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I just heard Dr. Pamela Gay say she once did a calculation and determined that New York City could be powered by "one potato" turned into energy (according to E=mc²). But wait, Dr. Pamela Gay is a scientist and scientists know that units matter. New York City is continually drawing power, and could theoretically use two potatoes or a whole bag of potatoes worth of energy if it needed to run for a long enough time. What I'm saying is she left out an important parameter: time. For how much time would a potato, converted to energy, power New York City? Pamela baby you left that out and I want to know! Great show!

I keep getting error 500 and error 3259 on iTunes and when i try to listen directly on Astronomycast.com i get internal server error 500. Please help... three brand new episodes I haven't heard yet and I'm Jones'in for my Pamela and Fraser!!!

I'm having the same trouble, but I expect it'll be back up and running soon.

Erik.

Same here with the errors on the lastest 2 pod casts.

Anyone know what JudasGutenberg problem is? What episode did she do this in? Perhaps we can put it into better context.

Fraser - I've downloaded this episode but get
No combination of filters could be found to render the stream. (Error=80040218)
the file is only 3.8KB
oh wait...its a HTML file...it is a 404 error...

You haven't put up the actual MP3 files yet or named them wrong

Skeptics Guide is also doing the same thing (Error 500 & 3259), so it might be an iTunes podcast problem.

Erik; with AC withdrawal meds ready.

Fixed now....listen away.

HA HA! As I was waiting for this to get fixed, I started re-listening to all the episodes starting with episode one. I probably never would have caught it but I had already seen Judas's comment so it stuck out to me. In episode 8 on Meteor Showers, Pamela was discussing why dust motes generate so much light when they hit the atmosphere. In her explanation she mentioned that even a potato could power NYC if its mass were converted directly to energy.

Edit: Now that I heard the new questions show she also mention's the potato thing trying to explain E=MC2. Its cool to see that most of these explanations aren't off the cuff but their own well thought out explanations used over a lifetime.