Michael here. The title of this video is misspelled

in honour of mistakes. Mistakes are

everywhere, they surround us like air

To err is human. Faults, flaws, faux pas, fumbles

and fallacies are as much a part of who we are today

as the stuff we've gotten right. For instance,

if a knight knocked your knuckle or knifed your knee,

why would there be so many "k"s?

Well, the "k"s are silent by mistake.

The original old English forms of these words were pronounced with "k"

sounds.

K-nife, k-night, k-nee.

But that's a bit of a mouthful to say and because reading and writing weren't as

common hundreds of years ago,

people just pronounced words the way they want to do, regardless of spelling.

Spelling is fun. Warren G knows what I'm talking about. In the fourth

verse of his "What's Next", he asks what's next.

What's next, what's N-X-E-T

Spelling isn't the only thing

we get wrong. The history of science is a graveyard

of dead an abandoned ideas. Fritz Machlup coined the phrase

"Half-life of knowledge". The amount of time it takes for half of the knowledge

within a field

to be superseded by new, better ideas or to simply be shown

untrue. Donald Hebb famously

estimated that the half-life of knowledge in psychology

is just five years.

Humans are awesome, don't get me wrong, but we tend to believe that what we currently

think we know about the universe

is reasonably correct, even though statistics

aren't on our side. Previous generations

incorrectly thought the exact same thing about what they used to think was true.

My favourite examples of the ubiquity of mistakes are production

errors in popular songs. They're like

humbling Easter eggs, just waiting to be found. For instance,

Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth".

26 second in the "be" in the lyric

"beware" is clipped, as is the "p"

in "people" at 1:24 minute. Once you hear the mistake,

it's tough to unhear it. In "Hey Jude"

Paul McCartney misses a cord. And if you listen closely you can clearly hear him

say

"F***ing h*ll". Seriously, it's in the actual song.

Go listen to it. In fact, there's an entire website that chronicles

mistakes in Beatles' songs. Take a look at this

700-year-old prayer book. A monk

wrote it on fresh, clean paper.

I'm kidding, of course. He scraped the ink off an older manuscript, cut the pages and

rotated them before

writing all over them. A mistake? Well,

kind of. Recent multispectral images

of the prayer book have revealed that the old manuscript he

erased was a previously unknown copy of a work

by Archimedes. It was called "The Method"

and laid out the heart of calculus thousands of years

before Newton and Leibniz. If that one monk

hadn't erased that one book, would we be

hundreds, thousands of years mathematically and technologically more

advanced today

than we currently are? It's hard to say.

All that is certain is that we would continue to make ridiculous mistakes,

like

the Mars Climate Orbiter. This 327.6 million dollar expedition

burned up in the red planet's atmosphere because

when calculating flight manoeuvres NASA used the agreed-upon metric units

while Lockheed Martin used the imperial system.

This is Neil Armstrong taking humankind's first steps

on the Moon. It's about the best footage

we have. The original tapes containing the highest quality recording

of that moment have been lost. They were probably

recorded over by later test missions. Ten years ago

Sergio Martinez became lost in the woods while

hunting outside of San Diego. Hoping to attract the attention of

rescuers, he lit a small fire.

But that fire quickly got out of control and became a giant Cedar Fire.

It destroyed 300,000 acres of land,

2,322 homes and killed

15 people.

The man carrying a wounded soldier in this painting, based on a photograph

taken during World War I,

is Henry Tandey, an English recipient of the Victoria Cross.

Four years after the event in this image Tandey caught a wounded

German soldier in his gun sights. But rather than kill the man,

Tandey took pity on his wounded state and spared his life.

The German he allowed to live was

this man. Later the man whose life he spared wore his mustache

shorter but still had the same name,

Adolf Hitler. In 1918

did Henry Tandey miss a chance to kill Hitler? Detailed researchers found that

the exact

days their units were in the same location don't quite match up.

The story is apocryphal but what is known

is that Hitler owned a copy of the painting

of Tandey, and in 1938,

when meeting with Neville Chamberlain, Hitler pointed to Tandey

and told Chamberlain: "That man came so close to killing me

in 1918 that I thought I should never see Germany

again." So, who's wrong?

Maybe Hitler confirmed the story

merely because he hoped to make up extra evidence that providence had kept him

alive to pursue his goals.

Either way, someone

is mistaken. Missed opportunities

are a bummer. Obsessing over them is not healthy but regret

is a powerful emotion. How do you deal

with regret, with guilt?

Can you? In the early morning hours on a bench outside a hotel in Anaheim this

summer

Ze Frank told me something I am going to paraphrase.

I love this metaphor. Stuff in your past

is like a carving on the bark of sapling. Over time,

the scar, the carving won't go away.

Because of the way trees grow it won't go up or down much either, it'll just

stay right where it began. It might even get darker.

But it won't get bigger. You, however,

can. You can keep growing, doing more things, more branches,

being more things. The wound won't get smaller but you can make it a smaller

part

of who you are. Maybe regrets

are like that. They stick around forever

like arborglyphs. Or maybe they make like a tree

and leaf.

A red or purple leaf in the autumn. As days get shorter

and chlorophyll production decreases, the yellow

and orange carotenoids, which are always in leaves,

appear as the green fades. But red and purple leaves

are the interesting ones. As winter approaches it would seem to be a good

time for trees to conserve energy but some trees

do the opposite. Instead of giving up, they spend

extra energy producing anthocyanins

to turn their leaves red and purple hues.

These colours protect their leaves from sun damage before their nutrients can

all be

used and may also be a defence against insects looking for

a parasitic home. A way for the tree to tell the insects: "Yes,

I am in part dying but not without a fight.

I am still very much vital."

Drought and even turn a kit applied by man

can bring about these colors prematurely. When you look at beautiful

autumn colours, you are looking at stress.

But the bigger the fight the trees put up, the more energy

they put into their defences at the very end, the more brilliant

their colours will be. Winter

will eventually come. But scientifically,

the brightest, deepest, most remarkable colours

come from not giving up too easily

or quickly.

And as always,

thanks for watching.