireflies, chocolate, sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea,

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you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball,

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it would be as smooth as a billiard ball,

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presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle.

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That's pretty cool.

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I didn't know that.

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Chimborazo!

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Thank you.

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(Applause)