Good morning, John. The star that you saw in your last video was in fact not a star, it was Jupiter. You can tell that it's a planet one, because it is so bright and two, because planets do not twinkle the way that stars do.

This is because planets are much closer to us, so instead of seeing just a point of light like we do with stars, we actually see lots of points of light in a tiny, tiny little disk.

The moving different layers of different densities of our atmosphere cause the light from the single point source to jiggle, and the light from the little disks jiggle as well, but all the different points tend to average each other out, so planets appear much more constant in their brightness.

So twinkle, twinkle little star- stars don't actually twinkle. They are also very constant in their brightness; our atmosphere just makes it look like they're twinkling. Another lie we tell to children!

Like the tortoise and the hare. That's just- no. I don't care how much the hare messes around, the hare's gonna win. A hare's top speed is like 45 miles per hour. Slow and steady doesn't win the race, John. You know who wins the race? Fast and steady, almost exclusively.

Though, it occurs to me, having said this, that hares actually have very short lifespans and tortoises live for, like, ever. So maybe if the "race" is the amount of distance an animal can cover in its lifetime, maybe then, maybe a tortoise could win? I'm gonna do some math.

Okay, we're back! No, um, the oldest tortoise in the world is named Jonathan, and he is 182 years old. His top speed is 0.17 miles per hour, meaning that if he traveled every hour of his life, and there have been more than 1.5 million of them, he would have by now traveled about 271 thousand miles. At 45 miles per hour, a hare would only need 13% of its five year life span to eclipse the tortoise.

So yeah, hare versus Jonathan, in a really terribly hypothetical in which neither of them ever sleep or rest, the hare still wins. Though the hare has been dead for a hundred and seventy seven years... So.

Maybe the real moral of the story is Slow and Steady Loses the Race But Who Cares As Long As You're Not Dead. Thanks to Jonathan the oldest tortoise, and also the oldest John, for teaching us that one.

Come on, John, you tell the history of Johns and you forget the oldest John ever? You're slacking, that's all I'm saying.

Here's another interesting bit of John trivia: there might be more forms of John than there are forms of any other name. Jane, Gianni, Juan, Ivan, Janice, Joan, Ian, Yanni-

Yeah, Yanni. These are just a few. Lots of them start with that J noise, 'J-uh'. But if you say a J noise without messing with the air as it's coming out of your mouth, it's just a Y noise. You have John, and you have Yahn.

And Y noises are weird, because they are never consonants. Yet another lie that we tell to children!

Y noises are two vowel sounds shoved together really quick. Like with 'your', you don't get to a consonant until you get to the r. It's just 'Ee-yore'. Eeyore. Eeyore, Eeyore, your, your, your, your.

W's are like this too. When you say Wednesday, you- there's no consonant. You say 'Oo-ens-day'. It's just vowels!

When two vowel sounds are slapped together, you get one of the coolest words in the English language, the 'dipthong'.'Dipthongs' are everywhere, we're pretty bad at hearing them, but even in simple words, like Mike- 'mi-eek'. 'a-ee'.

You see it written down sometimes, like 'oil', o-i-l. When we put a 'dipthong' in place of a consonant, as breaking two syllables apart, it basically is acting like a consonant, but it's not a consonant. So we call it semi-vowel.

In fact, the name that 'John' came from, 'Iohannes,' it's actually all spelled out there for everybody to see, all the vowels. It also shows the origin of the silent H, because John basically used to be Johan.

Now for a piece of seemingly random information: Middle English used the suffix '-kin' to put on the end of words that meant it was a small thing. Like if there was a kid named Tom, you would call him Tomkin. Or a small piece of cloth, would be called a clothkin, except their word for cloth was nap, so it would be a napkin.

The Middle English shortened Johan to Han, and when there was a little person named Han, they would call him Hankin. Which, I am not even kidding, is how the name Hank first appeared.

John, you and I have the same name!

I'll see you on Monday.