SGUTranscripts - User contributions [en]

Category:What's the Word?

2017-06-01T21:21:29Z

D Inwood: Added one Whats the Word to the list

Listed below are all of the What's the Word segments so far

{{tick}} means transcription is complete and proofread. {{mag}} means it has been transcribed, but not proofread. {{Open}} means no transcription is available yet. 

*[[SGU Episode_617#What.27s_the_Word_.284:04.29|Exaptation (617)]] {{mag}} – ''An organ that has a function that is not what it was originally evolved for''
*[[SGU Episode_607#What.27s_The_Word_.2858:32.29|Pathology (607)]] {{mag}} – ''The nature of a disease, or the study of the nature of a disease.''
*[[SGU Episode_605#What.27s_the_Word_.2811:50.29|Impedance (605)]] {{mag}} – ''The effective resistance of an electric circuit to alternating current''
*[[SGU Episode_601#What.27s_the_Word_.281:14.29|Parallax (601)]] {{mag}} – ''Apparent movement against a background as an observer moves''
*[[SGU Episode_597#What.27s_the_Word_.2845:58.29|In Situ (597)]] {{mag}} – ''Being in its original position or place''
*[[SGU Episode_596#What.27s_the_Word_.289:58.29|Phylogenetic (596)]] {{mag}} – ''The evolutionary history of a species''
*[[SGU Episode_595#What.27s_The_Word_.2858:54.29|Endemic (595)]] {{mag}} – ''Restricted to a particular region''
*[[SGU Episode_594#What.27s_the_Word_.284:42.29|Autopoiesis(594)]] {{mag}} – ''A system that is self-regulating ''
*[[SGU Episode_594#What.27s_the_Word_.284:42.29|Autological (594)]] {{mag}} – ''A word that describes itself''
*[[SGU Episode_592#What.27s_the_Word_.281:55.29|Xerophile (592)]] {{mag}} – ''An organism that thrives in dry environments''
*[[SGU Episode_591#What.27s_the_Word_.288:35.29|Relict (591)]] {{mag}} – ''Something that has survived from an earlier period of time''
*[[SGU Episode_589#What.27s_the_Word_.281:02:45.29|Taphonomy (589)]] {{mag}} – ''The study of fossilization''
*[[SGU Episode_588#What.27s_the_Word_.287:59.29|Autophagy (588)]] {{mag}} – ''The self-digestion of a cell's organelles''
*[[SGU Episode_587#What.27s_the_Word_.2858:29.29|Ultracrepidarian (587)]] {{mag}} – ''One who expresses opinions outside their area of expertise''
*[[SGU Episode_586#What.27s_the_Word_.2816:18.29|Apophenia (586)]] {{mag}} – ''Perceiving a connection between random things''
*[[SGU Episode_585#What.27s_the_Word_.2857:10.29|Superfecundation (585)]] {{mag}} – ''Successive fertilization of multiple ova from the same ovulation''
*[[SGU Episode_584#What.27s_the_Word_.281:01:04.29|Comorbidity (584)]] {{mag}} – ''Multiple simultaneous diagnoses''
*[[SGU Episode_583#What.27s_the_Word_.2847:01.29|Thanatosis (583)]] {{mag}} – ''When an animal plays dead''
*[[SGU Episode_582#What.27s_the_Word_.2845:41.29|Glycolysis (582)]] {{mag}} – ''The metabolic pathway that breaks down glucose''
*[[SGU Episode_581#What.27s_the_Word_.283:32.29|Inquiline (581)]] {{mag}} – ''An animal that exploits the living space of another species''
*[[SGU Episode_580#What.27s_the_Word_.2846:41.29|Flocculation (580)]] {{mag}} – ''The production of fluffy masses from a colloidal suspension''
*[[SGU Episode_579#What.27s_the_Word:_Hypnagogia_.289:00.29|Hypnagogia (579)]] {{mag}} – ''The state of drowsiness that immediately preceeds sleep''
*[[SGU Episode_578#What.27s_the_Word:_Mondegreen_.2841:20.29|Mondegreen (578)]] {{mag}} – ''Word / phrase resulting from a mishearing of something that was said or sung''
*[[SGU Episode_577#What.27s_the_Word_.282:04.29|Neoteny (577)]] {{mag}} – ''Retention of juvenile characteristics in adult individuals of a species''
*[[SGU Episode_576#What.27s_the_Word_.2847:28.29|Estivation (576)]] {{mag}} – ''Entering a dormant state when in a hot, dry environment''
*[[SGU Episode_575#What.27s_the_Word_.289:19.29|Apoptosis (575)]] {{mag}} – ''Programmed cell death''
*[[SGU Episode_574#What.27s_the_Word_.2854:56.29|Paroxysmal (574)]] {{mag}} – '' Relating to a sudden fit, or attack during illness''
*[[SGU Episode_573#What.27s_the_Word_.281:27.29|Alluvium (573)]] {{mag}} – ''Clay or silt that's deposited by running water''
*[[SGU Episode_572#What.27s_the_Word_.2835:20.29|Crepuscular (572)]] {{mag}} – ''Of, relating to, or resembling twilight''
*[[SGU Episode_571#What.27s_the_Word_.281:00:39.29|Eschatology (571)]] {{mag}} – ''In theology, the final destiny of the soul, and of mankind''
*[[SGU Episode_570#What.27s_the_Word_.282:28.29|Iatrogenic (570)]] {{mag}} – ''An infection or injury produced inadvertently by a physician''
*[[SGU Episode_569#What.27s_the_Word_.281:01:41.29|Cauliflory (569)]] {{mag}} – ''Production of flowers or fruits directly from the branches or trunks of plants''
*[[SGU Episode_568#What.27s_the_Word_.2814:34.29|Autotomy (568)]] {{mag}} – ''The reflexive separation of an appendage, or other part of the body''
*[[SGU Episode_567#What.27s_the_Word_.2825:28.29|Group animal names (589)]] {{mag}} – ''An obstinacy of buffalo, etc''
*[[SGU Episode_566#What.27s_the_Word_.281:00:25.29|Amphidromic (566)]] {{mag}} – ''A point where there's almost zero tides''
*[[SGU Episode_565#What.27s_the_Word_.284:43.29|Propaganda (565)]] {{mag}} – ''Spreading ideas to promote an institution''
*[[SGU Episode_564#What.27s_the_Word_.2839:20.29|Hyperthymesia (564)]] {{mag}} – ''Extremely efficacious autobiographical memory''
*[[SGU Episode_563#What.27s_the_Word_.280:25.29|Geodesic (563)]] {{mag}} – ''The shortest distance between two points''
*[[SGU Episode_562#What.27s_the_Word_.283:37.29|Homophily (562)]] {{mag}} – ''The theory that people tend to form connections with others who are similar to them''
*[[SGU Episode_561#What.27s_the_Word_.283:17.29|Foreign words that lack English equivalents (561)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode_560#What.27s_the_Word_.281:04:05.29|Chemiosmosis (560)]] {{mag}} – ''Turning ADP into ATP in mitochondria''
*[[SGU Episode_559#What.27s_the_Word_.284:26.29|Equilux (559)]] {{mag}} – ''The day in which the length of dark and light are equal''
*[[SGU Episode_558#What.27s_the_Word_.2840:46.29|Sciolism (558)]] {{mag}} – ''Opinionating on subjects of which one only has superficial knowledge''
*[[SGU Episode_557#What.27s_the_Word_.281:15.29|Thixotropy (557)]] {{mag}} – ''A property where shaking a substance thins it out''
*[[SGU Episode_553#What.27s_the_Word_.285:00.29|Pleochroism (553)]] {{mag}} – ''The way crystals show different colors when viewed from different directions''
*[[SGU Episode_552#What.27s_the_Word_.2851:07.29|Epistasis (552)]] {{mag}} – ''When combined genes have a dominant effect over other combinations''
*[[SGU Episode_551#What.27s_the_Word_.281:14.29|Words from science fiction (551)]] {{mag}} – ''Robotics, for example''
*[[SGU Episode_550#What.27s_the_Word_.2844:09.29|Agnatology (550)]] {{mag}} – '' The study of willful acts to spread confusion''
*[[SGU Episode_549#What.27s_the_Word_.283:21.29|Algorithm (549)]] {{mag}} – ''A set of prescribed rules for solving a problem''
*[[SGU Episode_548#What.27s_the_Word_.2841:55.29|Fugacity (548)]] {{mag}} – '' The pressure of a hypothetical ideal gas that would correspond to the real gas as it exists at a given temperature, pressure, and composition.''
*[[SGU Episode_547#What.27s_the_Word_.2858:23.29|Obligate (547)]] {{mag}} – ''A creature that is restricted to one characteristic mode of life''
*[[SGU Episode_544#What.27s_The_Word_.2844:25.29|Consilience (544)]] {{mag}} – '' Linking together principles from different disciplines to form a theory''
*[[SGU Episode_543#What.27s_the_Word_.284:28.29|Hysteresis (543)]] {{mag}} – ''The lag in a variable property of a system with respect to the effect producing it as this effect varies''
*[[SGU Episode_542#What.27s_the_Word_.282:09.29|Homeostasis (542)]] {{mag}} – ''The maintenance of internal stability in a system or organism''
*[[SGU Episode_541#What.27s_the_Word_.2847:16.29|Albedo (541)]] {{mag}} – ''The intensity of light that's reflected from an object''
*[[SGU Episode_540#What.27s_the_Word_.283:02.29|Formication (540)]] {{mag}} – ''The feeling that insects are crawling all over your skin''
*[[SGU Episode_539#What.27s_the_Word_.2858:41.29|Indolent (539)]] {{mag}} – ''Causing little or no pain, inactive, or relatively benign''
*[[SGU Episode_538#What.27s_the_Word_.2839:51.29|Canonical (538)]] {{mag}} – ''According to recognized rules or scientific laws''
*[[SGU Episode_534#What.27s_the_Word_.2850:21.29|Isograd (534)]] {{mag}} – ''A line connecting points on the Earth where metamorphism of rocks occurred under the same conditions''
*[[SGU Episode_533#What.27s_the_Word_.2849:26.29|Efferent (533)]] {{mag}} – ''A body part that projects outward''
*[[SGU Episode_532#What.27s_the_Word_.2850:59.29|Anosmia (532)]] {{mag}} – ''The loss of the sense of smell''
*[[SGU Episode_531#What.27s_the_Word_.2859:44.29|Stochastic (531)]] {{mag}} – ''A process that is a random in the particulars, but is statistical in the aggregate

== Trivia ==
* The longest What's the Word segment was 9 minutes and 55 seconds long, in episode 543
* The shortest was a tie at 1 minute and 50 seconds in episodes 534 and 558

Women in history on the SGU

2017-06-01T21:17:45Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

This page is intended to link to all of the history segments on the SGU where women are highlighted

== Forgotten Superheroes of Science ==
*[[SGU Episode 607#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.2811:06.29|Wang Zhenyi (607)]] {{mag}} - ''Chinese astronomer during the Qing dynasty. Studied equinoxes.''
*[[SGU Episode 597#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:38.29|Barbara Liskov (597)]] {{mag}} - ''Developed programming languages, leading to object oriented programming''
*[[SGU Episode 595#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:28.29|Maria Telkes (595)]] {{mag}} - ''Invented the solar distiller''
*[[SGU Episode 587#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.287:19.29|Rosa Smith Eigenmann (587)]] {{mag}} - ''Discovered more than 150 species of fish''
*[[SGU Episode 585#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:09.29|Mary Elizabeth Barber (585)]] {{mag}} - ''Plant collector from the 1800's''
*[[SGU Episode 580|Janet Rowley (580)]] {{mag}} - ''Linked chromosomal abnormalities to cancer''
*[[SGU Episode 578|Elizabeth Rona (578)]] {{mag}} - ''Worked with Pallonium''
*[[SGU Episode 572|Mary Edwards (572)]] {{mag}} - ''Tracked the positions of celestial objects for 55 years''
*[[SGU Episode 567#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.282:03.29|Cecilia Helena-Payne Gaposshkin (567)]] {{mag}} - ''Found that the Sun and the stars are mostly made of hydrogen''
*[[SGU Episode 566|Yvonne Brill (566)]] {{mag}} ''Pioneer rocket scientist''
*[[SGU Episode 564#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.281:14.29|Annie Maunder (564)]] {{mag}} ''Discovered the Maunder Minimum along with her husband''
*[[SGU Episode 560#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:13.29|Dorothy Hodgkin (560)]] {{mag}} ''Used X-ray crystallography to image penicillin, cholesterol, and vitamin B12''
*[[SGU Episode 555#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:12.29|Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha (555)]] {{mag}} ''The first doctor that brought the problem of Flint Michigan's water to the states attention''
*[[SGU Episode 552#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:51.29|Lorna Wing (552)]] {{mag}} ''Helped to redefine our conception of autism''
*[[SGU Episode 550#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.289:27.29|Stephanie Louise Kwolek (550)]] {{mag}} ''Invented the chemical behind Kevlar''
*[[SGU Episode 548#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:26.29|Dr. Hadiyah-Nicole Green (548)]] {{mag}} ''Cancer research involving nanoparticles and lasers''
*[[SGU Episode 544#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.281:49.29|Caroline Herschel (544)]] {{mag}} ''Sister of William Herschel. First woman paid for science work.''
*[[SGU Episode 541#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:47.29|Birute Mary Galdikas (541)]] {{mag}} ''Research on orangutans''
*[[SGU Episode 539#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:24.29|Andrea Ghez (539)]] {{mag}} ''Stellar motions near Milky Way's supermassive black hole''
*[[SGU Episode 538#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:13.29|Alice Hamilton (538)]] {{mag}} ''Development of industrial medicine in America''
*[[SGU Episode 537#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:59.29|Maria Sibylla Merian (537)]] {{mag}} ''Made illustrations of insects in the late 1600's''
*[[SGU Episode 536#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.289:18.29|Alice Catherine Evans (536)]] {{mag}} ''Showed the benefits of milk pasteurization''
*[[SGU Episode 534#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:01.29|Barbara McClintock (534)]] {{mag}} ''Jumping genes" and chromosome research''
*[[SGU Episode 533#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.281:36.29|Ruth Rogan Benerito (533)]] {{mag}} ''Wrinkle-resistant clothing''
*[[SGU Episode 532#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:08.29|Hedy Lamarr (532)]] {{mag}} ''Invented spread spectrum technology''
*[[SGU Episode 528#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.282:51.29|Frances Kelsey (528)]] {{mag}} ''Prevented thalidomide from being sold in the US''
*[[SGU Episode 527#Search_Engines_Influence_Elections_.2825:49.29|Marie Thorp (527)]] {{mag}} ''Discovered the Mid Atlantic Ridge under the ocean''
*[[SGU Episode 526#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.281:39.29|Inge Lehmann (526)]] {{mag}} ''Discovered that the Earth has a solid inner core''
*[[SGU Episode 525#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:03.29|Gerty Cori (525)]] {{mag}} ''Glucose metabolism''
*[[SGU Episode 524#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.288:42.29|Henrietta Leavitt (524)]] {{mag}} ''Discovered special property of Cepheid variables''
*[[SGU Episode 521#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.2813:37.29|Maria Goeppert-Mayer (521)]] {{mag}} ''Nuclear shell theory''
*[[SGU Episode 520#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.280:44.29|Vera Rubin (520)]] {{mag}} ''Studied galaxy rotation, which led to acceptance of dark matter''
*[[SGU Episode 518#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:11.29|Chien Shiug Wu (518)]] {{mag}} ''Showed that the conservation of parity does not always hold''
*[[SGU Episode 517#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:48.29|Margaret Hamilton (517)]] {{mag}} ''Saved the first moon landing with her robust computer code''
*[[SGU Episode 515#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.280:31.29|Mary Sherman Morgan (515)]] {{mag}} ''Developed the fuel used for the first U.S satellite launch''
*[[SGU Episode 511#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:04.29|Grace Murray Hopper (511)]] {{mag}} ''Wrote the first computer compiler and was the key architect of COBOL''
*[[SGU Episode 510#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.282:22.29|Lise Meitner and Ida Noddack Tacke (510)]] {{mag}} ''The women of fission''
*[[SGU Episode 508#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:43.29|Sandra Moore Faber (508)]] {{mag}} ''Part of the team that discovered the Great Attractor''
*[[SGU Episode 507#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:14.29|Women of ENIAC (507)]] {{mag}} ''The Team of 6 Women who were the first to program ENIAC, the first all electronic digital computer''
*[[SGU Episode 506#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.286:41.29|Irène Joliot-Curie (506)]] {{mag}} ''Nobel prize winning chemist who discovered artificial radioactivity''
*[[SGU Episode 505#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:47.29|Emmy Noether (505)]] {{mag}} ''Made significant contributions to algebra and theoretical physics''
*[[SGU Episode 503#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:56.29|Mary Anning (503)]] {{mag}} ''Made early contributions to our understanding of prehistoric life and the history of the earth''
*[[SGU Episode 502#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.281:59.29|Katherine Johnson (502)]] {{mag}} ''Calculated the flight trajectory for the first American in space.''
*[[SGU Episode 501#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.287:55.29|Ada Lovelace (501)]] {{mag}} ''Computer scientist. Saw the potential of the analytical engine.''
*[[SGU Episode 499#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:33.29|Jocelyn Bell Burnel (499)]] {{mag}} ''Astrophysicist who discovered pulsars.''
*[[SGU Episode 498#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:10.29|Rosalind Franklin (498)]] {{mag}} ''Gained insights into the structure of DNA.''
*[[SGU Episode 496#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:26.29|Annie Jump Cannon (496)]] {{mag}} ''Classification of stars''

== This Day in History ==
*[[SGU Episode 488#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:27.29|Sara Josephine Baker (488)]] {{mag}} ''Massively improved the survival rate of newborn babies.''
*[[SGU Episode 477#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:29.29|Sylvia Earle (477)]] {{mag}} ''Marine biologist. Has been underwater for almost a year in total.''
*[[SGU Episode 472#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:40.29|Marie Curie and Irene Curie (472)]] {{mag}} ''Studied radioactive materials.''
*[[SGU Episode 463#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:45.29|Yness Mexica (463)]] {{mag}} ''Did Botany is Central and South America.''
*[[SGU Episode 463#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:45.29|Helen Taussig (463)]] {{mag}} ''Founded pediatric cardiology''
*[[SGU Episode 456#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.282:20.29|Hattie Alexander (456)]] {{mag}} ''Treated influenzal meningitis in babies, reducing mortality tremendously.''
*[[SGU Episode 452#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:29.29|Tilly Shilling (452)]] {{mag}} ''Invented a "doodad" that improved airplane manoeuverability during WWII''
*[[SGU Episode 451#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:57.29|Rebecca Lee Crumpler (451)]] {{mag}} ''First black woman to receive an American medical degree''
*[[SGU Episode 446#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.282:21.29|Lydia DeWitt (446)]] {{mag}} ''Conducted research on tuberculosis''
*[[SGU Episode 443#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:47.29|Amelia Earhart (443)]] {{mag}} ''First person to fly solo from Hawaii to California''
*[[SGU Episode 438#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.2800:36.29|Eleanor Gibson (438)]] {{mag}} ''Did a famous study that tested the depth perception of babies''
*[[SGU Episode 434#Florence_Rena_Sabin_.280:30.29|Florence Rena Sabin (434)]] {{mag}} ''Showed the lymphatic system developed from the veins in the embryo''
*[[SGU Episode 431#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:14.29|Johnnetta B. Cole (431)]] {{mag}} ''First African-American woman President of Spelman College''
*[[SGU Episode 422#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:12.29|Hazel Bishop (422)]] {{mag}} ''Chemist who invented long-lasting lipstick''
*[[SGU Episode 402#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.282:39.29|Mary Calkins (402)]] {{mag}} ''First female president of the American Psychological Association''
*[[SGU Episode 402#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.282:39.29|Ellen Swallow Richards (402)]] {{mag}} ''The woman who came up with the idea of home economics''
*[[SGU Episode 396#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.283:02.29|Chien-Shiung Wu (396)]] {{mag}} ''Proved that conservation of parity was wrong with regards to the weak nuclear force''
*[[SGU Episode 365#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.284:38.29|Jane Goodall (365)]] {{tick}} ''Studied chimanzees in the wild''
*[[SGU Episode 356#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:28.29|Dorothy Hodgkin (356)]] {{mag}} ''Used X-ray crystallography to image penicillin, cholesterol, and vitamin B12''

SGU Episode 607

2017-06-01T21:14:02Z

D Inwood: Transcribed three segments

SGU Episode 606

2017-05-31T01:18:24Z

D Inwood: Transcribed two segments

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{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 606
|episodeDate = February 18th 2017 
|episodeIcon = File:Mirror%20test.jpg 
|previous = 
|next = 
|rebecca = 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|cara = y 
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|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2017-02-18.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,48237.0.html
|qowText = Ineffective therapies are always harmful. The greatest danger lies in the risk that a still treatable disease (is) not really being treated at an early stage, by first trying an alternative therapy. In the worst case, this can lead to the death of the patient. This is more common than you might think. 
|qowAuthor = {{w|The Association Against Quackery}}, The Netherlands, established 1881, considered to be the oldest continually running skeptical organization in the world. 
|}}

== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

== Special Report (0:26) ==
* Lawsuit Update

S: So, good news everyone!

E: O-h-h! I love good news!

S: You like good news?

E: So rare, these days, yes.

C: Yes

S: I won my first of two appeals on the Tobenick case today.

E: Yes!

J: ''(British accent)'' Quite well!

B: Ooh! Okay.

C: Yay! So, what does that mean? What does that mean?

S: Okay, so, just for a quick update, a few years ago, I and the SGU and actually, a couple other entities were sued by a physician called Edward Tobenick because of an article that I wrote on Science-Based Medicine, where I said that the treatments that he was giving and advertising were not adequately supported by evidence.

J: How dare you?

S: Yeah, something that I'm wont to do.

B: Were they pure energy entities?

''(Evan and Cara laugh)''

S: So he sued me. Now, you know, clearly, I was just expressing my professional opinion on Science-Based Medicine, so he had to concoct this theory that my article, my web post on Science-Based Medicine was commercial speech, and that I was interfering with his business, and it was unfair competition, et cetera. He also sued me for straight up libel and everything, but that's a really hard sell, in the US, because that pesky First Amendment, right?

E: ''(Chuckles)'' Yeah

C: Huh huh!

S: So, anyway, I won the case in Summary Judgement, which basically means the judge said, "Yeah, you have no chance of winning. As a matter of law - all the facts are in - as a matter of law, you can't possibly win." So, yeah.

J: And that's early on in the case, right? That's a judge, after hearing initial arguments, this wasn't after the whole thing happens. It's just the

S: I would

J: first step.

S: I wouldn't say early on.

''(Cara laughs)''

S: I mean, it was just like after a year and a half, but it was before

E: Yeah

S: the court case. So, yeah, there was no court case with a jury or anything. It was just motions, and basically trading motions back and forth. It took a while to get to that point. We had to go through discovery, and it was, you know, a huge pain.

Whatever, I actually won two big motions. I won an anti-SLAPP against the California plaintiff, and then I had the rest of the charges dropped based upon Summary Judgement.

So, Tobenick, who's going through multiple lawyers on this case. They just working his way through, I guess, whatever, whoever will keep the case going. He appealed. And then, so that's been in the works for like, a year and a half now, the appeal. And then we asked for fees, based on the

E: Yep!

S: fact that he was taking the case beyond all reason. And we were awarded pretty substantial fees. Not our full cost of the case. About half of what we spent on the case, which was good. And he appealed that as well. He appealed the awarding of fees.

So, today, we got the judgement from the, this is a federal case, right? So this is the Appealate Court for the 11th Circuit. And apparently, there are three judges,

E: Right

S: that decide the case. And the oral arguments were a couple of weeks ago. So this was a pretty quick turnaround for them. I think it was two or three weeks ago, it was oral arguments. And then they came down with a decision.

So, a couple of good things: One, it was unanimous. So there was no dissenting opinion, about any of the judges. And, they sided with me on every single issue. So they didn't walk anything back, there were no caveats. It was just, "Yep, we affirm every one of the decisions of the lower court." They denied every appeal.

B: Awesome! So game over, right?

E: ''(Sounding uneasy)'' Well... no, no, no, not yet.

S: Pretty - well, okay. Sort of pretty much.

E: Well ...

C: Can he do anything else?

S: Yeah, he can

E: But he said it's only part one, so ...

C: Yeah

S: Well, yeah. First of all, I think he's probably not gonna fare well on the second appeal given how thoroughly he was slapped down on this one. So ...

C: Is the second appeal for something different?

S: To clarify, there are two appeals. He appealed the Summary Judgement, and the anti-SLAPP decision. So basically, me winning the case.

C: I see.

S: And then, the second appeal was of the awarding of fees. So I won the appeal against the Summary Judgement and anti-SLAPP. So they stand. So I

C: Yeah, so it's quite likely that he'll have to pay

S: Yeah, so it's quite likely he's gonna fail on the fees.

E: Not only fail, but the judges will say

B: I don't know why. Can't you just scale them back?

E: Give you more money!

B: Right!

C: I mean, they could ...

S: Well, we're gonna add on all of the money for the appeals, you know.

E: Sure!

B: Oh, of course!

S: It's automatic for the

J: ''(New York accent)'' Include the damages here!

S: anti-SLAPP. But whatever, we're gonna try to get as much as we can back, you know, for the money that we're having to sink into this thing.

C: So for all intents and purposes, in terms of precedent, in terms of

S: Yeah

C: importance of this case, the most meaningful portion is over. Now,

S: Yes

C: it's really just about functionality. Are we gonna be suffering financially because of the case, any more than The Skeptic's Guide, and you personally, Steve, already have?

S: Yeah, so, that's correct. It's an appellate court. They set pretty big precedent. The only place to go above them is the

E: Supreme Court!

S: Supreme Court. So, Tobenick is probably ... he has - I'm not gonna guess what he ''will'' do. But I'll tell you a few things he ''can'' do. He can ask to have the case heard before the entire 11th Circuit.

B: Well, how many ''are'' there?

S: Not sure, but it's more than three, right? So he can say, "I want all the judges to decide." But they can turn him down for that.

E: Right

S: And he can appeal to the Supreme Court.

C: Which is crazy.

E: They take, yeah, I'd think that would be low probability at this point.

S: Yeah, low probability. I suspect low probability that they'll take the case, unless ... there are elements of the case that the Supreme Court may decide to just quickly decide to ... 'cause you know,

C: You said Supreme. Did you mean Appellate?

S: No, no. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court

C: Oh, sorry

S: may decide, yeah. So, the Circuit Courts, right, they set precedent for their circuit. They can disagree with each other, but in the elements of this case, they pretty much are all agreeing with each other. But the Supreme Court, they usually get involved when the Appellate Courts disagree with each other. So then they resolve the dispute. But they also might say, "Okay, we'll just make a decision on this case. That way, we set the precedent for everybody, rather than having to go Circuit by Circuit." You know what I mean?

B: Right

C: Gotcha.

S: So, for example, one question that comes up is, "Does the state anti-SLAPP law apply on a federal case?" And now, several of the districts have ruled that they do. But the Supreme Court might want to set that as universal precedent, rather than going circuit by circuit.

B: Oh! You think that's important enough where they might do that?

S: I don't know. I'm not a legal scholar. But from what I understand, that's a possibility.

B: Okay.

C: Okay.

S: But again, probably not. But again, that's why they would do it, because there are elements of the case for which they want to make a decision,

E: Right

S: and clarify and establish universal precedent.

E: Yeah, they pretty much use you at that point.

C: That would be a decision they would be making.

S: Yeah!

C: There's nothing Tobenick can do.

S: He can ask for it.

C: Can he appeal the appeal?

E: No

S: No

E: Well ...

C: I didn't think so.

E: no, he can't.

C: Yeah

S: Well, except to say, "I'd like to appeal to all, the full judges," which

C: Oh, so he can ask for that?

S: You can ask for it,

C: Gotcha

S: but they can turn him down.

C: Yeah

S: He's not guaranteed it. And then he could try to appeal to the Supreme Court, and they could turn him down. So he has no more guaranteed appeals.

C: And those are his only two real options at this point?

S: That's it. Then he's done done. And then he can sue me over something else, but this case would be done done. And then, in terms of the fees, we're pretty far along on that, but that could be another year, from where we are now.

C: And because the Appellate Court hasn't yet ruled on the fees, whether it's the total amount, or

S: Yeah

C: I'm sure they could change a lot of things, we haven't seen a dime from him yet.

S: Right, right.

J: Nope.

C: So everything's out of pocket, both for you personally, and for the SGU.

S: Yeah

C: It's just such a bummer, 'cause it's one of those things where even when justice works in the American legal

S: It's expensive

E: It'll break you!

C: People get screwed! There's no justice for the poor, you know?

E: It's part of the strategy almost from the beginning. They want to try to force you into a corner, because they know a lot of people can't afford to go through the lengthy legal process, because it does bankrupt lots of people this way.

S: Yeah, so they cave.

C: Absolutely! And that's a manipulation of the justice system! That's not justice.

S: That's why we need anti-SLAPP laws. We need anti-SLAPP laws so that if you do get sued frivolously, as a way of suppressing your free speech, you could shut it down quickly, and get your fees covered,

B: Yes!

S: so you can't be intimidated out of free speech 'cause even if you're right, it'll cost you a ridiculous amount of money to bring this to court.

E: That's right.

C: Absolutely.

E: I mean, geez, think about the heavy hands with endless pockets that could

B: My god!

E: shut anybody up. It's scary!

J: Well, it shows you that corporations have an amazing amount of power just because they have the legal team and the money behind them. And the other thing about this was the emotional strain of this court case. I mean, I know what it did to me. I can only imagine how much harder it must have been for Steve. Like, there was a good six months where I was losing my mind over this. It was so painful to deal with, because the injustice was extraordinary.

C: Yeah, it seems like those few good times when we see these First Amendment cases, like a young teenager is suing their school because they told them they couldn't wear a T-shirt. You know, these basic free speech cases that kind of capture the attention of the media, it seems like more often than not, those people are on the prosecuting side, and they probably have pro bono attorneys. It just seems crazy that a 17-year-old, or a regular shmo could afford to go all the way to the Supreme Court,

B: Yeah

C: unless there was a group like the ACLU who was doing it pro bono because they knew that setting certain precedent would be important for future litigation. It's just, I don't know, it really bums me out, because I have so much faith in this system, because there's so many checks and balances, and that's why, obviously, this political climate has been really scary for a lot of people, 'cause the system itself is being tested. But when you see places where there's such obvious flaws, where such easy abuses can come through, it's disheartening for sure.

S: Let me read you just the one paragraph from the decision, 'cause I think this is sort of the critical legal aspect, is whether or not my article could be considered commercial speech, therefore subject to different regulation than if it was just, you know, private speech. Because we have memberships, and I advertise for my Teaching Company courses on the website, you know. So, Tobenick had this funnel theory, that I was sort of funnelling visitors to the websites into these revenue-generating activity, and therefore every article I published is therefore commercial speech. This is what they said:

<Blockquote>"To be sure, neither the placement of the articles next to revenue-generating advertising, nor the ability of the reader to pay for a website subscription would be sufficient in this case to show a liability-causing economic motivation for Dr. Novella's informative articles. Both advertising and subscriptions are typical features of newspapers, whether online or in print. But the Supreme Court has explained to that, if a newspaper's profit were determinative, all aspects of its operation, from the selection of news stories, to the choice of editorial position would be subject to regulation, if it could be established that they were conducted with the view</blockquote>

E: Right

S: <Blockquote> toward increasing sales. Such a basis for regulation clearly would be incompatible with the First Amendment.</blockquote>

Hello! That's what

E: Absolutely!

S: we've been saying from the beginning.

E: Absolutely!

S: 'Cause newspapers sell subscriptions! They have advertisements.

C: Yeah, it's one or the other.

S: Therefore, every article in it would be, therefore, commercial speech, or if you sell a book for profit, the book itself is therefore commercial speech. So the Supreme Court has already decided, no, that's not the case. That would be incompatible with First Amendment free speech if you could so easily transform anything that's even incidentally associated with revenue generation into commercial speech. So his theory was really doomed from the beginning.

C: Yeah

B: Right

S: But he's continuing to pursue it, and that was also a large part of why I was awarded as many fees as I was, because he would not give up that theory, even when it was repeatedly slapped down. It's like

C: Ugh

S: no, here's the law. It's not commercial speech. Stop it. But he wouldn't give it up.

C: So what would be an example of commercial speech? Would that be like if you taught a seminar to the public, and you were really slanderous throughout the seminar about somebody?

S: No

C: 'Cause you could actually prove that it was because you were getting paid for it?

S: Commercial speech has to propose a transaction. It has to primarily be about a commercial transaction, right? So, if I'm expressing my opinions in an opinion piece, the fact that there is commercial activity happening around it is not enough.

C: I can't even think of an example where there ''is''

S: For example, if I had written an article saying, "Don't go see Dr. Tobenick, because he doesn't know what he's doing. Come see me, and get treated for the same thing by me. I'll fix you."

C: Oh, I see.

S: Right?

C: and then you would be directly funnelling them,

S: Exactly

C: to get paid by those people.

S: And Tobenick essentially accused me of doing that, even though it's quite obvious there's nothing like that at all in the articles that I wrote. And I don't even treat the same diseases that he treats. It was really an absurd theory, in my opinion. And that's what it would have taken. I was actually proposing some kind of commercial transaction, which I wasn't.

B: Well, what if you worked for the President, and you were trying to sell the President's daughter's stuff?

S: Yeah

B: in some official

C: You can't do that.

S: Oh yeah, no one would do that, Bob. You can't do that.

C: That's against the law anyway.

J: Yeah

''(Cara laughs)''

S: All right.

E: Well, there is that.

J: Great news.

S: You know, one more step.

E: Yes, yep.

J: Yep.

S: Couple more steps to go, but one more step.

B: Whew! Goddamn!

J: Yeah, that's the other thing that we don't know, until you get involved in a lawsuit, is it takes years!

S: Yeah

C: Yeah, for like, the simplest thing.

B: And that's just it!

C: Well, congrats, everyone!

B: Yeah

S: Thank you, thank you.

B: That's what makes it hurt so very much, is that this couldn't really be much more cut and dry. Really, it's, from day one, this was obvious, obvious! If there was any nuance or subtlety to it, he could probably double or triple all of this nonsense, just because there was a little bit of nuance to it.

C: I don't think it's about nuance, I really think it's about a lack of precedent. The whole point is trying to get these anti-SLAPP precedents in place.

B: Well, yes.

C: Because they don't exist, it wasn't cut and dry.

S: Well, here's the thing.

C: There has to be somebody that goes through all the bullshit so that the next person doesn't have to go through the bullshit.

S: Here's why it can take a long time: Because if you come up with, as the plaintiff, you come up with a novel theory, the court really wants to indulge you in that, right? They don't want to shoot it down. They want, "Okay, fine. You have your date in court." You have some theory about this should all work? "Go ahead, convince us." And that takes a long time! Then you get discovery. The process takes so long. And before the judge says, "Okay, you've had every chance in the world to explain your theory. I'm not buying it. Wrong." And then he appealed! And there's, you know, boom! Another two years tacked on to the whole process, because he decided to appeal. So that's all it takes, is just, you have some new point you want to make, and boom, you could tie things for years.

B: I don't know. I don't know how much I agree with that, because then

S: Bob, I'm saying that's the way it is. I'm saying that's the way it is. I'm not saying that's the way it ''should'' be.

B: Okay, but then what hope could there possibly be for anti-SLAPP everywhere then? If that's the case,

J: Because the anti-SLAPP is doomed! From the beginning!

S: No, no, it's not. Because the anti-SLAPP is a law that specifically cuts through all of that. It says that before you get to do anything, you have to prove you have a case. And if you don't meet that minimal proof, then you lose, and you pay the other guy's fees. Boom.

B: Right

S: That's it.

C: Yeah, because, it's bizarre that we don't have that yet. It's bizarre that it

S: We don't have it at the federal level. There's a number of states that do have it like

E: Right

S: California does have it.

C: Yeah

S: and I used California's anti-SLAPP in order to get that portion of the case shut down a long time ago.

E: Damn right.

S: and there's guaranteed

C: Yeah, 'cause he sued you in so many places.

S: Well, two states, yeah, California and Florida.

C: Oh

S: So California did. Florida at the time didn't, but now it does. But we really need to get one in every state, and then there's the question of should we have a federal anti-SLAPP,

C: Yeah

S: which is interesting. It could convert all of these cases to federal cases, might be a good thing.

C: Well, it might be?

B: But Steve!

S: It could burden the federal courts.

C: Yeah

B: But in the mean time, could we incorporate in one of these anti-SLAPP states?

S: So, the short answer is yes. Some people advise that you do incorporate in a state that has a good anti-SLAPP law, because then it would offer you the protection, and that also provides an incentive for the states to have good anti-SLAPP laws. For example, if Coneecticut had a good anti-SLAPP law, we could say, "Hey! New York Times, incorporate over the border in Connecticut, and you'll be protected by our anti-SLAPP law."

C: Yeah

S: Screw New York! They don't have a good anti-SLAPP law.

C: And then New York would be like, "No! We need their revenue!

S: Yeah

C: That'd be a good sales tac

S: "We'd better pass a good anti-SLAPP law." Yeah, so that's why

E: That's how it works, yep.

S: It's critical. There could be a domino effect, because it's good for business.

C: Yeah

S: Good for citizens, and it's good for business. And how often do you have a law that is both of those things?

C: Both, that's true.

S: Yeah

C: The crazy thing is, I'm just wondering how many people from other countries, maybe not England, because we know that they have notoriously, like crap libel laws and First Amendment protections. They don't call it First Amendment there. At least historically.

S: They don't have a first amendment, yeah.

C: But in other countries who are listening, who are like, "How is this even continuing to go on if the judge already ruled that the lawsuit is frivolous?" We're like, "Yeah, exactly! That's the complicated part of all this."

S: That's the point of an anti-SLAPP,

C: Yeah

S: is that it short-circuits the legal process. It bypasses a lot of the procedures, so that you can get to a much quicker and cheaper resolution. That's the whole point.

B: It's kind of like triage. It's like, "Don't even bother working on this guy. He's dead,

S: Yeah, exactly.

''(Cara laughs)''

B: He'll be dead in ten minutes anyway."

C: ''(Laughing)'' That's horrible! Yeah.

E: Pass me one of them toe tags.

S: Well, that's how triage worked on MASH, right? Remember

C: Yeah!

E: Everything I learned about triage, I learned from MASH.

S: Yeah

C: Just write on their foreheads in lipstick.

''(Laughter)''

S: Yeah

C: Wasn't that, that was Band of Brothers, but yeah.

S: Okay, let's move on to the news items.

== News Items ==
=== Monkey Mirror Test (~18:34) ===
* http://www.popsci.com/monkey-mirror-test-self-aware?dom=rss-default&src=syn

=== Immigration and Crime (30:22) ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/immigration-and-crime/

S: All right, we're gonna talk about immigration and crime. This is obviously a very hot topic political issue, but there is a very specific empirical question at its core, and that's all I really want to talk about. Often, I will become interested in trying to answer one very narrow empirical question. Like, a little while ago, in a discussion, it came up, what was the effect on unemployment of raising the minimum wage? And you might think that there's a really objective answer out there, but honestly, I could not convince myself that I knew what the bottom line answer to that question was. I'm sure that people are gonna email me, and tell me they know the answer. But you're probably cherry-picking.

C: They're probably convincing themselves.

E: And it's always more

S: Yeah

E: complex than you think.

S: And because it's economics, basically, you could talk to a liberal economist and they have one answer. You talk to a conservative economist, they have a different answer. And that's basically where you end up. And it's hard to find an objective answer to that question.

But anyway, this question is, do immigrants commit more crimes than native-born citizens? And I'm gonna restrict this to the United States, 'cause it's a tough enough question without trying to answer it for different countries. And you can break down immigrants into legal and illegal immigrants. Interestingly, I know a lot of people want to use "undocumented" immigrant as sort of the politically correct term, but a lot of the literature just says legal versus illegal 'cause it's a little bit more technically correct. So I'm just gonna use that terminology non-judgmentally. That's just what's in the technical literature.

So, and by the way, what's interesting about this is when I wrote about it and posted on Facebook, so many people thought they had to be so clever by saying, "Well, if they come into the country illegally, then by definition, then they've committed a crime. So it's a hundred percent." It's like, okay, first of all, coming into the country illegally is actually not a criminal offence. It's a civil offence. Did you know that?

C: Mm-mm ''(Negative)''

E: Ah!

S: Yeah, so, in a way, they haven't committed a crime. They've just committed a civil offence, because it's not ... in any case, whatever you think about that

C: But they can be prosecuted, right?

S: No, they just get deported.

C: Oh, you're right

S: Yeah

C: That's just the default. They don't even get

E: Yeah

C: a day in court.

S: Yeah

C: They just get deported.

S: They just get deported. So, anyway, but obviously, we're not counting that, 'cause that's kind of pointless. The whole point is, are they a menace? Are the immigrants here, either legal or illegal, are they in any way a burden or a menace, are they committing more crimes than people who were born here?

C: Yes, do we

E: Right

C: have to protect our borders because it is unsafe for immigrants to come into this country? That's really the question.

S: This is a really hard question to answer. The short answer is, it's really hard. Any sociological question, where you're asking, "What's happening out there in the real world?" Don't expect an easy answer. It's gonna be very difficult.

One thing I was surprised about, when I really dug through the data, is that we don't have ironclad statistics on people in prison. And I'm like, "Why the hell not?"

C: Yeah, we

S: Why wouldn't we know

C: we intake them!

S: Yeah, we intake them!

C: We have their fingerprints!

S: Why wouldn't we know

E: There has to be an inventory, essentially, right? I mean,

C: It's like, the one thing we should have an inventory for.

S: Yeah

E: Yeah, we must!

S: You would think this would be just a database.

E: A central hub of data for it, right.

S: But apparently, a lot of the studies had to basically ask the inmates if they're native-born or not.

E: Oh wow.

S: And it was self-report.

C: That's so dumb.

S: I was shocked. Really? We're going on self report for somebody that obviously went through the court system? How do we not know everything about them? I don't get it. But anyway. I guess they're just not keeping it in a database.

C: Yeah

S: But there are databases, but the databases are imperfect, or it's only certain counties, or it's only federal versus state. And every way you slice it up differently, you get different answers, and they don't agree with each other. And so you

E: It's a quagmire, basically.

S: It's a quagmire. I read through a very good summary from a few years ago that went through basically every single study, what it showed, and what the flaws in the study were. And there wasn't a single study without a significant flaw.

E: Yeah

S: Which means that you need to really triangulate. You need to say, "Okay, well where,

E: What's the overlap?

S: Yeah, where's the overlap?

C: A meta-analysis, yeah.

S: Yeah, where are things pointing? Are they triangulating in any certain direction? So, here's a couple of bottom lines that I found: If you just look at prison populations, you get some mixed data, but it does appear that overall, especially if you, here's one key: If you further break it down by demographic, immigrants commit fewer crimes, or are less represented in the prison population, than native-borns of the same demographics, right?

So, in other words, if you compare the same socioeconomic status, the same race, but native-born versus immigrant, some studies show that the immigrants are way, like an order of magnitude fewer crimes.

E: I wonder if age has anything to do with that?

S: Age,

C: ''(Inaudible)'' demographics do.

S: Exactly. The age does, because

E: Yeah

S: there's this huge peak in age around sixteen, eighteen, and then it trails way off. So, yeah, there's also lead time. Maybe they're just not here long enough to

E: That's exactly right.

S: work through the system. So there's all kinds of different controls that you can do as well. So,

C: Is that weighted for population? Like, obviously, to say there are less immigrants in prison than there are

S: Yeah, it's per hundred thousand, yeah. It's, yeah, it's the rate. It's not number of individuals, it's

C: Good, 'cause there's obviously way less immigrants than there are native-born

S: Yeah

C: people in America. Okay.

E: That's right.

C: Just making sure.

S: Yeah, it's like they're X percent of the population, and they're X percent of the prison population. Therefore

C: Yes

S: they're committing, per capita, fewer or more crimes. So, at the end of the day, I would say, we don't really have a definitive answer, but the weight of the evidence seems to be, if anything, towards maybe a little bit fewer crimes. But this really long review, basically their conclusion was, "We can't conclude from the evidence that they're committing more crimes."

E: Right

C: Sure.

S: Right

C: That's a safer thing to safe.

S: Yeah, so they made the negative, "So we can't say they're committing more crimes. We can't really say anything for sure, but there certainly isn't a big signal here that's saying they're committing more crime than the native-born." And some people interpret the data as, "They're probably committing fewer." And then, the responses are interesting, because basically, if you want to believe negative things about immigrants, you can say, "Well, they're just not reporting crimes, because they don't want to get," whatever, they don't want to get deported, or they don't want to be cut off by ...

E: ICE

C: ICE

S: Yeah, they don't want to be caught up by ICE. I can say, "Okay, but they try to control that in the data, and they look at lots of different kinds of crime. So, they can't," you know? But people were so willing to cherry-pick to make the outcome whatever they wanted to for political reasons,

E: Yeah

S: it's very

E: Yeah

S: interesting. Now the thing that triggered my recent deep dive into this was a recent study, which looked at the data in a different way, which is great. The more different ways you can look at the data, the, I think, better answer we can come to. They said, "All right, we're not gonna look at individuals. We're gonna look at cities. We're gonna ask the question, 'Do cities that have more immigrants'" - and most of these studies did not distinguish legal from illegal. It was just, "Were you born in the United States? Or were you not born in the United States?" You know, not really discriminating how you got here.

E: Citizen versus non-citizen?

S: No, just, "Were you born in the US or not born in the US?"

E: Okay

S: Because you could be not born in the US and a

E: Right

S: citizen.

E: I understand, that's why I wanted to clarify that.

S: So yeah, it was not citizenship, it was just where were you born, basically. And then, they said, "All right, do cities that have more immigrants have more or less crime than cities that have fewer immigrants." And the reason they did this was 'cause some people argue, "Well, even if the immigrants themselves are not getting caught for crimes as much as the native-born, maybe 'cause they're not committing as many, or maybe because, whatever, they're hiding better, or under-reporting, but because they are a strain on the city's resources, overall, the conditions will deteriorate, and that will be reflected in more overall crime in the city.

So they looked at a data set for forty years of data, up through 2010. And what they found was a pretty consistent negative correlation, meaning that cities with more immigrants had fewer crimes, it had less crime. So that kind of supports that end of the spectrum. And they said the results were very solid. And it was a huge data set. And they looked at both violent and property crime. So it was not just, they looked at, let's see, violent, property, and also drug-related crimes, and things like that, from 1970 to 2010. So that was interesting.

B: Huh!

S: So, yeah, very interesting. So, again, this is an area that still needs more study. It's amazing - ah, it's not amazing - it's predictable how political it is.

E: Yeah

S: But it is a very empirical question. You think we should be able to answer this question. But because it's sociological, and real-world type of question, it's actually very difficult, but

E: Hard to tie down.

S: But here's the thing: With all the evidence that exists, you cannot say that illegal immigrants are criminals, right? That they're committing more crimes than the native population, that they're importing crime. Right? They actually are no different than the native-born. And by some ways of looking at the data, they actually commit less crimes, you know.

C: And that is typically the political argument for minimizing

S: That's one. It's one. Now, there's one more question that has been addressed in research as well. Another study, which asked a very interesting question: Okay, so, illegal aliens are, it looks like they commit fewer crimes overall than native-borns. Why is that? Is it because we're deporting the criminals? Or is it because they're self-selected? Or there was some other variable? Is it because of lead time or something else?

And what they found was that you cannot explain the decrease because of deportation. So it's not that we're deporting the immigrants who are criminals. And they said that the best interpretation of the data is that they're self-selecting. Obviously, this is not universal. People come here to sell drugs, you know? But a lot of the immigrants who come here are self-selected for wanting to work, and improve their family, and better their life, and they're just not criminals. It's not a random sampling of the population. It's actually a less criminal sampling of the population, 'cause for whatever reason,

B: Imagine that. Imaging that.

S: motivates them to come here. Yeah.

B: What if more people just embraced that possibility, and believed it! Just believed it.

S: Yeah

J: Well, that's the problem, Bob.

E: It's one aspect of it, Bob, too. There are other socioeconomic factors at play, but we're talking about specifically criminality in this particular example.

B: Yeah, but I think if you put out a poll question asking that, most people would say, "No way!" And they wouldn't believe it. They wouldn't believe it.

J: And Bob, it takes a long time to change perception. I mean, think about how many years it takes for peoples' perceptions to change over social issues like this. I mean, think about homosexuality, as an example.

B: Well, I just had to hear and read about this study, and now I believe it. It didn't take me long.

J: Yeah, but that's

C: But you're a skeptic.

J: you, you're a trained skeptic.

C: Yeah

J: And you've trained yourself to be able to change your opinion with evidence. The average person, they're basing their feelings and their thoughts on their emotions, and on what they want.

B: We should get our voices out there and train other people, maybe do a podcast or something.

''(Cara laughs)''

S: Yeah, so listen,

''(Evan laughs)''

S: half the reason why I wanted to talk about this: One, it's just an interesting empirical question, and it's a good exercise in how complicated sociological data can be. So if you just forget about all of the political implications, just try to answer that question, it's really interesting. But the other part is, because I wrote about it on my blog, in the comments, if you read through the comments on my blog, on Neurologica, you will be rewarded with a stunning example of motivated reasoning.

E: ''(Excited)'' Oh!

''(Cara chuckles)''

S: Let me direct you

E: No surprise

S: specifically

B: Please do. This should be good.

S: to the comments by Michael Egnore. You guys remember Dr. Egnore.

B: Ohhh!

J: Of course!

E: He likes you, Steve.

S: He is the creationist neurosurgeon who blogs for the Discovery Institute, who, we have been crossing blog swords over the years. And he occasionally shows up in the comments to my blog, which is fine.

E: He likes you.

S: I would show up the comments in his blog, but the Discovery Institute blog has no comments. So,

''(Evan snickers)''

S: for whatever reason. Anyway, I mean, you have to read them. In my opinion, he just outs himself as a full blown bigot. I mean, it's just amazing. At one point, he's lecturing me about the cultural heritage of Italians. And it's just hilarious!

''(Laughter)''

E: Eh! Pastvasule!

B: Was he dissing Italians?

J: What was he trying to tell ya, Steve?

C: Uh oh! The brothers are getting angry!

S: Yeah, right?

E: you guys should put a hit out on him!

S: A lot of people made the point that - and this has been made in the literatures as well - in some studies are like, what's interesting is that there is this belief that immigrants are criminals more than the native population for 200 years, and it's never been true! In fact, I found a study from 1933 that said, "Nope, they're no more criminal than native-born." In 1933!

But anyway, the question is, why does the belief persist so strongly if it's just not empirically true. And read the comments, and you'll find out. So he has a very interesting narrative, Dr. Egnore. His narrative is that America was just fine when it was all WASPS, right? White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And WASP culture is American culture.

''(Cara gasps)''

''(Evan sighs)''

S: Right? Which he laid it out for us! Like, what is WASP culture? Well, I'll tell you! It's his summary of quote-unquote "WASP culture" is, "A strong work ethic, respect for law, belief in freedom of religion and speech, acceptance of Christian ethics, loyalty to family and country, among other things." To which I responded

E: That's not

S: "Loyalty to family? Are you effing kidding me? That's WASP culture and not Italian culture?" 'Cause he was saying

E: Any of

S: that Italians, after they immigrate, they didn't come with that culture. When they immigrated, they adopted, they assimilated and adopted WASP culture, right?

C: Wait, I just still don't understand the distinction. Okay, White Anglo-Saxon - Italians are white. I'm so confused.

S: Yeah, but we're Catholic, though, man. We're not

E: Yeah, it's the Anglo-Saxon

S: also, if you go south enough, we get pretty brown, you know?

C: No, I agree.

E: You get all Mediterranean on us.

C: So he's making a distinction between Mediteraneans and Europeans, really.

S: Well, see, Western versus Eastern European. So that's why, in one of my comments to my, that sounds like gangs of New York level bigotry right there. I mean, that's old school!

''(Laughter)''

J: Right?

S: That is old-school!

J: It's so old-school,

E: Throwin' rocks at people comin' off the boats!

J: it's actually entertaining

E: Oh gosh!

J: and borderline fascinating, like

S: Right

J: wow! How could you be born within the last fifty to sixty years, and be walkin' around with that attitude?

S: Right

E: 'Cause ...

B: And what about the meat balls?

S: ''(Cracks up)'' Right.

J: Oh, forget it, Bob. If he doesn't think we care about each other, he won't get the meat balls.

''(Cara laughs)''

S: So his point is that we can't allow these Muslims into the country because they just will not assimilate into WASP culture.

C: Oh no

S: They're fundamentally un-American.

E: Yeah, the Jews didn't exactly assimilate into WASP culture either, and you know, they seem to be okay.

C: Did he say anything about black people? Or did he just ignore that whole ''(inaudible)''

S: Nah, I couldn't get anything about him. I tried to egg him on a little bit, but yeah, he had his narrative.

''(Cara laughs)''

B: Egnore! Egg Egnore!

E: Egnore!

S: Yeah, so, but it was fascinating though. And he basically said he doesn't want legal immigration. He thinks that legal immigration

B: Wow!

S: is a

J: Oh man!

S: quote-unquote

E: That's just ridiculous

S: "scourge." It's a scourge.

C: He knows that America's only like, three hundred years old, right?

S: Yeah, right?

C: Like, in terms of what we consider "modern" society. Obviously, native Americans have been here for a long time.

S: Yeah.

C: But that's what always drives me crazy, when people talk about quote, "real" Americans. And it's like, real Americans ain't any of us!

S: Right

B: ''(Chuckles)'' Right

C: If you're a native American, sure. But people just ignore, they really rewrite history to think that this was a land for the taking. Nobody lived on it. And the British are really just the original Americans.

S: Right

E: ''(Very mild British accent)'' I say.

C: It's insane!

S: And then the Islamaphobia is just epic in his comments.

J: Yeah, but it's epic everywhere, Steve. I mean it's

S: Yeah

C: Islamaphobia, it's like, acceptable to be as overtly Islamaphobic now as it was during Jim Crow to be overtly racist.

S: Right

C: It's just, it's crazy how, and people can, I don't know, they kind of convince themselves that it's not about race, and it's not about heritage. And you're like, "How could it not be?" I mean, I'm against Islam in the sense that I'm against Christianity. I'm

S: Well, yeah, nobody wants Sharia law in the US.

C: Exactly! For me, it's about

S: Sure

C: religion. It's not about people. It's never about people.

S: So I said, I made the point. I said, "You know, there are moderate Muslims. I happen to know some. I have

C: Absolutely!

S: very good friends and colleagues, for example, who are Muslim. You would never freakin' know it." I mean, other than, if you know them, obviously, you know what their religion is. But other than where they worship, they're just regular people!" I mean, it's ridiculous. And his response to that was, "To the extent that they're moderate, they're not good Muslims. And to the extent that they're

C: Oh, that's - ugh!

S: Yeah, so either

C: It's such a shitty argument.

E: And he makes that determination? He's insane.

S: Yeah. So it's like, they're not real Muslims

J: Absolutely

S: That's the No True Scotsman fallacy, right. They're not

C: Yeah

S: real Muslims. Real Muslims are all these horrible things. And if they're not those horrible things, they're not a real Muslim. So,

J: Well he's

C: Ugh

J: rejecting the information. That's what that is.

S: Oh, rejecting the information? He basically said, "If the studies show that immigrants commit fewer crimes, the study's wrong." Period!

C: Yeah

S: He just flat out rejects it, because he doesn't like the results.

C: And you said this guy is a neurosurgeon.

S: Um hmm

C: People pay him to operate on their brains.

B: Well, Carson operated on brains too.

C: I know! It scares me so much!

S: Being a good surgeon is largely about having technical expertise.

C: Yeah, that's true. I mean, even a physician, we've talked about this

S: Yeah

C: on the show. Many, many physicians are not trained in the sciences.

S: Yeah

C: You can be pre-med in school, and get a minimal education in sort of scientific reasoning, and mostly focus on sort of the A and P aspect of biology,

S: Yeah

C: and not really have a good understanding of the scientific method.

S: Yeah, you could be a technically proficient professional, but not a critical thinker, obviously.

''(Commercial at 49:41)''

=== Human Embryo Editing (50:43) ===
* http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/us-panel-gives-yellow-light-human-embryo-editing?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=yellowlight-11109

=== Mission to Europa () ===
* http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-europa-jupiter-aliens-find-rover-saturn-report-science-goals-humanity-a7578161.html

== Who's That Noisy () ==
* Answer to last week: Tornado Siren

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Question #1: Momentum in Sports () ===
<blockquote>Reply to numerous e-mails about hindsight bias and momentum in sports.</blockquote>

== Science or Fiction () ==
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170215101444.htm Item #1]: A new study supports the hypothesis that comprehending a word that relates to motor function involves the relevant part of the motor cortex, and not just language cortex.
[http://www.crossroadstoday.com/story/34511914/autism-predicted-by-infant-brain-changes-study-says Item #2]: Using MRI scans, researchers have been able to predict which high-risk infants will go on to develop autism with 90% accuracy as young as 3 months of age.
[http://www.bme.utexas.edu/news/1030-ultraflexible-probe Item #3]: Engineers have developed brain electrodes that are 1000 times more flexible than previous electrodes, allowing for a stable connection that does not form scar tissue.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>"Ineffective therapies are always harmful. The greatest danger lies in the risk that a still treatable disease (is) not really being treated at an early stage, by first trying an alternative therapy. In the worst case, this can lead to the death of the patient. This is more common than you might think." - The Association Against Quackery, The Netherlands, established 1881, considered to be the oldest continually running skeptical organization in the world.</blockquote>

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

Female guests on the SGU

2017-05-25T17:11:04Z

D Inwood: Added one female interview to the list

Listed below are all of the interviews with women over the entire run of the SGU, as well as the guest rogues. Rebecca Watson, is only included on this list in her first appearance, when she was interviewed as a guest.

== Women interviewed on SGU ==
{{tick}} means transcription is complete and proofread. {{mag}} means it has been transcribed, but not proofread. {{Open}} means no transcription is available yet. 

*[[SGU Episode_605#Interview_with_Maureen_Ohlhausen_.2856:15.29|Maureen Ohlhausen (605)]] {{mag}} - ''Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. Discussion on homeopathy labeling.''
*[[SGU Episode_576#Interview_With_Maria_Cork_.2857:30.29|Maria Cork (576)]] {{mag}} - ''Worked on the Chewbacca costume for Star Wars: Episode VII''
*[[SGU Episode 568|Hai Ting (568)]] {{mag}} - ''Sings quotes from skeptics multiple times throughout the episode''
*[[SGU Episode 551#Interview_.2847:14.29|SciBabe (551)]] {{mag}} - ''Science communicator talks about her rise to fame, and also discusses the Food Babe''
*[[SGU Episode 513|Julia Galef (513)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU 10-Hour Show Part 9|Jocelyn Novella (10-Hour Show Part 9)]] {{mag}} - ''Pseudoscience in psycho therapy''
*[[SGU 10-Hour Show Part 8|Cara Santa Maria (10-Hour Show Part 8)]] {{mag}} - ''Atheism''
*[[SGU 10-Hour Show Part 6|Rebecca Watson (10-Hour Show Part 6)]] {{Open}} - ''What she's been doing since the SGU''
*[[SGU 10-Hour Show Part 1|Eugenie Scott (10-Hour Show Part 1)]] {{Open}} - ''Historical victory against Intelligent Design''
*[[SGU Episode 488|Siouxsie Wiles(488)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 465|Bug girl (465)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU_Episode_460#Elise_Andrew_.2843:45.29|Elise Andrew (460)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 453#Interview_with_Jennifer_Ouellette_.2849:07.29|Jennifer Ouellette (453)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 445|Karen Stollznow (445)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 442|Hai-Ting (442)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 438|Susan Gerbic (438)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 434|Indre Viskontas (434)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 424|Cara Santa Maria (424)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 409|Heather Berlin (409)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 393#Interview_with_Lizzie_Li_Taylor_.2843:17.29|Lizzie Li Taylor (393)]] {{tick}} = ''The translator and voice of Skeptoid Chinese''
*[[SGU Episode 376|Pamela Gay (376)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 364#Interview_with_Jann_Bellamy_.2846:45.29|Jann Bellamy (364)]] {{tick}}
*[[SGU Episode 359#Interview_with_with_Debbie_Feldman_.2840:06.29|Debbie Feldman (359)]] {{tick}}
*[[SGU Episode 345#Interview_with_Fraser_Cain_and_Pamela_Gay_.2835:40.29|Pamela Gay (345)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 340#Interview:_Eugenie_Scott_.2837:10.29|Eugenie Scott (340)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 326|Susana Martinez-Conde (326)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 322|Sara Mayhew (322)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 316|Elizabeth Loftus (316)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 311|Eugenie Scott (311)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 272|Bug Girl (272)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 270|Karen Stollznow (270)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 269|Carol Tavris (269)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 255|Pamela Gay (255)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 211|Carrie Iwan (211)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 210|Jennifer Ouellette (210)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 198|Rachael Dunlop (198)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 187|Angie McQuaig (187)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 183|Alice Tuff (183)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 171|Diana Blaney (171)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 166|Sharon Begley (166)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 149#Interview_with_Diana_Blaney_.2839:37.29|Diana Blaney (149)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 145#Interview_with_Kirsten_Sanford_.2837:12.29|Kirsten Sanford (145)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 140|Eugenie Scott (140)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 138#Interview_with_Ola_Fincke_.2833:47.29|Ola Fincke (138)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 131|Pamela Gay (131)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 95|Pamela Gay (95)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 93|Bug Girl (93)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU_Episode_91#Interview_with_Susan_Blackmore_.2825:43.29|Susan Blackmore (91)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 79|Eugenie Scott (79)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 42|Eugenie Scott (42)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 33#Interview_with_Rebecca_Watson.2C_founder_of_the_Skepchicks_.2823:00.29|Rebecca Watson (33)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 28#Interview_with_Tara_Smith_.2825:57.29|Tara Smith (28)]] {{mag}}

== Women guest rogues ==
*[[SGU Episode 555|Julia Galef (555)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 521|Joanne Benhamu (521)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 518|Ajia Moon (518)]] {{mag}} - ''Born with twisted legs, requiring surgery''
*[[SGU Episode 512|Siouxsie Wiles (512)]] {{mag}} - ''Microbiologist and science communicator''
*[[SGU Episode 502|Jennifer Dixon (502)]] {{mag}} - ''Writing a book called "Botanical Voyeur: A Guide to Sex on the Prairie."''
*[[SGU Episode 497|Cara Santa Maria (497)]] {{mag}} - ''Host of Talk Nerdy podcast. Talks about robot poker and depression.''
*[[SGU Episode 462|Aija Moon (462)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 404|Cathleen Carr (404)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 301|Iszi Lawrence (301)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 246|Eugenie Scott (246)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 163|Pamela Gay (163)]] {{Open}}

Category:What's the Word?

2017-05-25T17:06:35Z

D Inwood: Added one Whats the Word to the list

Listed below are all of the What's the Word segments so far

{{tick}} means transcription is complete and proofread. {{mag}} means it has been transcribed, but not proofread. {{Open}} means no transcription is available yet. 

*[[SGU Episode_617#What.27s_the_Word_.284:04.29|Exaptation (617)]] {{mag}} – ''An organ that has a function that is not what it was originally evolved for''
*[[SGU Episode_605#What.27s_the_Word_.2811:50.29|Impedance (605)]] {{mag}} – ''The effective resistance of an electric circuit to alternating current''
*[[SGU Episode_601#What.27s_the_Word_.281:14.29|Parallax (601)]] {{mag}} – ''Apparent movement against a background as an observer moves''
*[[SGU Episode_597#What.27s_the_Word_.2845:58.29|In Situ (597)]] {{mag}} – ''Being in its original position or place''
*[[SGU Episode_596#What.27s_the_Word_.289:58.29|Phylogenetic (596)]] {{mag}} – ''The evolutionary history of a species''
*[[SGU Episode_595#What.27s_The_Word_.2858:54.29|Endemic (595)]] {{mag}} – ''Restricted to a particular region''
*[[SGU Episode_594#What.27s_the_Word_.284:42.29|Autopoiesis(594)]] {{mag}} – ''A system that is self-regulating ''
*[[SGU Episode_594#What.27s_the_Word_.284:42.29|Autological (594)]] {{mag}} – ''A word that describes itself''
*[[SGU Episode_592#What.27s_the_Word_.281:55.29|Xerophile (592)]] {{mag}} – ''An organism that thrives in dry environments''
*[[SGU Episode_591#What.27s_the_Word_.288:35.29|Relict (591)]] {{mag}} – ''Something that has survived from an earlier period of time''
*[[SGU Episode_589#What.27s_the_Word_.281:02:45.29|Taphonomy (589)]] {{mag}} – ''The study of fossilization''
*[[SGU Episode_588#What.27s_the_Word_.287:59.29|Autophagy (588)]] {{mag}} – ''The self-digestion of a cell's organelles''
*[[SGU Episode_587#What.27s_the_Word_.2858:29.29|Ultracrepidarian (587)]] {{mag}} – ''One who expresses opinions outside their area of expertise''
*[[SGU Episode_586#What.27s_the_Word_.2816:18.29|Apophenia (586)]] {{mag}} – ''Perceiving a connection between random things''
*[[SGU Episode_585#What.27s_the_Word_.2857:10.29|Superfecundation (585)]] {{mag}} – ''Successive fertilization of multiple ova from the same ovulation''
*[[SGU Episode_584#What.27s_the_Word_.281:01:04.29|Comorbidity (584)]] {{mag}} – ''Multiple simultaneous diagnoses''
*[[SGU Episode_583#What.27s_the_Word_.2847:01.29|Thanatosis (583)]] {{mag}} – ''When an animal plays dead''
*[[SGU Episode_582#What.27s_the_Word_.2845:41.29|Glycolysis (582)]] {{mag}} – ''The metabolic pathway that breaks down glucose''
*[[SGU Episode_581#What.27s_the_Word_.283:32.29|Inquiline (581)]] {{mag}} – ''An animal that exploits the living space of another species''
*[[SGU Episode_580#What.27s_the_Word_.2846:41.29|Flocculation (580)]] {{mag}} – ''The production of fluffy masses from a colloidal suspension''
*[[SGU Episode_579#What.27s_the_Word:_Hypnagogia_.289:00.29|Hypnagogia (579)]] {{mag}} – ''The state of drowsiness that immediately preceeds sleep''
*[[SGU Episode_578#What.27s_the_Word:_Mondegreen_.2841:20.29|Mondegreen (578)]] {{mag}} – ''Word / phrase resulting from a mishearing of something that was said or sung''
*[[SGU Episode_577#What.27s_the_Word_.282:04.29|Neoteny (577)]] {{mag}} – ''Retention of juvenile characteristics in adult individuals of a species''
*[[SGU Episode_576#What.27s_the_Word_.2847:28.29|Estivation (576)]] {{mag}} – ''Entering a dormant state when in a hot, dry environment''
*[[SGU Episode_575#What.27s_the_Word_.289:19.29|Apoptosis (575)]] {{mag}} – ''Programmed cell death''
*[[SGU Episode_574#What.27s_the_Word_.2854:56.29|Paroxysmal (574)]] {{mag}} – '' Relating to a sudden fit, or attack during illness''
*[[SGU Episode_573#What.27s_the_Word_.281:27.29|Alluvium (573)]] {{mag}} – ''Clay or silt that's deposited by running water''
*[[SGU Episode_572#What.27s_the_Word_.2835:20.29|Crepuscular (572)]] {{mag}} – ''Of, relating to, or resembling twilight''
*[[SGU Episode_571#What.27s_the_Word_.281:00:39.29|Eschatology (571)]] {{mag}} – ''In theology, the final destiny of the soul, and of mankind''
*[[SGU Episode_570#What.27s_the_Word_.282:28.29|Iatrogenic (570)]] {{mag}} – ''An infection or injury produced inadvertently by a physician''
*[[SGU Episode_569#What.27s_the_Word_.281:01:41.29|Cauliflory (569)]] {{mag}} – ''Production of flowers or fruits directly from the branches or trunks of plants''
*[[SGU Episode_568#What.27s_the_Word_.2814:34.29|Autotomy (568)]] {{mag}} – ''The reflexive separation of an appendage, or other part of the body''
*[[SGU Episode_567#What.27s_the_Word_.2825:28.29|Group animal names (589)]] {{mag}} – ''An obstinacy of buffalo, etc''
*[[SGU Episode_566#What.27s_the_Word_.281:00:25.29|Amphidromic (566)]] {{mag}} – ''A point where there's almost zero tides''
*[[SGU Episode_565#What.27s_the_Word_.284:43.29|Propaganda (565)]] {{mag}} – ''Spreading ideas to promote an institution''
*[[SGU Episode_564#What.27s_the_Word_.2839:20.29|Hyperthymesia (564)]] {{mag}} – ''Extremely efficacious autobiographical memory''
*[[SGU Episode_563#What.27s_the_Word_.280:25.29|Geodesic (563)]] {{mag}} – ''The shortest distance between two points''
*[[SGU Episode_562#What.27s_the_Word_.283:37.29|Homophily (562)]] {{mag}} – ''The theory that people tend to form connections with others who are similar to them''
*[[SGU Episode_561#What.27s_the_Word_.283:17.29|Foreign words that lack English equivalents (561)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode_560#What.27s_the_Word_.281:04:05.29|Chemiosmosis (560)]] {{mag}} – ''Turning ADP into ATP in mitochondria''
*[[SGU Episode_559#What.27s_the_Word_.284:26.29|Equilux (559)]] {{mag}} – ''The day in which the length of dark and light are equal''
*[[SGU Episode_558#What.27s_the_Word_.2840:46.29|Sciolism (558)]] {{mag}} – ''Opinionating on subjects of which one only has superficial knowledge''
*[[SGU Episode_557#What.27s_the_Word_.281:15.29|Thixotropy (557)]] {{mag}} – ''A property where shaking a substance thins it out''
*[[SGU Episode_553#What.27s_the_Word_.285:00.29|Pleochroism (553)]] {{mag}} – ''The way crystals show different colors when viewed from different directions''
*[[SGU Episode_552#What.27s_the_Word_.2851:07.29|Epistasis (552)]] {{mag}} – ''When combined genes have a dominant effect over other combinations''
*[[SGU Episode_551#What.27s_the_Word_.281:14.29|Words from science fiction (551)]] {{mag}} – ''Robotics, for example''
*[[SGU Episode_550#What.27s_the_Word_.2844:09.29|Agnatology (550)]] {{mag}} – '' The study of willful acts to spread confusion''
*[[SGU Episode_549#What.27s_the_Word_.283:21.29|Algorithm (549)]] {{mag}} – ''A set of prescribed rules for solving a problem''
*[[SGU Episode_548#What.27s_the_Word_.2841:55.29|Fugacity (548)]] {{mag}} – '' The pressure of a hypothetical ideal gas that would correspond to the real gas as it exists at a given temperature, pressure, and composition.''
*[[SGU Episode_547#What.27s_the_Word_.2858:23.29|Obligate (547)]] {{mag}} – ''A creature that is restricted to one characteristic mode of life''
*[[SGU Episode_544#What.27s_The_Word_.2844:25.29|Consilience (544)]] {{mag}} – '' Linking together principles from different disciplines to form a theory''
*[[SGU Episode_543#What.27s_the_Word_.284:28.29|Hysteresis (543)]] {{mag}} – ''The lag in a variable property of a system with respect to the effect producing it as this effect varies''
*[[SGU Episode_542#What.27s_the_Word_.282:09.29|Homeostasis (542)]] {{mag}} – ''The maintenance of internal stability in a system or organism''
*[[SGU Episode_541#What.27s_the_Word_.2847:16.29|Albedo (541)]] {{mag}} – ''The intensity of light that's reflected from an object''
*[[SGU Episode_540#What.27s_the_Word_.283:02.29|Formication (540)]] {{mag}} – ''The feeling that insects are crawling all over your skin''
*[[SGU Episode_539#What.27s_the_Word_.2858:41.29|Indolent (539)]] {{mag}} – ''Causing little or no pain, inactive, or relatively benign''
*[[SGU Episode_538#What.27s_the_Word_.2839:51.29|Canonical (538)]] {{mag}} – ''According to recognized rules or scientific laws''
*[[SGU Episode_534#What.27s_the_Word_.2850:21.29|Isograd (534)]] {{mag}} – ''A line connecting points on the Earth where metamorphism of rocks occurred under the same conditions''
*[[SGU Episode_533#What.27s_the_Word_.2849:26.29|Efferent (533)]] {{mag}} – ''A body part that projects outward''
*[[SGU Episode_532#What.27s_the_Word_.2850:59.29|Anosmia (532)]] {{mag}} – ''The loss of the sense of smell''
*[[SGU Episode_531#What.27s_the_Word_.2859:44.29|Stochastic (531)]] {{mag}} – ''A process that is a random in the particulars, but is statistical in the aggregate

== Trivia ==
* The longest What's the Word segment was 9 minutes and 55 seconds long, in episode 543
* The shortest was a tie at 1 minute and 50 seconds in episodes 534 and 558

SGU Episode 605

2017-05-25T17:03:44Z

D Inwood: Transcribed two segments

{{Editing required
|transcription = y
||proof-reading = y
|time-stamps = y
|formatting = y
|links = y
|Today I Learned list = y
|categories = y
|segment redirects = y 
|}}
{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 605
|episodeDate = February 11th 2017 
|episodeIcon = File:American-Flag-ImageTA.jpg 
|previous = 
|next = 
|rebecca = 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|cara = y 
|perry = 
|guest1 = MO: Maureen Ohlhausen
|guest2 = 
|guest3 = 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2017-02-11.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,48199.0.html
|qowText = I believe that we are a story-driven species and that we understand how things are put together, in the context of narrative. It's a shame that science hasn't been taught that way, in a long time. It's usually the fact completely devoid of any human experience or any idea of how the scientist came to that conclusion. 
|qowAuthor = {{w|Ann Druyan}} 
|}}

== Introduction ==
* Incredible comeback at Superbowl game
* Hindsight bias in explaining game and in explaining election results

''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

== What's the Word (11:50) ==
* Impedance

S: Cara, What's the Word this week?

C: The word this week is impedance. Impedance is a deceptively complicated word.

''(Cara and Evan laugh)''

C: So, let's get into it.

E: Simple

C: All right, Merriam-Webster, right off the bat, simplest definition you could come up with, "Something that impedes." Okay, sure. But that's not the impedance that we're talking about. We're talking about the quote,

<Blockquote>"apparent opposition in an electrical circuit to the flow of an alternating current, that's analogous to the actual electrical resistance to the direct current. And that's the ratio of effective electro-motor force to the effective current.

The ratio, or in other words, the ratio of the pressure to the volume of displacement at a given surface, in a sound transmitting medium."</blockquote>

Okay, so that was one in a circuit, that was it in a sound transmitting medium. Oxford says something similar.

<Blockquote>"The effective resistance of an electric circuit or component to alternating current, arising from the combined effects of omic resistance and reactance."</blockquote>

Okay, that probably means nothing to a lot of people, so I think it's important to break it down. And the best way to break it down is to ensure that we understand the basic difference between AC and DC. Everybody here on the show likely does, but that doesn't mean that everybody listening does. So, if you remember the famous fights between Tesla and Edison, you may remember

E: Yeah

C: direct current

S: Oh yeah

C: and alternating current.

B: Yeah

C: Direct current came about first. It was the gold standard. And it's what a lot of people thought that most of our electrical infrastructure was going to be built upon. It was Edison's baby. He made a lot of money off of it. And then alternating current came about. They said it couldn't be done. Tesla figured out how to do it. And it really threw a wrench in a lot of things. Ultimately, our lives are much better for it.

The main difference is really implicit in the name, right? Direct current flows in one direction, directly. Alternating current switches and goes back, switches and goes back. It changes direction periodically.

S: You know what the frequency is?

C: Uh, oh wait! Something some - ''(growls)''.

E: It's in Hertz.

C: It's sixty? Sixty Hertz.

S: Sixty.

C: Is that right?

S: Sixty Hertz.

C: Yeah

E: Yeah, sixty

C: That's ambiant

J: All right, Cara!

C: That's in your - yes!

E: Well done.

S: And you know that if you deal with electrical equipment, which I do all the time,

C: Yeah

S: you know that because, if you're anywhere around technology, there is a sixty Hertz

C: Sixty Hertz in a ways

S: artefact

C: Yep

S: Yeah, there's sixty Hertz noise everywhere.

E: Yeah

C: That's how I remember it, from working in electric physiology, because we're looking at microvolts, right? We're looking at little

S: Yep

C: tiny measurements. And you would have sixty Hertz noise, and everything. So you would have to build a Faraday cage, and you'd have to subtract it from

S: Yeah, there's a filter. You have a sixty Hertz filter, basically.

C: Yeah, ''(Inaudible)'', yeah.

S: Filters out, yeah.

C: So yeah. So that's a main difference. Obviously, I could dig into this much deeper, but that's kind of a general difference between alternating current and direct currents. So, what is impedance then? Well impedance is necessary, as you heard in those definitions. Impedance is a measurement that we use in alternating current systems. In direct current systems, it's pretty easy to just call it resistance.

So when you look at a basic circuit, electrons flow from the power source all the way through. And it continues to cycle. And then you'll sometimes see things built in like capacitors and resistors, and all these different things that help stop the current, slow down the current, hold on to the current, and to change the outcome. If a resistor is in a DC current, or in a DC circuit, you can measure its resistance. It's that simple.

But in an alternating current circuit, because of the way that the electricity flows, and because there are a lot of other factors to measure, we actually measure overall resistance. So not just from the resistor itself, but from the capacitors, from everything that's there. We measure that as something called impedance. Now, I'm not gonna give you any sort of calculations. I think that we don't need them for the level of understanding what the word impedance means. But just know that impedance is the total resistance of a circuit using alternating current.

When you look at the actual etymology of the word impedance, it really does translate to hindrance. The first time it was used in full was in 1886, as that real definition, resistance due to induction in an electrical circuit. But if you start to break it down, you actually see that the word has these individual roots. Like, when we look at impede, what do you think impede literally translates to in Latin?

J: To get in the way of.

E: Stop. Block.

C: So what does pede mean?

S: A walk.

C: Pede.

E: Oh, walk.

S: Yeah

C: Feet. It's literally to shackle the feet.

S: Shackle the feet.

B: Cool

C: To impede is to shackle the feet.

J: All right.

C: Which makes sense.

E: Okay

C: That's how you hinder.

E: Sure

C: That's how you detain. And so over all, impedance is this hindrance, this resistance. Pretty interesting.

== News Items ==
=== Super Bowl Drones (16:31) ===
* https://www.wired.com/2017/02/lady-gaga-halftime-Whatshow-drones/?mbid=social_fb

=== GM Wheat (24:15) ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/first-gm-wheat-trials-set/

=== Security Chips () ===
* http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2017/02/03/study-id-fraud-up-since-security-chips-put-into-play/

== Who's That Noisy () ==
* Answer to last week: Baritone Trombone

== Name That Logical Fallacy (46:49) ==
<blockquote>I want to know if the following is a formal logical fallacy or an appeal of some sort. It goes like this, 'Because you were wrong on this one point, you are wrong on all of your points.' The person arguing dismisses all arguments on a particular topic because they poked a hole in one of them. I have seen this online with some Trump supporters making the following argument: 'The Left' said Trump was like Hitler. Hitler had death camps. Trump doesn't have death camps. Therefore, Trump isn't Hitler, and every other criticism levelled at Trump can be dismissed in one fell swoop. What do you guys think? Jonathan Jarry Montreal, Canada</blockquote>

''Commercial at 55:00''

== Interview with Maureen Ohlhausen (56:15) ==
* https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/biographies/maureen-k-ohlhausen

''(Interview music)''

S: We are joined now by acting Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen of the Federal Trade Commission. Maureen, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

MO: Excellent, thank you. I'm really delighted to join you.

S: So, for our listeners, who may not be intimately familiar with the FTC, and many of which are not even from the United States, can you tell us a little bit about what the FTC is, and how you conceive its core mission?

MO: The Federal Trade Commission is an independent bipartisan agency. We have five members, no more than three are from the same political party. And the current presidential administration picks who the Chair is. Our core mission is protecting consumers in two ways:

We police against unfair and deceptive acts or practices - that's our Consumer Protection Authority. And we also have Anti-Trust Authority, where we ensure that consumers get the benefits of competitive markets.

S: Yeah, I think the Anti-Trust mission is less well known than the anti-fraud and consumer protection angle. That's interesting. I read some of your recent articles and speeches, and let's talk about the anti-trust thing first, only because I think that would be fairly quick. The philosophy that you have articulated so far is one of regulatory humility. Tell us about that.

MO: So, regulatory humility is my name for the idea that we need to act with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge. The ability to predict the future, we are not always very good at predicting. And we want to be sure that we're addressing real harm, that we've got good evidence of that. Typically in the anti-trust area, we're looking for economic evidence, and that whatever remedy we impose will ultimately make consumers better off. By protecting competition, rather than shutting off new forms of competition that may develop in the marketplace.

S: So, when in doubt, don't act, rather than impose regulations that maybe have unintended consequences?

MO: Exactly. So I often talk about the need to address real harms, rather than speculative harms. And there are harms that may not have occurred yet that aren't truly speculative. If we know a lot about the market, there are certain markets where have a very good understanding of how market competition plays out, and economics can predict fairly well what might happen say, if there was a merger between the two closest competitors in a marketplace.

S: Um hmm

MO: So we certainly can take action, and should take action there, and do very frequently when it's presented to us. But in areas where we have less knowledge, where there's less certainty, where there's a lot more prediction, we should act with greater caution.

S: And you've also said that you're a strong believer in the free markets to sort things out. Is that right?

MO: Absolutely! I think that the free market is the first line of defence for consumers. Competition makes other forms of consumer protection less necessary. We may need it from time to time, but a competitive market often presents consumers with more information, better products, greater innovation, more convenience. And so keeping markets competitive is a very, very important mission that protects consumers' interests over all.

S: Let's turn to more of the fraud prevention, and again, protecting consumers by giving them adequate information. So part of the motivation for this interview was the recent FTC decision regarding the regulation of homeopathic products, which we were very happy about, actually. I don't know if you are well aware of the fact that I am the editor of Science-Based Medicine, and you actually quoted us in the decision.

We were very happy with the fact that you said, "Okay, homeopathic products need to now require evidence for the claims that they're making on the label." So my question for you is, what were your personal thoughts about that specific decision by the FTC? And how far do you think that's gonna go? How much is the FTC really gonna be able to hold the homeopathy industry to that kind of standard?

MO: The FTC decided to take a look at homeopathic products given the vast growth of these products' popularity in the marketplace. So we did a workshop in 2015, and we followed that by a report with the policy statement. And the idea of what we said in the policy statement, the basic theme of the policy statement was, "If an entity is going to make claims about a product's ability to treat diseases, then it has to have adequate substantiation to show that that product works for that." And that is the standard we apply across all products, homeopathic or otherwise, very consistently.

And so in this policy statement, we said, "Well that same standard should apply to homeopathic products. It applies to over the counter drugs. It applies to dietary supplements. It applies to other products that are put forward, making claims about health benefits to consumers." So we said, "That same standard should apply to homeopathic products." But the challenge with homeopathic products is that they are based on a medical theory from the 1700's. And there are no valid studies using current scientific methods showing that these products are effective.

So what do you do there? How do you deal with that? My view is always, we should not be taking choices away from consumers. We should be giving consumers the information they need to make good choices for themselves, or at least have the information at hand. So that is what we worked on through this policy statement. We said, "Well, if you're going to make these types of health benefit claims, curing, or treating some medical conditions, you have to either have that scientific evidence showing that's effective, or you have convey to consumers the fact that these claims are based on these theories for which there are no valid current scientific study showing that they're effective." So, consumers have that information.

Then they want to go ahead and try the product anyway, they just have a different belief, that's fine. But we wanted to be sure they had that information.

S: So, yeah, that's where it gets interesting. And I understand that it may not be within the FTC's mandate to, again, to as you say, take choices away from consumers. But homeopathy's a very interesting test case, because the scientific community is pretty united in their opinion that it is one hundred percent pure snake oil. There really isn't any possible effect from homeopathic product. It's literally a magic potion.

So is there ever a context where essentially, the entire industry is a hundred percent fraudulent, that they're, so what is the benefit to a consumer of having the choice to buy a homeopathic product. Or put another way, is there ever a situation in which a consumer is not harmed by buying a demonstrably worthless health product?

MO: Well, one of the things that we do when we're evaluating health claims about products, to say what type of evidence is necessary to a substantiated claim, so we look at - and this is across products - we look at the type of claim, the product, the consequences of a false claim, the benefits of a truthful claim, the cost of developing substantiation for the claim, and the amount of substantiation experts believe is reasonable.

So using that sliding scale, for example, the FTC has taken action against products that were false cancer treatment products, right? Cancer,

S: Um hmm

MO: cures. And we said, "Well, in that case, the consequence of a false claim is very serious." You have someone avoiding getting effective cancer treatment because they think, the time it was shark's

S: Yeah

MO: cartilage would work. So we challenged that. And then we say, "Well, was the product itself harmful? Did it carry some kind of risk with it?" So I think that that is where we might actually go ahead. We don't have that authority to ban products. I mean, we're not the Food and Drug Administration.

S: Right

MO: But we could bring enforcement actions. And I think that for homeopathic products, our policy statement, I will say, is only limited to disease conditions that resolve spontaneously, with or without specific treatment. So that's the kind of thing, like you've got pink-eye, or you have a little rash, or something like that. We're not, our policy statement doesn't apply to serious disease claims. And that could be in a different, that would certainly be in a different category, because the risks of the false claim would be much higher than for something that, if untreated, would resolve on its own, perhaps taking a little bit longer time.

S: Yeah, so definitely, the harm is greater, the more serious the illness that is being claimed. But if you apply the principle of humility, that you were endorsing, where we don't really know what's going to happen, maybe we have to be more cautious. I could argue in this case that the downstream harm of essentially selling magical potions in the pharmacy alongside drugs, even with implied claims, is huge, because then people learn bizarre notions about health and disease.

And I know from talking to many, many people about this, there's an implied endorsement. They think, "Well, hey, they couldn't be selling it packaged in this way in the pharmacy if it were complete nonsense." But in fact, that's an incorrect assumption. They ''are'' doing that. So I guess my point is that there's a lot of downstream harm that comes, even if they are selling homeopathic products for more benign conditions, like let's say the flu.

Like, Homeopathic Arnica for the Flu, or Ossilicoxinum. I mean, that's like fairy dust diluted out of existence. It's basically a magic potion. It's being sold, there's a certain implied endorsement of that by the government, because it's allowed to be sold. Do you ever account for this sort of meta-harm that could come from industries like this, that are allowed to operate and sell products with implied health claims?

MO: Well, your question raises a couple issues.

S: Yeah

MO: First, I want to point out, we are not the only actor in this space. And in 1988, the FDA issued a compliance policy guide entitled, "Conditions Underwhich Homeopathic Drugs May Be Marketed." And it permitted marketers to distribute over the counter homeopathic products without demonstrating their effectiveness, as long as they are limited to these self-limiting disease conditions. But also require them to have at least one major over the counter indication for use.

So the FDA's were, on the one hand, requiring some indication for use. So we have to act with that regulatory guidance from our sister agency in mind. So with that being the case, and of course, the First Amendment, it would be difficult, I think, for us to absolutely prohibit the sale of these products. So instead, we've taken the path of trying to give consumers additional information. And one of the things that we're going to do, moving forward, is look at the impression of the homeopathic advertising to ensure that it adequately conveys to consumers the extremely limited nature of the health claim being asserted, and that it is based on these theories that have no modern, scientific basis.

I mean, if consumers understand all of that, and they still want to move ahead, and buy the product, ultimately, it resolves to, the ability of the consumer to make that choice for him or herself.

J: Has any of the changes that you guys have made had any measurable impact?

MO: It's still early days. So this only came out in, I think it was November

S: Yup.

MO: of 2016. And the first thing that we're doing is working towards educating the industry, and retailers about what is expected here. So we're working with the industry on a voluntary basis to foster compliance. And then we're going to continue that effort. And then at some point, we might consider enforcement actions if we think the homeopathic drug industry, right? This doesn't, I also want to be clear, this is for over the counter products. This doesn't apply to the practice of medicine or

S: Yeah

MO: homeopathic medicine, what someone can do in their doctor's office. So we're educating Industry, will monitor for compliance. And then, down the road, consider what steps might be necessary.

C: Can I ask, what does that compliance actually involve? What is the real world effect? What can consumers expect to see on the bottle that is different than it was previously?

MO: Right. So they're going to have to see on the bottle, and possibly in any other advertising that would make the health claim. So there's going to have to be a disclaimer that effectively communicates, first, that there's no scientific evidence that the product works, and second, that the product's claims are based only on theories of homeopathy from the 1700's that aren't accepted by most modern, medical experts.

And then we'll look to make sure that the disclosures stand out, and that they're in close proximity to the product's message about effectiveness. Individual producers, manufacturers, will have to decide how they want to make that disclaimer, but we have to make sure that it is effective.

S: I'm gonna pivot a little bit away from homeopathy, because I want to dive a little bit deeper on this issue of, it sounds like, and from reading some of your decisions, that a lot hinges on trying to anticipate what a typical consumer might think, based upon the kind of advertising that's being made. And I specifically want to talk about your statement regarding the Pom Wonderful decision, which was the Pomegranate Juice products.

For quick background, they claim that they're loaded with antioxidants, and then there's a lot of implied claims about the effectiveness of antioxidants. Can you summarise your opinion in this case?

MO: So that was the case in which the agency challenged claims that Pom Wonderful had made about the health benefits of pomegranate juice. And our concerns were that these were being kind of over-represented, right? There was some evidence, but how convincing was that evidence to show that pomegranate juice could treat heart disease, and other serious ailments.

Ultimately, we found that some of the ads (not all of the ads) but some of their ads did convey a much stronger claim than they were able to substantiate using the scientific studies that existed at the time about pomegranate juice. And so the Commission ultimately found liability for false and misleading claims in these ads. And I agreed that a certain subset of those ads did convey these false and misleading claims.

Where I differed from my colleagues, though, was where they said, as a remedy for these claims, that the company had to have two randomised, controlled, clinical trials. And two RCT's is the standard for drugs in the US. But this is not a drug. This is a safe product, a juice. So going back, I read to you the factors that we consider about the level of substantiation that we need. And one of the things is the product itself, and whether it's a risky product.

So if you have a product like a juice that somebody could just add to their diet, and it could have some benefits, and there has been some clinical evidence showing that it has benefits, my view was that a drug level standard for that, a 2 RCT standard was too high a standard, because what would likely happen is then, the producers of different food products might not invest in the science to substantiate these claims if they had to do it to such a high level. But the risks to consumers of drinking the juice was rather low.

So my view was that one randomised, controlled trial was sufficient. We didn't need two to show it. And so when this got argued before the DC circuit, the court agreed with my view, that the two RCT standard, which is for drugs, was too high a standard to impose on a safe product, like a food.

S: Yeah, so that's, again, that's interesting, and I want to explore that a little bit further, 'cause, from the scientist / physician end, we're involved with protecting the consumer from health fraud as well, but we have, I think, a slightly different approach. There was one sentence you made in your statement about this, that you said, essentially, it seems unlikely that a consumer would interpret a claim that a food or a supplement, that because it's effective in preventing a disease, that it could be used to treat that disease. And you thought that that was over-interpreting.

But I have to disagree with you, because in my extensive experience, that's exactly what people do. They completely conflate claims made for prevention and treatment. In fact, I have prescribed to patients preventive treatments that they used incorrectly. I said, "You take this to prevent something," and they took it to treat it once it occurred. So even with correct instruction from the physician, that is a very common mistake that people make.

So, first of all, what do you think about that? And again, it seems like you want to error on the side of, "Well, unless we have extrinsic evidence," right? "Unless we can prove that consumers are going to interpret it this way, we should assume that they're going to be reasonable and not interpret that way." But is that asking for too high a standard of evidence? Who's gonna do those studies to show that the average, reasonable consumer is going to misinterpret those claims that way?

MO: Again, I think a lot of this has to be tied to the claim itself, and to the underlying product. Also, the cost of doing the tests and the benefits of the truthful claim, and the risks of the false claim. So I don't think there's a single answer in that regard. So, for example, in nutrition science, one of the things that we have seen is that that has migrated quite a bit over time, right?

S: Right

MO: You know? Eggs are bad! Eggs are fine! This, margarine is what you want! Nope! Margarine is bad for you, right? So, I think that this is kind of a fast moving area, or has been an area with a lot of change in it. And one of the problems in the food area is, if you make the standard very high, it is not like the pharmaceutical area, where you have a patent for that molecule, or that drug that you've created, and all the individual drug company's investment can be recouped through selling that patented product for x number of years.

When you make the standard for foods too high, like too many tests, what happens is, you reduce the incentive for anyone in the industry to engage in that research, because it's very expensive for you to engage in it. Say, you want to make a claim about health benefits of carrots. So you're the carrot guy, you invest all the money to make this claim. "Carrots are a safe product. We don't have to worry about that. They're part of a normal diet." But you invest all of this, and then what happens is, you can't keep the benefit of that, if you show carrots have this extra benefit. Every other carrot manufacturer comes in.

So one of the things I think we need to keep in mind as we're thinking about things is very much carefully, the types of claims, and those kinds of things. So, maybe this is a very roundabout answer just to say there is no way to just say, "Well, we know in one case it may be this, and it applies to everything." Each product, each claim, each risk, you need to look at it on more of this kind of sliding scale, putting all those pieces together.

So, as for who the reasonable consumer is, we have, that's what we try to pitch it at. At the FTC, that's the standard. What would the average consumer take away? You always have more knowledgeable and less knowledgeable consumers, and the concern is if you are always pitching it at the less knowledgeable consumers, what you're going to do is have less information put into the marketplace.

S: Maureen Ohlhausen, acting Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, thank you so much for giving us your time. It was a fascinating discussion.

MO: Great, thanks so much, Steve.

''Commercial at 1:19:14''

== Science or Fiction () ==
[http://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-016-0029 Item #1]: Scientists report the first discovery of a white dwarf pulsar, the only one known, just 380 light years from Earth.
[https://phys.org/news/2017-02-archaeologists-12th-dead-sea-scrolls.html Item #2]: Hebrew University archaeologists report that they have uncovered a 12th Dead Sea scroll cave with intact jars containing previously undiscovered scrolls.
[http://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/06/stanford-research-shows-anyone-can-become-internet-troll/ Item #3]: A new study finds that, with a little provocation, two-thirds of subjects engaged in trolling behavior in online comments.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>'I believe that we are a story-driven species and that we understand how things are put together, in the context of narrative. It's a shame that science hasn't been taught that way, in a long time. It's usually the fact completely devoid of any human experience or any idea of how the scientist came to that conclusion.' - Ann Druyan</blockquote>

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

Category:What's the Word?

2017-05-24T03:27:18Z

D Inwood: Added one Whats the Word to the list

Listed below are all of the What's the Word segments so far

{{tick}} means transcription is complete and proofread. {{mag}} means it has been transcribed, but not proofread. {{Open}} means no transcription is available yet. 

*[[SGU Episode_617#What.27s_the_Word_.284:04.29|Exaptation (617)]] {{mag}} – ''An organ that has a function that is not what it was originally evolved for''
*[[SGU Episode_601#What.27s_the_Word_.281:14.29|Parallax (601)]] {{mag}} – ''Apparent movement against a background as an observer moves''
*[[SGU Episode_597#What.27s_the_Word_.2845:58.29|In Situ (597)]] {{mag}} – ''Being in its original position or place''
*[[SGU Episode_596#What.27s_the_Word_.289:58.29|Phylogenetic (596)]] {{mag}} – ''The evolutionary history of a species''
*[[SGU Episode_595#What.27s_The_Word_.2858:54.29|Endemic (595)]] {{mag}} – ''Restricted to a particular region''
*[[SGU Episode_594#What.27s_the_Word_.284:42.29|Autopoiesis(594)]] {{mag}} – ''A system that is self-regulating ''
*[[SGU Episode_594#What.27s_the_Word_.284:42.29|Autological (594)]] {{mag}} – ''A word that describes itself''
*[[SGU Episode_592#What.27s_the_Word_.281:55.29|Xerophile (592)]] {{mag}} – ''An organism that thrives in dry environments''
*[[SGU Episode_591#What.27s_the_Word_.288:35.29|Relict (591)]] {{mag}} – ''Something that has survived from an earlier period of time''
*[[SGU Episode_589#What.27s_the_Word_.281:02:45.29|Taphonomy (589)]] {{mag}} – ''The study of fossilization''
*[[SGU Episode_588#What.27s_the_Word_.287:59.29|Autophagy (588)]] {{mag}} – ''The self-digestion of a cell's organelles''
*[[SGU Episode_587#What.27s_the_Word_.2858:29.29|Ultracrepidarian (587)]] {{mag}} – ''One who expresses opinions outside their area of expertise''
*[[SGU Episode_586#What.27s_the_Word_.2816:18.29|Apophenia (586)]] {{mag}} – ''Perceiving a connection between random things''
*[[SGU Episode_585#What.27s_the_Word_.2857:10.29|Superfecundation (585)]] {{mag}} – ''Successive fertilization of multiple ova from the same ovulation''
*[[SGU Episode_584#What.27s_the_Word_.281:01:04.29|Comorbidity (584)]] {{mag}} – ''Multiple simultaneous diagnoses''
*[[SGU Episode_583#What.27s_the_Word_.2847:01.29|Thanatosis (583)]] {{mag}} – ''When an animal plays dead''
*[[SGU Episode_582#What.27s_the_Word_.2845:41.29|Glycolysis (582)]] {{mag}} – ''The metabolic pathway that breaks down glucose''
*[[SGU Episode_581#What.27s_the_Word_.283:32.29|Inquiline (581)]] {{mag}} – ''An animal that exploits the living space of another species''
*[[SGU Episode_580#What.27s_the_Word_.2846:41.29|Flocculation (580)]] {{mag}} – ''The production of fluffy masses from a colloidal suspension''
*[[SGU Episode_579#What.27s_the_Word:_Hypnagogia_.289:00.29|Hypnagogia (579)]] {{mag}} – ''The state of drowsiness that immediately preceeds sleep''
*[[SGU Episode_578#What.27s_the_Word:_Mondegreen_.2841:20.29|Mondegreen (578)]] {{mag}} – ''Word / phrase resulting from a mishearing of something that was said or sung''
*[[SGU Episode_577#What.27s_the_Word_.282:04.29|Neoteny (577)]] {{mag}} – ''Retention of juvenile characteristics in adult individuals of a species''
*[[SGU Episode_576#What.27s_the_Word_.2847:28.29|Estivation (576)]] {{mag}} – ''Entering a dormant state when in a hot, dry environment''
*[[SGU Episode_575#What.27s_the_Word_.289:19.29|Apoptosis (575)]] {{mag}} – ''Programmed cell death''
*[[SGU Episode_574#What.27s_the_Word_.2854:56.29|Paroxysmal (574)]] {{mag}} – '' Relating to a sudden fit, or attack during illness''
*[[SGU Episode_573#What.27s_the_Word_.281:27.29|Alluvium (573)]] {{mag}} – ''Clay or silt that's deposited by running water''
*[[SGU Episode_572#What.27s_the_Word_.2835:20.29|Crepuscular (572)]] {{mag}} – ''Of, relating to, or resembling twilight''
*[[SGU Episode_571#What.27s_the_Word_.281:00:39.29|Eschatology (571)]] {{mag}} – ''In theology, the final destiny of the soul, and of mankind''
*[[SGU Episode_570#What.27s_the_Word_.282:28.29|Iatrogenic (570)]] {{mag}} – ''An infection or injury produced inadvertently by a physician''
*[[SGU Episode_569#What.27s_the_Word_.281:01:41.29|Cauliflory (569)]] {{mag}} – ''Production of flowers or fruits directly from the branches or trunks of plants''
*[[SGU Episode_568#What.27s_the_Word_.2814:34.29|Autotomy (568)]] {{mag}} – ''The reflexive separation of an appendage, or other part of the body''
*[[SGU Episode_567#What.27s_the_Word_.2825:28.29|Group animal names (589)]] {{mag}} – ''An obstinacy of buffalo, etc''
*[[SGU Episode_566#What.27s_the_Word_.281:00:25.29|Amphidromic (566)]] {{mag}} – ''A point where there's almost zero tides''
*[[SGU Episode_565#What.27s_the_Word_.284:43.29|Propaganda (565)]] {{mag}} – ''Spreading ideas to promote an institution''
*[[SGU Episode_564#What.27s_the_Word_.2839:20.29|Hyperthymesia (564)]] {{mag}} – ''Extremely efficacious autobiographical memory''
*[[SGU Episode_563#What.27s_the_Word_.280:25.29|Geodesic (563)]] {{mag}} – ''The shortest distance between two points''
*[[SGU Episode_562#What.27s_the_Word_.283:37.29|Homophily (562)]] {{mag}} – ''The theory that people tend to form connections with others who are similar to them''
*[[SGU Episode_561#What.27s_the_Word_.283:17.29|Foreign words that lack English equivalents (561)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode_560#What.27s_the_Word_.281:04:05.29|Chemiosmosis (560)]] {{mag}} – ''Turning ADP into ATP in mitochondria''
*[[SGU Episode_559#What.27s_the_Word_.284:26.29|Equilux (559)]] {{mag}} – ''The day in which the length of dark and light are equal''
*[[SGU Episode_558#What.27s_the_Word_.2840:46.29|Sciolism (558)]] {{mag}} – ''Opinionating on subjects of which one only has superficial knowledge''
*[[SGU Episode_557#What.27s_the_Word_.281:15.29|Thixotropy (557)]] {{mag}} – ''A property where shaking a substance thins it out''
*[[SGU Episode_553#What.27s_the_Word_.285:00.29|Pleochroism (553)]] {{mag}} – ''The way crystals show different colors when viewed from different directions''
*[[SGU Episode_552#What.27s_the_Word_.2851:07.29|Epistasis (552)]] {{mag}} – ''When combined genes have a dominant effect over other combinations''
*[[SGU Episode_551#What.27s_the_Word_.281:14.29|Words from science fiction (551)]] {{mag}} – ''Robotics, for example''
*[[SGU Episode_550#What.27s_the_Word_.2844:09.29|Agnatology (550)]] {{mag}} – '' The study of willful acts to spread confusion''
*[[SGU Episode_549#What.27s_the_Word_.283:21.29|Algorithm (549)]] {{mag}} – ''A set of prescribed rules for solving a problem''
*[[SGU Episode_548#What.27s_the_Word_.2841:55.29|Fugacity (548)]] {{mag}} – '' The pressure of a hypothetical ideal gas that would correspond to the real gas as it exists at a given temperature, pressure, and composition.''
*[[SGU Episode_547#What.27s_the_Word_.2858:23.29|Obligate (547)]] {{mag}} – ''A creature that is restricted to one characteristic mode of life''
*[[SGU Episode_544#What.27s_The_Word_.2844:25.29|Consilience (544)]] {{mag}} – '' Linking together principles from different disciplines to form a theory''
*[[SGU Episode_543#What.27s_the_Word_.284:28.29|Hysteresis (543)]] {{mag}} – ''The lag in a variable property of a system with respect to the effect producing it as this effect varies''
*[[SGU Episode_542#What.27s_the_Word_.282:09.29|Homeostasis (542)]] {{mag}} – ''The maintenance of internal stability in a system or organism''
*[[SGU Episode_541#What.27s_the_Word_.2847:16.29|Albedo (541)]] {{mag}} – ''The intensity of light that's reflected from an object''
*[[SGU Episode_540#What.27s_the_Word_.283:02.29|Formication (540)]] {{mag}} – ''The feeling that insects are crawling all over your skin''
*[[SGU Episode_539#What.27s_the_Word_.2858:41.29|Indolent (539)]] {{mag}} – ''Causing little or no pain, inactive, or relatively benign''
*[[SGU Episode_538#What.27s_the_Word_.2839:51.29|Canonical (538)]] {{mag}} – ''According to recognized rules or scientific laws''
*[[SGU Episode_534#What.27s_the_Word_.2850:21.29|Isograd (534)]] {{mag}} – ''A line connecting points on the Earth where metamorphism of rocks occurred under the same conditions''
*[[SGU Episode_533#What.27s_the_Word_.2849:26.29|Efferent (533)]] {{mag}} – ''A body part that projects outward''
*[[SGU Episode_532#What.27s_the_Word_.2850:59.29|Anosmia (532)]] {{mag}} – ''The loss of the sense of smell''
*[[SGU Episode_531#What.27s_the_Word_.2859:44.29|Stochastic (531)]] {{mag}} – ''A process that is a random in the particulars, but is statistical in the aggregate

== Trivia ==
* The longest What's the Word segment was 9 minutes and 55 seconds long, in episode 543
* The shortest was a tie at 1 minute and 50 seconds in episodes 534 and 558

SGU Episode 617

2017-05-24T03:23:40Z

D Inwood: Transcribed one segment

SGU Episode 604

2017-02-20T07:04:59Z

D Inwood: Added time stamps for episode

SGU Episode 603

2017-02-09T06:50:04Z

D Inwood: Added time stamps for episode

SGU Episode 602

2017-01-25T04:29:53Z

D Inwood: Added time stamps for episode

User:D Inwood

2017-01-23T04:13:34Z

D Inwood: One last edit of my page

== About D_Inwood ==
I have listened to SGU on and off since around the 150th episode, and have been attending skeptical events in {{w|Vancouver}}, {{w|Canada}} for about the same amount of time. My favourite events are the [http://vancouver.skepticamp.org/ Skepticamps] that seem to happen about once a year here.

I have done some transcriptions in the past, mostly on the Atheism Plus Scribe project where I transcribed several episodes of Radio Freethinker. I also transcribed the [http://skepchick.org/2013/09/video-science-resources-for-children-panel-skepchickcon/ Science Resources for Children] video on Skepchick.

I grew up in {{w|Ontario}} and moved to {{w|British Columbia}}, where I worked in shipping logistics for about a decade ago. I am currently back at school, studying Sociology at SFU. In my spare time I like play the Descent series of games, watch anime, and work on this website.

== My Activity on the Site ==
In the last year, I have been focusing on transcribing segments from recent episodes that I enjoy the most, or segments that match up with my personal politics the best. This has meant any Forgotten Superhero of Science that has to do with an overlooked woman, any news item that touches a political issue, and all of the What's the Word segments. I am also adding time stamps for all segments on every episode I look at.

I have gone through every episode from 500 to 601, and transcribed any segment that I found particularly interesting.

*[[What's the Word]]
*[[Female guests on the SGU]]
*[[Women in history on the SGU]]
*[[Environmentalism]]
*[[Rebecca's feminist segments]]

Segments that deal with things like gun control or global warming can all be found on the [https://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/Category:Politics Politics] page. All of the segments in episodes 500+ that are listed here were done by me.

I have made a total of about 1500 edits. In January of 2017, I started to get tired of the project. I decided that I needed to either stop and do other things with my life, or at least take a good, long break. I may get back into this in the future. It'll depend on how I feel at the time. I really enjoyed working on it during the last year, and I hope more people get involved in the future.

== Useful Links ==
*[[Template:SGU_episode_list]]
*[[Template:Transcribing]]
*[[Template:Adding links for all]]
*[[Template:Page categories]]
*[[Template:Sci or Fi entry]]
*[[Science or Fiction stats]]
*[[Template: University entry]]
*[[Universities on the SGU]]

== Older Activity ==
I have created the [[Science or Fiction stats]] page, and the table template that goes with it.

I have also created skeletons and summaries for each hour of the [[SGU 10-Hour Show]], and did transcriptions for a couple of interviews toward the end.
{|style="margin:1em 3em"
|style="padding-right: 6em;white-space:nowrap" valign="top"|<big>'''Transcriptions'''</big>
----
I have done the primary transcriptions for:
*[[SGU Episode 577]]
*[[SGU Episode 573]]
*[[SGU Episode 557]]
*[[SGU Episode 555|SGU Episode 555 with Julia Galef]]
*[[SGU Episode 521]]
*[[SGU Episode 519]]
*[[SGU Episode 518|SGU Episode 518 with Ajia Moon]]
*[[SGU Episode 512|SGU Episode 512 with Siouxie Wiles]]
*[[SGU Episode 502|SGU Episode 502 with Jennifer Dixon]]
*[[SGU Episode 497|SGU Episode 497 with Cara Santa Maria]]
*[[SGU Episode 475]]
*[[SGU Episode 473]]
*[[SGU Episode 472]]
*[[SGU Episode 471]]
*[[SGU Episode 467]]
*[[SGU Episode 464]]
*[[SGU_Episode_462|SGU Episode 462 with Aija Moon]]
*[[SGU_Episode_460|SGU Episode 460 with Elise Andrew]]

|valign="top" style=white-space:nowrap|<big>'''Redirects'''</big>
----
I have added segment redirects for:
*[[SGU Episode 102]]
*[[SGU Episode 42]]
*[[SGU Episode 36]]
*[[SGU Episode 18]]
*[[SGU Episode 17]]
*[[SGU Episode 16]]
*[[SGU Episode 15]]
*[[SGU Episode 14]]
*[[SGU Episode 13]]
*[[SGU Episode 12]]
*[[SGU Episode 11]]
*[[SGU Episode 10]]
*[[SGU Episode 9]]
*[[SGU Episode 8]]
*[[SGU Episode 5]]
*[[SGU Episode 4]]
|}

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-23T03:44:27Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

This page is intended to link to all of the history segments on the SGU where women are highlighted

== Forgotten Superheroes of Science ==
*[[SGU Episode 597#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:38.29|Barbara Liskov (597)]] {{mag}} - ''Developed programming languages, leading to object oriented programming''
*[[SGU Episode 595#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:28.29|Maria Telkes (595)]] {{mag}} - ''Invented the solar distiller''
*[[SGU Episode 587#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.287:19.29|Rosa Smith Eigenmann (587)]] {{mag}} - ''Discovered more than 150 species of fish''
*[[SGU Episode 585#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:09.29|Mary Elizabeth Barber (585)]] {{mag}} - ''Plant collector from the 1800's''
*[[SGU Episode 580|Janet Rowley (580)]] {{mag}} - ''Linked chromosomal abnormalities to cancer''
*[[SGU Episode 578|Elizabeth Rona (578)]] {{mag}} - ''Worked with Pallonium''
*[[SGU Episode 572|Mary Edwards (572)]] {{mag}} - ''Tracked the positions of celestial objects for 55 years''
*[[SGU Episode 567#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.282:03.29|Cecilia Helena-Payne Gaposshkin (567)]] {{mag}} - ''Found that the Sun and the stars are mostly made of hydrogen''
*[[SGU Episode 566|Yvonne Brill (566)]] {{mag}} ''Pioneer rocket scientist''
*[[SGU Episode 564#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.281:14.29|Annie Maunder (564)]] {{mag}} ''Discovered the Maunder Minimum along with her husband''
*[[SGU Episode 560#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:13.29|Dorothy Hodgkin (560)]] {{mag}} ''Used X-ray crystallography to image penicillin, cholesterol, and vitamin B12''
*[[SGU Episode 555#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:12.29|Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha (555)]] {{mag}} ''The first doctor that brought the problem of Flint Michigan's water to the states attention''
*[[SGU Episode 552#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:51.29|Lorna Wing (552)]] {{mag}} ''Helped to redefine our conception of autism''
*[[SGU Episode 550#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.289:27.29|Stephanie Louise Kwolek (550)]] {{mag}} ''Invented the chemical behind Kevlar''
*[[SGU Episode 548#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:26.29|Dr. Hadiyah-Nicole Green (548)]] {{mag}} ''Cancer research involving nanoparticles and lasers''
*[[SGU Episode 544#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.281:49.29|Caroline Herschel (544)]] {{mag}} ''Sister of William Herschel. First woman paid for science work.''
*[[SGU Episode 541#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:47.29|Birute Mary Galdikas (541)]] {{mag}} ''Research on orangutans''
*[[SGU Episode 539#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:24.29|Andrea Ghez (539)]] {{mag}} ''Stellar motions near Milky Way's supermassive black hole''
*[[SGU Episode 538#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:13.29|Alice Hamilton (538)]] {{mag}} ''Development of industrial medicine in America''
*[[SGU Episode 537#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:59.29|Maria Sibylla Merian (537)]] {{mag}} ''Made illustrations of insects in the late 1600's''
*[[SGU Episode 536#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.289:18.29|Alice Catherine Evans (536)]] {{mag}} ''Showed the benefits of milk pasteurization''
*[[SGU Episode 534#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:01.29|Barbara McClintock (534)]] {{mag}} ''Jumping genes" and chromosome research''
*[[SGU Episode 533#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.281:36.29|Ruth Rogan Benerito (533)]] {{mag}} ''Wrinkle-resistant clothing''
*[[SGU Episode 532#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:08.29|Hedy Lamarr (532)]] {{mag}} ''Invented spread spectrum technology''
*[[SGU Episode 528#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.282:51.29|Frances Kelsey (528)]] {{mag}} ''Prevented thalidomide from being sold in the US''
*[[SGU Episode 527#Search_Engines_Influence_Elections_.2825:49.29|Marie Thorp (527)]] {{mag}} ''Discovered the Mid Atlantic Ridge under the ocean''
*[[SGU Episode 526#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.281:39.29|Inge Lehmann (526)]] {{mag}} ''Discovered that the Earth has a solid inner core''
*[[SGU Episode 525#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:03.29|Gerty Cori (525)]] {{mag}} ''Glucose metabolism''
*[[SGU Episode 524#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.288:42.29|Henrietta Leavitt (524)]] {{mag}} ''Discovered special property of Cepheid variables''
*[[SGU Episode 521#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.2813:37.29|Maria Goeppert-Mayer (521)]] {{mag}} ''Nuclear shell theory''
*[[SGU Episode 520#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.280:44.29|Vera Rubin (520)]] {{mag}} ''Studied galaxy rotation, which led to acceptance of dark matter''
*[[SGU Episode 518#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:11.29|Chien Shiug Wu (518)]] {{mag}} ''Showed that the conservation of parity does not always hold''
*[[SGU Episode 517#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:48.29|Margaret Hamilton (517)]] {{mag}} ''Saved the first moon landing with her robust computer code''
*[[SGU Episode 515#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.280:31.29|Mary Sherman Morgan (515)]] {{mag}} ''Developed the fuel used for the first U.S satellite launch''
*[[SGU Episode 511#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:04.29|Grace Murray Hopper (511)]] {{mag}} ''Wrote the first computer compiler and was the key architect of COBOL''
*[[SGU Episode 510#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.282:22.29|Lise Meitner and Ida Noddack Tacke (510)]] {{mag}} ''The women of fission''
*[[SGU Episode 508#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:43.29|Sandra Moore Faber (508)]] {{mag}} ''Part of the team that discovered the Great Attractor''
*[[SGU Episode 507#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:14.29|Women of ENIAC (507)]] {{mag}} ''The Team of 6 Women who were the first to program ENIAC, the first all electronic digital computer''
*[[SGU Episode 506#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.286:41.29|Irène Joliot-Curie (506)]] {{mag}} ''Nobel prize winning chemist who discovered artificial radioactivity''
*[[SGU Episode 505#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:47.29|Emmy Noether (505)]] {{mag}} ''Made significant contributions to algebra and theoretical physics''
*[[SGU Episode 503#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.285:56.29|Mary Anning (503)]] {{mag}} ''Made early contributions to our understanding of prehistoric life and the history of the earth''
*[[SGU Episode 502#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.281:59.29|Katherine Johnson (502)]] {{mag}} ''Calculated the flight trajectory for the first American in space.''
*[[SGU Episode 501#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.287:55.29|Ada Lovelace (501)]] {{mag}} ''Computer scientist. Saw the potential of the analytical engine.''
*[[SGU Episode 499#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.283:33.29|Jocelyn Bell Burnel (499)]] {{mag}} ''Astrophysicist who discovered pulsars.''
*[[SGU Episode 498#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:10.29|Rosalind Franklin (498)]] {{mag}} ''Gained insights into the structure of DNA.''
*[[SGU Episode 496#Forgotten_Superheroes_of_Science_.284:26.29|Annie Jump Cannon (496)]] {{mag}} ''Classification of stars''

== This Day in History ==
*[[SGU Episode 488#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:27.29|Sara Josephine Baker (488)]] {{mag}} ''Massively improved the survival rate of newborn babies.''
*[[SGU Episode 477#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:29.29|Sylvia Earle (477)]] {{mag}} ''Marine biologist. Has been underwater for almost a year in total.''
*[[SGU Episode 472#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:40.29|Marie Curie and Irene Curie (472)]] {{mag}} ''Studied radioactive materials.''
*[[SGU Episode 463#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:45.29|Yness Mexica (463)]] {{mag}} ''Did Botany is Central and South America.''
*[[SGU Episode 463#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:45.29|Helen Taussig (463)]] {{mag}} ''Founded pediatric cardiology''
*[[SGU Episode 456#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.282:20.29|Hattie Alexander (456)]] {{mag}} ''Treated influenzal meningitis in babies, reducing mortality tremendously.''
*[[SGU Episode 452#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:29.29|Tilly Shilling (452)]] {{mag}} ''Invented a "doodad" that improved airplane manoeuverability during WWII''
*[[SGU Episode 451#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:57.29|Rebecca Lee Crumpler (451)]] {{mag}} ''First black woman to receive an American medical degree''
*[[SGU Episode 446#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.282:21.29|Lydia DeWitt (446)]] {{mag}} ''Conducted research on tuberculosis''
*[[SGU Episode 443#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:47.29|Amelia Earhart (443)]] {{mag}} ''First person to fly solo from Hawaii to California''
*[[SGU Episode 438#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.2800:36.29|Eleanor Gibson (438)]] {{mag}} ''Did a famous study that tested the depth perception of babies''
*[[SGU Episode 434#Florence_Rena_Sabin_.280:30.29|Florence Rena Sabin (434)]] {{mag}} ''Showed the lymphatic system developed from the veins in the embryo''
*[[SGU Episode 431#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:14.29|Johnnetta B. Cole (431)]] {{mag}} ''First African-American woman President of Spelman College''
*[[SGU Episode 422#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:12.29|Hazel Bishop (422)]] {{mag}} ''Chemist who invented long-lasting lipstick''
*[[SGU Episode 402#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.282:39.29|Mary Calkins (402)]] {{mag}} ''First female president of the American Psychological Association''
*[[SGU Episode 402#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.282:39.29|Ellen Swallow Richards (402)]] {{mag}} ''The woman who came up with the idea of home economics''
*[[SGU Episode 396#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.283:02.29|Chien-Shiung Wu (396)]] {{mag}} ''Proved that conservation of parity was wrong with regards to the weak nuclear force''
*[[SGU Episode 365#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.284:38.29|Jane Goodall (365)]] {{tick}} ''Studied chimanzees in the wild''
*[[SGU Episode 356#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:28.29|Dorothy Hodgkin (356)]] {{mag}} ''Used X-ray crystallography to image penicillin, cholesterol, and vitamin B12''

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-23T00:05:44Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

Female guests on the SGU

2017-01-22T23:44:37Z

D Inwood: Added one Guest Rogue to the list

Listed below are all of the interviews with women over the entire run of the SGU, as well as the guest rogues. Rebecca Watson, is only included on this list in her first appearance, when she was interviewed as a guest.

== Women interviewed on SGU ==
{{tick}} means transcription is complete and proofread. {{mag}} means it has been transcribed, but not proofread. {{Open}} means no transcription is available yet. 

*[[SGU Episode_576#Interview_With_Maria_Cork_.2857:30.29|Maria Cork (576)]] {{mag}} - ''Worked on the Chewbacca costume for Star Wars: Episode VII''
*[[SGU Episode 568|Hai Ting (568)]] {{mag}} - ''Sings quotes from skeptics multiple times throughout the episode''
*[[SGU Episode 551#Interview_.2847:14.29|SciBabe (551)]] {{mag}} - ''Science communicator talks about her rise to fame, and also discusses the Food Babe''
*[[SGU Episode 513|Julia Galef (513)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU 10-Hour Show Part 9|Jocelyn Novella (10-Hour Show Part 9)]] {{mag}} - ''Pseudoscience in psycho therapy''
*[[SGU 10-Hour Show Part 8|Cara Santa Maria (10-Hour Show Part 8)]] {{mag}} - ''Atheism''
*[[SGU 10-Hour Show Part 6|Rebecca Watson (10-Hour Show Part 6)]] {{Open}} - ''What she's been doing since the SGU''
*[[SGU 10-Hour Show Part 1|Eugenie Scott (10-Hour Show Part 1)]] {{Open}} - ''Historical victory against Intelligent Design''
*[[SGU Episode 488|Siouxsie Wiles(488)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 465|Bug girl (465)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU_Episode_460#Elise_Andrew_.2843:45.29|Elise Andrew (460)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 453#Interview_with_Jennifer_Ouellette_.2849:07.29|Jennifer Ouellette (453)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 445|Karen Stollznow (445)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 442|Hai-Ting (442)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 438|Susan Gerbic (438)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 434|Indre Viskontas (434)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 424|Cara Santa Maria (424)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 409|Heather Berlin (409)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 393#Interview_with_Lizzie_Li_Taylor_.2843:17.29|Lizzie Li Taylor (393)]] {{tick}} = ''The translator and voice of Skeptoid Chinese''
*[[SGU Episode 376|Pamela Gay (376)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 364#Interview_with_Jann_Bellamy_.2846:45.29|Jann Bellamy (364)]] {{tick}}
*[[SGU Episode 359#Interview_with_with_Debbie_Feldman_.2840:06.29|Debbie Feldman (359)]] {{tick}}
*[[SGU Episode 345#Interview_with_Fraser_Cain_and_Pamela_Gay_.2835:40.29|Pamela Gay (345)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 340#Interview:_Eugenie_Scott_.2837:10.29|Eugenie Scott (340)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 326|Susana Martinez-Conde (326)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 322|Sara Mayhew (322)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 316|Elizabeth Loftus (316)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 311|Eugenie Scott (311)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 272|Bug Girl (272)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 270|Karen Stollznow (270)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 269|Carol Tavris (269)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 255|Pamela Gay (255)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 211|Carrie Iwan (211)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 210|Jennifer Ouellette (210)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 198|Rachael Dunlop (198)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 187|Angie McQuaig (187)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 183|Alice Tuff (183)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 171|Diana Blaney (171)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 166|Sharon Begley (166)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 149#Interview_with_Diana_Blaney_.2839:37.29|Diana Blaney (149)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 145#Interview_with_Kirsten_Sanford_.2837:12.29|Kirsten Sanford (145)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 140|Eugenie Scott (140)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 138#Interview_with_Ola_Fincke_.2833:47.29|Ola Fincke (138)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 131|Pamela Gay (131)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 95|Pamela Gay (95)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 93|Bug Girl (93)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU_Episode_91#Interview_with_Susan_Blackmore_.2825:43.29|Susan Blackmore (91)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 79|Eugenie Scott (79)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 42|Eugenie Scott (42)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 33#Interview_with_Rebecca_Watson.2C_founder_of_the_Skepchicks_.2823:00.29|Rebecca Watson (33)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 28#Interview_with_Tara_Smith_.2825:57.29|Tara Smith (28)]] {{mag}}

== Women guest rogues ==
*[[SGU Episode 555|Julia Galef (555)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 521|Joanne Benhamu (521)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 518|Ajia Moon (518)]] {{mag}} - ''Born with twisted legs, requiring surgery''
*[[SGU Episode 512|Siouxsie Wiles (512)]] {{mag}} - ''Microbiologist and science communicator''
*[[SGU Episode 502|Jennifer Dixon (502)]] {{mag}} - ''Writing a book called "Botanical Voyeur: A Guide to Sex on the Prairie."''
*[[SGU Episode 497|Cara Santa Maria (497)]] {{mag}} - ''Host of Talk Nerdy podcast. Talks about robot poker and depression.''
*[[SGU Episode 462|Aija Moon (462)]] {{mag}}
*[[SGU Episode 404|Cathleen Carr (404)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 301|Iszi Lawrence (301)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 246|Eugenie Scott (246)]] {{Open}}
*[[SGU Episode 163|Pamela Gay (163)]] {{Open}}

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-22T23:38:56Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-22T23:18:36Z

D Inwood: Added two Forgotten Superheroines of Science to the list

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-22T19:20:49Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-22T18:28:06Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

Johnnetta Cole: Spelman College (431)

2017-01-22T18:26:06Z

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#REDIRECT [[SGU_Episode_431#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:14.29]]
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SGU Episode 431

2017-01-22T18:24:24Z

D Inwood: Transcribed one segment

{{Editing required
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{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 431
|episodeDate = October 19th 2013 
|episodeIcon = File:Golden-crowned-flying-fox.jpg 
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|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,47664.0.html
|qowText = ...academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there’s no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot — and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background. 
|qowAuthor = {{w|Paul Krugman}} 
|}}

== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

== This Day in Skepticism (1:14) ==
* October 19, 1936: Birthday of Johnnetta Betsch Cole

R: Hey! Happy birthday to Johnetta B. Cole. Do you guys know who Dr. Cole

J: He's awesome!

R: is?

E: Dr. Cole? Longtime listener?

R: She, actually

J: She's awesome!

''(Laughter)''

E: She rocks!

R: She is awesome! She was actually the first African-American woman President of Spellman College, which is the oldest private liberal arts college for black women in the United States, but it took them something like a hundred years to actually have a black woman as president of the college. And she was the first. And she was an anthropologist who traveled the world doing cultural anthropology with her husband and others. They did a lot of field work in Liberia and other west African areas. And she was a bad ass! She was born October 19th, 1936, and she is still alive.

S: Wow!

R: She's the great grand-daughter, maybe the great-great grand-daughter of a slave trader and slave owner who ended up marrying one of his slaves. And it's incredible to me that some one is still alive that had that history in a family so

J: Yeah

R: near to today. Yeah, and it's amazing that a black woman in the 1950's decided to pursue anthropology as a career when that certainly wasn't the sort of future that anybody expected of a black woman in the 1950's. So,

E: Yeah

R: Johnetta B. Cole is an awesome woman, and I think a good role model for other women, particularly black women.

J: I would love to hear what she has to say.

R: Yeah, well she's still alive. So maybe we could get her on the podcast at some point.

S: Yeah, that would be awesome.

R: She's currently director of the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of African Art.

== News Items ==
=== Money Predicts Apocalypse (3:14) ===
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU7rrWQ1nPI

=== Herbal Supplements () ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/whats-in-your-herbal-supplement/

=== Politics and Dogma () ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/extreme-dogmatism/

=== Singularity vs Bridge () ===
* http://www.gizmag.com/quantum-black-holes-singularity/29242/

== Who's That Noisy () ==
* Answer to last week: Meteor entering atmosphere

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Question #1: Cooling Drinks () ===
<blockquote>Greetings and thank you for the best podcast ever created! In addition to a wonderful listening experience I also have learned a great deal about how to teach my 4 1/2 year old daughter about science (specific thanks to you Steve and of course Pamela Gay via her own podcast as my daughter at 3 1/2 knew her planets, aware of gravity, etc…)Background for question: I was really charged with cooling drinks for a party at our house and completely dropped the ball (we had all warm drinks in August in DC and folks started arriving–my wife was irked to say the least that I forgot about this). My buddy who had already arrived told me to put the drinks in the freezer and pack frozen veges around the various bottles and cans, which I dutifully did without thinking at first.Question: Did packing frozen veges and such around the drinks so that they made contact with the cans and bottles–as opposed to the drinks simply sitting in an empty rack– make any difference? If so how/why? Isn’t the air in the freezer and all contents more or less EXACTLY the same temperature? Thanks. My apologies in advance but I did not have time to research any answer via the internet. Many thanks in advance.MattWashington DC</blockquote>

== Name That Logical Fallacy () ==
<blockquote>I’ve been considering an argument that I know is a logical fallacy, but I cannot put my finger on exactly which logical fallacy it is. The argument is related to the recent flareup of the perennial Washington Redskins name controversy. The argument goes something like this:So-and-so is a member of an American Indian tribe and she is not offended by the use of the name Redskins, therefore the name Redskins is not offensive. I feel like there are a few possible logical fallacies that fit (cherry picking, non-sequiter), but I cannot quite nail down which fits. Any ideas?All the best,Patrick HelmesCincinnati, OH</blockquote>

== Science or Fiction () ==
[http://animal.discovery.com/mammals/13-incredible-bat-facts.htm Item #1]: A single brown bat can consume 1,200 mosquito-size insects in one hour.
[http://listverse.com/2011/03/04/top-10-bizarre-bats/ Item #2]: The sucker footed bat from Madagascar attaches to palm leaves by suction cups on its wings and ankles.
[http://www.cdc.gov/rabies/bats/education/ Item #3]: Bats are the most common source of human rabies in the Americas, but this is still rare, only causing 1-2 cases per year in the US.
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10556567 Item #4]: Draculin is an anticoagulant (blood-thinner) purified from the saliva of vampire bats.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>...academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there’s no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot — and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background.</blockquote>

J: Paul Krugman!

{{Outro404}}
== References ==
<references/>

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Florence Sabin: Lymphatic system (434)

2017-01-22T06:41:12Z

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[[Category:History]]

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-22T06:39:11Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

SGU Episode 434

2017-01-22T06:36:49Z

D Inwood: Transcribed one segment

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-21T18:41:27Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

Eleanor Gibson: Baby psychology (438)

2017-01-21T18:38:21Z

D Inwood: Redirect to Forgotten Superheroine of Science

#REDIRECT [[SGU_Episode_438#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.2800:36.29]]
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Neuroscience & Psychology]]

Rube Goldberg: Elaborate machines (438)

2017-01-21T18:35:39Z

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[[Category:Entertainment]]
[[Category:History]]

SGU Episode 438

2017-01-21T18:34:04Z

D Inwood: Transcribed one segment

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{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 438
|episodeDate = December 7th 2013
|episodeIcon = File:Brainpnas.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = T: {{w|Tim Farley}}
|guest2 = SG: {{w|Susan Gerbic}}
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2013-12-07.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,48129.0.html
|qowText = The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
|qowAuthor = {{w|John Stuart Mill}}
|}}

== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

== This Day in Skepticism (00:36) ==
* December 7: Happy birthday to psychologist Eleanor Gibson and deathday to Rube Goldberg.

R: Well, speaking of peoples' passing,

E: Uh huh

S: Mm hmm

R: Today is December 7th. On December 7th, 1970, the world lost Rube Goldberg, who died at the age of eighty-seven, Rube Goldberg.

S: Who died at the hands of a very complicated machine.

''(Chuckling)''

R: Easy joke, there.

S: I know! Someone had to say it.

J: We're just tryin' to warm up here.

E: Beat me to it.

R: Yes, Rube Goldberg was best known as the cartoonist who would satirize an increasingly technological world, using cartoons, with people using very complex machines in order to solve otherwise simple tasks. And you see influences, the people he influenced everywhere is a popular video by OK Go in the last couple years.

E: Oh yeah, that's an awesome video.

R: The new commercial for Goldieblocks that was just travelling around the interparts.

S: Wallace of Wallace and Gromit?

R: Did he do Rube Goldberg? I just

S: He was at the nerdy scientist who came up with these elaborate Rube Goldberg inventions in order to accomplish something very simple like

R: Okay

S: eating breakfast or getting dressed.

R: All I remembered is that he liked cheese.

S: Yeah

R: I'm not sure if Rube Goldberg did. There was the beginning of Back to the Future,

S: Yeah

R: in Doc's lab.

E: Sure

R: And the popular game when I was a kid, Mouse Trap.

E: Mouse Trap!

B: Oh yeah!

R: I have no idea how that game was actually played. All we ever did was just set up ''(chuckles)''

E: Build it?

J: Yeah, me too.

R: Yeah, the trap.

J: And you do it like, a few times, and then that was it. You're done.

R: Yeah, yeah, then we were done with it.

B: Did you guys know that Rube, he won the Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning in '48?

E: Wow!

R: I did not know that.

B: A Pulitzer! Pretty impressive.

E: I spent a Saturday about a year ago just looking a couple of videos on YouTube. People and their own Rube Goldberg machines that they've come up with. I think I had spent about four hours before I looked

''(Bob laughs)''

E: at the clock and realized, "Oh my gosh! I've been watching these forever! They are mesmerizing!

R: Did you ever play The Incredible Machine? It was a computer game back in, I guessi n the '80's or the '90's. And it was addictive. It was building Rube Goldberg machines in order to solve problems. It was very open. I guess it was in the '90's. It was a lot of fun.

E: That sounds like fun.

R: The other notable thing for today was, I didn't want to just do a death day, so happy birthday to psychologist Elanor Gibson, who was born December 7th, 1910. Gibson is best known as being the person who came up with the study - she studied primarily perception in infants. That's what she's most famous for. And she's the one that came up with that study where she took a piece of glass, and hung it over a table ledge, basically, and put babies on top of it, and had them crawl across the ledge,

J: Oh yeah

R: coaxed by their parents. And many of the babies refused to do it. And that study helped show that infants have depth perception that informs their ability to stay out of danger. Also, a fun baby test to do. Make your baby think you're trying to coax him over a dangerous ledge.

S: Yeah, it's a trust thing. You know, it's like Abraham killing his son.

R: Is that what it was?

''(Chuckling)''

E: Wow! I didn't know we'd go all Bible

S: Just like that.

R: Yeah

S: Yeah, remember when God said, "Yeah, slice open your son's throat, you know?" And Abraham was like, "Really?"

R: Just as Abraham was about to do it, God's like, "I guess babies don't have depth perception."

S: Psyche!

R: "What a bunch of morons! Here, slit a goat."

''(Laughter)''

== News Items ==
=== Male-Female Brain Wiring (04:27) ===
* http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25198063

=== Wormholes and Black Holes (21:31) ===
* http://phys.org/news/2013-12-spooky-action-wormhole-entangled-quantum.html

=== Home Genetic Testing (29:14) ===
* http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25209956

== Who's That Noisy (39:46) ==
* Answer to last week: Bjorn Lomborg

== Interview with Tim Farley and Susan Gerbic (44:00) ==
*[http://guerrillaskepticismonwikipedia.blogspot.ca/ Guerrilla Skepticism]

S: Joining us now are {{w|Tim Farley}} and {{w|Susan Gerbic}}. Tim and Susan, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide!

T: Thanks for having us!

SG: Hello!

S: And for those who don't know, Tim Farley is a research fellow for the {{w|James Randi Educational Foundation}}; the creator of the website {{w|What's The Harm?|WhatsTheHarm.net}}, which we mention all the time on the show; and also blogs about internet techniques for skeptics at [http://skeptools.com/ skeptools.com].

Susan Gerbic is the co-founder of the [http://montereycountyskeptics.blogspot.ca/ Monterey County Skeptics]; a member of the {{w|Independent Investigations Group}}; and the founder of [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Skepticism_on_Wikipedia Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia], and the World Wikipedia project, which is what you two are here to talk about tonight. So, Susan, why don't you give us an encapsulation, what is Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia?

SG: Well, Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia is a little over two years old. I started it because Tim said it was a great idea. Wikipedia is the source of all of knowledge, and we decided that we need to improve skeptic pages, create pages, create skeptical content, because it's very important that the world is able to get great knowledge.

So we've been working on this in many different languages for a little over two years. Now I have a forum that we can discuss all the page edits; we can train; we can create videos; we can create commercials for our {{w|Podcast|podcasts}}; we can create podcasts. It's a little world, a little empire, that we have, that I'm always looking for new recruits, especially people who can speak and read and write in other languages.

S: So, why does it take so much effort to edit {{w|Wikipedia}}? Back in the day, you could just sign on there and start editing away. But that's not the case any more.

SG: Oh no! You can easily do that. But what we want to do, is we want to train, we want to make sure that people are editing correctly. There's a lot of rules. They call it “biting”. Some of the older editors might bite some of the newer editors who come in and try and make changes.

So we really want to coddle, I guess, our editors for a little bit; make sure that they know what they're doing; understand the process, so we can follow the rules; as well as, maybe put more focus on things that need to be done.

We're very critical about how we edit pages. When we roll out a page, it has seen many, many eyes before we release it to Wikipedia.

T: Yeah, what I've seen in the past when I've pushed Wikipedia on skeptic forums and stuff, is I occasionally get skeptics who are, “Oh! I tried to do that once, and they took the edit I put in out immediately.” What's happened over the years is if you remember from the early days of Wikipedia, when it first started, they were desperate for material. And it was super-easy to add stuff because they wanted to get articles written as quickly as possible.

But as the thing's grown up and attracted attention, they have to be more careful about what gets added, and what gets left in, and what gets taken out. So all these various rules have come up about {{w|Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources|reliable sources}}, and {{w|Secondary source|secondary sources}}, and things like that. And they tend to bite you if don't take a little bit of time to learn the rules and go slow at first. I found a lot of skeptics jump in there with both feet, and then get their fingers burned, so to speak.

S: Yeah.

T: Then they say, “Oh! Wikipedia's not interested in it.” And it couldn't be further from the truth. If you actually take the time to learn the rules, you can be very, very productive on Wikipedia. And the rules are actually pro-skeptic. They're oriented toward scientific evidence and scientific consensus, and there are rules against putting in fringe, crackpot theories; and stuff gets taken out all the time because there's no evidence for it.

S: So, they have some standard of scholarship now,

T: Yeah

S: to back up the edits. And when you say the old editors might bite you, you mean that they'll just remove the work that you did.

SG: Or they'll slap you down with some snarky comment that makes you not want to edit Wikipedia because they're … they use a lot of jargon, and it takes a little bit of time to learn the jargon, even though they're constantly giving you the links to what the jargon means. It's like a different world. It's not difficult to edit Wikipedia. The links and – it's not like learning a whole new computer language or anything like that. It's not difficult. It's just a culture.

T: Yeah.

SG: And it can be kind of overwhelming to people at first. So I coddle them. Like I said, we really, really, we practice. We start with spelling errors; we start with grammar; we start with adding periods, taking periods out, removing citations, putting in small things. And then everything's done in our user space, offline, where it's not seen by the general public. And we look it over and look it over, and people critique it, and we look it over again. And then when it's finally released, it should be done in good quality and good scholarship.

J: So, do you use that as a way to get your name recognized by the other editors so they don't jump on you in the beginning? You're just making the minor tweaks to get a level of familiarity?

SG: Well, sort of. You really need to build a history. And you don't want to just jump in and just start editing because that's a little suspicious. It kind of sounds like you're coming in with an agenda. So we do ask that you start with a history of small edits. It does look good, because it looks like you're trying to improve Wikipedia overall, and not just some specific person's page.

T: Yeah, and that exact thing has happened in the recent unpleasantness where people have come in, and suddenly started full speed editing one article. And it's always a red flag when somebody comes in and they're just editing this one article repeatedly and over and over and over. The other people on Wikipedia are wondering, “Are you interested in Wikipedia at all? Or are you just interested in this one article.”

S: What if you have an expert who has very narrow area of expertise, and that's the one article that they're looking to update?

T: They don't, it's not immediately, they don't immediately slap you down, if you're putting in the footnotes, and following the rules of documenting your work, you'll be fine. But it is something that sort of sets you aside.

So one of the things I always tell, and Susan tells her people, and I tell people, is if a skeptic wants to get involved, don't just edit skeptic stuff. Try to find some other things that you're interested in, {{w|Star Trek}}, or {{w|nanotechnology}}. I do a lot of stuff about buildings, and historic stuff here in Atlanta.

B: Good choices.

T: So there's a historic building that's used as a concert venue, and I wrote a whole big, long history of the building because it's a one hundred year old building. I wrote that for Wikipedia, and it helps build up your history, and people see that you're interested in Wikipedia, and not just trying to push an agenda.

S: But it is still true that anybody can sign up to be an editor and start editing.

T: Yup.

S: It's just that it'll be hard unless you know the culture and you build this history.

T: Right.

S: So, for the skeptics out there who want to make the world a better place by adding their edits to Wikipedia, is there a primer, or some place they could go where they could get a one page, sort of, “All right, this is what you gotta know if you want to be a Wikipedia editor.”

T: There is a couple places. I've got some blog posts on my site, at skeptools.com, there's a Wikipedia link right at the top of the page. If you go in there, there's a whole bunch of articles I've written. There's a couple of “Starting up, here's how you set up your account. Here's how you do simple edits,” like spelling changes, and reverting vandalism.

And then Susan has taken it a lot deeper; and she's done a bunch of videos on YouTube with much deeper stuff about how to do different types of edits, and what they're doing with the Guerrilla Skeptics.

S: Now, this all came up – the reason why we're getting you guys on the show now is because of {{w|Rupert Sheldrake}} and {{w|Deepak Chopra}} have been complaining about you guys.<ref>[http://www.sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake/blog/wikipedia-under-threat Rupert Sheldrake's post about Guerrilla Skepticism]</ref>

T: Yeah (laughs)

S: They're trying to portray you as skeptical vandals going in and spreading your skepticism through Wikipedia.

T: That's very interesting. I've actually spent some time going back through the blog posts, and going back through the histories of the articles in Wikipedia. And all their posts about it are amazingly evidence-free, which is striking with Wikipedia, because Wikipedia's very, very open. The history of every article is there. You can see every single edit to every single article all the way back. You can see every edit that individual editors have made. You can see the hit counts on articles. You know which articles are popular, and which ones aren't. You can see all the discussions all the way back to trivial discussions that were had six years ago about editing two words in a sentence. They're all there.

So there's plenty of information about who's editing it, and when they're editing it, and why they're editing it. And none of these posts by Sheldrake or Deepak have dug into any of that! Yet they somehow latched on to Susan. Basically it all boils down to a blog post way back in March, by [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Robert_McLuhan Robert McLuhan]. He's a spiritualist / psy type person who's written a book about {{w|One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge|The Million Dollar Challenge}} that's apparently very critical of Randi.

He blogged about Susan's project; and it wasn't especially angry blog, but he pointed out some things in Wikipedia that he didn't like, and said some things about, “Well, maybe we, the psy-believers should be getting our own group together.” And it was there that Sheldrake picked it up. Sheldrake mentions McLuhan in his first blog post, which was on June twentieth.

Actually, this afternoon, I went back and looked at the [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rupert_Sheldrake&action=history history of Sheldrake's article]. And until McLuhan, and Sheldrake, and later Deepak Chopra were blogging about it, Sheldrake's article actually wasn't being edited that much at all! In fact, in February of this year, no one edited it at all that entire month. And all the way back to June 2012, it typically would get, like, five edits a month, six edits a month, three edits a month. Very typical for a lesser article like that.

And then all of a sudden, after Robert McLuhan's post in April, it's getting twenty-one edits, and then twenty-six. And in June, it shot up, and it accelerated from there. A large number of editors were editing the article.

What was happening, from what I can tell, is people were stepping on each others' toes, and getting in each others' way. And there were a lot of clearly, very new editors to Wikipedia jumping in, I presume, as a result of these blog posts, and trying to edit. And there was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:8i347g8gl one editor] in particular in June who made most of the edits in June, who had a weird random string for their name on Wikipedia. And eventually got blocked, and was accused of being a sock puppet.

And in August and September, was blocked off of Wikipedia because their edits they were making were not productive. And that was kind of the start of it; and it's gone on from there. There was another editor by the name of Tumbleman who came in around August. And he had a post on his own kind of profile page on Wikipedia that somebody dug up, that basically said he was doing an experiment in social psychology by editing the Rupert Sheldrake page, and seeing how people reacted.

Essentially, he admitted he was trolling the other editors on that page. And people accused him of it, and he deleted that from his user page. And he created all sorts of havoc on the page. That brought in another blogger by the name of [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Craig_Weiler Craig Weiler], who's blogged about it a few times, and that's how it got to Deepak Chopra, I think. Because Deepak Chopra mentioned Craig Weiler's blog.

But neither one, neither Tumbleman nor Craig Wheiler made that many constructive edits. In fact, I was laughing with Susan earlier because I found a blog post that Craig Wheeler made, where he referred to Sheldrake's article as “my article on Wikipedia,” which is something you never do. You never assume ownership of a Wikipedia article.

He's made one edit to the Sheldrake article, one, over the entire time. And that one edit was he deleted something, a footnote. And that's it! That's it! Yet, in his blog, if you read his blog, you would think he was making these gigantic edits that the skeptics were removing every day. He wasn't. He's been arguing with people on Wikipedia. He's only made about sixty edits, and then he finally gave up. He posted a thing on his blog that “the only way to win the Wikipedia game is to not play.”

S: Yeah. Well, good! Good riddance, right? I mean,

T: Exactly!

S: It's not like they can't get their shit together, and they're just complaining because you guys ''do'' have your shit together. You're actually making constructive, evidence-based, scholarly edits.

T: Right.

S: They just don't like what the scholarship has to say.

T: Yeah.

S: Well, let's talk about Wikipedia in general for a bit, because Wikipedia has an interesting reputation. It's all over the place. If you do a search on almost anything, any basic topic, Wikipedia comes up on the first page, if not the first hit for most things. Yet teachers, for example, usually do not allow students to reference Wikipedia for no other reason than because it's by definition a secondary source.

So it sort of has a bad reputation among scholars, yet it's emerging as – it's the closest thing to the one reservoir of human knowledge that we have. So it's kind of in this strange place in terms of its reputation as a source of information.

SG: Right. And you know, Steve, it's a great point. We hear a lot about how bad Wikipedia is, but it is the source of all knowledge. You can't beat its Google hits, the results. There's no way that anybody can write a blog, do a podcast, or anything of that sort that's gonna get the hit views that the Wikipedia page receives.

In fact, just take one, for example, homeopathy. The most popular blogger out there can do an article on homeopathy, write great evidence, cite great sources, and they're not even gonna get close to the hundred thousand views a month every month for years that Wikipedia's gonna get.

And this B.S. about not being able to cite it on scholarly, for articles and things like that. That's nice. I hear that all the time. People are always talking about, “You can't cite Wikipedia.” But everyone goes to Wikipedia.

T: Yeah.

SG: So they can flail their arms, and they can fling their arms about, and wave their hands and so on about how bad Wikipedia is, but it is where everyone is going. And there are great sources on a lot of pages that people can find when they go to familiarize themselves with a topic; to get a general overview of a historical piece, or one of our scientists, or {{w|global warming}}, and then follow the citations to get really good information, and then cite those.

S: Yeah.

T: That's the key that I think a lot of educational people who have a more nuanced view of Wikipedia always emphasize is, skim the article. Maybe use the article as a starting point. But one of the first things you're gonna do is go down to the bottom of the article and look at the footnotes. For a well-written article, there will be exhaustive footnotes down there. And where those footnotes lead are the sources that you're probably gonna want to really be reading after you've got sort of your {{w|CliffsNotes}} view from the article itself.

It varies from article to article. A lot of articles are very poor, and have just a couple of footnotes, and not very good sources. And there are other articles that have hundreds and hundreds of footnotes down there to very scholarly sources, and will really send you exactly where you need to be.

S: It does seem like this is a place where it's worthwhile for us as a community to put our efforts, because this is the show. This is the resource that people go to.

T: One of the big things that Susan has focused on, and I've focused on myself mainly just to kind of stay out of a lot of these controversies like Sheldrake and Chopra, is not necessarily diving into the controversial pseudoscience articles, but editing the articles on the other side that just document the skeptic movement.

So, writing biographies. For instance, I wrote {{w|George Hrab|George Hrab's}} biography on Wikipedia. I wrote {{w|Harriet A. Hall|Harriet Hall's}}. I wrote most of {{w|Karen Stollznow|Karen Stollznow's}} bio. It's just a matter of finding someone like that who clearly, Harriet Hall is notable enough to be in Wikipedia, and she didn't happen to have an article, so I just sat down and started digging up references of stuff that she's written, stuff that she's done; and wrote it up, and put it in there. And it helps document skepticism for the general public.

When somebody sees an article by Harriet Hall, and they go, “Who is this Harriet Hall person?” They Google her name. There's a whole bio of her on Wikipedia.

SG: We specialize in that. We call that project “We Got Your Wiki-Back.” And we've done that time and time again in our forum. What we're trying to do is we're really trying to improve the pages of our skeptical spokespeople, and that includes the SGU as well as many other skeptical organizations and spokespeople; because what we want is when you are in the media, we know that you're gonna get Googled. We know that you're gonna get high stats because we can see that. We have a way of looking at your stats, and see how many hits come to your Wikipedia page each day.

We can look at that and we can say, “Well, so-and-so's in the news, so we gotta make sure that there are pages in really good shape; and we need to make sure that the links are going from there to scientific skepticism, to the different organizations, to the different kinds of things we have. And it needs to be done in all languages.

In fact, we've written the SGU page in - I think we just did {{w|Portuguese language|Portuguese}} just recently, not so long ago. So, we have to have the pages done in English really great, and then they get translated into other languages from different people on my team.

B: Wow.

J: That is awesome! That's fantastic.

S: All right, so guys, you're gonna provide me with some links for anyone listening to the show who wants to get involved as a Wiki editor, or directly with you guys in the Guerrilla Skepticism project.

T: Yup.

S: All right guys, well, thanks for joining us tonight, and thanks for all the good work.

SG: Thank you!

T: Thank you!

== Science or Fiction (1:04:21) ==

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week—

E: Duh duh duh!

S: The theme is "how many?" and we have four items.

R: How many?

S: There are four items. OK. Here they are: The human body has [http://www.livescience.com/32314-how-many-senses-do-humans-have.html more than 12] distinct types of sensation (without dividing taste, smell, vision, or hearing into subtypes). Item #2: There are {{w|Moons of Pluto|six known moons of Pluto (five named)}}, and {{w|Moons of Jupiter|83 confirmed moons of Jupiter}}. {{w|State of matter|Item #3}}: There are 11 known states of matter (not counting non-classical states and purely theoretical states). And [http://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/ Item #4]: There are currently six people in space. So obviously, this is all about the numbers; one of those numbers is incorrect.

J: Uh, I'm not a fan of this!

S: Jay, go first.

E: ''(laughs)''

J: OK. So, this first one. I do believe that there are other types of sensations other than the five obvious senses that we have. And I'm not dipping into "sense hunger" or any of that nonsense that L. Ron Hubbard wants us to believe. And the second one here, that there are six known moons of Pluto... oh, wow; I just—I don't even know if Pluto has any moons. That's how bad this one is. You're supposed to know stuff like that, Bob, and I'm supposed to know about yelling and bad accents.

B: ''(chuckles)''

E: And Thanksgiving.<ref>[[SGU Episode 383#Science or Fiction (1:02:56)|SGU Episode 383: Science or Fiction]]</ref>

J: Thank you. Yeah, and where was my Thanksgiving Science or Fiction, Steve? Really, really...

R: It's true.

J: You did me wrong, son. I'm not sure about the Pluto one, and I just hate having to admit to myself that I don't know more information about that. And the final one that are 11 known states of matter. Damn you! I believe there are six people in space right now, so that's the fourth one; I'm going to say that's science. Between two and three, I'm going to say that there are not 11 states of matter.

S: OK. Evan?

E: Um, for the 12 distinct types of sensation in the human body, that really doesn't make sense to me. Certainly not what we're taught in school, but that doesn't mean a damn thing these days. I'm having a problem with this one: "distinct types". I don't know that they're distinct; lot of things are connected. Six known moons of Pluto, five named, 83 confirmed moons of Jupiter? That's a lot. Always thought Jupiter was kind of in the 40s or 50s, but they're always finding new moons. I would not be surprised. Eleven known states of matter. Well, sure, I'm tending to think that that one is correct. You know, please don't ask me to name them ''(chuckles)'' because I couldn't get all eleven, I think, in under the worst of circumstances. And then this last one. There are currently six people in space. You know, what can you say about that? There either is or there isn't. And you kind of just have to take a guess with that one. So it's coming down to the six people in space or 12 distinct types of sensation. Given those two options that I've narrowed it down to, I'm going to have to say that the 12 distinct types of sensation I'll say is the fiction.

S: OK. Rebecca?

R: Oh, man. That was the one that I thought was science, 'cause... I don't know about 12, but I know that there are other senses like sense of balance I know is one that people don't ordinarily think of. And there must be more; like, I feel like psychologists are always coming up with new senses. Like, what about the sense that you're an individual? You know, there are people who have brain damage who lose certain senses about themselves and it's really freaky. So I don't know; I feel like that one could be true. Six known moons of Pluto, 83 moons of Jupiter; no idea. Honestly, I have no idea. Eleven known states of matter? I mean, I know the solid, liquid, gas, plasma. That's four. What else could there be? I don't know. Do {{w|Newtonian fluid|Newtonian liquids}}—is that a... I don't think so. I don't—there's probably—I'm sure that there must be some other crazy states of matter that I don't know about, but... I don't know. And I have no idea how many people are in space at any one time. How do we even define space? We can't, Steve.

E: ''(laughs)''

R: Somebody just went into space and came back just now while I was answering this question, so I don't know. I don't know; I guess I'm going to go with the states of matter one, because I feel like eleven is too many states of matter, but I'm probably way wrong.

S: OK. Bob.

B: Yeah, this is tough. These numbers are good; they're just outside of the range that I'm comfortable in. Yeah, for distinct sensations, I kind of like what Evan was saying about how twelve distinct ones definitely seems high. A lot of them are just kind of fusion of different sensations. The moons of Pluto... I wasn't aware of the sixth one, and 83 for Jupiter? Yeah, I just lost count. And that seems a little high, but not that high. The eleven known states of matter. That seems high as well; I mean, there's a bunch of them besides the obvious: plasma, Bose-Einstein condensate; there's these quasi-crystals...

R: ''(laughs)'' Were those part of the obvious?

E: Course Bob knows.

B: Quark-gluon plasma...

R: You know, the obvious ones: The Bose-Einstein crystallites.

E: He was reading a paper on that earlier today.

B: No. I said beside the obvious solid, liquid, gas.

R: Oh, OK.

B: But even for those, I remember thinking, "that's it; I've just officially lost track of how many states of matter there are." There are just all these obscure ones. Some of them are fascinating; other ones were kind of not as fascinating. But that still seems high to me. And people in space; I really don't know; six sounds reasonable. Part of me is thinking that that's such a simple little thing. There are six people in space, and that's going to be the fiction; nobody's going to pick it.

E: ''(laughs)''

B: Jay, what did you pick?

J: I said that the eleven known states of matter.

B: Screw it. I'm going with the six people in space.

E: Right, Bob. Good for you.

S: OK. All right. So, the one that you all agree on is that there are six known moons of Pluto (five named) and 83 confirmed moons of Jupiter. You all think that is science.

E: Gosh.

B: Wait! Can I change my mind??

''(laughter)''

S: No.

B: I know; I know.

S: And that one is... the fiction!

E: Of course it is! Because—

R: ''(groans)''

B: F''[deleted]'' you, Steve!

S: Because... there are five moons of Pluto; Bob, we have not discovered a sixth.

E: Right!

R: Come on!

S: Those moons are—you should know how many moons Pluto has!

J: There are no moons of Pluto!

R: Why??

S: Charon—

E: We talked about it; Nix and... the other one.

S: Yeah, Nix and—we just talked about this!{{Link_needed}}

R: Why do I ever need to know about that?

S: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberus and Hydra.

E: Cerberus; right.

S: And Jupiter has 67 confirmed moons, not 83.

J: There's a lot of people listening to this show right now that were in the same exact shoes as I was in. Admit it, people—

E: I was right about Jupiter!

J: A lot of you should know. There's no—nobody knew that there were any moons of Jupiter. There were no moons of Jupiter before the recording of this program.

S: Jupiter? You mean Pluto.

J: Whatever!

E: Same deal.

S: Jupiter has 67 moons. All right. Let's go back over the other ones in order. The human body has more than 12 distinct types of sensation (without dividing taste, smell, vision, or hearing). That is science. I had to say "more than 12" because there's just no way to give one number. It depends on how you divide them or count them. I said "not dividing taste" because do you count bitter, salt and sweet as three sensations or one?

R: No. What are you, crazy?

S: Is color and black-and-white vision could be more than one. Every smell; how many different types of receptors do we have for smell? So I said, "just forget those; we'll keep those as just one type of sensation". But in addition to sight, smell, sound and taste, we have temperature, pain, {{w|Propioception}}, soft touch, pressure, vibration, {{w|Vestibular system|vestibular sensation}}, itch and stretch. Like, you know when your bladder's full or if your bowel is distended.

B: Isn't itch just a form of pain?

S: That's thirteen—nope; there's a distinct receptor for it. That's thirteen; I got over 12, so I just said "more than 12". If there's more, whatever.

E: ''(laughs)''

J: I knew it; I was right. Thank you.

E: Bastard.

S: Yeah, they actually discovered that there's—and they're distinct; they have distinct receptors, pathways—

J: Steve! I got one that you did think of: Detect fart.

S: Detect fart?

J: No, because you know they're different—

R: I believe that's pressure.

S: That's a combination of stretch and odor.

J: You know—there's a difference. You know whether you have to go to the bathroom or you have to fart. Or else we'd all be shitting our pants!

R: Well, hopefully you do. Sometimes people—

S: We'll call that the Jay Principle.

B: Not always.

J: No, I've named it "Detect Fart". Thank you.

S: ''(chuckles)'' Isn't that a Scientology power?

B: ''(chuckles)'' Yeah, right.

S: All right. There are eleven known states of matter (not counting non-classical states and purely theoretical states). So, I had to throw that caveat in there because there's all sorts of ''possible'' states of matter and I'm sure somebody could come in and say, "no, there's only eleven—there's only ten" or there's twelve or whatever. But here are the eleven. I tried to... You gotta draw the line somewhere between how much confirmation's enough to say we know that it exists.

B: Right.

S: But here's are the eleven I thought were above the board: Solid, liquid, gas, plasma—you all know about that—superfluid, Bose-Einstein condensate, fermionic condensate, Rydberg molecule, photonic matter, degenerate matter and quark-gluon plasma.

B: What about a quasi-crystal?

S: Those are non-classical states.

E: What about dark matter?

S: {{w|Dark matter}}'s purely theoretical.

E: Uggghhh. What? Wait a minute! What do you mean, "purely theoretical"?

S: We don't know what it is. It's just theorized that it must exist.

E: But we know it exists!

S: There was like, ten other ones that probably, that theoretically should exist; we have no idea what it is. I didn't count those.

B: That's awesome. Read those again!

S: But the list could be a lot more; I mean, there's a lot more things potentially on the list.

E: Bob's getting excited.

R: Go Google it and read it yourself.

S: Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, superfluid, Bose-Einstein condensate, fermionic condensate, Rydberg molecule, photonic matter, which we talked about recently; degenerate matter, like in a neutron star and quark-gluon plasma. Quark-gluon plasma's on the fence about because—

B: Why?!

S: Because how confirmed is it? We've definitely detected it in particle accelerators, but it's not 100%, 100% confirmed. I thought it was above the bar.

B: Oh, come on. Yeah, it is.

R: I think my cat is a new state of matter, because he is soft and squishy; I can touch him, but he also seems—so that's like a solid, but he also seems to fill any space, like a gas. So like a very tiny box or a very large box; he can fill it perfectly.

J: And Rebecca, that's another sense: Detect cat.

R: Yes.

S: And, there are currently six people in space. They are: {{w|Oleg Kotov}}, {{w|Mike Hopkins}}, and {{w|Sergey Ryazanskiy}}; they've all been in space for 70 days. {{w|Rick Mastracchio}}, {{w|Mikhail Tyurin}} and {{w|Koichi Wakata}} have been in space for 28 days.

E: Hey, Koichi. He listens to the show.

J: So how many people are in space right now?

S: There's two Americans, three Russians and one Japanese.

B: Hey, I heard Koichi went home, so I think I win.

S: What do you mean? How could he have gone home?

R: He was homesick.

B: He was tired of it.

R: Had his parents pick him up.

E: No, no, he just did what Sandra Bullock did in ''{{w|Gravity (film)|Gravity}}''.

S: There's a website called, "howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com".

R: Really?

''(laughter)''

B: Oh, awesome! Awesome!

S: Yup.

B: That's great.

E: What is it, just one big number six on the screen? ''(laughs)''

S: ''(laughs)'' Yes, exactly! There's a picture of the Earth; there's a big number six on the screen. And then below that are the names. But yes, that's it!

R: Wow.

J: That is awesome.

B: What's the highest that number's ever been, I wonder?

S: I don't know.

E: Oh, gosh.

B: I should know.

R: Is there a website, "whatsthemostpeoplewhohaveeverbeeninspace.com"?

S: ''(laughs)'' We need to make one.

B: Steve!

S: Yeah?

B: Did you say, "Rydberg atom"?

S: Molecule.

B: How did they—so they classify that as a separate state of matter?

S: Rydberg molecule. They did; yeah.

B: That's interesting; OK. 'Cause isn't that where the molecule is—the electron is so far away that it actually exhibits classical and quantum characteristics?

S: I believe so; yes. I could read the description for you.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:17:18) ==
<blockquote>'The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.'-John Stuart Mill</blockquote>

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}} 

{{Page categories
|Interview = y 
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}}

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-21T07:12:48Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

Amelia Earhart (443)

2017-01-21T07:10:13Z

D Inwood: Redirect to Forgotten Superheroine of Science

#REDIRECT [[SGU_Episode_443#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:47.29]]
[[Category:Conspiracy Theories]]
[[Category:History]]

SGU Episode 443

2017-01-21T07:08:44Z

D Inwood: Transcribed one segment

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-21T05:44:16Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

Lydia DeWitt: Tuberculosis (446)

2017-01-21T05:42:14Z

D Inwood: Redirect to Forgotten Superheroine of Science

#REDIRECT [[SGU_Episode_446#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.282:21.29]]
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Science & Medicine]]

SGU Episode 446

2017-01-21T05:40:19Z

D Inwood: Transcribed one segment

Template:SGU episode list

2017-01-20T23:19:51Z

D Inwood: Marked episode 449 as transcribed

<noinclude>This template is used to display the list of full-length episodes on the [[Main Page]] and the [[SGU Episodes]] page. Additions and amendments to this template will be reflected on those pages.

Where the first pass of transcription is done using Google Speech API, the page should be followed by <code><nowiki>{{a}}</nowiki></code> to add the microphone icon.

Pages currently in progress should be followed by <code><nowiki>{{i}}</nowiki></code> to add the pencil icon, and pages that have sections open to other contributors to transcribe should be followed by <code><nowiki>{{Open}}</nowiki></code> to include the green arrow icon.

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Below are links to all the SGU episodes with transcription pages.

Jump to: [[#2015|2015]], [[#2014|2014]], [[#2013|2013]], [[#2012|2012]], [[#2011|2011]], [[#2010|2010]], [[#2009|2009]], [[#2008|2008]], [[#2007|2007]], [[#2006|2006]], [[#2005|2005]]

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{|style="margin:1em 3em"
|style="padding-right: 6em;white-space:nowrap" valign="top"|<big>'''2016'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 601]], Jan 14 2017{{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 600]], Jan 7 2017{{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 599]], Dec 31 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 598]], Dec 24 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 597]], Dec 17 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 596]], Dec 10 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 595]], Dec 3 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 594]], Nov 26 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 593]], Nov 19 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 592]], Nov 12 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 591]], Nov 5 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 590]], Oct 29 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 589]], Oct 22 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 588]], Oct 15 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 587]], Oct 08 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 586]], Oct 01 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 585]], Sep 24 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 584]], Sep 17 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 583]], Sep 10 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 582]], Sep 3 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 581]], Aug 27 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 580]], Aug 20 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 579]], Aug 13 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 578]], Aug 06 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 577]], Jul 30 2016 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 576]], Jul 23 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 575]], Jul 16 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 574]], Jul 9 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 573]], Jun 22 2016 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 572]], Jun 25 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 571]], Jun 18 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 570]], Jun 11 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 569]], Jun 4 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 568]], May 28 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 567]], May 21 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 566]], May 14 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 565]], May 7 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 564]], Apr 30 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 563]], Apr 23 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 562]], Apr 16 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 561]], Apr 9 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 560]], Apr 2 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 559]], Mar 26 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 558]], Mar 19 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 557]], Mar 12 2016 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 556]], Mar 5 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 555]], Feb 27 2016 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 554]], Feb 20 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 553]], Feb 13 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 552]], Feb 6 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 551]], Jan 30 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 550]], Jan 23 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 549]], Jan 16 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 548]], Jan 9 2016 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 547]], Jan 2 2016 {{Open}}

<big>'''2015'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 546]], Dec 26 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 545]], Dec 19 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 544]], Dec 12 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 543]], Dec 5 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 542]], Nov 28 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 541]], Nov 21 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 540]], Nov 14 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 539]], Nov 7 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 538]], Oct 31 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 537]], Oct 24 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 536]], Oct 17 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 535]], Oct 10 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 534]], Oct 3 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 533]], Sep 19 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 532]], Sep 19 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 531]], Sep 12 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 530]], Sep 5 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 529]], Aug 29 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 528]], Aug 22 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 527]], Aug 15 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 526]], Aug 8 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 525]], Aug 1 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 524]], Jul 25 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 523]], Jul 18 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 522]], Jul 11 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 521]], Jul 4 2015 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 520]], Jun 27 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 519]], Jun 20 2015 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 518]], Jun 13 2015 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 517]], Jun 6 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 516]], May 30 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 515]], May 23 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 514]], May 16 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 513]], May 9 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 512]], May 2 2015 {{mag}}
* [[SGU 10-Hour Show]], May 2 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 511]], Apr 25 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 510]], Apr 18 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 509]], Apr 11 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 508]], Apr 4 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 507]], Mar 28 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 506]], Mar 21 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 505]], Mar 14 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 504]], Mar 7 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 503]], Feb 28 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 502]], Feb 21 2015 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 501]], Feb 14 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 500]], Feb 7 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 499]], Jan 31 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 498]], Jan 24 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 497]], Jan 17 2015 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 496]], Jan 10 2015 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 495]], Jan 3 2015 {{Open}}

<big>'''2014'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 494]], Dec 27 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 493]], Dec 20 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 492]], Dec 13 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 491]], Dec 6 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 490]], Nov 29 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 489]], Nov 22 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 488]], Nov 15 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 487]], Nov 8 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 486]], Nov 1 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 485]], Oct 25 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 484]], Oct 18 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 483]], Oct 11 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 482]], Oct 4 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 481]], Sep 27 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 480]], Sep 20 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 479]], Sep 13 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 478]], Sep 6 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 477]], Aug 30 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 476]], Aug 23 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 475]], Aug 16 2014 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 474]], Aug 9 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 473]], Aug 2 2014 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 472]], Jul 26 2014 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 471]], Jul 19 2014 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 470]], Jul 12 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 469]], Jul 5 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 468]], Jun 28 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 467]], Jun 21 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 466]], Jun 14 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 465]], Jun 7 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 464]], May 31 2014 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 463]], May 24 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 462]], May 17 2014 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 461]], May 10 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 460]], May 3 2014 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 459]], Apr 26 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 458]], Apr 19 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 457]], Apr 12 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 456]], Apr 5 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 455]], Mar 29 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 454]], Mar 22 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 453]], Mar 15 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 452]], Mar 8 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 451]], Mar 1 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 450]], Feb 22 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 449]], Feb 15 2014 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 448]], Feb 10 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 447]], Feb 8 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 446]], Feb 1 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 445]], Jan 25 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 444]], Jan 18 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 443]], Jan 11 2014 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 442]], Jan 4 2014 {{Open}}

<big>'''2013'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 441]], Dec 28 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 440]], Dec 21 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 439]], Dec 14 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 438]], Dec 7 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 437]], Nov 30 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 436]], Nov 23 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 435]], Nov 16 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 434]], Nov 9 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 433]], Nov 2 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 432]], Oct 26 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 431]], Oct 19 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 430]], Oct 12 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 429]], Oct 5 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 428]], Sep 28 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 427]], Sep 21 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 426]], Sep 14 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 425]], Sep 7 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 424]], Aug 31 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 423]], Aug 24 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 422]], Aug 17 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 421]], Aug 10 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 420]], Aug 3 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 419]], Jul 27 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 418]], Jul 20 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 417]], Jul 13 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 416]], Jul 6 2013 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 415]], Jun 29 2013 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 414]], Jun 22 2013 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 413]], Jun 15 2013 {{Open}}{{a}}
* [[SGU Episode 412]], Jun 8 2013 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 411]], Jun 1 2013 {{a}}
* [[SGU Episode 410]], May 25 2013 {{Tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 409]], May 18 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 408]], May 11 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 407]], May 4 2013 {{Open}}{{a}}
* [[SGU Episode 406]], Apr 27 2013 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 405]], Apr 20 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 404]], Apr 13 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 403]], Apr 6 2013 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 402]], Mar 30 2013 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 401]], Mar 23 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 400]], Mar 16 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 399]], Mar 9 2013 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 398]], Mar 2 2013 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 397]], Feb 23 2013 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 396]], Feb 16 2013 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 395]], Feb 9 2013 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 394]], Feb 2 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 393]], Jan 26 2013 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 392]], Jan 19 2013 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 391]], Jan 12 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 390]], Jan 5 2013 {{tick}}

<big>'''2012'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 389]], Dec 29 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 388]], Dec 22 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 387]], Dec 15 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 386]], Dec 8 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 385]], Dec 1 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 384]], Nov 24 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 383]], Nov 17 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 382]], Nov 10 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 381]], Nov 3 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 380]], Oct 27 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 379]], Oct 20 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 378]], Oct 13 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 377]], Oct 6 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 376]], Sep 29 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 375]], Sep 22 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 374]], Sep 15 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 373]], Sep 8 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 372]], Sep 1 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 371]], Aug 25 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 370]], Aug 18 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 369]], Aug 11 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 368]], Aug 4 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 367]], Jul 28 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 366]], Jul 21 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 365]], Jul 14 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 364]], Jul 7 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 363]], Jun 30 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 362]], Jun 23 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 361]], Jun 16 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 360]], Jun 9 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 359]], Jun 2 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 358]], May 26 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 357]], May 19 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 356]], May 12 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 355]], May 5 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 354]], Apr 28 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 353]], Apr 21 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 352]], Apr 14 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 351]], Apr 7 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 350]], Mar 31 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 349]], Mar 24 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 348]], Mar 17 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 347]], Mar 10 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 346]], Mar 3 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 345]], Feb 25 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 341]], Jan 28 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 340]], Jan 21 2012 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 339]], Jan 14 2012 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 338]], Jan 7 2012 {{tick}}

<big>'''2011'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 337]], Dec 31 2011 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 336]], Dec 24 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 335]], Dec 17 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 334]], Dec 10 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 333]], Dec 3 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 332]], Nov 26 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 331]], Nov 19 2011 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 330]], Nov 11 2011 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 329]], Nov 5 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 328]], Oct 29 2011 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 327]], Oct 22 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 326]], Oct 15 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 325]], Oct 8 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 324]], Oct 1 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 323]], Sep 24 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 322]], Sep 17 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 321]], Sep 10 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU 24hr]], Sep 23-24 2011
* [[SGU Episode 320]], Aug 29 2011 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 319]], Aug 24 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 318]], Aug 17 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 317]], Aug 10 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 316]], Aug 3 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 315]], Jul 27 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 314]], Jul 20 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 313]], Jul 13 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 312]], Jul 5 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 311]], Jun 29 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 310]], Jun 22 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 309]], Jun 13 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 308]], Jun 08 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 307]], May 31 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 306]], May 25 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 305]], May 18 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 304]], May 9 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 303]], May 4 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 302]], Apr 27 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 301]], Apr 20 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 300]], Apr 9 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 299]], Apr 4 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 298]], Mar 30 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 297]], Mar 24 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 296]], Mar 16 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 295]], Mar 9 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 294]], Mar 2 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 293]], Feb 23 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 292]], Feb 16 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 291]], Feb 9 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 290]], Jan 31 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 289]], Jan 26 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 288]], Jan 19 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 287]], Jan 12 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 286]], Jan 5 2011 {{Open}}

|style="padding-right: 6em;white-space:nowrap" valign="top"| <big>'''2010'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 285]], Dec 29 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 284]], Dec 22 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 283]], Dec 15 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 282]], Dec 8 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 281]], Dec 1 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 280]], Nov 24 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 279]], Nov 15 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 278]], Nov 10 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 277]], Nov 3 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 276]], Oct 27 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 275]], Oct 19 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 274]], Oct 13 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 273]], Oct 6 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 272]], Sep 30 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 271]], Sep 22 2010 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 270]], Sep 15 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 269]], Sep 8 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 268]], Sep 1 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 267]], Aug 25 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 266]], Aug 19 2010 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 265]], Aug 11 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 264]], Aug 4 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 263]], Jul 29 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 262]], Jul 21 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 261]], Jul 10 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 260]], Jun 30 2010 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 259]], Jun 28 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 258]], Jun 16 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 257]], Jun 14 2010 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 256]], Jun 9 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 255]], Jun 2 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 254]], May 26 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 253]], May 19 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 252]], May 12 2010 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 251]], May 5 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 250]], Apr 28 2010 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 249]], Apr 17 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 248]], Apr 13 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 247]], Apr 7 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 246]], Mar 31 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 245]], Mar 25 2010 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 244]], Mar 18 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 243]], Mar 11 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 242]], Mar 3 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 241]], Feb 24 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 240]], Feb 17 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 239]], Feb 10 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 238]], Feb 3 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 237]], Jan 27 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 236]], Jan 20 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 235]], Jan 13 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 234]], Nov 15 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 233]], Jan 6 2010 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 232]], Jan 1 2010 {{mag}}

<big>'''2009'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 231]], Dec 21 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 230]], Dec 16 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 229]], Dec 9 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 228]], Dec 2 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 227]], Nov 25 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 226]], Nov 18 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 225]], Nov 11 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 224]], Nov 4 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 223]], Oct 28 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 222]], Oct 21 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 221]], Oct 14 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 220]], Oct 7 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 219]], Sep 28 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 218]], Sep 23 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 217]], Sep 12 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 216]], Sep 9 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 215]], Sep 1 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 214]], Aug 25 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 213]], Aug 18 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 212]], Aug 12 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 211]], Aug 4 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 210]], Jul 29 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 209]], Jul 22 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 208]], Jul 11 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 207]], Jul 1 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 206]], Jun 18 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 205]], Jun 16 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 204]], Jun 11 2009 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 203]], Jun 9 2009 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 202]], Jun 3 2009 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 201]], May 27 2009 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 200]], May 20 2009 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 199]], May 13 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 198]], May 7 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 197]], Apr 30 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 196]], Apr 22 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 195]], Apr 15 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 194]], Apr 8 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 193]], Apr 1 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 192]], Mar 25 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 191]], Mar 18 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 190]], Mar 12 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 189]], Mar 4 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 188]], Feb 26 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 187]], Feb 11 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 186]], Feb 9 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 185]], Feb 4 2009 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 184]], Jan 28 2009 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 183]], Jan 21 2009 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 182]], Jan 15 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 181]], Jan 7 2009 {{Open}}

<big>'''2008'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 180]], Dec 30 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 179]], Dec 23 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 178]], Dec 16 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 177]], Dec 3 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 176]], Nov 20 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 175]], Nov 10 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 174]], Nov 18 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 173]], Nov 12 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 172]], Nov 5 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 171]], Oct 29 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 170]], Oct 22 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 169]], Oct 11 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 168]], Oct 8 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 167]], Oct 1 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 166]], Sep 24 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 165]], Sep 17 2008 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 164]], Sep 10 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 163]], Sep 3 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 162]], Aug 26 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 161]], Aug 20 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 160]], Aug 13 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 159]], Aug 6 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 158]], Jul 30 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 157]], Jul 23 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 156]], Jul 16 2008 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 155]], Jul 9 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 154]], Jul 2 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 153]], Jun 21 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 152]], Jun 11 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 151]], Jun 9 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 150]], Jun 4 2008 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 149]], May 28 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 148]], May 21 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 147]], May 14 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 146]], May 7 2008 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 145]], Apr 30 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 144]], Apr 23 2008 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 143]], Apr 16 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 142]], Apr 9 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 141]], Apr 2 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 140]], Mar 26 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 139]], Mar 19 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 138]], Mar 12 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 137]], Mar 5 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 136]], Feb 27 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 135]], Feb 20 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 134]], Feb 13 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 133]], Feb 6 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 132]], Jan 30 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 131]], Jan 23 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 130]], Jan 16 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 129]], Jan 9 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 128]], Jan, 2 2008 {{Open}}

<big>'''2007'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 127]], Dec 26 2007 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 126]], Dec 19 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 125]], Dec 12 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 124]], Dec 5 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 123]], Nov 28 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 122]], Nov 20 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 121]], Nov 14 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 120]], Nov 7 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 119]], Oct 30 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 118]], Oct 24 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 117]], Oct 17 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 116]], Oct 10 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 115]], Oct 3 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 114]], Sep 27 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 113]], Sep 19 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 112]], Sep 12 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 111]], Sep 5 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 110]], Aug 28 2007 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 109]], Aug 24, 2007 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 108]], Aug 11 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 107]], Aug 8 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 106]], Aug 1 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 105]], Jul 25 2007 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 104]], Jul 18 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 103]], Jul 11 2007 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 102]], Jul 3 2007 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 101]], June 20 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 100]], June 19 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 99]], June 13 2007 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 98]], June 6 2007 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 97]], May 30 2007 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 96]], May 23 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 95]], May 16 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 94]], May 9 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 93]], May 3 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 92]], Apr 25 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 91]], Apr 18 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 90]], Apr 10 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 89]], Apr 4 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 88]], Mar 28 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 87]], Mar 21 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 86]], Mar 14 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 85]], Mar 7 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 84]], Feb 28 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 83]], Feb 21 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 82]], Feb 15 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 81]], Feb 7 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 80]], Jan 31 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 79]], Jan 24 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 78]], Jan 15 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 77]], Jan 10 2007 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 76]], Jan 3 2007 {{open}}

<big>'''2006'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 75]], Dec 27 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 74]], Dec 20 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 73]], Dec 13 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 73]], Dec 13 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 72]], Dec 6 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 71]], Nov 29 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 70]], Nov 21 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 69]], Nov 15 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 68]], Nov 8 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 67]], Nov 1 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 66]], Oct 25 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 65]], Oct 18 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 64]], Oct 11 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 63]], Oct 4 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 62]], Sep 27 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 61]], Sep 20 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 60]], Sep 13 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 59]], Sep 5 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 58]], Aug 30 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 57]], Aug 23 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 56]], Aug 15 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 55]], Aug 9 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 54]], Aug 2 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 53]], Jul 26 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 52]], Jul 19 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 51]], Jul 12 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 50]], Jul 5 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 49]], Jun 28 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 48]], Jun 21 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 47]], Jun 14 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 46]], Jun 7 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 45]], May 31 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 44]], May 24 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 43]], May 17 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 42]], May 10 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 41]], May 3 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 40]], Apr 26 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 39]], Apr 19 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 38]], Apr 12 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 37]], Apr 6 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 36]], Mar 29 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 35]], Mar 22 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 34]], Mar 15 2006 {{mag}}
* [[SGU Episode 33]], Mar 9 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 32]], Mar 1 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 31]], Feb 22 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 30]], Feb 15 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 29]], Feb 8 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 28]], Feb 1 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 27]], Jan 25 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 26]], Jan 17 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 25]], Jan 11 2006 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 24]], Jan 6 2006 {{tick}}

<big>'''2005'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 23]], Dec 21 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 22]], Dec 14 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 21]], Dec 7 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 20]], Nov 23 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 19]], Nov 16 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 18]], Nov 2 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 17]], Oct 26 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 16]], Oct 12 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 15]], Oct 6 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 14]], Sep 28 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 13]], Sep 14 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 12]], Sep 7 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 11]], Aug 31 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 10]], Aug 23 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 9]], Aug 10 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 8]], Aug 2 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 7]], Jul 20 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 6]], Jul 7 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 5]], Jun 29 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 4]], Jun 15 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 3]], Jun 7 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 2]], Jun 1 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 1]], May 4 2005 {{tick}}
|}

<noinclude>
[[Category: List templates]]
[[Category: Templates]]
</noinclude>

SGU Episode 449

2017-01-20T23:18:32Z

D Inwood: Removed "needs transcription" tag

{{Editing required
|proof-reading = y
|formatting = y
|links = y
|Today I Learned list = y
|categories = y
|segment redirects = y 
|}}
{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 449
|episodeDate = February 15th 2014 
|episodeIcon = File:Burgess2.jpg 
|previous = 
|next = 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|perry = 
|guest1 = 
|guest2 = 
|guest3 = 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2014-02-15.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=48798.0.html
|qowText = The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it. 
|qowAuthor = {{w|Otto Pfleiderer}}, 1902 
|}}

== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday February 12th 2014, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella

B: Hey everybody

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Ello guvna

S: Happy Darwin Day everyone!

B: Yay!

R: Happy Darwin Day! I’m wearin my little Darwin t-shirt, available at skepticalrobot.com.

B: I’m sitting here all evolved and everything.

E: What exactly is Darwin Day?

R: It’s the day Darwin was born.

S: Otherwise known as his birthday, yeah. Did you guys know, here’s my Darwin Day factoid for the day, a scientist named a new species of beetle after Darwin? The beetle was discovered by Dr. Stylianos Chatzimanolis from the University of Tennessee

B: Wait wait wait, say that again.

S: NO. This is a uh a rove beetle. There are fifty-seven thousand described species, but apparently Darwin collected this specimen when he was on the beetle. And then it sat lost in a drawer at the Natural History Museum in London; and was rediscovered in London in 2008. And then somebody realized hey this was actually collected by Darwin

B: Oh!

S: So it was just described and it was named Darwinilus sedarisi

B: Oh sweet

E: very nice

J: what’s this bug called luv?

B: I would have put that on EBay

E: Imagine if someone would have opened the drawer and said, “Ew there’s a dead bug in here. Let’s dump it out and get rid of it ew!”

R: There are tons of Darwin specimens that are just sitting in drawers underneath the uh London Museum of Natural Science. My friend, Karen James, used to work there and she gave me the behind the scenes tour and it was amazing! There was all of…they have so much incredible stuff. They keep Darwin’s own samples in a basement somewhere. Ya know, not even open to the public.

E: Have you guys seen the show on HBO called Questioning Darwin?

R: Nope

E: HBO’s ran that, I think, starting last week. And I didn’t watch all of it; I watched parts of it. And it had some very parts. Apparently, something I didn’t know about Darwin before, is that during his seminal time in which he was writing the Origin of Species – that he spent twenty years accumulating – all of his notes and everything in doing this… He basically cloistered himself inside of his house and his wife kind of made, ya know brought everything to him. He had his family all around him and the varied species and all the animals and things and plant life and his his green house was immense and everything. But he basically stayed there for twenty years and worked like eighteen hour days like every day for twenty years just in pursuit of this… of of of learning more about the origin of species. And that is dedication

B: How many wives would put up with that crap? Like yeah this is gonna be a revolutionary theory, I need eighteen hours a day for the next two decades.

E: Apparently she was entirely on board

B: Wow

E: and made it possible for him to do the work that was necessary for him to get that book published.

B: Glad she did, but what a hard sale that must have been…

== This Day in Skepticism (03:20) ==
* February 15: Happy Decimal Day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day
R: Hey, speaking of…England uh Happy Decimal Day everyone! Uh the day we record this is Darwin Day, but the day this episode comes out is February 15th. And February 15th, 1971 was Decimal Day. Which, personally I think they should celebrate every year; just because it’s a wonderfully dorky sounding holiday. But, in 1971 that was the date when the UK and Ireland switched their currency to using decimals instead of, you know, the ridiculously confusing system that they used to use.

E: Don’t you like having a pocket full of farthings and three pence and…

R: I wrote this down just so I could get it all right. They were two farthings in a hay penny, two hay pennies in a penny (obviously), twelve pence in a shilling, two and a half shillings in a half crown, twenty shillings in a pound, twenty-one shillings in a guinea

B: OH! Twenty-one!

R: And sixty-seven guineas in a pandapiddle(?)

B: You made that last part up

E: Did you make up that last one?

R: I did. I did. It took you guys a minute. So, in 1824 decimalization was proposed based upon the fact that the French did it. So…

B: Wait, I think that’s the first time I have ever heard that word.

R: Decimalization?

B: I like it!

R: It’s a word!

B: I believe it!

R: But yeah, even though it was proposed in 1824, it took almost a century and a half for it to actually happen. Which, you know, should make all of us in the US feel a bit better about our metric system concerns. When it did finally happen, the government broke the pound into a hundred pennies. And they started, actually, in 1968 when they issued 5p and 10p coins. And in 1969 they issued the 50p coins. And then finally, on Decimal Day, they introduced the last three coins which were a half penny, one penny and two pence coins. And yeah, they eventually… they started by marking all prices in stores in stuff with both the old currency and the new currency; and they eventually dropped off the old currency. They also had two full years of educational PSAs and stuff teaching people how to use the new currency system. So that when Decimal Day finally rolled around it was pretty easy, not many complaints about it.

E: Because they realized, hey this actually makes sense.

R: Yeah

B: I don’t have much hope. We’re… There’s only three countries on the planet that aren’t metric, and we’re one of them.

E: Yay…

S: Well we’re semi-metric. I mean we buy two liter bottles of soda at the store…

E: Yeah, we’re hybrid sort of…

B: We’re hybrid. Lame hybrid

E: We are. Look at your speedometer. It’s got both miles per hour and kilometers per hour.

B: How often do you even look at that?

R: Every time I go to Canada

E: For every furlong I drive.

S: Alright, Rebecca I have to point out that we got an e-mail last week by a listener calling themselves Sharon. Who said that they were disgusted and dismayed, that you had turned This Day in Skepticism into this day in feminism…talking about all of your female scientists and everything.

R: Right. And like, pennies are girls so… this one too.

S: Which, yeah I immediately recognize this nonsense. But I did a tally of the last years’ worth of This Day in Skepticism; and it turns out that there were twenty-one males mentioned, seven females, and twenty-eight not mentioning a specific person… Like Decimal Day, they were not about a specific person.

R: Right

S: Right. So you talked about female scientists about 13.5% of the time over the last year.

R: And that is

S: Clearly saying

J: That’s too much

E: Stop shoving it in our faces

R: It’s ridiculous

S: And one third as often as male scientists

R: So yeah, Steve, I really appreciate your response…so much so that I published it on SkepChick. Which inspired another response that I found quite funny. It was actually from, you guys wouldn’t have known this but I recognized the name as somebody who has harassed me in the past on Twitter and Facebook and such and I’ve got him blocked pretty much everywhere. His response was, “If you think about it, men have contributed a lot more to the sciences that women. So really, when you’re talking about This Day in Science, you should talk about men, the preponderates of time. And that proves that I was talking about women way too often.

S: Right

B: Wooooooow

R: Which I just love. This demand that, without evidence, well I believe that man have contributed approximately ninety-nine percent of our scientific knowledge and therefore, you highlighting things people haven’t necessarily heard of that they might find interesting and educational, should also adhere to this ninety-nine percent/ one percent split. It’s

S: a totally made up split. Yeah it’s also saying that we have to perpetuate past inequities.

R: Yeah

S: And also, I pointed out, when I responded to the original e-mail, that part of the purpose – our mission of the SGU – is to promote science…is to create enthusiasm for science. And evidence clearly shows, that women are not as encouraged as much as men to go into the sciences, or to any stem field. And, that when they are encouraged, they go in greater numbers. So, we are getting the message out to the people who need it. That’s part of our mission. It’s just ridiculous

B: I’d argue that we’re not; not at thirteen point five percent.

S: We’re not doing it enough!

R: Yeah

S: I ended it by saying that now that we’re actually running the numbers, we’re actually not doing it enough. Thanks for pointing out the deficiency for us.

B: Hahaha

R: And like, you know even as an aside, I really do…what I try to do when I’m choosing an item, is to pick something people probably haven’t heard of before, something they could learn a bit from. So, today for instance, is also Galileo’s birthday; which is quite notable. I’m pretty sure most people in the audience have heard of Galileo. And it’s also Richard Feynman’s death day. I try to avoid death days, because they’re depressing. And it’s also the anniversary the meteor exploding over Russia last year. You know, these are all things we’ve talked about, you know we’ve gone over them a million times…why not talk about something a little weird and you know…different.

B: That was a year ago? Geez

R: Yeah

J: Ten years ago, Chappelle’s Show Rick James skit appeared.

B: Oh my god, that’s what we should have talked about

J: It’s a celebration bitches!

R: Ten years ago today, I’m Rick James, bitch.

J: It was actually yesterday, but still…ten years ago.

== News Items ==
=== Organic Molecules on the Moon (10:15) ===
* http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2556947/Could-creatures-one-day-live-MOON-Ice-pockets-lunar-surface-hiding-building-blocks-simple-life.html
S: Alright let’s move on to some news items. Jay, you’re gonna tell us about why there might be, but not really, life on the moon.

J: Yeah, let’s not jump to conclusions. I mean when we say life, people tend to think of

S: Or life-like molecules

J: Ya know creatures. Yeah we’re talking about molecules here. So let me give you the background. So back in 2009, the lunar crater observation and sensing satellite was sent to the moon; and part of the mission was to crash a used part of the launch vehicle that was still attached to the ship into the moon to help us understand if the moon is actually made of cheese or if it’s a dessert pasty. But it actually also analyzed a plume of debris that the ship that they crashed into the moon’s surface kicked up by the impact. And what we ended up with, after observing the plume of debris that came up, is that there are organic molecules trapped in the moon’s ice. Organic molecules are, simply put, molecules that contain carbon; but these could be solid, liquid, gas or solid chemical compounds. So the organic compounds are often called the building blocks of life. So how strange is it to find them on the moon, right? Which is just a really big ball of marzipan, after all. Thank you Rebecca. So how did those organic molecules get to the moon? Some believe that they came from comets that crashed into the moon’s surface. So these comets, which have been traveling through space for unknown amount of time either picked them up or whatever. But ya know somehow those organic molecules got on the comets and the comets brought them to the moon’s surface. But recently, the University of Hawaii’s Sarah Crites said that cosmic rays are powerful enough to create a reaction that could actually create organic compounds. Cosmic rays you say, huh? Bob, what’s a cosmic ray?
B: Cosmic rays are particles, they’re not rays…it’s a funny misnomer. But they’re particles. Alpha particles and protons that come from outside of our solar system and they’re very energetic and can be nasty.

J: Yeah, high energy particles that are mostly protons; and they come from outside the solar system and they exist pretty much everywhere in the universe. So Sarah and her team believe that up to six percent of the moon’s simpler molecules, found in the polar ice, could be converted into organic compounds over a billion years of being hit by cosmic rays. And to put that time scale into perspective, that is approximately one quarter of the moo’s age. And the funny thing is that cosmic rays also break down complex molecules. So once these organic molecules are finally created, they could be damaged by the same rays.

S: mhmm

J: So the first thing to think about, in my opinion, is if this is happening...if cosmic rays are hitting inorganic molecules and creating organic molecules, then this is happing possibly anywhere that there’s ice or water in the entire universe. That was a little…that puts a different twist on the idea of billions and billions. You know what I mean? Like, wow! That blew my mind.

S: Yeah but ya know, I think it’s pretty well established that organic molecules are pretty common out there in space.

J: Well the thing is, Steve, have we really observed or have any information on things that are outside our solar system?

S: Outside the solar system, not that I know of, no.

J: Right, but that’s the point though.

S: Yeah
J: So now if by observing this stuff on the moon we can…I’m not saying we’re certain or anything, it’s still something to think about. That’s a pretty profound thought.

S: Yeah. I mean although there is a general principle of, that we’re not unique. Ya know that whatever we see here is probably typical of the rest of the universe

J: So pretty much all over the universe, like movies are really just eye candy now with not much real content? That’s happening everywhere now?

S: Is that a question?

E: *laughs* a rhetorical one

R: Steve, have you ever given a patient a hug?

B: *laughs

S: Why do you ask?

J: I want to hear the answer to that question.

E: Like an inappropriate hug?

R: Cuz my doctor today gave me a hug, and it was fine at the moment. Then when he left the room, I was like that was weird! Why did he give me a hug?

B: How well do ya know him?

R: Uh this is like my third of fourth visit.

J: Rebecca, maybe he surmised that you’re gonna die and he felt bad.

R: Yeah that’s, he wasn’t giving me bad news or anything. It was just like a physical, and then

B: And then he got physical

E: Very physical

J: Have you ever hugged a patient?

S: I have never initiated a hug; but if patients initiate a hug with me I allow it.

R: And it’s always like when you’ve just told them something horrible right?

S: No no! I just…ya know I just have some like older female patients that are very huggy

R: Oook

S: and feel

E: cultural

S: they feel comfortable doing that.

R: He’s an older man who looks like Richard Dreyfuss and sounds like Richard Dreyfuss.

S: Interesting. Doctors have different personalities with their patients. But there are lines that we try to be cognizant of.

R: Yeah

=== Astrology Belief (15:14) ===
* http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/02/public-opinion-astrology-dumb
S: Um Alright, Evan, you’re gonna tell us about public opinion regarding an oldie, but a goodie…astrology.

E: Oh boy, oh boy. Yeah Chris Mooney, author, long-time friend of the SGU and the New England Skeptical Society; he wrote an article at motherjones.com the other day. A very revealing piece in which he showcases the latest analysis of how well Americans understand science. Or, rather, how terribly Americans misunderstand science. Chris reports that, according to a new survey by the national science foundation, nearly half of all Americans say astrology – which is the study of celestial bodies’ reported influence on human behavior, worldly events and other human centered notions – astrology is either very scientific or sort of scientific. Nearly half of Americans.

S: Mhmm

R: Wow

E: And this was part of a larger comprehensive analysis contained within the 2014 science and engineering indicator study; which has revealed that American attitudes about science are moving in the wrong direction. Skepticism of astrology had hit an all-time high in 2004, when sixty-six percent of Americans believed that astrology was total nonsense. But since then, each year fewer and fewer respondents have dismissed connections between star alignment and personality as bunk.

S: So basically you’re saying right when the SGU started, it was all downhill from there.

E: I hate to have to say that, but that’s correlation and causation, by the way folks.

S: Yeah

E: We can actually not ascribe anything really meaningful to that. But you’re right, Steve, that is an interesting little tidbit. But here’s how it went, they first took this poll in 1979. And at the point fifty percent of Americans were skeptical of astrology as a science, fifty percent were skeptical. And then the skepticism, it crept up it rose and kept rising until 2004 sixty-six percent had skepticism of astrology. But since then, 2012 were the latest numbers, and it’s dropped down to fifty-five percent skepticism, which is the lowest number since 1983. And young people are especially inclined to offer astrology scientific legitimacy. A majority of Americans aged 18 to 24 considering the practice at least sort of scientific. And the 25 to 34 age group was not far behind them. This is extremely disconcerting

S: Mhmm

E: Um remember when Carl Sagan famously wrote in his book, The Demon Haunted World, he wrote that if pseudoscience is embraced it might be argued in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood. I don’t think there’s ever been a more succinct way of putting it. And what he’s basically saying is the understanding of science is in decline; as result, the embrace of pseudoscience is on the rise.

S: Yeah actually the data shows that there’s not a linear relationship, there’s more of a curve there that actually…People who know a little bit of, as you know more and more science you get more interested in pseudoscience and the paranormal. And it’s only as you start to get to the higher levels of science education that it starts to drop off. Isn’t that interesting?

E: That is very interesting.

S: So I think it makes people more curious and open minded and they start to think about interesting things. But you got to get to a pretty high level of science understanding, or you need critical thinking skills. And that, I think it hasn’t really been tracked separately with that same data. But before you can start to deconstruct and understand why the pseudoscience is more pseudoscientific. But there is separate data, just looking at the ability to think critically; and that definitely correlates with rejection of pseudoscience.

E: Right. Very unfortunate. Um

S: Yeah

E: What can we do? What aren’t we doing?

S: Let’s start a podcast.

E: Yeah, let’s do that. What can our society…and we’re talking about Americans. And they did do some research with other places in the world. And surprisingly a place like China, they’re acceptance of astrology as science is low, very low. Only about ten percent in China compared to the numbers over here. Again it’s called the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicator Study. A lot of good information and data collected there from lots of different sources; not only the National Science Foundation but others. And they kind of put it all together there for you in one nice package. So we’ll recommend that folks go there and check it out for themselves.

S: Yeah so we still got a lot of work to do.

E: A lot.

=== New Burgess Shale Find (19:53) ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-burgess-shale-find/
S: Hey well let’s move to a really cool science news item. Uh have you guys ever heard of the Burgess Shale?

B: Yes

R: Yeah

E: Uh, yes

R: He was in a Twilight Zone episode with (?)

B,S,E: *laugh

S: Uh Charles Walcott discovered what is now called the Walcott Quarry about a hundred years ago; right after the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. And this is a uh excellent bed of soft-bodied fossils from the Cambrian Explosion, from the Cambrian era. 570 to 530 million years ago, this was soon after the first proliferation of multicellular plants and animals. Tons of really weird and bizarre species, you know, were pulled out of the Burgess Shale. If you’re interested in this, I think probably still probably the best book that describes the Burgess Shale is Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend it. Well, recently scientists reported that a discovery of another find – the Kootenay National Park find. It’s in the Burgess Shale, it’s only forty kilometers Southeast of Walcott Quarry; so it’s in the general geographic area. And this is a fossil bed from slightly later in the Cambrian than the Walcott Quarry; so creatures are a little bit more developed. And the early reports are that it could be an even bigger fossil find than the original Walcott Quarry. I mean they’re pulling tons of specimens out of this. And the shale is like these plates; so when you find the fossils you pull the plates apart so you have basically two images of the fossil. You have the negative and the positive image of the fossil. Because of the way the fossils were preserved, it preserves the soft parts. So it’s not just the bones, cuz they’re because early multicellular life didn’t have a lot of hard parts to fossilize. That’s why you need to have these optimal conditions.

E: So when you can see the soft parts you can actually get a sense of what the creature really looked like from the outside.

S: Yeah

B: What kind of preservation are we talking about? These soft parts, what are we talking about here?

S: Well essentially you can reconstruct three dimensional images of these specimens from the two plates ya know. Ya know you may have to get multiple specimens, they do get flattened out. So you have to kind of infer their three dimensional structure. So it takes a lot of work to really reconstruct these fossils, but you can do it. So far they have yielded three thousand and fifty-three specimens, representing at least fifty-two taxa. Of these, half of are known from the Walcott Quarry.

B: And fifteen of them are new right?

S: Yeah, totally new.

R: Wow

B: Amazing

S: And they’re learning new details about previously known species from the Walcott Quarry. So this find, it’s something we’re going to be hearing about for decades I would think.

B: Oh, sure

=== Boeing Anti-Gravity (23:06) ===
* http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/
S: Bob, you’re gonna tell us about another interesting item. This one, I think this is probably more towards the pseudoscience end of the spectrum. You let us know what you think.

B: Oh yeah!

S: Apparently Boeing has been researching antigravity.

B: Yeah…

J: What?!

B: Jay I mean, how extraordinary is that? If that’s even true. Didn’t NASA, I mean how many government agencies have done like ESP and stuff like that? There are no bastion of skeptics in these corporations and in the government. I wasn’t terribly surprised. So basically, a prominent aero researcher named Nick Cook claimed Boeing is working on antigravity projects. He claims that Boeing is kind of trying to get in on some Russian research that has claimed to produce a gravity-like energy beam that can produce, get this, a force of about a thousand Gs on an object, vaporizing it. That’s pretty heavy stuff, this is I think what you can safely call a game changer, if it’s true. Not only for the military offense and defense but for physics itself. I mean is it any surprise though that my skeptical and physics alarm bells are totally going off on this one. So I wanted to take a look at just some of the players behind this. Nick Cook has an interesting resume; he’s a British aerospace researcher and writer, he’s considered an expert on military black projects, and he’s also the current aerospace consultant and was for fourteen years the aviation editor for Janes Defence Weekly. Have you guys heard of that?

E: Oh absolutely, it’s considered like one of the standards of aeronautics.

B: Well it’s an important, it’s an international defense journal. Which basically covers and analyzes military defense activity around the world. If you want to know what’s going on around the world in those realms, this is one of the most prominent journals to look through. Now Nick of course has some red flags in his resume. He’s been on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast a number of times – DING DING DING!

R: Who hasn’t?

B: Yeah, well

E: Phil Plait’s been on there.

B: But not everyone is espousing their beliefs in zero point and ant gravitation devices, among other things. Regarding the zero point energy, he says that it has a potential and limitless power source that pervades all of science. And, I quote, he says it’s rooted in science. Now we’ve covered that before, on zero point energy. But um, there’s another good quote from him, “some theories say if you spin the zero point energy field that exists all around you, some weird and magical things start popping out, one of which is an ant gravitational effect.” So okay, whatever. He admits though that he’s not a scientist, very good’; but he has enlisted some help. So who do you think he asked for some help? None other than Dr. Hal Puthoff. Puthoff was an, he helped pioneer this whole dubious zero point energy field idea in the first place. And he’s also famous for endorsing Uri Geller, enough said about that. And he also, he had to, get this one, he headed the CIA’s remote viewing program and he actually claimed to send his own mind into the surface of the planet Mercury. So you know if I want a scientist to back up my revolutionary claims, I’ll just say that I would not pick Dr. Hal Puthoff okay. So according to Cook, Boeing has not only confessed to researching antigravity, but claimed… I really I couldn’t corroborate that at all. I found denial from Boeing, but that was from 2002. I couldn’t find anything recent; so I can’t find anything saying that they’ve actually been looking into it. And even if they were, so what? Does that mean that it’s a real science? He also claims that they have a project. He actually has the name of a project that they’re working on called Grasp, Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion. And the aim of the project, apparently, is three holed. They want to enter a collaborative relationship with their Russian scientist who’s behind this new revolutionary device that can project a thousand Gs of energy towards anything. His name is Dr. Eugene Podkletnov. They want to determine the validity of his work; and finally they wanted to examine the uses for such a technology. Clearly, there’d be amazing uses for it; but the thing is, how feasible is it and what’s the evidence like? So, now I looked into Eugene and he’s got some red flags as well, of course. He’s a material scientist, he’s not a physicist like I assumed. He was about to publish his research… I looked into his early years and he was about to publish his research on gravity negation way back in ’96 and scientists criticized his conclusion; and then he withdrew his article. And then somehow this was followed by the University evicting him. Then he disappeared for a while, he went off the grid for a while. So for me, you know if you’re unable to handle criticism, that’s classic pseudoscientist right there. I mean that’s what…that’s an integral part of science. If you can’t handle it then um…that’s just a major red flag I think that you are an actual pseudoscientist. Clearly this guy is bright, but you know how that goes. Just because you’re a smart guy doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get swayed by woo. Also, I’ve been reading about some of the problems with his published research. Typical things I’m hearing are that he doesn’t give out enough information so that you can actually replicate any of his experiments. People mentioned anomalies that seemed to have never been described or analyzed so. Those are red flags as well. And then I tried to look into the, what’s the science have to say about shielding gravity or even gravity weapons? It doesn’t look good. You know you typically can’t say it’s impossible, but it doesn’t look good for some of this. I got some good quotes, George Smoot (he’s a professor of physics at UC Berkley) he said, “If gravity shielding is going to be consistent with Einstein’s general theory, you would need tremendous amounts of mass and energy. It’s far beyond the technology we have today.” Yeah, that kind of makes sense. You wanna mess with gravity, you need a lot of mass to generate it. But then Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at UC Irvine, he said “There’s nothing impossible about gravity shielding, it just requires a field theory that we don’t have yet.” That’s all, a new field theory. That alone would garner this guy a Nobel Prize, that would be an amazing thing. But just saying this guy that all he needs is a new field theory, I mean that seems like quite a bit. So also there’s another final point I wanted to make about this, I think – it just seems reasonable- that if he had a working device, that he demonstrated, that was dramatic as what they’re saying… I just think that the Russian government would clamp down on this guy and not let him out of their sight. I mean that’s an amazing development and I think it’d be obvious that they would pour billions of dollars into anything like that. Especially, if this guy has got a working device. The benefits are just not to be believed, you have amazing weapons that would literally put Russia’s military in a league all its own, if they had things like this. They’d have gravity shielding to protect them missile and light saber attacks and all sorts of things. Flying cars with no conventional food and space ships that literally seem to pop right out of science fiction movies. I mean it’s almost unending what they would have. And they would take quite seriously if he was actually able to demonstrate it. So I was reading Wired article about him and the guy’s looking for funding you know; and that just totally reminds me of the free energy and perpetual motion devices that we have seen in the past

S: Yeah

B: The only thing perpetual about them is the need for your money and just a little bit more time. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. The fact that Boeing, if they didn’t even research it, whatever. I mean companies like that do all sorts of whacky stuff trying to make a revolutionary leap in just one bound. And hey, you know, it’s not impossible, that would be an amazing thing. But I wouldn’t be sinking lots of money into this. Not unless I actually saw his device.

S: I think that’s a very common feature of technological pseudoscience is that it’s like five to ten steps ahead of where we are ya know. And it’s where companies might get in trouble. They’re always looking for the next thing right, the next technological breakthrough; because they want to invest in it and be and own it. But I guess you need some science background to know when that breakthrough is the next iterative step in our development of technology versus someone claiming to have let decades of research ahead of where we are. To the point where you can’t of course predict

B: Right

S: What’s gonna happen. And, with no paper trail to show for it, you know.

=== Photo Lineups (31:56) ===
* http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/
S: Alright one last news item. Uh Rebecca, you’re gonna tell us about the science of photo lineups.

R: Sure. Or the lack of science about photo lineups. Steve sent me a very interesting article that talks about the fact that more and more United States police departments are using a new method of doing photo lineups; something called double-blind sequential lineups. Or instead of lineups sometimes they say arrays, because that’s a bit more specific. To have crime witnesses identify perpetrators. So most people probably know the traditional lineups that you see in films and the usual suspects where a witness looks over a group of people all at once to see which one is the criminal, while there’s a police lieutenant or someone looking on. Or maybe you’ve seen a Law & Order episode where a witness is looking over a bunch of photos while the detective looks over the shoulder; it’s ya know same idea. But there are a lot of problems with that method. There are decades of research that show that when witnesses are presented with a group of people, they won’t necessarily pick out the perpetrator, they’ll just pick out the person they think looks most like the perpetrator. Which is obviously a huge problem. That can lead to false convictions, false arrests, and false convictions. There’s also the problem of having a police officer standing nearby who knows who the quote un quote correct suspect is. Uh the article Steve sent me, I thought kind of naively stated that uh police officers can unconsciously influence witnesses. But of course they can and have, in the past, very consciously influenced witnesses, as well as unconsciously influencing witnesses to get what they need to make an arrest. So with this new method, or at least newer than that method, the lineup is overseen by an officer who has no idea who the actual suspect is – which is what makes it blinded. And instead of the witness seeing all of the suspects, or all of the photos of the suspects at once, they view each one individually so that they can compare that person to their actual memory and decide if it matches up. As opposed to comparing all of the suspects to one another. Despite the preponderance of research suggesting that this method is superior, most police departments actually, in the United States at least, still go by the old method. Some of that might be due to you know just general slow changing just you know, sometimes making a change like that can be difficult for something that’s imbedded in their procedures. Some of the inability to change is due to the fact that the research also shows that not only does sequential presentation of the suspects lead to fewer incorrect identifications, but it also leads to fewer identifications overall. Just to be clear, the reduction in incorrect identifications is much greater than the reduction in all identifications. But, unfortunately there are many police departments that are happy to accept a certain number of false identifications if it means more identifications overall, which is kind of depressing. And the other depressing news is that even if the majority of departments started using the scientifically proven to be better method of showing a sequential array, there are still a host of systemic problems regarding witness uh eyewitness identification in police work. Eyewitness misidentification is the number one cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. It accounts for about seventy-five percent of overturned convictions according to the Innocence Project, which is a great nonprofit that focuses on providing resources and representation to people who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. So, how a lineup is conducted is just one of what they call system variables that can impact uh accuracy of identifications. Other system variables include who is chosen by the police to participate in the lineup and what instructions are given to the witness before they make an identification, and what they witness is told after an identification. And then in addition to system variables, there are what’s known as estimator variables, which are uncontrollable circumstances that can hamper an identification. Like maybe the crime took place at night, or far away from the witness, or maybe the criminal is a different race than the witness – which studies show make a witness less able to distinguish certain characteristics and less likely to be able to choose the correct suspects. Or maybe the witness, at the time of the crime, was under a great deal of stress, which happens quite often and can negatively influence whether or not they can correctly identify the perpetrator. So fixing the lineup issue isn’t going to account for any of that. So even if police departments do start paying attention to the science on lineups, our court systems need to do a better job of paying attention to the science that tells us eyewitness identifications are extremely unreliable, and in many cases we have to use other methods like DNA testing in order to make a case for criminal convictions.
S: Yeah I mean there’s actually a pretty broad literature on eyewitness identification. And you’re right Rebecca, pretty much all the variables that you think would influence people’s choice do influence it. At the very least, you have to have a rigorous, almost pristine process. No bias instructions, nobody present who knows what the quote un quote correct answer is, no forced choices and no post identification feedback.

R: Yeah

S: That all effects their confidence. There’s also… did you come across the term choice blindness in your reading about this?

R: I think so

S: Yeah so people don’t even know why they make the choices that they do and don’t even remember the choices they made when like they’re asked to reproduce them.

E: Wow

S: They basically, we know this from all the psychological experiments and other contexts, but people can be manipulated in pretty much every way you can think of, and these all apply. And the bottom line is yeah these kind of eyewitness testimonies is the weakest form of evidence.

R: Yeah

S: It’s the most biased, easily manipulated etcetera etcetera, and yet juries emotionally tend to invest the most weight on eyewitness testimony.

R: Right. And it’s not to say that eyewitness testimony doesn’t have a place in trials and in the investigation, it’s just that you’re right, we need to… There are so many factors that we can’t control. These so called estimator variables, that the very least we can do, the very least we should do, is absolutely everything we can to make the system variables in line with scientific accuracy. So yeah. And so instituting something like this as a law, for instance, making it against the law to do simultaneous lineups…you know that’s just one small step, but it is still probably an important step on the road towards cleaning up how we think about eyewitness testimonies and how we treat eyewitnesses in crimes. And hopefully that can lead to fewer false convictions.

S: Yeah it’s a minimum, at the minimum we should at least be having blinded examiners, you know.

R: yeah

S: Space and stuff like that, you’re right.

=== Quickie with Bob - Fusion Beats Unity (39:55) ===
* http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13008.html
S: Hey you know what we haven’t had in a while?

R: Uh, a quickie with Bob?

S: A quickie with Bob

R: Yeah it has been a while.

B: Well thank you Steve, I appreciate your offer. Um, this is your quickie with Bob. This is pretty cool guys. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility have broken unity.

E: There’s a National Ignition Society?

B: Facility

E: Facility?

B: Where you been boy? So this internal confinement system focuses five hundred terawatt lasers, one hundred ninety-two of them, onto a pellet with the hopes of heating and compressing to such a degree that they achieve ignition creating a self-sustaining fusion reaction to power our ya know Delorean time machines of course. Um, well maybe that was cold fusion. But still, this is a major milestone guys. For the first time ever they’ve created more energy from the fuel than actually did the fuel. I worded that very carefully, that’s a key distinction. Because, the lasers actually produced a hundred times the amount than the fuel actually used. But still, I mean fusion actually happened. Some of the alpha particles that were created actually heated other parts of the fuel to create more alpha particles and so on and so on. The bootstrapping process, um it’s an order of magnitude more efficient than previously. So uh this is clearly, this is a process that’s working that’s creating more and more energy. Now the caveats, of course we got some caveats, this is not ignition. This achievement does not mean even that this process is the one that will get us to ignition. But still, um it’s the best fusion news that we’ve had in a really long time and uh I think this is really good news. It really shows that the money, you know the millions and billions of dollars that we’re investing in this, is really worth it. They are making some really good gains. For years now they, you know the news items are coming fairly quickly, and this uh this is the biggest one. I mean we actually, fusion actually happened. This hasn’t really happened in any facility like this ever. So uh, so that’s fantastic and hopefully the process that they’re working on now is the one that really gonna, that’s really gonna show us a way to achieve ignition.

S: What do ya think, five years? We’ll have ignition?

B: *laughs* yeah

S: Five to ten years.

B: Yeah so keep your eye on this one. Uh fusion is one of those huge technologies that it, once we have it ya know it would just be one of the inventions of history. This has been your quickie with Bob, and I hope it was good for you too. Discuss

S: Ya see this is the kind of paper trail that I was talking about. When you’re developing something as big as fusion, then there are these incremental advances. I mean the research is there, it’s happening. Ya know it’s not like somebody just says hey I created fusion, ya know.

E: Let’s have a press release

S: I leaped ahead twenty steps and thirty years of research all in fell swoop.

B: It’s not one lone scientist, I mean those days are long gone. Sure you could have ya know a breakthrough, a theoretical breakthrough, in lots of different areas by one person. But typically now, it’s teams and teams and countries. How many times have we had discussions of news items and it’s completely international? Two, three, four five different countries are all working together.

E: Makes sense.

S: It does

R: Did you notice that the uh researcher quoted on NPR was called Omar Hurricane?

B: Yes

R: So the researcher named Omar Hurricane used a giant laser to produce nuclear fusion. That is definitely a superman plot.

S: He’s a super villain!

R: Yeah

B,E: *Laugh

R: Right?

S: Absolutely

J: Is his last name Hiruken? From Street Fighter, is that what you’re saying?

B: *laughs

R: No, it’s actually hurricane

S: Hurricane

R: But that would also be great. Yeah

== Who's That Noisy (44:55) ==
* Answer to last week: Alan Shephard
S: Alright Evan, light us up with some Who’s That Noisy

E: Light it up, baby. Let’s play for you last week’s Who’s That Noisy. A very popular one, lots of correct answers; but here it is again. *Plays last week’s noisy* Helium atmosphere

S: Where was he, on Saturn or something?

E: Yeah where was he? Well why don’t I read you the e-mail we received from the person who was the winner this week. Uh Abigail Drum, she writes to us and says, “Hi there! The sound clip for Who’s That Noisy was taken from a phone call from the 1960’s between President Linden B Johnson and Scott Carpenter, a former astronaut. Carpenter had spent the last thirty days 200 feet underwater in the Navy’s SEALAB 2 project. However, at the time of the call, Carpenter was in a decompression chamber which has helium instead of nitrogen in the air, hence why Carpenter’s voice is so high it’s barely comprehensible. Interesting fact, Sea Lab 2 was apparently much nicer than the previous Sea Lab 1. It had hot showers, but it was also not completely flat on the sea floor. So they called it the Tiltin’ Hilton.

J: Evan, that makes me feel kind of like, isn’t that dangerous? Like there was enough helium in that guy, in the atmosphere in there, his voice sounded like that.

S: Well I’m sure that was enough oxygen too. There’s oxygen and helium instead of oxygen and nitrogen.

J: No, I know that, Steve. I just didn’t know that you could, I know that helium is inert, I just didn’t know that you could it could be mixed with oxygen like that and you could breathe it like an atmosphere.

S: Well now you do.

B: *laughs*

S: Yeah Jay there’s a whole field of helium diving; divers, deep divers who use helium oxygen mixtures instead of nitrogen oxygen mixtures and they really claim that it’s a lot better. Apparently you can breathe in helium for months without there being any tissue damage, and there’s much lesser a risk of narcosis then there is from nitrogen. So yeah, it’s perfectly safe to breathe helium oxygen mixtures.

E: Now Scott, a little bit about Scott Carpenter right? One of the original seven, bright stuff from NASA’s project Mercury. He was the second American after John Glenn to orbit the Earth, and the fourth American in space following Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and John Glenn. And he died on October 10th 2013. So only recently departed the Earth. So, very sad but lots of correct answers. A lot of people, very happy to have that one correctly recognized. But congratulations, Abby, you were chosen this week as this week’s winner.

S: Thanks Evan. And what have you got for this week?

E: For this week I got something that I think Bob will enjoy.

B: Ooo

E: Here we go, brand new Who’s That Noisy. *plays noisy* Could you hear that scratching kind of sound?

R: Mhmm, that was Skrillex, the early years.

B,E: *laughs

B: Nice

E: Uh this one is well, like I said, a little hint – Bob would find this one fascinating. Do what they did last week with the Scott Carpenter clip and send us it via e-mail wtn@theskepticsguide.org or several answers were posted to our forums sgu.com, feel free to post there as well. And as I always say, and I mean it from the bottom of Jay’s heart, good luck everyone.

S: You can also send that to ttfn@theskepticsguide.org that would work also

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Question #1: Net Neutrality (48:43) ===
<blockquote>Follow up discussion on net neutrality</blockquote>
S: Got a couple of e-mails this week. Uh we had a lot of feedback about our net neutrality discussion from the special episode that we had that came out early this week on Monday. So, big caveat, this was a live show, meaning that we were taking questions live without prep. We got asked about net neutrality and we talked about it off the cuff without really being able to investigate the details. Which, I allowed because I figured we’d come back and actually do a more meaty discussion of it on the next episode; so that’s what I want to do. We’re not gonna ready any one specific email, because there was a ton of people who gave us feedback about it. So I wanted to do a follow up to go into a little bit more detail. The issue is the recent decision by a circuit appeals court, I think in the district of Washington DC.

E: Mhmm, yes

S: That ruled that the FCC’s regulation of establishing what is called net neutrality were not legitimate, that the FCC can’t do that. So there was lots of speculation about why they made that decision, what the implications of that decisions is. In short, what net neutrality is, is the notion that service providers cannot discriminate different kinds of traffic on the networks. They can’t give premium bandwidth or throughput to people who pay for their premium access and throttle back throughput for everybody else or give preference to their own services or even keep competitors from providing competing services on their own networks. Proponents of net neutrality say that ya know the internet is a vital resource and we need to protect it and it’s a level playing field for everybody and that if you give a service providers the ability to discriminate against different websites, different content originators etcetera, that they will exploit this to ya know make the internet experience much worse and charge a lot more money for stuff basically. Opponents of net neutrality say, essentially the free market should sort itself out and the government doesn’t need to impose these artificial rules inhibiting the free market. So that’s the debate. But I read a lot of dissections of this recent decision and they all basically are saying the same thing. But actually the best summary was by one of our forum members who goes by Vince Gamer, and this is how they broke it down, they wrote this is now quoting from him “FCC, under Bush, said essentially the internet is not a common carrier regulated under Section 2, but is an information service regulated under the much more lenient Section 1. The FCC under Obama, this is a 2010 rule now, said that we can impose a net neutrality regime on the internet. Verizon sued the FCC, saying that you can’t do that because you don’t have the authority to regulate the internet at all. The court ruling essentially said the FCC absolutely does have the authority to regulate the internet. If they decide to call it a common carrier, under Section 2 they can do what they did. But since they called it an information service, they went beyond Section 1 authority.” Does that make sense? So the court decision actually said the FCC does have the authority to regulate the internet. But the FCC has said that the internet is not a common carrier, but is an information service. And therefor under the FCC’s own rules they can’t impose net neutrality. The court’s basically saying yes you have the authority, FCC, to regulate the internet but you’re trying to have it both ways and you can’t do that, you gotta choose one or the other. Either it’s a common carrier or you can’t impose these net neutrality rules. So the FCC hasn’t decided yet, I think it’s going to appeal. Some people speculate it may go all the way to the Supreme Court, of course this whole thing could be rendered moot if congress just passes a law clarifying everything, they could basically do whatever they want in this respect. There aren’t really any constitutional issues here, this is all just what does the FCC, what authority does congress give the FCC in terms of regulating the internet? If congress clarifies that then there’s no legal issue.

E: So are we saying the FCC can’t change the determination, it has to come through congress? The FCC’s not allowed to go ahead and redefine it?

S: Agencies can’t decide what power they have, they are given power by congress. Like the FDA, you know the Food and Drug Administration, they can’t decide what authority they have to do stuff; all they could do is act with the authority that congress gives them. Uh the FCC is the same thing, congress gives them authority to regulate you know it’s the Federal Communications Commission so they regulate communication services in the country. So they’re you know the law gives them certain powers so it’s only a matter of interpreting that law, does that law five the authority to the FCC to do what the FCC is now doing. That’s what the judges were deciding, not whether or not net neutrality is a good idea. The judges were not deciding on the bigger issue of net neutrality it was just does the law give the FCC this authority. And so since this is granted by congress, congress can clarify or change or do whatever they want to give the FCC greater or less regulatory power to clarify this. Of course the bigger discussion is again between is net neutrality a good idea or not and it’s actually an interesting idea. A lot it comes from predicting what will happen you know, sort of predicting the future. Opponents say that if you free up ISPs, internet service providers, they could make more interesting and varied packages or deals with their consumers; they can provide new and innovative services to their customers.

J: I think that’s complete b.s.

S: Now the proponents of net neutrality, like Jay apparently, believe that they’re just going to exploit it to wreck the internet basically.

E: Of course

R: I agree with Jay.

E: I’m not convinced

J: Guys most of these corporations don’t sit around and go what’s a great product that we can offer people and how can we make as much money as possible

E: yeah but they still need a market Jay

S: They can do both

E: It’s not black or white

J: I’m all for net neutrality, I don’t want the ISP to have any say in what I do online whatsoever. They can’t slice and dice up services or anything. Just give me my bandwidth and go away.

S: My fear, without net neutrality, is that big companies are going to get into these complicated arrangements where iTunes/Apple will make a deal with Verizon to give preference to downloads from iTunes over competitors. You know, that sort of thing.

E: Lock out the little guy?

S: Yeah so it will basically make it impossible for little guys to compete on the internet because they won’t have the money and the power to get the premium special deals. A lot of people, a lot of internet commentators are writing that essentially this will result in there being two internets – the fast lane for the big players that can pay premium prices and the slow lane for everybody else. And that’s what proponents of net neutrality fear the most. But again, it’s always hard to say with these regulations what might happen in the future, because everybody can sort of project their own biases into the future. I do personally find the net neutrality arguments more persuasive; I do recognize it’s actually a complicated area.

=== Question #2: Placebo Medicine (56:25) ===
<blockquote>This is a question perhaps specifically focused at Steve, but I would be interested in hearing everyone else's opinions as well. I am a fourth year medical student about to graduate and enter an internal medicine primary care program with the goal of becoming a future primary care doctor. As such, I will be many patients' first and/or only contact with the health system. I know that I will encounter a lot of pseudoscience in this role, and I already have seen my fair share during my clinical rotations thus far. I am unsure of how to stay true to my skeptical nature while still supporting my patients therapeutically. For example, I recently had a patient with failed back surgery syndrome – essentially, lower back pain status post surgery, now with worse pain dependent on opioids to treat. It's a bad situation – the pain is keeping him out of work, opioids are causing problems of their own (and are ineffectual and inappropriate for chronic pain), and he has exhausted the limits of our medical knowledge – he is on NSAIDs, has done physical therapy, has has had all the imaging and even the surgery without relief. So he comes in and tells me he recently started acupuncture and 'it's working wonders'. I have seen this similar story frequently – patients with fibromyalgia or arthritis, or itching, finding relief from acupuncture, or herbal medications, or homeopathy. Frankly, these particular cases have minimal 'harm' – even though alt med can have harm on a large scale when patients avoid conventional medical treatment or engage in dangerous practices, in these particular cases the patients have tried everything medicine has to offer and are still following up with their physicians. While I feel strongly that it is unethical to prescribe a placebo and would not thus go out of my way to recommend non-proven alternative medicine, if a patient takes a placebo on their own and finds relief, it would only be harmful to their health (both mental and physical) and the therapeutic doctor-patient relationship to disabuse them of the notion that the alt med is helping them. A few things could happen if I did: they stop the therapy and are in worse pain taking meds with more side effects, or they don't stop the therapy but stop seeing me because they don't trust my opinion anymore since the therapy has worked and I don't believe it. So when a patient comes to me, being helped by alternative medicine, and asks what I think, I nod and smile and say 'some patients do report relief from that'. Is that wrong? Should I be more firm to my skeptical roots? What if they ask for my opinion before starting the alternative medicine? It may legitimately be helpful through a placebo effect (which would only be minimized by my telling them the truth), they would be taking it under physician supervision, and honestly, there are a lot of medications that we DO prescribe with actual serious side effects that, on balance, are likely only minimally superior to placebo (SSRIs being a good example). These patients are taking alt med for pain or depression or other more subjective complaints, not for cancer or heart disease or something that could kill them without proper therapy. As you can see, I'm ethically conflicted, sorry for the rather rambling question. I could really use your advice!PS – all the usual: love the show, been listening for years, huge fan :)JaimePhiladelphia</blockquote>
S: Alright let’s do one more email; this one comes from Jamie, from Philadelphia, and Jamie writes: I’m not gonna read the rest of Jamie’s email because it’s very long. But essentially he’s asking this question: what if my patients tell me that they are using some alternative modality (like acupuncture, homeopathy or whatever) but they say it works for their symptoms; it’s working for them. Should I just go along with it and say okay it’s fine that it’s working for you or should I say no that doesn’t work you shouldn’t use it, even though the patient is telling him that it is providing them relief.

R: You can’t just tell somebody it doesn’t work when they say this works for me. Like a response of well it doesn’t work is not going to convince anyone.

E: You’re not gonna influence them, right?

R: Yeah and like Steve will have the ultimate say on this obviously as a working skeptical physician; but from a patient standpoint, I think the best goal is to say well I’m glad that that’s working for you, let’s talk about the

E: But here’s the data

R: Well, yeah, like you know or let’s talk about the ways that we can help you out using modern medicine and make sure that you’re not using anything that could actually hamper your treatment. To me the most important thing that a physician can do is make sure that they’re not actively harming themselves by forgoing real medical treatment or taking something that could be actively harming their health.

B: Yeah but besides that, what else can you do? You have to try to explain ya know the intricacies of the placebo effect

E: Yeah

B: and that’s not

R: It’s a tough conversation to have when someone’s

B: It is it is

R: has like a little paper robe on in front of you

E: And I tell you what, he’s becoming a future primary care doctor, you’re not gonna have you’re not gonna be sitting down with people twenty minutes to discuss these things; you’re gonna be in and out, time is precious when it comes to these doctor’s appointments and they’re becoming more and more so, probably less time to see patients than you have today.

S: So let me tell you what I do, because this happens to me almost every day. Jamie also asks about what if patients ask you should I try acupuncture, I think that’s an even easier question. Let me start there. If patients ask if they should try something, and again I get this question pretty much every day – what about this? What about that? Should I try this? – Acupuncture I think is pretty much the most popular one these days, because I treat migraines and neuropathic pain so for pain it’s almost guaranteed to come up. So there I tell the patients, well I’ve actually explored the research, the literature of that question and what the literature shows is that acupuncture is not effective for migraines so I therefor do not recommend it. That’s easy, that’s an easy one in my opinion. I don’t believe in placebo medicine, I think it’s unethical to prescribe placebos for patients or to allow them passively to with your lack of objection to use placebos to treat their symptoms. Even if they report that they feel better, don’t confuse that with them actually having higher quality of life because those two things don’t correlate, the reporting bias may be all that you’re getting. It may make your life as the practitioner easier, but it’s not necessarily helping the patient; don’t confuse those two things. And I also think it’s very harmful to instill in patients, to allow them to believe that nonsense is effective. Now stuff like homeopathy? If they get a placebo effect from their homeopathic remedy for their elbow pain, then they’re gonna rely upon it when they have an infection or they have something that’s not self-limiting or more serious. And that’s on you, their physician for allowing that to happen. The trickier situation, absolutely, is when a patient tells you hey you know I’ve had this symptom for a long time, nothing helped and then I got acupuncture and it feels much better. What do you tell them? The answer is, it depends, it depends on the patient. There isn’t a one size fits all approach, you really have to titrate your response to first of all is the patient asking me a question or are they just informing me about something? What’s my therapeutic relationship with that patient? And what do I think is their level of sophistication in terms of are they interested in me explaining to them what the scientific literature shows.

E: And do you intend to hug the patient?

R: *laughs* Well you know in my physician’s defense, he spends a lot of time with me and he put me on a drug and I came back and I said I’m having this side effect and I looked it up and a lot of other people have this side effect. And he laughed and he was like that’s a side effect that literally everyone has for every medicine. And then he pulled out his iPhone and brought up like a list of side effects and then showed me and then we talked about very openly with what the research shows. So

S: That’s good

R: I quite like him because of that, because of that openness and because he doesn’t mince words; if he thinks something doesn’t work he does tell me. But I don’t know if that’s his approach to somebody who is not quite as openly skeptical.

S: Yeah so but I have told patients who have told me I tried this and it helped me, I have told them well let me tell you what I think about that. So I tell them the research shows that that treatment overall is not effective for what you’re using it for, so then therefor I don’t recommend it. I understand that you feel better after taking the treatment, but I have lots of reasons why that might be the case. And I want to make sure that we are using treatments that are actually helping you. You can tailor it in a way that patients will accept it and they won’t feel threatened. Of course if they do start to feel threatened by that, then I don’t pursue it. I did my job, I told them what I think, I do redirect the conversation to something that I think is constructive. You know I’m not gonna sit there and berate, I never get negative with a patient, I never berate, I never tell them they’re wrong or you never make them feel like they’ve done something wrong. You have to be very careful, you’re always completely nonjudgmental about the patient. But you know I just bring it to this is my reading of the scientific evidence. They can accept that or not, but I’m doing my job and telling them what it shows. Right they’re sitting in my office, they’re seeing a science-based practitioner, I’m gonna tell them what the science shows. But I’m not going to patronize them and be paternalistic and say you know oh some people feel better with that treatment when I don’t believe it for a second. I’m never going to say something to patients that I don’t honestly believe. So it is… I’ve done fine with that, I haven’t had trouble with that. You know patients are actually thankful for my opinion. But you don’t confront the… I guess the bottom line is I tell the patient what the science shows, I don’t confront their beliefs, ever. That’s the distinction, that’s just not appropriate within a doctor patient relationship.

R: I think that’s a good distinction

S: Yeah. Alright well thanks Jamie that was a good question.

== Science or Fiction (1:05:23) ==
[http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2014/02/americas-only-clovis-skeleton-had-its-genome-mapped/ Item #1]: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants.
[http://www.herpetologynotes.seh-herpetology.org/Volume7_PDFs/Dinets_HerpetologyNotes_volume7_pages3-7.pdf Item #2]: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically.
[http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/10/australian-astronomers-discover-oldest-known-star-in-universe Item #3]: Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts; two genuine and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys all ready for this week?

E: I lost last week

J: Yes sir

S: We have an interesting one this week. Don’t take it personally.

E: Well, you know.

S: Item #1: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants. Item #2: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically. Item #3: Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe. Evan, go first.

E: Oh, what’s the theme?

S: *laughs* no theme

E: Randomness is clumpy

R: Two benign things and one terrifying thing.

E: *laughs* Okay, alright let’s go with this in order: mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton. *sigh* I’m having trouble with this one. Okay but the Indian populations came from Siberia, didn’t they? Or most of them did and there’s not necessarily part of Clovis population? I’m tryin to piece this together ugh. So that one’s a guessing game, basically. Uh ok, crocodiles are able to climb trees…okay, I’ll buy that. Maybe they use their tail uh in order to give themselves you know the extra leverage or strength in order to do it. The rate of ascension might be extremely slow; you know we’re not talking about a bear scurrying up a tree or something. But I don’t see a problem with a crocodile being able to climb the tree. They probably use their tail like other creatures in trees have been known to do. Uh, the last one, the Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, 14.5 billion years old – 800 million years older than the age of the universe. Okay, so what’s going on here? Seems ridiculous on the surface. I’m inclined to think this one is actually science because there’s a piece here that’s missing. I wonder if this astronomer is claiming we have to recalculate what we know of the age of the universe because we do now have the evidence of this star and it’s been confirmed. Therefore, time to push the old cosmic calendar back a bit and say the age of the universe is probably a little maybe, perhaps a little older than thought. Well, I’m having a problem with the Clovis one the most; I guess I’m gonna go with that one as fiction but, ya know I’m not…I’m not at all confident in my pick this week.

S: Okay. Bob you seem to have a pretty strong opinion, why don’t you go next.

B: I’ve got no problem with the Clovis skeleton. They were here before Native Americans, okay they’re related, no biggie. Sure it could have gone the other way, but um nothing crazy… nothing crazy like two two and three. Crocodiles climbing trees… what the hell? I mean, I can’t imagine, their tails are meant to go back and forth that’s all. They really don’t move well up and down cuz that’s not how they swim.

S: You don’t think they could use it like a spring like Tigger?

B,J,E: *laugh

R: The second Tigger reference of the evening? Too many

E: Second?

B: I mean depending on the tree, they could grip it properly; I can kinda see that maybe. But that’s the weirdest thing, but not as weird as… Well I noticed that you saved for the one about the star that they date 14.5 billion years. I mean they could have made a mistake, maybe some weird anomaly with the red shift that is giving them an unusual date, therefor I’ll say the alligator crocodile.

E: *laughs*

R: You don’t even know what the animal is! Oh my god

E: I was gonna say the first one to say it’s an alligator automatically loses.

S: Alright, Jay

J: A new study about crocodiles are able to climb trees, I totally believe that one; that’s the end of that.

E: And that’s that

J: Australian astronomers discovered the oldest known star which puts the date to be older than the universe. I’m just assuming that they’re either modifying the name of the universe or they made a there’s a factual error. Are they saying that that is now the age of the universe?

R: Just say a number

J: I’ll go with one.

S: The Clovis?

E: The Clovis

S: Alright so we’ve got Jay and Evan with the Clovis and Bob with the crocodiles. Alright, Rebecca

R: I’m going rogue! I’m goin with the star!

E: You’re going with the star?

R: Yeah because the Clovis is the one that makes the most sense. Like

J: Why?

E: That’s what makes it the fiction

R: Because that’s what, I think that’s the direction things were heading

B: I agree

J: That’s the only one that doesn’t have a tricky thing in it though, there’s nothing tricky about that. And Steve won’t be like it’s 70%

R: Steve would never do that. I don’t know, that seems really obvious to me. That one is true, I don’t know. The crocodiles climbing trees, I just want it to be true. They’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years, they’re like a perfect killing machine. Surely in all that time they would have learned to kill something in a tree. So, yeah, they’re just they’re reptiles like reptiles climb trees all the time. Why not? But pushing back the age of the universe by eight-hundred million years? I feel like I would have heard of that. Yes I know we lose on that argument all the time; but, I feel like that would have shown up in my RSS feeds…age of the universe pushed back. So I think that one’s the fiction. Done. Go

S: Okay a nice spread, nice spread. Um I guess we’ll take these in order. Number one: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants. Jay and Evan you think this one is the fiction and this one is SCIENCE. This one is science.

R: In your faces!

J: Son of a!

E: Now the crocodile one’s gonna be the fiction.

S: Okay so, this is cool. This is really cool.

B: It better be.

S: I’ve been following this Clovis story because I love it. I find it fascinating. Now the Clovis people are known primarily from their, the Clovis culture are known for their points.

J: They’re called Clovis!

S: And you know the Clovis have a certain feature to it. And these were big game hunters, they were hunting

E: Big game

J: *laughs

S: Mammoths, mastodons, giant bison… They had big spears with these big points. The Clovis people, they lived in the Americas about 13,000 years ago and then they all died out.

J: Why? What happened to them?

S: That’s a good question, but nobody knows why the Clovis died out. There are multiple theories, which we’ve talked about before on the show; but
that’s not important for this item. Um

E: Clovis, what is it?

S: The other question is where did the Clovis people come from, what’s their relationship with modern-day Native Americans? Did they Clovis people die out and get replaced by the Paleo Indians who eventually became modern Native Americans? Or did they, are they the same people? Did the Clovis people, just their culture change but they actually became Native Americans? Well this Clovis skeleton, a boy actually a young boy, they were able to map the genome and compare it to Native American populations; and they found that it the uh family in which this boy came is the ancestor to 80% of present-day Native American populations. Mainly the ones from South America and Mexico.

E: So not the ones to cross the Bering Strait.

S: No no they are. The Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait and they divided pretty much into two populations – those that stayed in the north in Canada and those that went south to where the US’s Mexico and South America. They just haven’t examined American Native American populations, so we just don’t know their relationships. But, the ones from South America are definitely related to the Clovis people. So it’s probable that the Clovis culture died out, the people – at least enough of them to survive to become or interbreed with or whatever the Paleo Indians that are ya know the ancestors of the Native Americans. So that’s very interesting. So obviously this was a controversy, this was a huge piece of information that helps us clarify that. Cuz there are still people that are saying maybe the Clovis people came from Europe or whatever. There was a separate migration that wasn’t the same migration that ultimately led to the Native Americans. It does bring up the whole issue of who owns these skeletons; and a lot of Native Americans are saying that well they’re their ancestors therefor they should have the right to choose what happens to them. And others counter like, you know well the Clovis people were not necessarily ancestors of your tribe, so you don’t have control over them. So this in away also throws that argument towards the Native Americans that are saying they should be able to determine what happens with these remains. For example, this Clovis skeleton was reburied after it was examined. Lots of interesting implications for that. Alright let’s move on to number two: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically. Bob, you just cannot believe this one, everyone else thinks this one is true.

J: I mean seriously Bob.

B: I said I could imagine it.

S: Alright so you could imagine a crocodile sitting in a tree, would you believe

R: k.i.s.s.i.n.g.

J: Two crocodiles

S: Would you believe four meters up? Could you believe that a crocodile could get four meters up a tree?

J: That’s what is that thirty feet?

R: twelve feet

E: thirty feet

R: what’s that like a million feet?
*all laughing*

E: metric system wins!

R: It’s like four farthings right?

S: There have been sightings, people claiming to see crocodiles in trees before but never any scientific description.

B: Until now

S: Until now

R: Ahahaha Eat it!

S: Yeah so there’s a picture and everything. So it’s very interesting. It seems that their tree-climbing behavior is probably not to hunt things in the tree, but to bask. Because you know their reptiles, they’re cold-blooded, they need to bask in the sun and in some places that’s the best place they climb

R: I bet they’ve murdered things though.

S: Eh they might have. They also they tend to like for those some crocodiles tend to climb trees around the waters’ edge, they like will climb out onto branches and then when anything comes by they drop in to the water, to hide.

R: Oh I thought you meant to murder.

S: No they tend to be very skittish

R: Like death from above

S: I guess they feel vulnerable while they’re out basking in the sun on the edge of a tree limb; so they will tend to drop into the water if they if anybody comes by. The researchers also said that the smaller crocodiles are more likely to climb trees and climb higher. The really big crocodiles tend to get to big to climb trees. So yeah the biggest ones aren’t doing this. But it’s not just the babies, some moderately big ones will still climb trees. And yeah they can use their claws to climb even vertical surfaces. So even though they don’t look to be adapted to be arboreal, they can still manage to climb trees. And this is a ya know the researchers made a very interesting observation that when we’re trying to interpret the ecology of fossil species, you know we base it on their claws their bones their teeth etcetera, but animals will make use of their anatomies in lots of different and interesting ways. It’s like even though the crocodiles’ claws may have evolved quote un quote for one particular purpose, they will still use them in other ways. That’s an important concept to evolution. One, that I find, creationists consistently miss. There isn’t this simplistic interpretation that one anatomical structure is for one thing, or evolved for only one purpose. Most structures can be put to multiple use, and that maybe some population of crocodiles might eventually evolve into an arboreal species. And then they’ll say well how did that happen. Well because they can climb trees now even though they’re not specifically adapted for it. Ya know? All of this means that Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe is fictions. Congratulations, Rebecca.

R: Thank you

S: Now this is, this in fact was the state of affairs about ten years ago or fifteen ago. Do you guys remember this? Where the oldest stars were older than the estimated age of the universe.

B: Oh yeah it was a big problem

S: Yeah it was a big problem. I remember a creationist threw that up in my face. I was like well we’ll sort it out. I’m sure that one or the other or both of the dating is off. Either the age or whatever method they’re using to estimate the age of the star, or whatever method we’re using to estimate the age of the universe, one or both of those must be off obviously. It’s so plausible it actually was the case not too long ago. But, eventually we discovered that the universe was older than we thought and that everything came into alignment. These stars were like twelve billion and a half billion years old, the age of the universe was pushed back to 13.4 and everybody was happy (or 13.7). Now Australian astronomers did discover the oldest known star, but it’s about point one billion years after the formation of the universe. So it’s 13. Yeah 13.6

E: A hundred million years?

R: And it’s nearby right?

E: Was that like a protostar? I mean were there really

S: Yeah it was a star

E: I thought that was too soon for stars to form

S: It’s probably getting close to just about as soon as it could form. Yeah the astronomer, Kellar, said it was like finding a needle in a haystack; they got lucky. They were using a wide-field telescope to search for ancient stars as part of a research project specifically designed to do this and they found one; 13.6 billion year-old star. So this will help us study what the first first stars to form in the universe were like. Were they any different than the stars that we see today? Alright, you guys really struggled this week.

J: Oh man

R: I didn’t

J: That was really bad, Steve.

E: I’m very sad, I’m very sad.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:21:09) ==
<blockquote>“The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it.” - Otto Pfleiderer, 1902</blockquote>
S: Alright, Jay, you got a quote for us?

J: I do. Very strange, I’m not 100% sure who the author is, so I’m going to read um who I think the author is. But I challenge anybody out there to correct it. Um this is an old one. The quote was sent in by a listener named Nathan Dickey and the quote is, “The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it.” And that quote is thought to be from Otto Pfleiderer

S: Otto? Otto Pfleiderer?

J: That’s close enough. German he was a German Protestant theologian, but I am not sure that’s the author so please send in the correction if you can find one.

R: Hey I’m gonna be at SkepTech in April at University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, April 4-6. Find out more at skep-tech.com.

J: Hey I’m gonna be at NECSS

S: Yeah we have NECSS coming up

R: Mhmm, I’m gonna be there too!

S: April 11-13 in New York City. And the dates for The Amazing Meeting 2014 were announced; Las Vegas South Point hotel, July 10-13th. Well guys thank you for joining me this week.

R: Thank you, Steve

J: Thank you Doctor Steve

B: Yeeeah

E: No crocodile tears here

J: Dr. Huggy to his personal patients

R: Dr. Hugs.

S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-20T23:15:33Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

Rebecca Crumpler: Doctor (451)

2017-01-20T23:13:19Z

D Inwood: Redirect to Forgotten Superheroine of Science

#REDIRECT [[SGU_Episode_451#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:57.29]]
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Science & Education]]

SGU Episode 451

2017-01-20T23:11:28Z

D Inwood: Transcribed one segment

Rebecca's feminist segments

2017-01-20T06:58:32Z

D Inwood: Added one segment to the list

This page is intended to link to all of the segments on the SGU where Rebecca talks about feminist issues

== Segments ==
*[[SGU Episode 495#Gender_in_Education_.2846:24.29|Gender in Education (495)]] {{mag}} - ''Gender-segregated schools''
*[[SGU Episode 491#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.281:01.29|Polytechnique Massacre (491)]] {{mag}} - ''Murder for fourteen women in Montreal school''
*[[SGU Episode 486#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.285:30.29|Boston Female Medical College (486)]] {{mag}} - ''The first medical school for women''
*[[SGU Episode 452#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:29.29|International Women's Day (452)]] {{mag}} - ''Equality for women is progress for all''

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-20T06:56:25Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

International Women's Day (452)

2017-01-20T06:54:17Z

D Inwood: Redirect to feminist segment

#REDIRECT [[SGU_Episode_452#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:29.29]]
[[Category:History]]

Tilly Shilling: Flight mechanics (452)

2017-01-20T06:53:00Z

D Inwood: Redirect to Forgotten Superheroine of Science

#REDIRECT [[SGU_Episode_452#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.280:29.29]]
[[Category:History]]

SGU Episode 452

2017-01-20T06:50:27Z

D Inwood: Transcribed one segment

{{Editing required
|transcription = y

|time-stamps = y
|formatting = y
|links = y
|Today I Learned list = y
|categories = y
|segment redirects = y 
|}}
{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 452
|episodeDate = 8th Mar 2014
|episodeIcon = File:Mars_Jelly_Donut.png
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|perry = y
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2014-03-08.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=49039.0
|qowText = Humanity and life are reflected in the stars, and the Universe itself is poetry.
|qowAuthor = {{w|Phil Plait}}
|}}

== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

== This Day in Skepticism (0:29)==
* Happy birthday to {{w|Beatrice Shilling|Tilly Shilling}}, and it's {{w|International Women's Day}}!

R: Hey, happy International Women's Day to everyone. Not the day that

S: International

R: we're recording,

S: Women's Day.

R: but yeah, March 8th, the day that this podcast goes out, is International Women's Day.

S: What's it celebrating?

R: Women.

''(Laughter)''

E: International women.

R: International women. Well, it started out as a socialist holiday, as a celebration of working women. And there are a lot of dates that tie into the Bolshevik's rebellion, and the February revolution, and all that good stuff. But eventually, over the years, it has become an internationally celebrated event.

In 1977, the UN invited member states to celebrate the day as an official UN day for women's rights and world peace. So, that has been happening year after year. Back in 2011, in fact, it was the theme that the UN announced for Women's Day was equal access to education, training, and science and technology. And this year, is equality for women is progress for all.

E: Good. You know, that is probably a finger in the eye to places like Saudi Arabia who won't let women do the most basic of things that the rest of the men in the country are able to do, education among them.

R: So, with that in mind, I thought that I would mention that this day in science history was Beatrice Shilling's birthday. Beatrice Shilling was an aeronautical engineer who corrected a serious default in a plane engine during the second world war. Basically, what would happen was German planes had the ability to fly, to manoeuver in combat by flying towards the ground very quickly.

But the British planes couldn't follow them, because the negative g manoeuvers would flood the engine with excess fuel, and cause them to lose power, or completely shut down.

E: Is that like choking the engine is like? 'Cause that

R: Or flooding the engine, I guess?

E: Flooding the engine?

R: Yeah. So yeah, Beatrice, also known as Tilly, Tilly Shilling, Tilly came up with this little, kind of like a little washer. It's just a little disk with a hole in it.

S: A doodad?

R: Yeah, a doodad. And it was really simple,

E: ''(Chuckles)'' Doodad!

R: but it solved the problem. And in 1941, she toured around to different fighter bases, installing this little doodad on their engines. And she became immensely popular for that, because she probably saved a lot of lives through it.

S: And then we won the war.

''(Chuckling)''

R: Thanks to Tilly. So, yeah, and apparently the doodad became known as Miss Shilling's orifice, or simply the Tilly orifice.

''(Laughter)''

R: She'd quite like. Yeah, so she was a bad ass, and after the war, she started racing motorcycles, and apparently an anecdote goes that she refused to marry the guy who became her eventual husband until he matched her speed around a race course. She had been awarded a gold star for lapping this particular circuit at over a hundred miles per hour, and so she wouldn't marry him until he did the same, which apparently, he did, because they got married. So, yeah, Tilly Shilling. Happy birthday.

S: Gotta be careful there, Rebecca, you're gonna get over fifteen percent.

R: I know! I'm getting to an early head start for the year. I'm stacking them up!

E: This counts as two.

R: Yeah, this was a double.

S: No no, Women's Day is three and a half billion!

R: Oh, right, that's a good point.

E: Oh!

R: I'm gonna have to do quite a bit to make up for this.

== News Items ==
=== Countering Anti-Vaccine Fears (4:22)===
* http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anti-vaccination-parents-dig-in-heels-even-after-receiving-medical-info/

=== Dowsing in CA ()===
* http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/weird/SD-California-Farmers-Hire-Water-Witches-to-Find-Water-248105281.html

=== Capturing Earth's Energy ()===
* http://phys.org/news/2014-03-physicists-device-capture-energy-earth.html

=== Crank Sues NASA ()===
* http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/29/jelly-donut-rock-on-mars-prompts-lawsuit-against-nasa-for-hiding-evidence-of-life/

== Who's That Noisy? ()==
* Answer to last week: Turtle Love

== Questions and Emails ()==
=== Michio Kaku ()===
<blockquote>I have only been listening to the show for six months or so, and have been thoroughly enjoying it. Thank you for making it so great. However, this week's interview with Michio Kaku was very disappointing. I have a decent understanding of several of the topics he was talking about by virtue of being in a neuroscience lab, and he was so far off in characterizing our understanding of the brain. Kaku conflated DBS treatment of Alzheimer's Disease with the Ramirez optogenetics experiment, which are completely different efforts with different goals. Relating to implanting a memory, we are so far off from reaching that point in humans it is ridiculous. The simplest level of this would be activating an existing engram created by the individual, and I don't think we'll even reach that point in humans within my lifetime (for context, I am 23). Kaku goes on to explain bottom-up learning, but I don't think he understands for how long we have been implementing machine learning[1]. He also seems to think that we will 'understand' the brain once we have mapped all the connections, which would fly in the face of long-term potentiation (LTP) or our understanding of Working Memory. His grandiose ideas for using of imaging for understanding psychological diseases are nice, but ignore the sensitivities of such diseases and all that imaging cannot show us. There's more inadequacies, and I am sure as I learn more about the brain, I will be able to identify more. It really seems as though Kaku is far more interested in the science fiction implications of neuroscience than anything else. And that's great — we need to discuss those implications for the future, but we need to do so competently and acknowledging what can or cannot be done. And don't get me wrong, there's fantastic and amazing things happening in neuroscience every day, things like this[1]. But as skeptics, I think we should move one step at a time and constantly challenge and evaluate the evidence brought forward by people like Kaku. Again, I love the show and thank you for everything, Omri</blockquote>

=== Dealing with Negativity ()===
<blockquote>How do you honestly cope with the Intelligent Design frustration? I ask this because I saw a YouTube video where a simple audience question was asked — what scientific test is used to validate Intelligent Design This was…a VERY straightforward question. Rather than answering it, the person went on to discuss the meaning of 'test' and the validity of science using as much convoluted logic as he could possibly muster. It went on for about 10 minutes and the question was never answered (and yes I know they have no idea how to answer it since there IS no test for ID). I honestly wanted to shout out and say 'answer the FUCKING question please.' I can't see how you guys can take this because there are times where I am mystified Seriously, how can you take it sometimes? Dave Fernandes Rolla MO Dear Steven, Bob, Rebecca, Jay, and Evan, First off I wanted to thank you for all being a sound, reasonable voice in what feels like a largely unreasonable society. My question for you comes from a feeling I got while listening to your recent episode in which you discuss 'The food babe'. I found myself uncomfortable with anger. Almost to the point where I had to take a walk around the building to work off some frustration. I feel like the voices of people like Vani drown out the voices of those people should be listening to. I see people on her blog and youtube praising her for her 'Research,' and citing shallow reasons she makes good arguments (one of which literally being because she's attractive) I can't help but see this and feel overwhelmed. It almost feels pointless to try to work against these people. My question is do you also feel this way from time to time, and how do you deal with it? Thank you for all your hard work -Brian Anderegg United States</blockquote>

== Name that Logical Fallacy ()==
<blockquote>As a vegan skeptic, I often find myself in arguments with omnivores who seem to rely almost exclusively on logical fallacies to justify their diets. Examples include: - 'Humans have been eating meat for tens of thousands of years…' (Argument from antiquity) - 'Lions hunt and kill animals. Humans are no different It's natural to eat meat.' (Naturalistic fallacy) One I hear a lot though, is the question of 'Well what would we do with all the animals that already exist? Should we just kill them? Stop them from reproducing?' Of course, this has nothing to do with the question of whether it's ethically acceptable to raise and kill animals for food. It may be an unsolved problem, but it doesn't justify a continuation of that policy. So is this just a red herring? Non-sequitur? The latter also appears a lot, as in 'Harvesting vegetables kills insects!' and 'Vegetables are bad for the environment, too!' Thanks! –Steven Yenzer United States</blockquote>

== Science or Fiction ()==
[http://www.coleandmason.com/history-of-pepper.aspx Item #1]: Peppercorns are the dried fruit of the pepper tree, which is native to India and parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa.
[http://www.foodreference.com/html/fpepper.html Item #2]: Black pepper has been used as currency throughout ancient and medieval times, often valued equal to or greater than gold.
[http://www.ancient.eu.com/Pepper/ Item #3]: Pepper was used in the mummification process of Ramesses II.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week ()==
<blockquote>Humanity and life are reflected in the stars, and the Universe itself is poetry.</blockquote>
{{w|Phil Plait}}

== Announcements ()==

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

{{Page categories
|History = y  
}}

Ulugh Beg: Astronomer (454)

2017-01-20T03:25:31Z

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[[Category:History]]

SGU Episode 454

2017-01-20T03:23:57Z

D Inwood: Transcribed one segment

Women in history on the SGU

2017-01-18T22:41:37Z

D Inwood: Added one Forgotten Superheroine of Science to the list

Conflicts of interest (456)

2017-01-18T22:39:19Z

D Inwood: Redirect to political item

#REDIRECT [[SGU_Episode_456#Conflicts_of_Interest_.2825:15.29]]
[[Category:Politics]]

Hattie Alexander: Meningitis (456)

2017-01-18T22:37:48Z

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#REDIRECT [[SGU_Episode_456#This_Day_in_Skepticism_.282:20.29]]
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Science & Medicine]]