Everything is Arbitrary

Planning for the best day of your life often starts at childhood and ramps up upon engagement. It gets super expensive! That's if you're allowed to have a wedding at all. This episode covers the stereotypical wedding, and the history of wedding traditions which vary from violent, exclusionary, cute, and bizarre. Some of these traditions are also not all that traditional.

When we see colour, we’re creating colour. Different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation hit our eyes, and then it’s up to the brain to interpret what we’re seeing. And then it’s up to our language, culture, and historical moment for us to be able to label it, and give meaning to it. Learn about alternative ways of seeing, feeling about, and using colour through the lens of internet memes, ancient texts, artist palettes, Isaac Newton’s discoveries, gender reveal parties, and more.

Dogs are the super-cute, ancient friends of humans. And how they look and what they're like have been shaped by humans. Find out about the arbitrary standards that define breeds, and the problematic underpinnings and monstrous results of these standards.

The story of breakfast is not a scientific story. It's a story of religion, industrialisation, colonisation, imperialism, marketing, indigestion, and panic about acidosis. Find out how breakfast began, how it got to be equated with health, and why it's a weirdly moral meal.

Models are pervasive, but you don't see them. They affect our lives in a range of ways: weather forecasting, political polling, search engines, bridge design, insurance costs, economic crashes, crashes on Mars... In order to make them we have to pick and choose what data to abstract and what to ignore. And sometimes those choices can be arbitrary. Listen to mathematician Lindon Roberts talk about the problems with mathematical models, and why we use them anyway.

What's the difference between a baby boomer and a millennial? Social change happens over time, but everyone's character, opportunities, and world views don't uniformly change with it. This episode examines how our thinking about generations formed and evolved. And it looks at the ways our conversations about generations limits us.

The BMI is not a measure of willpower. Or a measure of health. It was designed in the 1800s to work out the proportions of the average human and make predictions about what this theoretical person would get up to. Find out about what BMIs are useful for, as well as what makes it limited.

Clock time, yam time, overtime, daylight saving time, atomic time... We arrange our whole lives in time, it's something we can sell, something we can waste, something humans have come to order in a wide range of ways, and something we can measure with ridiculous amounts of precision. Find out why it's arbitrary and coercive, but also very cool, and a source of connection.