SGUTranscripts - User contributions [en]

SGU Episode 341

2013-03-01T23:50:24Z

Jessiessica:

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{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 341
|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
|episodeIcon = File:tripod.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = SC: Sean Carroll
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2012-01-28.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,40106.0.html
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov Isaac Asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/ Neurologica: Stem Cells for Blindness]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/ Science-Based Medicine: Chiropractic Neurology]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness (18:30) ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/ Bethel Buzz News: (UPDATED) Cause of Sick LeRoy, NY Teens Remains a Mystery (With Poll!)]

S: One more medical news item by coincidence. Again, a number of people sent this to us. This has a little bit of a local angle for us, also a chiropractor. Again, this is not by design, this is just one of the things we wanted to talk about. So in a small town, LeRoy New York, twelve teenaged girls have come down with what the presses calling a mystery illness. You guys hears about this?

E: Mystery science illness 3000 (inaudible).

J: I sure did!

S: Yeah, they all attend the same school. It's a middle school high school. And all twelve of them are displaying symptoms that are being described as Tourette-like symptoms, that they're having these involuntary motor tics or movements. The question is why would twelve girls all come down with the same constellation of symptoms over a short period of time. So of course the CDC has gotten involved. There is one neurologist who examined I think eleven of the twelve girls, who has been doing an extensive testing on all of them, trying to figure out if there anything environmental. But what caught our eye about this is this story is there is a chiropractor by the name of Russell Caram who is local to us, he's in a town nearby us, wrote an article about this situation, and starts off okay, I mean I think a little bit clunky, but saying that there's a cluster of cases, so there has to be an explanation that can accommodate that. It can't be genetic 'cause they're not genetically related, and eventually comes to the conclusion that it's got to be something environmental, which I think is actually a reasonable conclusion. But then I think he inappropriately narrows the list of what counts as environmental. Says that well okay toxins and infections, seems that they've been ruled out. So he comes to the conclusion that the environmental trigger was probably the HPV vaccine - Gardasil or Cervarix - that it would explain the timing, the age - why it's all girls. So essentially he's trying to blame vaccines on these symptoms. And he goes on to talk about that there's high levels of aluminum in the vaccine and that could be a cause of toxicity, and then he goes on from there to saying how the government's untrustworthy, and we can't trust the government to investigate this properly. So at the end, it just became an anti-vaccine crank diatribe. Where he most significantly goes off the rails is in dismissing the possibility that the environmental trigger here is psychological, because that is something else that these twelve girls share in common. They are all part of the same very small community, attending the same, small school. He writes, now in scare quotes "Now the “establishment” has diagnosed them with “Conversion Disorder” – a disease resulting in similar symptoms...but usually brought on by some kind of stress or traumatic event." Actually it wasn't the "establishment", it was a ''neurologist'' who actually examined eleven of the twelve girls, ran a battery of tests, ruled out anything else that could link these together, and by the process of elimination, but also from direct examination and history-taking et cetera concluded that this is a case of mass psychogenic illness, which happens, this is a known phenomena, and cannot be easily dismissed. I actually did find [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ca50O2nrI video of some of the girls displaying their symptoms] So this is similar to prevous cases that we've talked about, like if you remember the cheerleader [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Desiree_Jennings Desiree Jennings] who belived she had vaccine-induced dystonia. Movement disorders can be diagnosed by video because what's important is how they're moving, so it's not a substitute for a complete neurological exam, but you can actually tell a lot just from a video of what the movement itself is. In this case, what I'm seeing is something that does look like tics. I think that 'tics' is the best technical description for the kind of movement that it is, a sudden, somewhat bizarre facial movement or gesture, maybe involving a vocalisation. This could be compatible with a tic disorder or Tourette's syndrome. I don't think I can say based upon this video alone that it's psychogenic, that it's psychological, because tics can be almost anything. Although I will say that it's a little atypical, it certainly could be psychogenic also. I think the fact that there are twelve unrelated girls who are all affected over a short period of time without there being any detectable environmental trigger or other environmental trigger is pretty strong inference that it is psychogenic. These psychogenic episodes are much more common in women than men for whatever reason, so kind of fits that profile as well. So it's interesting, I think that this is a difficult kind of a situation to deal with in the press, in public. This is something that should be dealt with between these families' physicians and them, because it's very delicate.

R: Yeah and I think that the public aspect of this and the Desiree Jenkins [sic] case actually make it more difficult because of the bias against psychological...

S: Mmm hmm

R: ...illnesses. You know I think that people would rather have an obvious physical disability they can point to as opposed to a psychological illness, just because we see people with psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...illnesses as "nutso freaks", you know. So without the public aspect I think there would be a better chance of them actually confirming that it's psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...and getting the correct treatment.

S: Yeah I agree there's a stigma attached to it and because when it's made public, I mean these girls are going on the news, going on TV, that invests them in the reality, the organic bases of the illness to an extent that would make it very hard for them to sort of just give it up. And it's hard enough as it is to get people to accept the diagnosis that it's psychogenic and to make it stop. It's something that's incredibly hard to treat. It becomes almost impossible if now it's been made public and they have that angle to it, again like with Desiree Jennings, I mean she's become so invested in that that I think it would be hopeless to try to get them to get past this. So it's unfortunately very counterproductive. But if you reads the comments, a lot of people made the analogy to the Salem witch trials where you essentially had a small group of young teenaged girls who started manifesting symptoms that were blamed on withes at the time, but you know in certain ways very similar.

R: Yeah, and when you start blaming vaccines instead, which helps feed into the idea that vaccines are dangerous and convinces more people to not get vaccinated, then you could even say that they have a similar level of danger to them as the witch trials.

S: Yeah, I mean this is a with hunt against vaccines, it is very similar.

== Who's That Noisy? (26:23)==

S: Alright well let's move on. We're going to... Let's move on first to Who's That Noisy. Evan, give us the answer to last week.

E: Here we go, last week's Who's That Noisy.

Recording: There's no such thing as a psychic.

E: You guys remember that?

S: Yes.

J: Yes I do! That's from TV.

E: "There's no such thing as a psychic."

S: Nope. It's from a movie.

E: Now, it sounds like it's from TV. It's actually from a movie. The movie is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_wood Ed Wood]...

S: (laughs) That's a funny movie.

E: ...one of my ''all time'' favourite movies, wonderful!

B: Really? I've never seen that, I have to see that.

E: Oh you must see, ''must see'' movie Bob, you will not be disappointed. It is incred... One of Tim Burton's finest in my opinion.

B: Yeah, Burton and Depp, how could I not see that?

E: Right? You totally should see it, they were wonderful. But that was actor Jeffery Jones, portraying the Amazing Criswell...

S: Mmm hmm

E: ...who was of course was an actual psychic at the time, well...

S: Stage psychic.

E: ...not really psychic. Yeah, a showman, (laughs) because he basically admitted in that same scene in the movie to Ed Wood (laughs), said it's all horseshit.

S: Yeah.

E: (laughs) That's basically what he says. 'I just guess. People believe be 'cause I wear a tuxedo.' (laughs)

S: Yeah, it's all showmanship.

E: So, while he admitted that certainly to his friends, he was quoted as saying once that he once had the gift, but he lost it when he started taking money.

S: Yeeahh, see you can't take that evil money, otherwise yeah, your powers go away.

E: Yeah, your cosmic energy there plummets at that point.

E: Right, isn't it like that James Bond movie where the tarot card reader, her power went away because she had sex with James Bond?

(all laugh)

B: Oh yeah! Oh my god! (laughing)

R: That is one powerful cock.

S: Yes, you so you can't take money or have sex.

J: He stole the mojo. (Austin Power voice)

E: And that's what Sean Connery said...

S: (laughs)

E: ..."I bet you didn't shee that coming. (laughs)" (Sean Connery accent)

S: Although it might have been not Sean Connery. I think is was Roger Moore.

E: (simultaneously) Or Roger Moore?

S: Right. Who got that quote?

E: So, a lot of people... Well a lot of people actually guessed it was The Mentalist, right, you know?

S: Mmm Hmm Similar thing.

E: 'Cause it's similar, but you know there was that music in the background, right Rebecca that you noticed last week...

R: Yeah.

E: ...and, so it was... You have to know the movie perhaps as in depth as I know it which is almost line for line. We had no winners.

R: Oh! Wow.

E: ...so I was able to stump...

S: Clean sweep.

E: ...our listening audience.

S: Good job.

E: So we're gonna do something a little different this week.

S: A ''lot'' different.

E: Aah you're right. It is a lot different.

S: It's a kind of an experiment which we do in January.

E: (laughs)

B: I'm scared.

S: (laughs)

E: Don't be...

R: Hold me.

E: Don't be frightened, hold my hand, here, hold my hand. Eeh! That's not my hand. We're gonna have a Who's That Noisy scavenger hunt. So instead of me playing a noisy for you this week, I am tasking ''you'', the listening audience to come up with the correct noisy for ''us'', ''and'' the listening audience of course. You must submit to us... I challenge you to submit to us...

J: (laughs)

E: ...the dumbest thing (laughs) that in your opinion, that a politician has said concerning science or a scientific statement that is just so stupid that a politician must have said it. Send us your submissions, send us your audio clip.

S: Yeah it's got to be an actual audio clip, not a...

E: ...had to be an audio clip.

S: ...a link to it, not a transcript, we need the audio.

R: It is a podcast.

S: Yeah.

E: After all it is.

S: And brief.

E: And yes, brief.

J: And your underwear, yes.

E: Yes.

S: Right.

E: I understand politicians, their mouths move all the time, and lots of dumb things come out of their mouths but, keep it brief.

S: And give us the information, you're not trying to stump us. We will select the dumbest thing that... statement that people send us and we'll play that next week.

E: And we'll play it next week...

S: Yeah.

e: ...for your listening enjoyment. Alright? So you have your homework, and we're lookin' forward to seeing what you come up with.

S: Yeah.

E: I know I am. (laughs)

S: It should be...

E: This could be hilarious.

S: ... should be fun, should be fun.

E: Yep.

S: Aah, okay, well thank you Evan.

E: You are welcome.

== Questions and Emails (30:18) ==
=== Question: Sounds in the Sky ===

S: We're gonna do one email this week, and Rebecca, you're gonna take the lead on this, do you want to read the email?

R: Sure, here we go. Michael from Ohio writes:

<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

R: And so I checked it out, and it's true, strange sounds coming from the sky have taken YouTube by storm. I've taken this story because as you all know, I do have an ongoing segment on SGU called Things People See in the Sky and Mistake for Other Possibly Paranormal Things. This is related, only instead of seeing, it's hearing. And I'm gonna give you a warning at right from the outset here: I'm gonna explain some of the videos, but as soon as I do, someone's going to upload a new video using a new trick, and somebody's will have to start all over again to debunk it. So remember a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That said, creepy sounds are probably about as common as creepy sights, but for some reason, photos of UFOs tend to get more attention than recordings of those weird bleeps and bloops and rumbles in our lives. The rumbles, when they have a most likely natural origin are known as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontide brontides], which we've talked about before. They're deep, booming sounds that seem to come from very far away, like there's no definite source that you can pinpoint. They're often heard near bodies of water, like the with Guns of Seneca at the Seneca Lake in Ney York, or the Barisal Guns near the Bay of Bengal. They could be caused by thunder, natural gas explosions, seismic activity, or some people even think possibly waves of water hitting at resonant hollows. And they can easily be confused with man-made sounds like sonic booms, artillery, construction, stuff like that. There's also the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop Bloop], I think we've talked about that. It's an ultra-low frequency sound that was detected underwater by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1997, that's NOAA. It was several times louder than our loudest known creature which is the blue whale, and nobody knows what caused it [see episode 385, news item [http://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_385#Bloop_Solved_.2815:35.29 Bloop Solved] for an update]. NOAA in addition to the Bloop has found five other sounds of unknown origin under water, so that's kind of scary and fun. And even fairly well known animals can make sounds that scare people, like owls, foxes, fisher cats, and even rabbits can actually sound like people screaming for instance. Very creepy sounds. So all of these weird sounds can freak people out in much the same way that satellites and the Moon and stars and weather balloons can freak people out when they're not sure what they're looking at. So ordinarily if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos of people who have recorded sounds that genuinely scare the crap out of them. However if you go on YouTube to search for strange sounds these days, you will most likely only find ''lies''. Bald faced lies. And that's what our email had written in about. I first became aware of these about around January 12th or so, that's when blogs started picking up on this huge influx of videos featuring creepy sounds. All that week, there were an insane number of videos being uploaded from all around the world like the emailer says - the US, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Australia, and they all claim to demonstrate a creepy sound, sort of like, most of them sound sort of like trumpets signalling the oncoming apocalypse or something. So I'll play you [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuMWhjbkEOM an example]:

Recording: (Male voice with British accent) Can anyone else hear that noise? (low rumbling sound) The hell is that? (low rumbling sound)

R: Okay, that was from Melbourne Australia, and that's one of the first ones I saw. Now, I found that one kind of suspicious, because in the video there's no one around, even though the guy seems to be asking someone if anyone can hear the noise. So I decided to do a little digging. I got the audio off of YouTube, and I threw it into Audacity, which is the free sound editing program that we all use to record this show, and I noticed that it's in stereo, which made me very happy because I don't know a whole lot about audio, but I do know that there's this really neat trick that you can do with a stereo track that you think might have been manipulated. You can also use this trick if you want to make karaoke songs. You see if the manipulator of the video is particularly lazy or just ignorant, they might actually record their audio in mono, but then add a stereo sound effect to it. Stereo meaning there's a left channel and a right channel, so you hear different things in each ear. Mono, you hear the same thing in each ear. So Audacity has this free plugin called Centre Pan Removal, which basically inverts one of the channels and then puts the audio back together again, causing the mono sounds to cancel each other out, and you're left hearing only the stereo sound. So I did that, and ten seconds later, this is the exact same clip you just heard but with the mono gone:

Recording: *silence* (low rumbling sound)

R: So you may notice there's a bit of silence where there used to be a man talking...

Recording: (low rumbling sound)

R: ...and then the creepy sound. Isn't that convenient?

S: So this is a stereo effect added to a mono track.

R: Exactly.

S: Yeah.

R: ''Or'' maybe the angels of the apocalypse broadcast in ''magical'' stereo that bypasses mono devices. (sarcastic) Or yes, this is actually a complete and utter fake.

E: (inaudible)

R: And not just like a "whoops I made a mistake, I thought it was a ghost" but it's not fake, this is someone who went into an audio program and added that sound. And as for the actual sound, it doesn't really matter what it is, and it could be any number of things, but I happened to have watched Kevin Smith's film [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_State_%282011_film%29 Red State] last month. It's free on Netflix watch instantly. And spoiler alert everyone, don't listen if you haven't seen the movie, if you want to see the movie, I'll be honest, not that good of a movie, but spoiler.

E: (snickers)

R: At the end of the movie, there's an apocalyptic trumpeting sound and seriously, this is a big spoiler even though, not a good movie.

S: (snickers)

R: The trumpeting in the movie is actually caused by some kids playing a prank on a Christian doomsday cult. So I thought this sound you just heard in the Melbourne clip, I thought it sounded kind of familiar, so I went and found that [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItD6dQa5ncw clip of Red State], and I will play it for you now.

Recording: (low, rumbling trumpet sounds and faint sound of men crying out)

E: Now, where have I heard that before? Ummm...

R: (snickers) So yeah.

E: Sounds so familiar.

R: ...that should sound pretty familiar to you.

B: Yeeeah.

R: I mean maybe, maybe it's not, maybe it's something different, but yeah, those do sound remarkably similar to me, and there are a number of other videos that use a remarkably similar sound. So you can keep an ear out for that. I was ready to just say that this is a sound that comes from some psy-fi movie, but just a few hours ago, one of my Twitter followers notinmyname2050, I'm sorry I don't know your real name, but I guess that's appropriate for your username. But anyway, notinmyname2050 pointed me to a video by YouTuber Voodoo 6, in which he figures out that that came directly from the 2008 film [transcriber's note: 2005] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_%282005_film%29 War of the Worlds]. So...

S: Yeah, I recognised that.

R: Okay.

B: Yeah.

R: See yeah, I like most people skipped that film.

S: No, that was the...

E: Just 'cause Tom Cruise was in it.

S: I mean it was a mediocre movie all things considered, but I loved the Martian or whatever machines and they made a noise that was legitimately scary.

R: Yeah, and that's the thing. Some of these videos are pretty scary, if you can sort of put yourself in that mindset.

S: Yeah.

R: Sure the short version is - don't worry, the apocalypse is not until October at least.

S: That's right.

R: So you're fine.

S: Right. Alright well thanks Rebecca, let's move on to our interview.

== Interview with Sean Carroll (40:00) ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

<blockquote>There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
</blockquote>

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T08:11:31Z

Jessiessica: /* Question: Sounds in the Sky */ punctuation

{{transcribing all
|transcriber = jessiessica
}}

{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 341
|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
|episodeIcon = File:tripod.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = SC: Sean Carroll
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2012-01-28.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,40106.0.html
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov Isaac Asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/ Neurologica: Stem Cells for Blindness]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/ Science-Based Medicine: Chiropractic Neurology]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness (18:30) ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/ Bethel Buzz News: (UPDATED) Cause of Sick LeRoy, NY Teens Remains a Mystery (With Poll!)]

S: One more medical news item by coincidence. Again, a number of people sent this to us. This has a little bit of a local angle for us, also a chiropractor. Again, this is not by design, this is just one of the things we wanted to talk about. So in a small town, LeRoy New York, twelve teenaged girls have come down with what the presses calling a mystery illness. You guys hears about this?

E: Mystery science illness 3000 (inaudible).

J: I sure did!

S: Yeah, they all attend the same school. It's a middle school high school. And all twelve of them are displaying symptoms that are being described as Tourette-like symptoms, that they're having these involuntary motor tics or movements. The question is why would twelve girls all come down with the same constellation of symptoms over a short period of time. So of course the CDC has gotten involved. There is one neurologist who examined I think eleven of the twelve girls, who has been doing an extensive testing on all of them, trying to figure out if there anything environmental. But what caught our eye about this is this story is there is a chiropractor by the name of Russell Caram who is local to us, he's in a town nearby us, wrote an article about this situation, and starts off okay, I mean I think a little bit clunky, but saying that there's a cluster of cases, so there has to be an explanation that can accommodate that. It can't be genetic 'cause they're not genetically related, and eventually comes to the conclusion that it's got to be something environmental, which I think is actually a reasonable conclusion. But then I think he inappropriately narrows the list of what counts as environmental. Says that well okay toxins and infections, seems that they've been ruled out. So he comes to the conclusion that the environmental trigger was probably the HPV vaccine - Gardasil or Cervarix - that it would explain the timing, the age - why it's all girls. So essentially he's trying to blame vaccines on these symptoms. And he goes on to talk about that there's high levels of aluminum in the vaccine and that could be a cause of toxicity, and then he goes on from there to saying how the government's untrustworthy, and we can't trust the government to investigate this properly. So at the end, it just became an anti-vaccine crank diatribe. Where he most significantly goes off the rails is in dismissing the possibility that the environmental trigger here is psychological, because that is something else that these twelve girls share in common. They are all part of the same very small community, attending the same, small school. He writes, now in scare quotes "Now the “establishment” has diagnosed them with “Conversion Disorder” – a disease resulting in similar symptoms...but usually brought on by some kind of stress or traumatic event." Actually it wasn't the "establishment", it was a ''neurologist'' who actually examined eleven of the twelve girls, ran a battery of tests, ruled out anything else that could link these together, and by the process of elimination, but also from direct examination and history-taking et cetera concluded that this is a case of mass psychogenic illness, which happens, this is a known phenomena, and cannot be easily dismissed. I actually did find [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ca50O2nrI video of some of the girls displaying their symptoms] So this is similar to prevous cases that we've talked about, like if you remember the cheerleader [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Desiree_Jennings Desiree Jennings] who belived she had vaccine-induced dystonia. Movement disorders can be diagnosed by video because what's important is how they're moving, so it's not a substitute for a complete neurological exam, but you can actually tell a lot just from a video of what the movement itself is. In this case, what I'm seeing is something that does look like tics. I think that 'tics' is the best technical description for the kind of movement that it is, a sudden, somewhat bizarre facial movement or gesture, maybe involving a vocalisation. This could be compatible with a tic disorder or Tourette's syndrome. I don't think I can say based upon this video alone that it's psychogenic, that it's psychological, because tics can be almost anything. Although I will say that it's a little atypical, it certainly could be psychogenic also. I think the fact that there are twelve unrelated girls who are all affected over a short period of time without there being any detectable environmental trigger or other environmental trigger is pretty strong inference that it is psychogenic. These psychogenic episodes are much more common in women than men for whatever reason, so kind of fits that profile as well. So it's interesting, I think that this is a difficult kind of a situation to deal with in the press, in public. This is something that should be dealt with between these families' physicians and them, because it's very delicate.

R: Yeah and I think that the public aspect of this and the Desiree Jenkins [sic] case actually make it more difficult because of the bias against psychological...

S: Mmm hmm

R: ...illnesses. You know I think that people would rather have an obvious physical disability they can point to as opposed to a psychological illness, just because we see people with psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...illnesses as "nutso freaks", you know. So without the public aspect I think there would be a better chance of them actually confirming that it's psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...and getting the correct treatment.

S: Yeah I agree there's a stigma attached to it and because when it's made public, I mean these girls are going on the news, going on TV, that invests them in the reality, the organic bases of the illness to an extent that would make it very hard for them to sort of just give it up. And it's hard enough as it is to get people to accept the diagnosis that it's psychogenic and to make it stop. It's something that's incredibly hard to treat. It becomes almost impossible if now it's been made public and they have that angle to it, again like with Desiree Jennings, I mean she's become so invested in that that I think it would be hopeless to try to get them to get past this. So it's unfortunately very counterproductive. But if you reads the comments, a lot of people made the analogy to the Salem witch trials where you essentially had a small group of young teenaged girls who started manifesting symptoms that were blamed on withes at the time, but you know in certain ways very similar.

R: Yeah, and when you start blaming vaccines instead, which helps feed into the idea that vaccines are dangerous and convinces more people to not get vaccinated, then you could even say that they have a similar level of danger to them as the witch trials.

S: Yeah, I mean this is a with hunt against vaccines, it is very similar.

== Who's That Noisy? (26:23)==

S: Alright well let's move on. We're going to... Let's move on first to Who's That Noisy. Evan, give us the answer to last week.

E: Here we go, last week's Who's That Noisy.

Recording: There's no such thing as a psychic.

E: You guys remember that?

S: Yes.

J: Yes I do! That's from TV.

E: "There's no such thing as a psychic."

S: Nope. It's from a movie.

E: Now, it sounds like it's from TV. It's actually from a movie. The movie is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_wood Ed Wood]...

S: (laughs) That's a funny movie.

E: ...one of my ''all time'' favourite movies, wonderful!

B: Really? I've never seen that, I have to see that.

E: Oh you must see, ''must see'' movie Bob, you will not be disappointed. It is incred... One of Tim Burton's finest in my opinion.

B: Yeah, Burton and Depp, how could I not see that?

E: Right? You totally should see it, they were wonderful. But that was actor Jeffery Jones, portraying the Amazing Criswell...

S: Mmm hmm

E: ...who was of course was an actual psychic at the time, well...

S: Stage psychic.

E: ...not really psychic. Yeah, a showman, (laughs) because he basically admitted in that same scene in the movie to Ed Wood (laughs), said it's all horseshit.

S: Yeah.

E: (laughs) That's basically what he says. 'I just guess. People believe be 'cause I wear a tuxedo.' (laughs)

S: Yeah, it's all showmanship.

E: So, while he admitted that certainly to his friends, he was quoted as saying once that he once had the gift, but he lost it when he started taking money.

S: Yeeahh, see you can't take that evil money, otherwise yeah, your powers go away.

E: Yeah, your cosmic energy there plummets at that point.

E: Right, isn't it like that James Bond movie where the tarot card reader, her power went away because she had sex with James Bond?

(all laugh)

B: Oh yeah! Oh my god! (laughing)

R: That is one powerful cock.

S: Yes, you so you can't take money or have sex.

J: He stole the mojo. (Austin Power voice)

E: And that's what Sean Connery said...

S: (laughs)

E: ..."I bet you didn't shee that coming. (laughs)" (Sean Connery accent)

S: Although it might have been not Sean Connery. I think is was Roger Moore.

E: (simultaneously) Or Roger Moore?

S: Right. Who got that quote?

E: So, a lot of people... Well a lot of people actually guessed it was The Mentalist, right, you know?

S: Mmm Hmm Similar thing.

E: 'Cause it's similar, but you know there was that music in the background, right Rebecca that you noticed last week...

R: Yeah.

E: ...and, so it was... You have to know the movie perhaps as in depth as I know it which is almost line for line. We had no winners.

R: Oh! Wow.

E: ...so I was able to stump...

S: Clean sweep.

E: ...our listening audience.

S: Good job.

E: So we're gonna do something a little different this week.

S: A ''lot'' different.

E: Aah you're right. It is a lot different.

S: It's a kind of an experiment which we do in January.

E: (laughs)

B: I'm scared.

S: (laughs)

E: Don't be...

R: Hold me.

E: Don't be frightened, hold my hand, here, hold my hand. Eeh! That's not my hand. We're gonna have a Who's That Noisy scavenger hunt. So instead of me playing a noisy for you this week, I am tasking ''you'', the listening audience to come up with the correct noisy for ''us'', ''and'' the listening audience of course. You must submit to us... I challenge you to submit to us...

J: (laughs)

E: ...the dumbest thing (laughs) that in your opinion, that a politician has said concerning science or a scientific statement that is just so stupid that a politician must have said it. Send us your submissions, send us your audio clip.

S: Yeah it's got to be an actual audio clip, not a...

E: ...had to be an audio clip.

S: ...a link to it, not a transcript, we need the audio.

R: It is a podcast.

S: Yeah.

E: After all it is.

S: And brief.

E: And yes, brief.

J: And your underwear, yes.

E: Yes.

S: Right.

E: I understand politicians, their mouths move all the time, and lots of dumb things come out of their mouths but, keep it brief.

S: And give us the information, you're not trying to stump us. We will select the dumbest thing that... statement that people send us and we'll play that next week.

E: And we'll play it next week...

S: Yeah.

e: ...for your listening enjoyment. Alright? So you have your homework, and we're lookin' forward to seeing what you come up with.

S: Yeah.

E: I know I am. (laughs)

S: It should be...

E: This could be hilarious.

S: ... should be fun, should be fun.

E: Yep.

S: Aah, okay, well thank you Evan.

E: You are welcome.

== Questions and Emails (30:18) ==
=== Question: Sounds in the Sky ===

S: We're gonna do one email this week, and Rebecca, you're gonna take the lead on this, do you want to read the email?

R: Sure, here we go. Michael from Ohio writes:

<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

R: And so I checked it out, and it's true, strange sounds coming from the sky have taken YouTube by storm. I've taken this story because as you all know, I do have an ongoing segment on SGU called Things People See in the Sky and Mistake for Other Possibly Paranormal Things. This is related, only instead of seeing, it's hearing. And I'm gonna give you a warning at right from the outset here: I'm gonna explain some of the videos, but as soon as I do, someone's going to upload a new video using a new trick, and somebody's will have to start all over again to debunk it. So remember a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That said, creepy sounds are probably about as common as creepy sights, but for some reason, photos of UFOs tend to get more attention than recordings of those weird bleeps and bloops and rumbles in our lives. The rumbles, when they have a most likely natural origin are known as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontide brontides], which we've talked about before. They're deep, booming sounds that seem to come from very far away, like there's no definite source that you can pinpoint. They're often heard near bodies of water, like the with Guns of Seneca at the Seneca Lake in Ney York, or the Barisal Guns near the Bay of Bengal. They could be caused by thunder, natural gas explosions, seismic activity, or some people even think possibly waves of water hitting at resonant hollows. And they can easily be confused with man-made sounds like sonic booms, artillery, construction, stuff like that. There's also the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop Bloop], I think we've talked about that. It's an ultra-low frequency sound that was detected underwater by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1997, that's NOAA. It was several times louder than our loudest known creature which is the blue whale, and nobody knows what caused it [see episode 385, news item [http://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_385#Bloop_Solved_.2815:35.29 Bloop Solved] for an update]. NOAA in addition to the Bloop has found five other sounds of unknown origin under water, so that's kind of scary and fun. And even fairly well known animals can make sounds that scare people, like owls, foxes, fisher cats, and even rabbits can actually sound like people screaming for instance. Very creepy sounds. So all of these weird sounds can freak people out in much the same way that satellites and the Moon and stars and weather balloons can freak people out when they're not sure what they're looking at. So ordinarily if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos of people who have recorded sounds that genuinely scare the crap out of them. However if you go on YouTube to search for strange sounds these days, you will most likely only find ''lies''. Bald faced lies. And that's what our email had written in about. I first became aware of these about around January 12th or so, that's when blogs started picking up on this huge influx of videos featuring creepy sounds. All that week, there were an insane number of videos being uploaded from all around the world like the emailer says - the US, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Australia, and they all claim to demonstrate a creepy sound, sort of like, most of them sound sort of like trumpets signalling the oncoming apocalypse or something. So I'll play you [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuMWhjbkEOM an example]:

Recording: (Male voice with British accent) Can anyone else hear that noise? (low rumbling sound) The hell is that? (low rumbling sound)

R: Okay, that was from Melbourne Australia, and that's one of the first ones I saw. Now, I found that one kind of suspicious, because in the video there's no one around, even though the guy seems to be asking someone if anyone can hear the noise. So I decided to do a little digging. I got the audio off of YouTube, and I threw it into Audacity, which is the free sound editing program that we all use to record this show, and I noticed that it's in stereo, which made me very happy because I don't know a whole lot about audio, but I do know that there's this really neat trick that you can do with a stereo track that you think might have been manipulated. You can also use this trick if you want to make karaoke songs. You see if the manipulator of the video is particularly lazy or just ignorant, they might actually record their audio in mono, but then add a stereo sound effect to it. Stereo meaning there's a left channel and a right channel, so you hear different things in each ear. Mono, you hear the same thing in each ear. So Audacity has this free plugin called Centre Pan Removal, which basically inverts one of the channels and then puts the audio back together again, causing the mono sounds to cancel each other out, and you're left hearing only the stereo sound. So I did that, and ten seconds later, this is the exact same clip you just heard but with the mono gone:

Recording: *silence* (low rumbling sound)

R: So you may notice there's a bit of silence where there used to be a man talking...

Recording: (low rumbling sound)

R: ...and then the creepy sound. Isn't that convenient?

S: So this is a stereo effect added to a mono track.

R: Exactly.

S: Yeah.

R: ''Or'' maybe the angels of the apocalypse broadcast in ''magical'' stereo that bypasses mono devices. (sarcastic) Or yes, this is actually a complete and utter fake.

E: (inaudible)

R: And not just like a "whoops I made a mistake, I thought it was a ghost" but it's not fake, this is someone who went into an audio program and added that sound. And as for the actual sound, it doesn't really matter what it is, and it could be any number of things, but I happened to have watched Kevin Smith's film [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_State_%282011_film%29 Red State] last month. It's free on Netflix watch instantly. And spoiler alert everyone, don't listen if you haven't seen the movie, if you want to see the movie, I'll be honest, not that good of a movie, but spoiler.

E: (snickers)

R: At the end of the movie, there's an apocalyptic trumpeting sound and seriously, this is a big spoiler even though, not a good movie.

S: (snickers)

R: The trumpeting in the movie is actually caused by some kids playing a prank on a Christian doomsday cult. So I thought this sound you just heard in the Melbourne clip, I thought it sounded kind of familiar, so I went and found that [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItD6dQa5ncw clip of Red State], and I will play it for you now.

Recording: (low, rumbling trumpet sounds and faint sound of men crying out)

E: Now, where have I heard that before? Ummm...

R: (snickers) So yeah.

E: Sounds so familiar.

R: ...that should sound pretty familiar to you.

B: Yeeeah.

R: I mean maybe, maybe it's not, maybe it's something different, but yeah, those do sound remarkably similar to me, and there are a number of other videos that use a remarkably similar sound. So you can keep an ear out for that. I was ready to just say that this is a sound that comes from some psy-fi movie, but just a few hours ago, one of my Twitter followers notinmyname2050, I'm sorry I don't know your real name, but I guess that's appropriate for your username. But anyway, notinmyname2050 pointed me to a video by YouTuber Voodoo 6, in which he figures out that that came directly from the 2008 film [transcriber's note: 2005] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_%282005_film%29 War of the Worlds]. So...

S: Yeah, I recognised that.

R: Okay.

B: Yeah.

R: See yeah, I like most people skipped that film.

S: No, that was the...

E: Just 'cause Tom Cruise was in it.

S: I mean it was a mediocre movie all things considered, but I loved the Martian or whatever machines and they made a noise that was legitimately scary.

R: Yeah, and that's the thing. Some of these videos are pretty scary, if you can sort of put yourself in that mindset.

S: Yeah.

R: Sure the short version is - don't worry, the apocalypse is not until October at least.

S: That's right.

R: So you're fine.

S: Right. Alright well thanks Rebecca, let's move on to our interview.

== Interview with Sean Carroll (40:00) ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

<blockquote>There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
</blockquote>

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T08:09:11Z

Jessiessica: /* Interview with Sean Carroll (40:00) */ added timestamp

{{transcribing all
|transcriber = jessiessica
}}

{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 341
|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
|episodeIcon = File:tripod.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = SC: Sean Carroll
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2012-01-28.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,40106.0.html
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov Isaac Asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/ Neurologica: Stem Cells for Blindness]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/ Science-Based Medicine: Chiropractic Neurology]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness (18:30) ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/ Bethel Buzz News: (UPDATED) Cause of Sick LeRoy, NY Teens Remains a Mystery (With Poll!)]

S: One more medical news item by coincidence. Again, a number of people sent this to us. This has a little bit of a local angle for us, also a chiropractor. Again, this is not by design, this is just one of the things we wanted to talk about. So in a small town, LeRoy New York, twelve teenaged girls have come down with what the presses calling a mystery illness. You guys hears about this?

E: Mystery science illness 3000 (inaudible).

J: I sure did!

S: Yeah, they all attend the same school. It's a middle school high school. And all twelve of them are displaying symptoms that are being described as Tourette-like symptoms, that they're having these involuntary motor tics or movements. The question is why would twelve girls all come down with the same constellation of symptoms over a short period of time. So of course the CDC has gotten involved. There is one neurologist who examined I think eleven of the twelve girls, who has been doing an extensive testing on all of them, trying to figure out if there anything environmental. But what caught our eye about this is this story is there is a chiropractor by the name of Russell Caram who is local to us, he's in a town nearby us, wrote an article about this situation, and starts off okay, I mean I think a little bit clunky, but saying that there's a cluster of cases, so there has to be an explanation that can accommodate that. It can't be genetic 'cause they're not genetically related, and eventually comes to the conclusion that it's got to be something environmental, which I think is actually a reasonable conclusion. But then I think he inappropriately narrows the list of what counts as environmental. Says that well okay toxins and infections, seems that they've been ruled out. So he comes to the conclusion that the environmental trigger was probably the HPV vaccine - Gardasil or Cervarix - that it would explain the timing, the age - why it's all girls. So essentially he's trying to blame vaccines on these symptoms. And he goes on to talk about that there's high levels of aluminum in the vaccine and that could be a cause of toxicity, and then he goes on from there to saying how the government's untrustworthy, and we can't trust the government to investigate this properly. So at the end, it just became an anti-vaccine crank diatribe. Where he most significantly goes off the rails is in dismissing the possibility that the environmental trigger here is psychological, because that is something else that these twelve girls share in common. They are all part of the same very small community, attending the same, small school. He writes, now in scare quotes "Now the “establishment” has diagnosed them with “Conversion Disorder” – a disease resulting in similar symptoms...but usually brought on by some kind of stress or traumatic event." Actually it wasn't the "establishment", it was a ''neurologist'' who actually examined eleven of the twelve girls, ran a battery of tests, ruled out anything else that could link these together, and by the process of elimination, but also from direct examination and history-taking et cetera concluded that this is a case of mass psychogenic illness, which happens, this is a known phenomena, and cannot be easily dismissed. I actually did find [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ca50O2nrI video of some of the girls displaying their symptoms] So this is similar to prevous cases that we've talked about, like if you remember the cheerleader [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Desiree_Jennings Desiree Jennings] who belived she had vaccine-induced dystonia. Movement disorders can be diagnosed by video because what's important is how they're moving, so it's not a substitute for a complete neurological exam, but you can actually tell a lot just from a video of what the movement itself is. In this case, what I'm seeing is something that does look like tics. I think that 'tics' is the best technical description for the kind of movement that it is, a sudden, somewhat bizarre facial movement or gesture, maybe involving a vocalisation. This could be compatible with a tic disorder or Tourette's syndrome. I don't think I can say based upon this video alone that it's psychogenic, that it's psychological, because tics can be almost anything. Although I will say that it's a little atypical, it certainly could be psychogenic also. I think the fact that there are twelve unrelated girls who are all affected over a short period of time without there being any detectable environmental trigger or other environmental trigger is pretty strong inference that it is psychogenic. These psychogenic episodes are much more common in women than men for whatever reason, so kind of fits that profile as well. So it's interesting, I think that this is a difficult kind of a situation to deal with in the press, in public. This is something that should be dealt with between these families' physicians and them, because it's very delicate.

R: Yeah and I think that the public aspect of this and the Desiree Jenkins [sic] case actually make it more difficult because of the bias against psychological...

S: Mmm hmm

R: ...illnesses. You know I think that people would rather have an obvious physical disability they can point to as opposed to a psychological illness, just because we see people with psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...illnesses as "nutso freaks", you know. So without the public aspect I think there would be a better chance of them actually confirming that it's psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...and getting the correct treatment.

S: Yeah I agree there's a stigma attached to it and because when it's made public, I mean these girls are going on the news, going on TV, that invests them in the reality, the organic bases of the illness to an extent that would make it very hard for them to sort of just give it up. And it's hard enough as it is to get people to accept the diagnosis that it's psychogenic and to make it stop. It's something that's incredibly hard to treat. It becomes almost impossible if now it's been made public and they have that angle to it, again like with Desiree Jennings, I mean she's become so invested in that that I think it would be hopeless to try to get them to get past this. So it's unfortunately very counterproductive. But if you reads the comments, a lot of people made the analogy to the Salem witch trials where you essentially had a small group of young teenaged girls who started manifesting symptoms that were blamed on withes at the time, but you know in certain ways very similar.

R: Yeah, and when you start blaming vaccines instead, which helps feed into the idea that vaccines are dangerous and convinces more people to not get vaccinated, then you could even say that they have a similar level of danger to them as the witch trials.

S: Yeah, I mean this is a with hunt against vaccines, it is very similar.

== Who's That Noisy? (26:23)==

S: Alright well let's move on. We're going to... Let's move on first to Who's That Noisy. Evan, give us the answer to last week.

E: Here we go, last week's Who's That Noisy.

Recording: There's no such thing as a psychic.

E: You guys remember that?

S: Yes.

J: Yes I do! That's from TV.

E: "There's no such thing as a psychic."

S: Nope. It's from a movie.

E: Now, it sounds like it's from TV. It's actually from a movie. The movie is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_wood Ed Wood]...

S: (laughs) That's a funny movie.

E: ...one of my ''all time'' favourite movies, wonderful!

B: Really? I've never seen that, I have to see that.

E: Oh you must see, ''must see'' movie Bob, you will not be disappointed. It is incred... One of Tim Burton's finest in my opinion.

B: Yeah, Burton and Depp, how could I not see that?

E: Right? You totally should see it, they were wonderful. But that was actor Jeffery Jones, portraying the Amazing Criswell...

S: Mmm hmm

E: ...who was of course was an actual psychic at the time, well...

S: Stage psychic.

E: ...not really psychic. Yeah, a showman, (laughs) because he basically admitted in that same scene in the movie to Ed Wood (laughs), said it's all horseshit.

S: Yeah.

E: (laughs) That's basically what he says. 'I just guess. People believe be 'cause I wear a tuxedo.' (laughs)

S: Yeah, it's all showmanship.

E: So, while he admitted that certainly to his friends, he was quoted as saying once that he once had the gift, but he lost it when he started taking money.

S: Yeeahh, see you can't take that evil money, otherwise yeah, your powers go away.

E: Yeah, your cosmic energy there plummets at that point.

E: Right, isn't it like that James Bond movie where the tarot card reader, her power went away because she had sex with James Bond?

(all laugh)

B: Oh yeah! Oh my god! (laughing)

R: That is one powerful cock.

S: Yes, you so you can't take money or have sex.

J: He stole the mojo. (Austin Power voice)

E: And that's what Sean Connery said...

S: (laughs)

E: ..."I bet you didn't shee that coming. (laughs)" (Sean Connery accent)

S: Although it might have been not Sean Connery. I think is was Roger Moore.

E: (simultaneously) Or Roger Moore?

S: Right. Who got that quote?

E: So, a lot of people... Well a lot of people actually guessed it was The Mentalist, right, you know?

S: Mmm Hmm Similar thing.

E: 'Cause it's similar, but you know there was that music in the background, right Rebecca that you noticed last week...

R: Yeah.

E: ...and, so it was... You have to know the movie perhaps as in depth as I know it which is almost line for line. We had no winners.

R: Oh! Wow.

E: ...so I was able to stump...

S: Clean sweep.

E: ...our listening audience.

S: Good job.

E: So we're gonna do something a little different this week.

S: A ''lot'' different.

E: Aah you're right. It is a lot different.

S: It's a kind of an experiment which we do in January.

E: (laughs)

B: I'm scared.

S: (laughs)

E: Don't be...

R: Hold me.

E: Don't be frightened, hold my hand, here, hold my hand. Eeh! That's not my hand. We're gonna have a Who's That Noisy scavenger hunt. So instead of me playing a noisy for you this week, I am tasking ''you'', the listening audience to come up with the correct noisy for ''us'', ''and'' the listening audience of course. You must submit to us... I challenge you to submit to us...

J: (laughs)

E: ...the dumbest thing (laughs) that in your opinion, that a politician has said concerning science or a scientific statement that is just so stupid that a politician must have said it. Send us your submissions, send us your audio clip.

S: Yeah it's got to be an actual audio clip, not a...

E: ...had to be an audio clip.

S: ...a link to it, not a transcript, we need the audio.

R: It is a podcast.

S: Yeah.

E: After all it is.

S: And brief.

E: And yes, brief.

J: And your underwear, yes.

E: Yes.

S: Right.

E: I understand politicians, their mouths move all the time, and lots of dumb things come out of their mouths but, keep it brief.

S: And give us the information, you're not trying to stump us. We will select the dumbest thing that... statement that people send us and we'll play that next week.

E: And we'll play it next week...

S: Yeah.

e: ...for your listening enjoyment. Alright? So you have your homework, and we're lookin' forward to seeing what you come up with.

S: Yeah.

E: I know I am. (laughs)

S: It should be...

E: This could be hilarious.

S: ... should be fun, should be fun.

E: Yep.

S: Aah, okay, well thank you Evan.

E: You are welcome.

== Questions and Emails (30:18) ==
=== Question: Sounds in the Sky ===

S: We're gonna do one email this week, and Rebecca, you're gonna take the lead on this, do you want to read the email?

R: Sure, here we go. Michael from Ohio writes:

<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

R: And so I checked it out, and it's true, strange sounds coming from the sky have taken YouTube by storm. I've taken this story because as you all know, I do have an ongoing segment on SGU called Things People See in the Sky and Mistake for Other Possibly Paranormal Things. This is related, only instead of seeing, it's hearing. And I'm gonna give you a warning at right from the outset here: I'm gonna explain some of the videos, but as soon as I do, someone's going to upload a new video using a new trick, and somebody's will have to start all over again to debunk it. So remember a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That said, creepy sounds are probably about as common as creepy sights, but for some reason, photos of UFOs tend to get more attention than recordings of those weird bleeps and bloops and rumbles in our lives. The rumbles, when they have a most likely natural origin are known as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontide brontides], which we've talked about before. They're deep, booming sounds that seem to come from very far away, like there's no definite source that you can pinpoint. They're often heard near bodies of water, like the with Guns of Seneca at the Seneca Lake in Ney York, or the Barisal Guns near the Bay of Bengal. They could be caused by thunder, natural gas explosions, seismic activity, or some people even think possibly waves of water hitting at resonant hollows. And they can easily be confused with man-made sounds like sonic booms, artillery, construction, stuff like that. There's also the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop Bloop], I think we've talked about that. It's an ultra-low frequency sound that was detected underwater by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1997, that's NOAA. It was several times louder than our loudest known creature which is the blue whale, and nobody knows what caused it [see episode 385, news item [http://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_385#Bloop_Solved_.2815:35.29 Bloop Solved] for an update]. NOAA in addition to the Bloop has found five other sounds of unknown origin under water, so that's kind of scary and fun. And even fairly well known animals can make sounds that scare people, like owls, foxes, fisher cats, and even rabbits can actually sound like people screaming for instance. Very creepy sounds. So all of these weird sounds can freak people out in much the same way that satellites and the Moon and stars and weather balloons can freak people out when they're not sure what they're looking at. So ordinarily if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos of people who have recorded sounds that genuinely scare the crap out of them. However if you go on YouTube to search for strange sounds these days, you will most likely only find ''lies''. Bald faced lies. And that's what our email had written in about. I first became aware of these about around January 12th or so, that's when blogs started picking up on this huge influx of videos featuring creepy sounds. All that week, there were an insane number of videos being uploaded from all around the world like the emailer says - the US, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Australia, and they all claim to demonstrate a creepy sound, sort of like, most of them sound sort of like trumpets signalling the oncoming apocalypse or something. So I'll play you [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuMWhjbkEOM an example]:

Recording: (Male voice with British accent) Can anyone else hear that noise? (low rumbling sound) The hell is that? (low rumbling sound)

R: Okay, that was from Melbourne Australia, and that's one of the first ones I saw. Now, I found that one kind of suspicious, because in the video there's no one around, even though the guy seems to be asking someone if anyone can hear the noise. So I decided to do a little digging. I got the audio off of YouTube, and I threw it into Audacity, which is the free sound editing program that we all use to record this show, and I noticed that it's in stereo, which made me very happy because I don't know a whole lot about audio, but I do know that there's this really neat trick that you can do with a stereo track that you think might have been manipulated. You can also use this trick if you want to make karaoke songs. You see if the manipulator of the video is particularly lazy or just ignorant, they might actually record their audio in mono, but then add a stereo sound effect to it. Stereo meaning there's a left channel and a right channel, so you hear different things in each ear. Mono, you hear the same thing in each ear. So Audacity has this free plugin called Centre Pan Removal, which basically inverts one of the channels and then puts the audio back together again, causing the mono sounds to cancel each other out, and you're left hearing only the stereo sound. So I did that, and ten seconds later, this is the exact same clip you just heard but with the mono gone:

Recording: *silence* (low rumbling sound)

R: So you may notice there's a bit of silence where there used to be a man talking...

Recording: (low rumbling sound)

R: ...and then the creepy sound. Isn't that convenient?

S: So this is a stereo effect added to a mono track.

R: Exactly.

S: Yeah.

R: ''Or'' maybe the angels of the apocalypse broadcast in ''magical'' stereo that bypasses mono devices. (sarcastic) Or yes, this is actually a complete and utter fake.

E: (inaudible)

R: And not just like a "whoops I made a mistake, I thought it was a ghost" but it's not fake, this is someone who went into an audio program and added that sound. And as for the actual sound, it doesn't really matter what it is, and it could be any number of things, but I happened to have watched Kevin Smith's film [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_State_%282011_film%29 Red State] last month. It's free on Netflix watch instantly. And spoiler alert everyone, don't listen if you haven't seen the movie, if you want to see the movie, I'll be honest, not that good of a movie, but spoiler.

E: (snickers)

R: At the end of the movie, there's an apocalyptic trumpeting sound and seriously, this is a big spoiler even though, not a good movie.

S: (snickers)

R: The trumpeting in the movie is actually caused by some kids playing a prank on a Christian doomsday cult. So I thought this sound you just heard in the Melbourne clip, I thought it sounded kind of familiar, so I went and found that [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItD6dQa5ncw clip of Red State], and I will play it for you now.

Recording: (low, rumbling trumpet sounds and faint sound of men crying out)

E: Now, where have I heard that before? Ummm...

R: (snickers) So yeah.

E: Sounds so familiar.

R: ...that should sound pretty familiar to you.

B: Yeeeah.

R: I mean maybe, maybe it's not, maybe it's something different, but yeah, those do sound remarkably similar to me, and there are a number of other videos that use a remarkably similar sound. So you can keep an ear out for that. I was ready to just say that this is a sound that comes from some psy-fi movie, but just a few hours ago, one of my Twitter followers notinmyname2050, I'm sorry I don't know your real name, but I guess that's appropriate for your username. But anyway, notinmyname2050 pointed me to a video by YouTuber Voodoo 6, in which he figures out that that came directly from the 2008 film [transcriber's note: 2005] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_%282005_film%29 War of the Worlds]. So...

S: Yeah, I recognised that.

R: Okay.

B: Yeah.

R: See yeah, I like most people skipped that film.

s: No, that was the...

E: Just 'cause Tom Cruise was in it.

S: I mean it was a mediocre movie all things considered, but I loved the Martian or whatever machines and they made a noise that was legitimately scary.

R: Yeah, and that's the thing. Some of these videos are pretty scary, if you can sort of put yourself in that mindset.

S: Yeah.

R: Sure the short version is - don't worry, the apocalypse is not until October at least.

S: That's right.

R: So you're fine.

S: Right. Alright well thanks Rebecca, let's move on to our interview.

== Interview with Sean Carroll (40:00) ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

<blockquote>There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
</blockquote>

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T08:08:39Z

Jessiessica: /* Question: Sounds in the Sky */ Completed transcript

{{transcribing all
|transcriber = jessiessica
}}

{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 341
|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
|episodeIcon = File:tripod.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = SC: Sean Carroll
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2012-01-28.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,40106.0.html
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov Isaac Asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/ Neurologica: Stem Cells for Blindness]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/ Science-Based Medicine: Chiropractic Neurology]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness (18:30) ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/ Bethel Buzz News: (UPDATED) Cause of Sick LeRoy, NY Teens Remains a Mystery (With Poll!)]

S: One more medical news item by coincidence. Again, a number of people sent this to us. This has a little bit of a local angle for us, also a chiropractor. Again, this is not by design, this is just one of the things we wanted to talk about. So in a small town, LeRoy New York, twelve teenaged girls have come down with what the presses calling a mystery illness. You guys hears about this?

E: Mystery science illness 3000 (inaudible).

J: I sure did!

S: Yeah, they all attend the same school. It's a middle school high school. And all twelve of them are displaying symptoms that are being described as Tourette-like symptoms, that they're having these involuntary motor tics or movements. The question is why would twelve girls all come down with the same constellation of symptoms over a short period of time. So of course the CDC has gotten involved. There is one neurologist who examined I think eleven of the twelve girls, who has been doing an extensive testing on all of them, trying to figure out if there anything environmental. But what caught our eye about this is this story is there is a chiropractor by the name of Russell Caram who is local to us, he's in a town nearby us, wrote an article about this situation, and starts off okay, I mean I think a little bit clunky, but saying that there's a cluster of cases, so there has to be an explanation that can accommodate that. It can't be genetic 'cause they're not genetically related, and eventually comes to the conclusion that it's got to be something environmental, which I think is actually a reasonable conclusion. But then I think he inappropriately narrows the list of what counts as environmental. Says that well okay toxins and infections, seems that they've been ruled out. So he comes to the conclusion that the environmental trigger was probably the HPV vaccine - Gardasil or Cervarix - that it would explain the timing, the age - why it's all girls. So essentially he's trying to blame vaccines on these symptoms. And he goes on to talk about that there's high levels of aluminum in the vaccine and that could be a cause of toxicity, and then he goes on from there to saying how the government's untrustworthy, and we can't trust the government to investigate this properly. So at the end, it just became an anti-vaccine crank diatribe. Where he most significantly goes off the rails is in dismissing the possibility that the environmental trigger here is psychological, because that is something else that these twelve girls share in common. They are all part of the same very small community, attending the same, small school. He writes, now in scare quotes "Now the “establishment” has diagnosed them with “Conversion Disorder” – a disease resulting in similar symptoms...but usually brought on by some kind of stress or traumatic event." Actually it wasn't the "establishment", it was a ''neurologist'' who actually examined eleven of the twelve girls, ran a battery of tests, ruled out anything else that could link these together, and by the process of elimination, but also from direct examination and history-taking et cetera concluded that this is a case of mass psychogenic illness, which happens, this is a known phenomena, and cannot be easily dismissed. I actually did find [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ca50O2nrI video of some of the girls displaying their symptoms] So this is similar to prevous cases that we've talked about, like if you remember the cheerleader [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Desiree_Jennings Desiree Jennings] who belived she had vaccine-induced dystonia. Movement disorders can be diagnosed by video because what's important is how they're moving, so it's not a substitute for a complete neurological exam, but you can actually tell a lot just from a video of what the movement itself is. In this case, what I'm seeing is something that does look like tics. I think that 'tics' is the best technical description for the kind of movement that it is, a sudden, somewhat bizarre facial movement or gesture, maybe involving a vocalisation. This could be compatible with a tic disorder or Tourette's syndrome. I don't think I can say based upon this video alone that it's psychogenic, that it's psychological, because tics can be almost anything. Although I will say that it's a little atypical, it certainly could be psychogenic also. I think the fact that there are twelve unrelated girls who are all affected over a short period of time without there being any detectable environmental trigger or other environmental trigger is pretty strong inference that it is psychogenic. These psychogenic episodes are much more common in women than men for whatever reason, so kind of fits that profile as well. So it's interesting, I think that this is a difficult kind of a situation to deal with in the press, in public. This is something that should be dealt with between these families' physicians and them, because it's very delicate.

R: Yeah and I think that the public aspect of this and the Desiree Jenkins [sic] case actually make it more difficult because of the bias against psychological...

S: Mmm hmm

R: ...illnesses. You know I think that people would rather have an obvious physical disability they can point to as opposed to a psychological illness, just because we see people with psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...illnesses as "nutso freaks", you know. So without the public aspect I think there would be a better chance of them actually confirming that it's psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...and getting the correct treatment.

S: Yeah I agree there's a stigma attached to it and because when it's made public, I mean these girls are going on the news, going on TV, that invests them in the reality, the organic bases of the illness to an extent that would make it very hard for them to sort of just give it up. And it's hard enough as it is to get people to accept the diagnosis that it's psychogenic and to make it stop. It's something that's incredibly hard to treat. It becomes almost impossible if now it's been made public and they have that angle to it, again like with Desiree Jennings, I mean she's become so invested in that that I think it would be hopeless to try to get them to get past this. So it's unfortunately very counterproductive. But if you reads the comments, a lot of people made the analogy to the Salem witch trials where you essentially had a small group of young teenaged girls who started manifesting symptoms that were blamed on withes at the time, but you know in certain ways very similar.

R: Yeah, and when you start blaming vaccines instead, which helps feed into the idea that vaccines are dangerous and convinces more people to not get vaccinated, then you could even say that they have a similar level of danger to them as the witch trials.

S: Yeah, I mean this is a with hunt against vaccines, it is very similar.

== Who's That Noisy? (26:23)==

S: Alright well let's move on. We're going to... Let's move on first to Who's That Noisy. Evan, give us the answer to last week.

E: Here we go, last week's Who's That Noisy.

Recording: There's no such thing as a psychic.

E: You guys remember that?

S: Yes.

J: Yes I do! That's from TV.

E: "There's no such thing as a psychic."

S: Nope. It's from a movie.

E: Now, it sounds like it's from TV. It's actually from a movie. The movie is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_wood Ed Wood]...

S: (laughs) That's a funny movie.

E: ...one of my ''all time'' favourite movies, wonderful!

B: Really? I've never seen that, I have to see that.

E: Oh you must see, ''must see'' movie Bob, you will not be disappointed. It is incred... One of Tim Burton's finest in my opinion.

B: Yeah, Burton and Depp, how could I not see that?

E: Right? You totally should see it, they were wonderful. But that was actor Jeffery Jones, portraying the Amazing Criswell...

S: Mmm hmm

E: ...who was of course was an actual psychic at the time, well...

S: Stage psychic.

E: ...not really psychic. Yeah, a showman, (laughs) because he basically admitted in that same scene in the movie to Ed Wood (laughs), said it's all horseshit.

S: Yeah.

E: (laughs) That's basically what he says. 'I just guess. People believe be 'cause I wear a tuxedo.' (laughs)

S: Yeah, it's all showmanship.

E: So, while he admitted that certainly to his friends, he was quoted as saying once that he once had the gift, but he lost it when he started taking money.

S: Yeeahh, see you can't take that evil money, otherwise yeah, your powers go away.

E: Yeah, your cosmic energy there plummets at that point.

E: Right, isn't it like that James Bond movie where the tarot card reader, her power went away because she had sex with James Bond?

(all laugh)

B: Oh yeah! Oh my god! (laughing)

R: That is one powerful cock.

S: Yes, you so you can't take money or have sex.

J: He stole the mojo. (Austin Power voice)

E: And that's what Sean Connery said...

S: (laughs)

E: ..."I bet you didn't shee that coming. (laughs)" (Sean Connery accent)

S: Although it might have been not Sean Connery. I think is was Roger Moore.

E: (simultaneously) Or Roger Moore?

S: Right. Who got that quote?

E: So, a lot of people... Well a lot of people actually guessed it was The Mentalist, right, you know?

S: Mmm Hmm Similar thing.

E: 'Cause it's similar, but you know there was that music in the background, right Rebecca that you noticed last week...

R: Yeah.

E: ...and, so it was... You have to know the movie perhaps as in depth as I know it which is almost line for line. We had no winners.

R: Oh! Wow.

E: ...so I was able to stump...

S: Clean sweep.

E: ...our listening audience.

S: Good job.

E: So we're gonna do something a little different this week.

S: A ''lot'' different.

E: Aah you're right. It is a lot different.

S: It's a kind of an experiment which we do in January.

E: (laughs)

B: I'm scared.

S: (laughs)

E: Don't be...

R: Hold me.

E: Don't be frightened, hold my hand, here, hold my hand. Eeh! That's not my hand. We're gonna have a Who's That Noisy scavenger hunt. So instead of me playing a noisy for you this week, I am tasking ''you'', the listening audience to come up with the correct noisy for ''us'', ''and'' the listening audience of course. You must submit to us... I challenge you to submit to us...

J: (laughs)

E: ...the dumbest thing (laughs) that in your opinion, that a politician has said concerning science or a scientific statement that is just so stupid that a politician must have said it. Send us your submissions, send us your audio clip.

S: Yeah it's got to be an actual audio clip, not a...

E: ...had to be an audio clip.

S: ...a link to it, not a transcript, we need the audio.

R: It is a podcast.

S: Yeah.

E: After all it is.

S: And brief.

E: And yes, brief.

J: And your underwear, yes.

E: Yes.

S: Right.

E: I understand politicians, their mouths move all the time, and lots of dumb things come out of their mouths but, keep it brief.

S: And give us the information, you're not trying to stump us. We will select the dumbest thing that... statement that people send us and we'll play that next week.

E: And we'll play it next week...

S: Yeah.

e: ...for your listening enjoyment. Alright? So you have your homework, and we're lookin' forward to seeing what you come up with.

S: Yeah.

E: I know I am. (laughs)

S: It should be...

E: This could be hilarious.

S: ... should be fun, should be fun.

E: Yep.

S: Aah, okay, well thank you Evan.

E: You are welcome.

== Questions and Emails (30:18) ==
=== Question: Sounds in the Sky ===

S: We're gonna do one email this week, and Rebecca, you're gonna take the lead on this, do you want to read the email?

R: Sure, here we go. Michael from Ohio writes:

<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

R: And so I checked it out, and it's true, strange sounds coming from the sky have taken YouTube by storm. I've taken this story because as you all know, I do have an ongoing segment on SGU called Things People See in the Sky and Mistake for Other Possibly Paranormal Things. This is related, only instead of seeing, it's hearing. And I'm gonna give you a warning at right from the outset here: I'm gonna explain some of the videos, but as soon as I do, someone's going to upload a new video using a new trick, and somebody's will have to start all over again to debunk it. So remember a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That said, creepy sounds are probably about as common as creepy sights, but for some reason, photos of UFOs tend to get more attention than recordings of those weird bleeps and bloops and rumbles in our lives. The rumbles, when they have a most likely natural origin are known as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontide brontides], which we've talked about before. They're deep, booming sounds that seem to come from very far away, like there's no definite source that you can pinpoint. They're often heard near bodies of water, like the with Guns of Seneca at the Seneca Lake in Ney York, or the Barisal Guns near the Bay of Bengal. They could be caused by thunder, natural gas explosions, seismic activity, or some people even think possibly waves of water hitting at resonant hollows. And they can easily be confused with man-made sounds like sonic booms, artillery, construction, stuff like that. There's also the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop Bloop], I think we've talked about that. It's an ultra-low frequency sound that was detected underwater by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1997, that's NOAA. It was several times louder than our loudest known creature which is the blue whale, and nobody knows what caused it [see episode 385, news item [http://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_385#Bloop_Solved_.2815:35.29 Bloop Solved] for an update]. NOAA in addition to the Bloop has found five other sounds of unknown origin under water, so that's kind of scary and fun. And even fairly well known animals can make sounds that scare people, like owls, foxes, fisher cats, and even rabbits can actually sound like people screaming for instance. Very creepy sounds. So all of these weird sounds can freak people out in much the same way that satellites and the Moon and stars and weather balloons can freak people out when they're not sure what they're looking at. So ordinarily if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos of people who have recorded sounds that genuinely scare the crap out of them. However if you go on YouTube to search for strange sounds these days, you will most likely only find ''lies''. Bald faced lies. And that's what our email had written in about. I first became aware of these about around January 12th or so, that's when blogs started picking up on this huge influx of videos featuring creepy sounds. All that week, there were an insane number of videos being uploaded from all around the world like the emailer says - the US, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Australia, and they all claim to demonstrate a creepy sound, sort of like, most of them sound sort of like trumpets signalling the oncoming apocalypse or something. So I'll play you [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuMWhjbkEOM an example]:

Recording: (Male voice with British accent) Can anyone else hear that noise? (low rumbling sound) The hell is that? (low rumbling sound)

R: Okay, that was from Melbourne Australia, and that's one of the first ones I saw. Now, I found that one kind of suspicious, because in the video there's no one around, even though the guy seems to be asking someone if anyone can hear the noise. So I decided to do a little digging. I got the audio off of YouTube, and I threw it into Audacity, which is the free sound editing program that we all use to record this show, and I noticed that it's in stereo, which made me very happy because I don't know a whole lot about audio, but I do know that there's this really neat trick that you can do with a stereo track that you think might have been manipulated. You can also use this trick if you want to make karaoke songs. You see if the manipulator of the video is particularly lazy or just ignorant, they might actually record their audio in mono, but then add a stereo sound effect to it. Stereo meaning there's a left channel and a right channel, so you hear different things in each ear. Mono, you hear the same thing in each ear. So Audacity has this free plugin called Centre Pan Removal, which basically inverts one of the channels and then puts the audio back together again, causing the mono sounds to cancel each other out, and you're left hearing only the stereo sound. So I did that, and ten seconds later, this is the exact same clip you just heard but with the mono gone:

Recording: *silence* (low rumbling sound)

R: So you may notice there's a bit of silence where there used to be a man talking...

Recording: (low rumbling sound)

R: ...and then the creepy sound. Isn't that convenient?

S: So this is a stereo effect added to a mono track.

R: Exactly.

S: Yeah.

R: ''Or'' maybe the angels of the apocalypse broadcast in ''magical'' stereo that bypasses mono devices. (sarcastic) Or yes, this is actually a complete and utter fake.

E: (inaudible)

R: And not just like a "whoops I made a mistake, I thought it was a ghost" but it's not fake, this is someone who went into an audio program and added that sound. And as for the actual sound, it doesn't really matter what it is, and it could be any number of things, but I happened to have watched Kevin Smith's film [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_State_%282011_film%29 Red State] last month. It's free on Netflix watch instantly. And spoiler alert everyone, don't listen if you haven't seen the movie, if you want to see the movie, I'll be honest, not that good of a movie, but spoiler.

E: (snickers)

R: At the end of the movie, there's an apocalyptic trumpeting sound and seriously, this is a big spoiler even though, not a good movie.

S: (snickers)

R: The trumpeting in the movie is actually caused by some kids playing a prank on a Christian doomsday cult. So I thought this sound you just heard in the Melbourne clip, I thought it sounded kind of familiar, so I went and found that [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItD6dQa5ncw clip of Red State], and I will play it for you now.

Recording: (low, rumbling trumpet sounds and faint sound of men crying out)

E: Now, where have I heard that before? Ummm...

R: (snickers) So yeah.

E: Sounds so familiar.

R: ...that should sound pretty familiar to you.

B: Yeeeah.

R: I mean maybe, maybe it's not, maybe it's something different, but yeah, those do sound remarkably similar to me, and there are a number of other videos that use a remarkably similar sound. So you can keep an ear out for that. I was ready to just say that this is a sound that comes from some psy-fi movie, but just a few hours ago, one of my Twitter followers notinmyname2050, I'm sorry I don't know your real name, but I guess that's appropriate for your username. But anyway, notinmyname2050 pointed me to a video by YouTuber Voodoo 6, in which he figures out that that came directly from the 2008 film [transcriber's note: 2005] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_%282005_film%29 War of the Worlds]. So...

S: Yeah, I recognised that.

R: Okay.

B: Yeah.

R: See yeah, I like most people skipped that film.

s: No, that was the...

E: Just 'cause Tom Cruise was in it.

S: I mean it was a mediocre movie all things considered, but I loved the Martian or whatever machines and they made a noise that was legitimately scary.

R: Yeah, and that's the thing. Some of these videos are pretty scary, if you can sort of put yourself in that mindset.

S: Yeah.

R: Sure the short version is - don't worry, the apocalypse is not until October at least.

S: That's right.

R: So you're fine.

S: Right. Alright well thanks Rebecca, let's move on to our interview.

== Interview with Sean Carroll () ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

<blockquote>There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
</blockquote>

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T07:55:35Z

Jessiessica: /* Question: Sounds in the Sky */

{{transcribing all
|transcriber = jessiessica
}}

{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 341
|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
|episodeIcon = File:tripod.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = SC: Sean Carroll
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2012-01-28.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,40106.0.html
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov Isaac Asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/ Neurologica: Stem Cells for Blindness]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/ Science-Based Medicine: Chiropractic Neurology]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness (18:30) ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/ Bethel Buzz News: (UPDATED) Cause of Sick LeRoy, NY Teens Remains a Mystery (With Poll!)]

S: One more medical news item by coincidence. Again, a number of people sent this to us. This has a little bit of a local angle for us, also a chiropractor. Again, this is not by design, this is just one of the things we wanted to talk about. So in a small town, LeRoy New York, twelve teenaged girls have come down with what the presses calling a mystery illness. You guys hears about this?

E: Mystery science illness 3000 (inaudible).

J: I sure did!

S: Yeah, they all attend the same school. It's a middle school high school. And all twelve of them are displaying symptoms that are being described as Tourette-like symptoms, that they're having these involuntary motor tics or movements. The question is why would twelve girls all come down with the same constellation of symptoms over a short period of time. So of course the CDC has gotten involved. There is one neurologist who examined I think eleven of the twelve girls, who has been doing an extensive testing on all of them, trying to figure out if there anything environmental. But what caught our eye about this is this story is there is a chiropractor by the name of Russell Caram who is local to us, he's in a town nearby us, wrote an article about this situation, and starts off okay, I mean I think a little bit clunky, but saying that there's a cluster of cases, so there has to be an explanation that can accommodate that. It can't be genetic 'cause they're not genetically related, and eventually comes to the conclusion that it's got to be something environmental, which I think is actually a reasonable conclusion. But then I think he inappropriately narrows the list of what counts as environmental. Says that well okay toxins and infections, seems that they've been ruled out. So he comes to the conclusion that the environmental trigger was probably the HPV vaccine - Gardasil or Cervarix - that it would explain the timing, the age - why it's all girls. So essentially he's trying to blame vaccines on these symptoms. And he goes on to talk about that there's high levels of aluminum in the vaccine and that could be a cause of toxicity, and then he goes on from there to saying how the government's untrustworthy, and we can't trust the government to investigate this properly. So at the end, it just became an anti-vaccine crank diatribe. Where he most significantly goes off the rails is in dismissing the possibility that the environmental trigger here is psychological, because that is something else that these twelve girls share in common. They are all part of the same very small community, attending the same, small school. He writes, now in scare quotes "Now the “establishment” has diagnosed them with “Conversion Disorder” – a disease resulting in similar symptoms...but usually brought on by some kind of stress or traumatic event." Actually it wasn't the "establishment", it was a ''neurologist'' who actually examined eleven of the twelve girls, ran a battery of tests, ruled out anything else that could link these together, and by the process of elimination, but also from direct examination and history-taking et cetera concluded that this is a case of mass psychogenic illness, which happens, this is a known phenomena, and cannot be easily dismissed. I actually did find [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ca50O2nrI video of some of the girls displaying their symptoms] So this is similar to prevous cases that we've talked about, like if you remember the cheerleader [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Desiree_Jennings Desiree Jennings] who belived she had vaccine-induced dystonia. Movement disorders can be diagnosed by video because what's important is how they're moving, so it's not a substitute for a complete neurological exam, but you can actually tell a lot just from a video of what the movement itself is. In this case, what I'm seeing is something that does look like tics. I think that 'tics' is the best technical description for the kind of movement that it is, a sudden, somewhat bizarre facial movement or gesture, maybe involving a vocalisation. This could be compatible with a tic disorder or Tourette's syndrome. I don't think I can say based upon this video alone that it's psychogenic, that it's psychological, because tics can be almost anything. Although I will say that it's a little atypical, it certainly could be psychogenic also. I think the fact that there are twelve unrelated girls who are all affected over a short period of time without there being any detectable environmental trigger or other environmental trigger is pretty strong inference that it is psychogenic. These psychogenic episodes are much more common in women than men for whatever reason, so kind of fits that profile as well. So it's interesting, I think that this is a difficult kind of a situation to deal with in the press, in public. This is something that should be dealt with between these families' physicians and them, because it's very delicate.

R: Yeah and I think that the public aspect of this and the Desiree Jenkins [sic] case actually make it more difficult because of the bias against psychological...

S: Mmm hmm

R: ...illnesses. You know I think that people would rather have an obvious physical disability they can point to as opposed to a psychological illness, just because we see people with psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...illnesses as "nutso freaks", you know. So without the public aspect I think there would be a better chance of them actually confirming that it's psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...and getting the correct treatment.

S: Yeah I agree there's a stigma attached to it and because when it's made public, I mean these girls are going on the news, going on TV, that invests them in the reality, the organic bases of the illness to an extent that would make it very hard for them to sort of just give it up. And it's hard enough as it is to get people to accept the diagnosis that it's psychogenic and to make it stop. It's something that's incredibly hard to treat. It becomes almost impossible if now it's been made public and they have that angle to it, again like with Desiree Jennings, I mean she's become so invested in that that I think it would be hopeless to try to get them to get past this. So it's unfortunately very counterproductive. But if you reads the comments, a lot of people made the analogy to the Salem witch trials where you essentially had a small group of young teenaged girls who started manifesting symptoms that were blamed on withes at the time, but you know in certain ways very similar.

R: Yeah, and when you start blaming vaccines instead, which helps feed into the idea that vaccines are dangerous and convinces more people to not get vaccinated, then you could even say that they have a similar level of danger to them as the witch trials.

S: Yeah, I mean this is a with hunt against vaccines, it is very similar.

== Who's That Noisy? (26:23)==

S: Alright well let's move on. We're going to... Let's move on first to Who's That Noisy. Evan, give us the answer to last week.

E: Here we go, last week's Who's That Noisy.

Recording: There's no such thing as a psychic.

E: You guys remember that?

S: Yes.

J: Yes I do! That's from TV.

E: "There's no such thing as a psychic."

S: Nope. It's from a movie.

E: Now, it sounds like it's from TV. It's actually from a movie. The movie is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_wood Ed Wood]...

S: (laughs) That's a funny movie.

E: ...one of my ''all time'' favourite movies, wonderful!

B: Really? I've never seen that, I have to see that.

E: Oh you must see, ''must see'' movie Bob, you will not be disappointed. It is incred... One of Tim Burton's finest in my opinion.

B: Yeah, Burton and Depp, how could I not see that?

E: Right? You totally should see it, they were wonderful. But that was actor Jeffery Jones, portraying the Amazing Criswell...

S: Mmm hmm

E: ...who was of course was an actual psychic at the time, well...

S: Stage psychic.

E: ...not really psychic. Yeah, a showman, (laughs) because he basically admitted in that same scene in the movie to Ed Wood (laughs), said it's all horseshit.

S: Yeah.

E: (laughs) That's basically what he says. 'I just guess. People believe be 'cause I wear a tuxedo.' (laughs)

S: Yeah, it's all showmanship.

E: So, while he admitted that certainly to his friends, he was quoted as saying once that he once had the gift, but he lost it when he started taking money.

S: Yeeahh, see you can't take that evil money, otherwise yeah, your powers go away.

E: Yeah, your cosmic energy there plummets at that point.

E: Right, isn't it like that James Bond movie where the tarot card reader, her power went away because she had sex with James Bond?

(all laugh)

B: Oh yeah! Oh my god! (laughing)

R: That is one powerful cock.

S: Yes, you so you can't take money or have sex.

J: He stole the mojo. (Austin Power voice)

E: And that's what Sean Connery said...

S: (laughs)

E: ..."I bet you didn't shee that coming. (laughs)" (Sean Connery accent)

S: Although it might have been not Sean Connery. I think is was Roger Moore.

E: (simultaneously) Or Roger Moore?

S: Right. Who got that quote?

E: So, a lot of people... Well a lot of people actually guessed it was The Mentalist, right, you know?

S: Mmm Hmm Similar thing.

E: 'Cause it's similar, but you know there was that music in the background, right Rebecca that you noticed last week...

R: Yeah.

E: ...and, so it was... You have to know the movie perhaps as in depth as I know it which is almost line for line. We had no winners.

R: Oh! Wow.

E: ...so I was able to stump...

S: Clean sweep.

E: ...our listening audience.

S: Good job.

E: So we're gonna do something a little different this week.

S: A ''lot'' different.

E: Aah you're right. It is a lot different.

S: It's a kind of an experiment which we do in January.

E: (laughs)

B: I'm scared.

S: (laughs)

E: Don't be...

R: Hold me.

E: Don't be frightened, hold my hand, here, hold my hand. Eeh! That's not my hand. We're gonna have a Who's That Noisy scavenger hunt. So instead of me playing a noisy for you this week, I am tasking ''you'', the listening audience to come up with the correct noisy for ''us'', ''and'' the listening audience of course. You must submit to us... I challenge you to submit to us...

J: (laughs)

E: ...the dumbest thing (laughs) that in your opinion, that a politician has said concerning science or a scientific statement that is just so stupid that a politician must have said it. Send us your submissions, send us your audio clip.

S: Yeah it's got to be an actual audio clip, not a...

E: ...had to be an audio clip.

S: ...a link to it, not a transcript, we need the audio.

R: It is a podcast.

S: Yeah.

E: After all it is.

S: And brief.

E: And yes, brief.

J: And your underwear, yes.

E: Yes.

S: Right.

E: I understand politicians, their mouths move all the time, and lots of dumb things come out of their mouths but, keep it brief.

S: And give us the information, you're not trying to stump us. We will select the dumbest thing that... statement that people send us and we'll play that next week.

E: And we'll play it next week...

S: Yeah.

e: ...for your listening enjoyment. Alright? So you have your homework, and we're lookin' forward to seeing what you come up with.

S: Yeah.

E: I know I am. (laughs)

S: It should be...

E: This could be hilarious.

S: ... should be fun, should be fun.

E: Yep.

S: Aah, okay, well thank you Evan.

E: You are welcome.

== Questions and Emails (30:18) ==
=== Question: Sounds in the Sky ===

S: We're gonna do one email this week, and Rebecca, you're gonna take the lead on this, do you want to read the email?

R: Sure, here we go. Michael from Ohio writes:

<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

R: And so I checked it out, and it's true, strange sounds coming from the sky have taken YouTube by storm. I've taken this story because as you all know, I do have an ongoing segment on SGU called Things People See in the Sky and Mistake for Other Possibly Paranormal Things. This is related, only instead of seeing, it's hearing. And I'm gonna give you a warning at right from the outset here: I'm gonna explain some of the videos, but as soon as I do, someone's going to upload a new video using a new trick, and somebody's will have to start all over again to debunk it. So remember a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That said, creepy sounds are probably about as common as creepy sights, but for some reason, photos of UFOs tend to get more attention than recordings of those weird bleeps and bloops and rumbles in our lives. The rumbles, when they have a most likely natural origin are known as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontide brontides], which we've talked about before. They're deep, booming sounds that seem to come from very far away, like there's no definite source that you can pinpoint. They're often heard near bodies of water, like the with Guns of Seneca at the Seneca Lake in Ney York, or the Barisal Guns near the Bay of Bengal. They could be caused by thunder, natural gas explosions, seismic activity, or some people even think possibly waves of water hitting at resonant hollows. And they can easily be confused with man-made sounds like sonic booms, artillery, construction, stuff like that. There's also the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop Bloop], I think we've talked about that. It's an ultra-low frequency sound that was detected underwater by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1997, that's NOAA. It was several times louder than our loudest known creature which is the blue whale, and nobody knows what caused it [see episode 385, news item [http://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_385#Bloop_Solved_.2815:35.29 Bloop Solved] for an update]. NOAA in addition to the Bloop has found five other sounds of unknown origin under water, so that's kind of scary and fun. And even fairly well known animals can make sounds that scare people, like owls, foxes, fisher cats, and even rabbits can actually sound like people screaming for instance. Very creepy sounds. So all of these weird sounds can freak people out in much the same way that satellites and the Moon and stars and weather balloons can freak people out when they're not sure what they're looking at. So ordinarily if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos of people who have recorded sounds that genuinely scare the crap out of them. However if you go on YouTube to search for strange sounds these days, you will most likely only find ''lies''. Bald faced lies. And that's what our email had written in about. I first became aware of these about around January 12th or so, that's when blogs started picking up on this huge influx of videos featuring creepy sounds. All that week, there were an insane number of videos being uploaded from all around the world like the emailer says - the US, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Australia, and they all claim to demonstrate a creepy sound, sort of like, most of them sound sort of like trumpets signalling the oncoming apocalypse or something. So I'll play you [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuMWhjbkEOM an example]:

Recording: (Male voice with British accent) Can anyone else hear that noise? (low rumbling sound) The hell is that? (low rumbling sound)

R: Okay, that was from Melbourne Australia, and that's one of the first ones I saw. Now, I found that one kind of suspicious, because in the video there's no one around, even though the guy seems to be asking someone if anyone can hear the noise. So I decided to do a little digging. I got the audio off of YouTube, and I threw it into Audacity, which is the free sound editing program that we all use to record this show, and I noticed that it's in stereo, which made me very happy because I don't know a whole lot about audio, but I do know that there's this really neat trick that you can do with a stereo track that you think might have been manipulated. You can also use this trick if you want to make karaoke songs. You see if the manipulator of the video is particularly lazy or just ignorant, they might actually record their audio in mono, but then add a stereo sound effect to it. Stereo meaning there's a left channel and a right channel, so you hear different things in each ear. Mono, you hear the same thing in each ear. So Audacity has this free plugin called Centre Pan Removal, which basically inverts one of the channels and then puts the audio back together again, causing the mono sounds to cancel each other out, and you're left hearing only the stereo sound. So I did that, and ten seconds later, this is the exact same clip you just heard but with the mono gone:

Recording: *silence* (low rumbling sound)

R: So you may notice there's a bit of silence where there used to be a man talking...

Recording: (low rumbling sound)

R: ...and then the creepy sound. Isn't that convenient?

S: So this is a stereo effect added to a mono track.

R: Exactly.

S: Yeah.

R: ''Or'' maybe the angels of the apocalypse broadcast in ''magical'' stereo that bypasses mono devices. (sarcastic) Or yes, this is actually a complete and utter fake.

E: (inaudible)

R: And not just like a "whoops I made a mistake, I thought it was a ghost" but it's not fake, this is someone who went into an audio program and added that sound. And as for the actual sound, it doesn't really matter what it is, and it could be any number of things, but I happened to have watched Kevin Smith's film [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_State_%282011_film%29 Red State] last month. It's free on Netflix watch instantly. And spoiler alert everyone, don't listen if you haven't seen the movie, if you want to see the movie, I'll be honest, not that good of a movie, but spoiler.

E: (snickers)

R: At the end of the movie, there's an apocalyptic trumpeting sound and seriously, this is a big spoiler even though, not a good movie.

S: (snickers)

R: The trumpeting in the movie is actually caused by some kids playing a prank on a Christian doomsday cult. So I thought this sound you just heard in the Melbourne clip, I thought it sounded kind of familiar, so I went and found that [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItD6dQa5ncw clip of Red State], and I will play it for you now.

Recording: (low, rumbling trumpet sounds and faint sound of men crying out)

E: Now, where have I heard that before? Ummm...

R: (snickers) So yeah.

E: Sounds so familiar.

R: ...that should sound pretty familiar to you.

B: Yeeeah.

R: I mean maybe, maybe it's not, maybe it's something different, but yeah, those do sound remarkably similar to me, and there are a number of other videos that use a remarkably similar sound. So you can keep an ear out for that. I was ready to just say that this is a sound that comes from some psy-fi movie, but just a few hours ago, one of my Twitter followers notinmyname2050, I'm sorry I don't know your real name, but I guess that's appropriate for your username. But anyway, notinmyname2050 pointed me to a video by YouTuber Voodoo 6, in which he figures out that that came directly from the 2008 film [transcriber's note: 2005] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_%282005_film%29 War of the Worlds]. So...

S: Yeah, I recognised that.

R: Okay.

B: Yeah.

R: See yeah, I like most people skipped that film.

...

[transcription ceases at 39:24]

== Interview with Sean Carroll () ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

<blockquote>There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
</blockquote>

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T07:54:38Z

Jessiessica: /* Skeptical Quote of the Week () */ Added quote

{{transcribing all
|transcriber = jessiessica
}}

{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 341
|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
|episodeIcon = File:tripod.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = SC: Sean Carroll
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2012-01-28.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,40106.0.html
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov Isaac Asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/ Neurologica: Stem Cells for Blindness]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/ Science-Based Medicine: Chiropractic Neurology]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness (18:30) ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/ Bethel Buzz News: (UPDATED) Cause of Sick LeRoy, NY Teens Remains a Mystery (With Poll!)]

S: One more medical news item by coincidence. Again, a number of people sent this to us. This has a little bit of a local angle for us, also a chiropractor. Again, this is not by design, this is just one of the things we wanted to talk about. So in a small town, LeRoy New York, twelve teenaged girls have come down with what the presses calling a mystery illness. You guys hears about this?

E: Mystery science illness 3000 (inaudible).

J: I sure did!

S: Yeah, they all attend the same school. It's a middle school high school. And all twelve of them are displaying symptoms that are being described as Tourette-like symptoms, that they're having these involuntary motor tics or movements. The question is why would twelve girls all come down with the same constellation of symptoms over a short period of time. So of course the CDC has gotten involved. There is one neurologist who examined I think eleven of the twelve girls, who has been doing an extensive testing on all of them, trying to figure out if there anything environmental. But what caught our eye about this is this story is there is a chiropractor by the name of Russell Caram who is local to us, he's in a town nearby us, wrote an article about this situation, and starts off okay, I mean I think a little bit clunky, but saying that there's a cluster of cases, so there has to be an explanation that can accommodate that. It can't be genetic 'cause they're not genetically related, and eventually comes to the conclusion that it's got to be something environmental, which I think is actually a reasonable conclusion. But then I think he inappropriately narrows the list of what counts as environmental. Says that well okay toxins and infections, seems that they've been ruled out. So he comes to the conclusion that the environmental trigger was probably the HPV vaccine - Gardasil or Cervarix - that it would explain the timing, the age - why it's all girls. So essentially he's trying to blame vaccines on these symptoms. And he goes on to talk about that there's high levels of aluminum in the vaccine and that could be a cause of toxicity, and then he goes on from there to saying how the government's untrustworthy, and we can't trust the government to investigate this properly. So at the end, it just became an anti-vaccine crank diatribe. Where he most significantly goes off the rails is in dismissing the possibility that the environmental trigger here is psychological, because that is something else that these twelve girls share in common. They are all part of the same very small community, attending the same, small school. He writes, now in scare quotes "Now the “establishment” has diagnosed them with “Conversion Disorder” – a disease resulting in similar symptoms...but usually brought on by some kind of stress or traumatic event." Actually it wasn't the "establishment", it was a ''neurologist'' who actually examined eleven of the twelve girls, ran a battery of tests, ruled out anything else that could link these together, and by the process of elimination, but also from direct examination and history-taking et cetera concluded that this is a case of mass psychogenic illness, which happens, this is a known phenomena, and cannot be easily dismissed. I actually did find [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ca50O2nrI video of some of the girls displaying their symptoms] So this is similar to prevous cases that we've talked about, like if you remember the cheerleader [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Desiree_Jennings Desiree Jennings] who belived she had vaccine-induced dystonia. Movement disorders can be diagnosed by video because what's important is how they're moving, so it's not a substitute for a complete neurological exam, but you can actually tell a lot just from a video of what the movement itself is. In this case, what I'm seeing is something that does look like tics. I think that 'tics' is the best technical description for the kind of movement that it is, a sudden, somewhat bizarre facial movement or gesture, maybe involving a vocalisation. This could be compatible with a tic disorder or Tourette's syndrome. I don't think I can say based upon this video alone that it's psychogenic, that it's psychological, because tics can be almost anything. Although I will say that it's a little atypical, it certainly could be psychogenic also. I think the fact that there are twelve unrelated girls who are all affected over a short period of time without there being any detectable environmental trigger or other environmental trigger is pretty strong inference that it is psychogenic. These psychogenic episodes are much more common in women than men for whatever reason, so kind of fits that profile as well. So it's interesting, I think that this is a difficult kind of a situation to deal with in the press, in public. This is something that should be dealt with between these families' physicians and them, because it's very delicate.

R: Yeah and I think that the public aspect of this and the Desiree Jenkins [sic] case actually make it more difficult because of the bias against psychological...

S: Mmm hmm

R: ...illnesses. You know I think that people would rather have an obvious physical disability they can point to as opposed to a psychological illness, just because we see people with psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...illnesses as "nutso freaks", you know. So without the public aspect I think there would be a better chance of them actually confirming that it's psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...and getting the correct treatment.

S: Yeah I agree there's a stigma attached to it and because when it's made public, I mean these girls are going on the news, going on TV, that invests them in the reality, the organic bases of the illness to an extent that would make it very hard for them to sort of just give it up. And it's hard enough as it is to get people to accept the diagnosis that it's psychogenic and to make it stop. It's something that's incredibly hard to treat. It becomes almost impossible if now it's been made public and they have that angle to it, again like with Desiree Jennings, I mean she's become so invested in that that I think it would be hopeless to try to get them to get past this. So it's unfortunately very counterproductive. But if you reads the comments, a lot of people made the analogy to the Salem witch trials where you essentially had a small group of young teenaged girls who started manifesting symptoms that were blamed on withes at the time, but you know in certain ways very similar.

R: Yeah, and when you start blaming vaccines instead, which helps feed into the idea that vaccines are dangerous and convinces more people to not get vaccinated, then you could even say that they have a similar level of danger to them as the witch trials.

S: Yeah, I mean this is a with hunt against vaccines, it is very similar.

== Who's That Noisy? (26:23)==

S: Alright well let's move on. We're going to... Let's move on first to Who's That Noisy. Evan, give us the answer to last week.

E: Here we go, last week's Who's That Noisy.

Recording: There's no such thing as a psychic.

E: You guys remember that?

S: Yes.

J: Yes I do! That's from TV.

E: "There's no such thing as a psychic."

S: Nope. It's from a movie.

E: Now, it sounds like it's from TV. It's actually from a movie. The movie is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_wood Ed Wood]...

S: (laughs) That's a funny movie.

E: ...one of my ''all time'' favourite movies, wonderful!

B: Really? I've never seen that, I have to see that.

E: Oh you must see, ''must see'' movie Bob, you will not be disappointed. It is incred... One of Tim Burton's finest in my opinion.

B: Yeah, Burton and Depp, how could I not see that?

E: Right? You totally should see it, they were wonderful. But that was actor Jeffery Jones, portraying the Amazing Criswell...

S: Mmm hmm

E: ...who was of course was an actual psychic at the time, well...

S: Stage psychic.

E: ...not really psychic. Yeah, a showman, (laughs) because he basically admitted in that same scene in the movie to Ed Wood (laughs), said it's all horseshit.

S: Yeah.

E: (laughs) That's basically what he says. 'I just guess. People believe be 'cause I wear a tuxedo.' (laughs)

S: Yeah, it's all showmanship.

E: So, while he admitted that certainly to his friends, he was quoted as saying once that he once had the gift, but he lost it when he started taking money.

S: Yeeahh, see you can't take that evil money, otherwise yeah, your powers go away.

E: Yeah, your cosmic energy there plummets at that point.

E: Right, isn't it like that James Bond movie where the tarot card reader, her power went away because she had sex with James Bond?

(all laugh)

B: Oh yeah! Oh my god! (laughing)

R: That is one powerful cock.

S: Yes, you so you can't take money or have sex.

J: He stole the mojo. (Austin Power voice)

E: And that's what Sean Connery said...

S: (laughs)

E: ..."I bet you didn't shee that coming. (laughs)" (Sean Connery accent)

S: Although it might have been not Sean Connery. I think is was Roger Moore.

E: (simultaneously) Or Roger Moore?

S: Right. Who got that quote?

E: So, a lot of people... Well a lot of people actually guessed it was The Mentalist, right, you know?

S: Mmm Hmm Similar thing.

E: 'Cause it's similar, but you know there was that music in the background, right Rebecca that you noticed last week...

R: Yeah.

E: ...and, so it was... You have to know the movie perhaps as in depth as I know it which is almost line for line. We had no winners.

R: Oh! Wow.

E: ...so I was able to stump...

S: Clean sweep.

E: ...our listening audience.

S: Good job.

E: So we're gonna do something a little different this week.

S: A ''lot'' different.

E: Aah you're right. It is a lot different.

S: It's a kind of an experiment which we do in January.

E: (laughs)

B: I'm scared.

S: (laughs)

E: Don't be...

R: Hold me.

E: Don't be frightened, hold my hand, here, hold my hand. Eeh! That's not my hand. We're gonna have a Who's That Noisy scavenger hunt. So instead of me playing a noisy for you this week, I am tasking ''you'', the listening audience to come up with the correct noisy for ''us'', ''and'' the listening audience of course. You must submit to us... I challenge you to submit to us...

J: (laughs)

E: ...the dumbest thing (laughs) that in your opinion, that a politician has said concerning science or a scientific statement that is just so stupid that a politician must have said it. Send us your submissions, send us your audio clip.

S: Yeah it's got to be an actual audio clip, not a...

E: ...had to be an audio clip.

S: ...a link to it, not a transcript, we need the audio.

R: It is a podcast.

S: Yeah.

E: After all it is.

S: And brief.

E: And yes, brief.

J: And your underwear, yes.

E: Yes.

S: Right.

E: I understand politicians, their mouths move all the time, and lots of dumb things come out of their mouths but, keep it brief.

S: And give us the information, you're not trying to stump us. We will select the dumbest thing that... statement that people send us and we'll play that next week.

E: And we'll play it next week...

S: Yeah.

e: ...for your listening enjoyment. Alright? So you have your homework, and we're lookin' forward to seeing what you come up with.

S: Yeah.

E: I know I am. (laughs)

S: It should be...

E: This could be hilarious.

S: ... should be fun, should be fun.

E: Yep.

S: Aah, okay, well thank you Evan.

E: You are welcome.

== Questions and Emails (30:18) ==
=== Question: Sounds in the Sky ===

S: We're gonna do one email this week, and Rebecca, you're gonna take the lead on this, do you want to read the email?

R: Sure, here we go. Michael from Ohio writes:

<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

R: And so I checked it out, and it's true, strange sounds coming from the sky have taken YouTube by storm. I've taken this story because as you all know, I do have an ongoing segment on SGU called Things People See in the Sky and Mistake for Other Possibly Paranormal Things. This is related, only instead of seeing, it's hearing. And I'm gonna give you a warning at right from the outset here: I'm gonna explain some of the videos, but as soon as I do, someone's going to upload a new video using a new trick, and somebody's will have to start all over again to debunk it. So remember a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That said, creepy sounds are probably about as common as creepy sights, but for some reason, photos of UFOs tend to get more attention than recordings of those weird bleeps and bloops and rumbles in our lives. The rumbles, when they have a most likely natural origin are known as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontide brontides], which we've talked about before. They're deep, booming sounds that seem to come from very far away, like there's no definite source that you can pinpoint. They're often heard near bodies of water, like the with Guns of Seneca at the Seneca Lake in Ney York, or the Barisal Guns near the Bay of Bengal. They could be caused by thunder, natural gas explosions, seismic activity, or some people even think possibly waves of water hitting at resonant hollows. And they can easily be confused with man-made sounds like sonic booms, artillery, construction, stuff like that. There's also the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop Bloop], I think we've talked about that. It's an ultra-low frequency sound that was detected underwater by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1997, that's NOAA. It was several times louder than our loudest known creature which is the blue whale, and nobody knows what caused it [see episode 385, news item [http://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_385#Bloop_Solved_.2815:35.29 Bloop Solved] for an update]. NOAA in addition to the Bloop has found five other sounds of unknown origin under water, so that's kind of scary and fun. And even fairly well known animals can make sounds that scare people, like owls, foxes, fisher cats, and even rabbits can actually sound like people screaming for instance. Very creepy sounds. So all of these weird sounds can freak people out in much the same way that satellites and the Moon and stars and weather balloons can freak people out when they're not sure what they're looking at. So ordinarily if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos of people who have recorded sounds that genuinely scare the crap out of them. However if you go on YouTube to search for strange sounds these days, you will most likely only find ''lies''. Bald faced lies. And that's what our email had written in about. I first became aware of these about around January 12th or so, that's when blogs started picking up on this huge influx of videos featuring creepy sounds. All that week, there were an insane number of videos being uploaded from all around the world like the emailer says - the US, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Australia, and they all claim to demonstrate a creepy sound, sort of like, most of them sound sort of like trumpets signalling the oncoming apocalypse or something. So I'll play you [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuMWhjbkEOM an example]:

Recording: (Male voice with British accent) Can anyone else hear that noise? (low rumbling sound) The hell is that? (low rumbling sound)

R: Okay, that was from Melbourne Australia, and that's one of the first ones I saw. Now, I found that one kind of suspicious, because in the video there's no one around, even though the guy seems to be asking someone if anyone can hear the noise. So I decided to do a little digging. I got the audio off of YouTube, and I threw it into Audacity, which is the free sound editing program that we all use to record this show, and I noticed that it's in stereo, which made me very happy because I don't know a whole lot about audio, but I do know that there's this really neat trick that you can do with a stereo track that you think might have been manipulated. You can also use this trick if you want to make karaoke songs. You see if the manipulator of the video is particularly lazy or just ignorant, they might actually record their audio in mono, but then add a stereo sound effect to it. Stereo meaning there's a left channel and a right channel, so you hear different things in each ear. Mono, you hear the same thing in each ear. So Audacity has this free plugin called Centre Pan Removal, which basically inverts one of the channels and then puts the audio back together again, causing the mono sounds to cancel each other out, and you're left hearing only the stereo sound. So I did that, and ten seconds later, this is the exact same clip you just heard but with the mono gone:

Recording: *silence* (low rumbling sound)

R: So you may notice there's a bit of silence where there used to be a man talking...

Recording: (low rumbling sound)

R: ...and then the creepy sound. Isn't that convenient?

S: So this is a stereo effect added to a mono track.

R: Exactly.

S: Yeah.

R: ''Or'' maybe the angels of the apocalypse broadcast in ''magical'' stereo that bypasses mono devices. (sarcastic) Or yes, this is actually a complete and utter fake.

E: (inaudible)

R: And not just like a "whoops I made a mistake, I thought it was a ghost" but it's not fake, this is someone who went into an audio program and added that sound. And as for the actual sound, it doesn't really matter what it is, and it could be any number of things, but I happened to have watched Kevin Smith's film [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_State_%282011_film%29 Red State] last month. It's free on Netflix watch instantly. And spoiler alert everyone, don't listen if you haven't seen the movie, if you want to see the movie, I'll be honest, not that good of a movie, but spoiler.

E: (snickers)

R: At the end of the movie, there's an apocalyptic trumpeting sound and seriously, this is a big spoiler even though, not a good movie.

S: (snickers)

R: The trumpeting in the movie is actually caused by some kids playing a prank on a Christian doomsday cult. So I thought this sound you just heard in the Melbourne clip, I thought it sounded kind of familiar, so I went and found that [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItD6dQa5ncw clip of Red State], and I will play it for you now.

Recording: (low, rumbling trumpet sounds and faint sound of men crying out)

E: Now, where have I heard that before? Ummm...

R: (snickers) So yeah.

E: Sounds so familiar.

R: ...that should sound pretty familiar to you.

B: Yeeeah.

R: I mean maybe, maybe it's not, maybe it's something different, but yeah, those do sound remarkably similar to me, and there are a number of other videos that use a remarkably similar sound. So you can keep an ear out for that. I was ready to just say that this is a sound that comes from some psy-fi movie, but just a few hours ago, one of my Twitter followers notinmyname2050, I'm sorry I don't know your real name, but I guess that's appropriate for your username. But anyway, notinmyname2050 pointed me to a video by YouTuber Voodoo 6, in which he figures out that that came directly from the 2008 film [transcriber's edit: 2005] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_%282005_film%29 War of the Worlds]. So...

S: Yeah, I recognised that.

R: Okay.

B: Yeah.

R: See yeah, I like most people skipped that film.

...

[transcription ceases at 39:24]

== Interview with Sean Carroll () ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

<blockquote>There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
</blockquote>

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T07:48:53Z

Jessiessica: /* Questions and Emails (30:18) */

{{transcribing all
|transcriber = jessiessica
}}

{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 341
|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
|episodeIcon = File:tripod.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = SC: Sean Carroll
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2012-01-28.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,40106.0.html
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov Isaac Asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/ Neurologica: Stem Cells for Blindness]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/ Science-Based Medicine: Chiropractic Neurology]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness (18:30) ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/ Bethel Buzz News: (UPDATED) Cause of Sick LeRoy, NY Teens Remains a Mystery (With Poll!)]

S: One more medical news item by coincidence. Again, a number of people sent this to us. This has a little bit of a local angle for us, also a chiropractor. Again, this is not by design, this is just one of the things we wanted to talk about. So in a small town, LeRoy New York, twelve teenaged girls have come down with what the presses calling a mystery illness. You guys hears about this?

E: Mystery science illness 3000 (inaudible).

J: I sure did!

S: Yeah, they all attend the same school. It's a middle school high school. And all twelve of them are displaying symptoms that are being described as Tourette-like symptoms, that they're having these involuntary motor tics or movements. The question is why would twelve girls all come down with the same constellation of symptoms over a short period of time. So of course the CDC has gotten involved. There is one neurologist who examined I think eleven of the twelve girls, who has been doing an extensive testing on all of them, trying to figure out if there anything environmental. But what caught our eye about this is this story is there is a chiropractor by the name of Russell Caram who is local to us, he's in a town nearby us, wrote an article about this situation, and starts off okay, I mean I think a little bit clunky, but saying that there's a cluster of cases, so there has to be an explanation that can accommodate that. It can't be genetic 'cause they're not genetically related, and eventually comes to the conclusion that it's got to be something environmental, which I think is actually a reasonable conclusion. But then I think he inappropriately narrows the list of what counts as environmental. Says that well okay toxins and infections, seems that they've been ruled out. So he comes to the conclusion that the environmental trigger was probably the HPV vaccine - Gardasil or Cervarix - that it would explain the timing, the age - why it's all girls. So essentially he's trying to blame vaccines on these symptoms. And he goes on to talk about that there's high levels of aluminum in the vaccine and that could be a cause of toxicity, and then he goes on from there to saying how the government's untrustworthy, and we can't trust the government to investigate this properly. So at the end, it just became an anti-vaccine crank diatribe. Where he most significantly goes off the rails is in dismissing the possibility that the environmental trigger here is psychological, because that is something else that these twelve girls share in common. They are all part of the same very small community, attending the same, small school. He writes, now in scare quotes "Now the “establishment” has diagnosed them with “Conversion Disorder” – a disease resulting in similar symptoms...but usually brought on by some kind of stress or traumatic event." Actually it wasn't the "establishment", it was a ''neurologist'' who actually examined eleven of the twelve girls, ran a battery of tests, ruled out anything else that could link these together, and by the process of elimination, but also from direct examination and history-taking et cetera concluded that this is a case of mass psychogenic illness, which happens, this is a known phenomena, and cannot be easily dismissed. I actually did find [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ca50O2nrI video of some of the girls displaying their symptoms] So this is similar to prevous cases that we've talked about, like if you remember the cheerleader [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Desiree_Jennings Desiree Jennings] who belived she had vaccine-induced dystonia. Movement disorders can be diagnosed by video because what's important is how they're moving, so it's not a substitute for a complete neurological exam, but you can actually tell a lot just from a video of what the movement itself is. In this case, what I'm seeing is something that does look like tics. I think that 'tics' is the best technical description for the kind of movement that it is, a sudden, somewhat bizarre facial movement or gesture, maybe involving a vocalisation. This could be compatible with a tic disorder or Tourette's syndrome. I don't think I can say based upon this video alone that it's psychogenic, that it's psychological, because tics can be almost anything. Although I will say that it's a little atypical, it certainly could be psychogenic also. I think the fact that there are twelve unrelated girls who are all affected over a short period of time without there being any detectable environmental trigger or other environmental trigger is pretty strong inference that it is psychogenic. These psychogenic episodes are much more common in women than men for whatever reason, so kind of fits that profile as well. So it's interesting, I think that this is a difficult kind of a situation to deal with in the press, in public. This is something that should be dealt with between these families' physicians and them, because it's very delicate.

R: Yeah and I think that the public aspect of this and the Desiree Jenkins [sic] case actually make it more difficult because of the bias against psychological...

S: Mmm hmm

R: ...illnesses. You know I think that people would rather have an obvious physical disability they can point to as opposed to a psychological illness, just because we see people with psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...illnesses as "nutso freaks", you know. So without the public aspect I think there would be a better chance of them actually confirming that it's psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...and getting the correct treatment.

S: Yeah I agree there's a stigma attached to it and because when it's made public, I mean these girls are going on the news, going on TV, that invests them in the reality, the organic bases of the illness to an extent that would make it very hard for them to sort of just give it up. And it's hard enough as it is to get people to accept the diagnosis that it's psychogenic and to make it stop. It's something that's incredibly hard to treat. It becomes almost impossible if now it's been made public and they have that angle to it, again like with Desiree Jennings, I mean she's become so invested in that that I think it would be hopeless to try to get them to get past this. So it's unfortunately very counterproductive. But if you reads the comments, a lot of people made the analogy to the Salem witch trials where you essentially had a small group of young teenaged girls who started manifesting symptoms that were blamed on withes at the time, but you know in certain ways very similar.

R: Yeah, and when you start blaming vaccines instead, which helps feed into the idea that vaccines are dangerous and convinces more people to not get vaccinated, then you could even say that they have a similar level of danger to them as the witch trials.

S: Yeah, I mean this is a with hunt against vaccines, it is very similar.

== Who's That Noisy? (26:23)==

S: Alright well let's move on. We're going to... Let's move on first to Who's That Noisy. Evan, give us the answer to last week.

E: Here we go, last week's Who's That Noisy.

Recording: There's no such thing as a psychic.

E: You guys remember that?

S: Yes.

J: Yes I do! That's from TV.

E: "There's no such thing as a psychic."

S: Nope. It's from a movie.

E: Now, it sounds like it's from TV. It's actually from a movie. The movie is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_wood Ed Wood]...

S: (laughs) That's a funny movie.

E: ...one of my ''all time'' favourite movies, wonderful!

B: Really? I've never seen that, I have to see that.

E: Oh you must see, ''must see'' movie Bob, you will not be disappointed. It is incred... One of Tim Burton's finest in my opinion.

B: Yeah, Burton and Depp, how could I not see that?

E: Right? You totally should see it, they were wonderful. But that was actor Jeffery Jones, portraying the Amazing Criswell...

S: Mmm hmm

E: ...who was of course was an actual psychic at the time, well...

S: Stage psychic.

E: ...not really psychic. Yeah, a showman, (laughs) because he basically admitted in that same scene in the movie to Ed Wood (laughs), said it's all horseshit.

S: Yeah.

E: (laughs) That's basically what he says. 'I just guess. People believe be 'cause I wear a tuxedo.' (laughs)

S: Yeah, it's all showmanship.

E: So, while he admitted that certainly to his friends, he was quoted as saying once that he once had the gift, but he lost it when he started taking money.

S: Yeeahh, see you can't take that evil money, otherwise yeah, your powers go away.

E: Yeah, your cosmic energy there plummets at that point.

E: Right, isn't it like that James Bond movie where the tarot card reader, her power went away because she had sex with James Bond?

(all laugh)

B: Oh yeah! Oh my god! (laughing)

R: That is one powerful cock.

S: Yes, you so you can't take money or have sex.

J: He stole the mojo. (Austin Power voice)

E: And that's what Sean Connery said...

S: (laughs)

E: ..."I bet you didn't shee that coming. (laughs)" (Sean Connery accent)

S: Although it might have been not Sean Connery. I think is was Roger Moore.

E: (simultaneously) Or Roger Moore?

S: Right. Who got that quote?

E: So, a lot of people... Well a lot of people actually guessed it was The Mentalist, right, you know?

S: Mmm Hmm Similar thing.

E: 'Cause it's similar, but you know there was that music in the background, right Rebecca that you noticed last week...

R: Yeah.

E: ...and, so it was... You have to know the movie perhaps as in depth as I know it which is almost line for line. We had no winners.

R: Oh! Wow.

E: ...so I was able to stump...

S: Clean sweep.

E: ...our listening audience.

S: Good job.

E: So we're gonna do something a little different this week.

S: A ''lot'' different.

E: Aah you're right. It is a lot different.

S: It's a kind of an experiment which we do in January.

E: (laughs)

B: I'm scared.

S: (laughs)

E: Don't be...

R: Hold me.

E: Don't be frightened, hold my hand, here, hold my hand. Eeh! That's not my hand. We're gonna have a Who's That Noisy scavenger hunt. So instead of me playing a noisy for you this week, I am tasking ''you'', the listening audience to come up with the correct noisy for ''us'', ''and'' the listening audience of course. You must submit to us... I challenge you to submit to us...

J: (laughs)

E: ...the dumbest thing (laughs) that in your opinion, that a politician has said concerning science or a scientific statement that is just so stupid that a politician must have said it. Send us your submissions, send us your audio clip.

S: Yeah it's got to be an actual audio clip, not a...

E: ...had to be an audio clip.

S: ...a link to it, not a transcript, we need the audio.

R: It is a podcast.

S: Yeah.

E: After all it is.

S: And brief.

E: And yes, brief.

J: And your underwear, yes.

E: Yes.

S: Right.

E: I understand politicians, their mouths move all the time, and lots of dumb things come out of their mouths but, keep it brief.

S: And give us the information, you're not trying to stump us. We will select the dumbest thing that... statement that people send us and we'll play that next week.

E: And we'll play it next week...

S: Yeah.

e: ...for your listening enjoyment. Alright? So you have your homework, and we're lookin' forward to seeing what you come up with.

S: Yeah.

E: I know I am. (laughs)

S: It should be...

E: This could be hilarious.

S: ... should be fun, should be fun.

E: Yep.

S: Aah, okay, well thank you Evan.

E: You are welcome.

== Questions and Emails (30:18) ==
=== Question: Sounds in the Sky ===

S: We're gonna do one email this week, and Rebecca, you're gonna take the lead on this, do you want to read the email?

R: Sure, here we go. Michael from Ohio writes:

<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

R: And so I checked it out, and it's true, strange sounds coming from the sky have taken YouTube by storm. I've taken this story because as you all know, I do have an ongoing segment on SGU called Things People See in the Sky and Mistake for Other Possibly Paranormal Things. This is related, only instead of seeing, it's hearing. And I'm gonna give you a warning at right from the outset here: I'm gonna explain some of the videos, but as soon as I do, someone's going to upload a new video using a new trick, and somebody's will have to start all over again to debunk it. So remember a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That said, creepy sounds are probably about as common as creepy sights, but for some reason, photos of UFOs tend to get more attention than recordings of those weird bleeps and bloops and rumbles in our lives. The rumbles, when they have a most likely natural origin are known as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontide brontides], which we've talked about before. They're deep, booming sounds that seem to come from very far away, like there's no definite source that you can pinpoint. They're often heard near bodies of water, like the with Guns of Seneca at the Seneca Lake in Ney York, or the Barisal Guns near the Bay of Bengal. They could be caused by thunder, natural gas explosions, seismic activity, or some people even think possibly waves of water hitting at resonant hollows. And they can easily be confused with man-made sounds like sonic booms, artillery, construction, stuff like that. There's also the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop Bloop], I think we've talked about that. It's an ultra-low frequency sound that was detected underwater by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1997, that's NOAA. It was several times louder than our loudest known creature which is the blue whale, and nobody knows what caused it [see episode 385, news item [http://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_385#Bloop_Solved_.2815:35.29 Bloop Solved] for an update]. NOAA in addition to the Bloop has found five other sounds of unknown origin under water, so that's kind of scary and fun. And even fairly well known animals can make sounds that scare people, like owls, foxes, fisher cats, and even rabbits can actually sound like people screaming for instance. Very creepy sounds. So all of these weird sounds can freak people out in much the same way that satellites and the Moon and stars and weather balloons can freak people out when they're not sure what they're looking at. So ordinarily if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos of people who have recorded sounds that genuinely scare the crap out of them. However if you go on YouTube to search for strange sounds these days, you will most likely only find ''lies''. Bald faced lies. And that's what our email had written in about. I first became aware of these about around January 12th or so, that's when blogs started picking up on this huge influx of videos featuring creepy sounds. All that week, there were an insane number of videos being uploaded from all around the world like the emailer says - the US, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Australia, and they all claim to demonstrate a creepy sound, sort of like, most of them sound sort of like trumpets signalling the oncoming apocalypse or something. So I'll play you [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuMWhjbkEOM an example]:

Recording: (Male voice with British accent) Can anyone else hear that noise? (low rumbling sound) The hell is that? (low rumbling sound)

R: Okay, that was from Melbourne Australia, and that's one of the first ones I saw. Now, I found that one kind of suspicious, because in the video there's no one around, even though the guy seems to be asking someone if anyone can hear the noise. So I decided to do a little digging. I got the audio off of YouTube, and I threw it into Audacity, which is the free sound editing program that we all use to record this show, and I noticed that it's in stereo, which made me very happy because I don't know a whole lot about audio, but I do know that there's this really neat trick that you can do with a stereo track that you think might have been manipulated. You can also use this trick if you want to make karaoke songs. You see if the manipulator of the video is particularly lazy or just ignorant, they might actually record their audio in mono, but then add a stereo sound effect to it. Stereo meaning there's a left channel and a right channel, so you hear different things in each ear. Mono, you hear the same thing in each ear. So Audacity has this free plugin called Centre Pan Removal, which basically inverts one of the channels and then puts the audio back together again, causing the mono sounds to cancel each other out, and you're left hearing only the stereo sound. So I did that, and ten seconds later, this is the exact same clip you just heard but with the mono gone:

Recording: *silence* (low rumbling sound)

R: So you may notice there's a bit of silence where there used to be a man talking...

Recording: (low rumbling sound)

R: ...and then the creepy sound. Isn't that convenient?

S: So this is a stereo effect added to a mono track.

R: Exactly.

S: Yeah.

R: ''Or'' maybe the angels of the apocalypse broadcast in ''magical'' stereo that bypasses mono devices. (sarcastic) Or yes, this is actually a complete and utter fake.

E: (inaudible)

R: And not just like a "whoops I made a mistake, I thought it was a ghost" but it's not fake, this is someone who went into an audio program and added that sound. And as for the actual sound, it doesn't really matter what it is, and it could be any number of things, but I happened to have watched Kevin Smith's film [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_State_%282011_film%29 Red State] last month. It's free on Netflix watch instantly. And spoiler alert everyone, don't listen if you haven't seen the movie, if you want to see the movie, I'll be honest, not that good of a movie, but spoiler.

E: (snickers)

R: At the end of the movie, there's an apocalyptic trumpeting sound and seriously, this is a big spoiler even though, not a good movie.

S: (snickers)

R: The trumpeting in the movie is actually caused by some kids playing a prank on a Christian doomsday cult. So I thought this sound you just heard in the Melbourne clip, I thought it sounded kind of familiar, so I went and found that [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItD6dQa5ncw clip of Red State], and I will play it for you now.

Recording: (low, rumbling trumpet sounds and faint sound of men crying out)

E: Now, where have I heard that before? Ummm...

R: (snickers) So yeah.

E: Sounds so familiar.

R: ...that should sound pretty familiar to you.

B: Yeeeah.

R: I mean maybe, maybe it's not, maybe it's something different, but yeah, those do sound remarkably similar to me, and there are a number of other videos that use a remarkably similar sound. So you can keep an ear out for that. I was ready to just say that this is a sound that comes from some psy-fi movie, but just a few hours ago, one of my Twitter followers notinmyname2050, I'm sorry I don't know your real name, but I guess that's appropriate for your username. But anyway, notinmyname2050 pointed me to a video by YouTuber Voodoo 6, in which he figures out that that came directly from the 2008 film [transcriber's edit: 2005] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_%282005_film%29 War of the Worlds]. So...

S: Yeah, I recognised that.

R: Okay.

B: Yeah.

R: See yeah, I like most people skipped that film.

...

[transcription ceases at 39:24]

== Interview with Sean Carroll () ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T05:52:36Z

Jessiessica: /* Who's That Noisy? (26:23) */ Added transcript

{{transcribing all
|transcriber = jessiessica
}}

{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 341
|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
|episodeIcon = File:tripod.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = SC: Sean Carroll
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2012-01-28.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,40106.0.html
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov Isaac Asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/ Neurologica: Stem Cells for Blindness]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/ Science-Based Medicine: Chiropractic Neurology]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness (18:30) ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/ Bethel Buzz News: (UPDATED) Cause of Sick LeRoy, NY Teens Remains a Mystery (With Poll!)]

S: One more medical news item by coincidence. Again, a number of people sent this to us. This has a little bit of a local angle for us, also a chiropractor. Again, this is not by design, this is just one of the things we wanted to talk about. So in a small town, LeRoy New York, twelve teenaged girls have come down with what the presses calling a mystery illness. You guys hears about this?

E: Mystery science illness 3000 (inaudible).

J: I sure did!

S: Yeah, they all attend the same school. It's a middle school high school. And all twelve of them are displaying symptoms that are being described as Tourette-like symptoms, that they're having these involuntary motor tics or movements. The question is why would twelve girls all come down with the same constellation of symptoms over a short period of time. So of course the CDC has gotten involved. There is one neurologist who examined I think eleven of the twelve girls, who has been doing an extensive testing on all of them, trying to figure out if there anything environmental. But what caught our eye about this is this story is there is a chiropractor by the name of Russell Caram who is local to us, he's in a town nearby us, wrote an article about this situation, and starts off okay, I mean I think a little bit clunky, but saying that there's a cluster of cases, so there has to be an explanation that can accommodate that. It can't be genetic 'cause they're not genetically related, and eventually comes to the conclusion that it's got to be something environmental, which I think is actually a reasonable conclusion. But then I think he inappropriately narrows the list of what counts as environmental. Says that well okay toxins and infections, seems that they've been ruled out. So he comes to the conclusion that the environmental trigger was probably the HPV vaccine - Gardasil or Cervarix - that it would explain the timing, the age - why it's all girls. So essentially he's trying to blame vaccines on these symptoms. And he goes on to talk about that there's high levels of aluminum in the vaccine and that could be a cause of toxicity, and then he goes on from there to saying how the government's untrustworthy, and we can't trust the government to investigate this properly. So at the end, it just became an anti-vaccine crank diatribe. Where he most significantly goes off the rails is in dismissing the possibility that the environmental trigger here is psychological, because that is something else that these twelve girls share in common. They are all part of the same very small community, attending the same, small school. He writes, now in scare quotes "Now the “establishment” has diagnosed them with “Conversion Disorder” – a disease resulting in similar symptoms...but usually brought on by some kind of stress or traumatic event." Actually it wasn't the "establishment", it was a ''neurologist'' who actually examined eleven of the twelve girls, ran a battery of tests, ruled out anything else that could link these together, and by the process of elimination, but also from direct examination and history-taking et cetera concluded that this is a case of mass psychogenic illness, which happens, this is a known phenomena, and cannot be easily dismissed. I actually did find [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ca50O2nrI video of some of the girls displaying their symptoms] So this is similar to prevous cases that we've talked about, like if you remember the cheerleader [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Desiree_Jennings Desiree Jennings] who belived she had vaccine-induced dystonia. Movement disorders can be diagnosed by video because what's important is how they're moving, so it's not a substitute for a complete neurological exam, but you can actually tell a lot just from a video of what the movement itself is. In this case, what I'm seeing is something that does look like tics. I think that 'tics' is the best technical description for the kind of movement that it is, a sudden, somewhat bizarre facial movement or gesture, maybe involving a vocalisation. This could be compatible with a tic disorder or Tourette's syndrome. I don't think I can say based upon this video alone that it's psychogenic, that it's psychological, because tics can be almost anything. Although I will say that it's a little atypical, it certainly could be psychogenic also. I think the fact that there are twelve unrelated girls who are all affected over a short period of time without there being any detectable environmental trigger or other environmental trigger is pretty strong inference that it is psychogenic. These psychogenic episodes are much more common in women than men for whatever reason, so kind of fits that profile as well. So it's interesting, I think that this is a difficult kind of a situation to deal with in the press, in public. This is something that should be dealt with between these families' physicians and them, because it's very delicate.

R: Yeah and I think that the public aspect of this and the Desiree Jenkins [sic] case actually make it more difficult because of the bias against psychological...

S: Mmm hmm

R: ...illnesses. You know I think that people would rather have an obvious physical disability they can point to as opposed to a psychological illness, just because we see people with psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...illnesses as "nutso freaks", you know. So without the public aspect I think there would be a better chance of them actually confirming that it's psychological...

S: Yeah.

R: ...and getting the correct treatment.

S: Yeah I agree there's a stigma attached to it and because when it's made public, I mean these girls are going on the news, going on TV, that invests them in the reality, the organic bases of the illness to an extent that would make it very hard for them to sort of just give it up. And it's hard enough as it is to get people to accept the diagnosis that it's psychogenic and to make it stop. It's something that's incredibly hard to treat. It becomes almost impossible if now it's been made public and they have that angle to it, again like with Desiree Jennings, I mean she's become so invested in that that I think it would be hopeless to try to get them to get past this. So it's unfortunately very counterproductive. But if you reads the comments, a lot of people made the analogy to the Salem witch trials where you essentially had a small group of young teenaged girls who started manifesting symptoms that were blamed on withes at the time, but you know in certain ways very similar.

R: Yeah, and when you start blaming vaccines instead, which helps feed into the idea that vaccines are dangerous and convinces more people to not get vaccinated, then you could even say that they have a similar level of danger to them as the witch trials.

S: Yeah, I mean this is a with hunt against vaccines, it is very similar.

== Who's That Noisy? (26:23)==

S: Alright well let's move on. We're going to... Let's move on first to Who's That Noisy. Evan, give us the answer to last week.

E: Here we go, last week's Who's That Noisy.

Recording: There's no such thing as a psychic.

E: You guys remember that?

S: Yes.

J: Yes I do! That's from TV.

E: "There's no such thing as a psychic."

S: Nope. It's from a movie.

E: Now, it sounds like it's from TV. It's actually from a movie. The movie is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_wood Ed Wood]...

S: (laughs) That's a funny movie.

E: ...one of my ''all time'' favourite movies, wonderful!

B: Really? I've never seen that, I have to see that.

E: Oh you must see, ''must see'' movie Bob, you will not be disappointed. It is incred... One of Tim Burton's finest in my opinion.

B: Yeah, Burton and Depp, how could I not see that?

E: Right? You totally should see it, they were wonderful. But that was actor Jeffery Jones, portraying the Amazing Criswell...

S: Mmm hmm

E: ...who was of course was an actual psychic at the time, well...

S: Stage psychic.

E: ...not really psychic. Yeah, a showman, (laughs) because he basically admitted in that same scene in the movie to Ed Wood (laughs), said it's all horseshit.

S: Yeah.

E: (laughs) That's basically what he says. 'I just guess. People believe be 'cause I wear a tuxedo.' (laughs)

S: Yeah, it's all showmanship.

E: So, while he admitted that certainly to his friends, he was quoted as saying once that he once had the gift, but he lost it when he started taking money.

S: Yeeahh, see you can't take that evil money, otherwise yeah, your powers go away.

E: Yeah, your cosmic energy there plummets at that point.

E: Right, isn't it like that James Bond movie where the tarot card reader, her power went away because she had sex with James Bond?

(all laugh)

B: Oh yeah! Oh my god! (laughing)

R: That is one powerful cock.

S: Yes, you so you can't take money or have sex.

J: He stole the mojo. (Austin Power voice)

E: And that's what Sean Connery said...

S: (laughs)

E: ..."I bet you didn't shee that coming. (laughs)" (Sean Connery accent)

S: Although it might have been not Sean Connery. I think is was Roger Moore.

E: (simultaneously) Or Roger Moore?

S: Right. Who got that quote?

E: So, a lot of people... Well a lot of people actually guessed it was The Mentalist, right, you know?

S: Mmm Hmm Similar thing.

E: 'Cause it's similar, but you know there was that music in the background, right Rebecca that you noticed last week...

R: Yeah.

E: ...and, so it was... You have to know the movie perhaps as in depth as I know it which is almost line for line. We had no winners.

R: Oh! Wow.

E: ...so I was able to stump...

S: Clean sweep.

E: ...our listening audience.

S: Good job.

E: So we're gonna do something a little different this week.

S: A ''lot'' different.

E: Aah you're right. It is a lot different.

S: It's a kind of an experiment which we do in January.

E: (laughs)

B: I'm scared.

S: (laughs)

E: Don't be...

R: Hold me.

E: Don't be frightened, hold my hand, here, hold my hand. Eeh! That's not my hand. We're gonna have a Who's That Noisy scavenger hunt. So instead of me playing a noisy for you this week, I am tasking ''you'', the listening audience to come up with the correct noisy for ''us'', ''and'' the listening audience of course. You must submit to us... I challenge you to submit to us...

J: (laughs)

E: ...the dumbest thing (laughs) that in your opinion, that a politician has said concerning science or a scientific statement that is just so stupid that a politician must have said it. Send us your submissions, send us your audio clip.

S: Yeah it's got to be an actual audio clip, not a...

E: ...had to be an audio clip.

S: ...a link to it, not a transcript, we need the audio.

R: It is a podcast.

S: Yeah.

E: After all it is.

S: And brief.

E: And yes, brief.

J: And your underwear, yes.

E: Yes.

S: Right.

E: I understand politicians, their mouths move all the time, and lots of dumb things come out of their mouths but, keep it brief.

S: And give us the information, you're not trying to stump us. We will select the dumbest thing that... statement that people send us and we'll play that next week.

E: And we'll play it next week...

S: Yeah.

e: ...for your listening enjoyment. Alright? So you have your homework, and we're lookin' forward to seeing what you come up with.

S: Yeah.

E: I know I am. (laughs)

S: It should be...

E: This could be hilarious.

S: ... should be fun, should be fun.

E: Yep.

S: Aah, okay, well thank you Evan.

E: You are welcome.

== Questions and Emails () ==
=== Question 1: Sounds in the Sky ()===
<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

== Interview with Sean Carroll () ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T04:42:39Z

Jessiessica: /* Psychogenic Illness (18:30) */ Added transcript

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T03:33:19Z

Jessiessica: /* Psychogenic Illness (18:30) */ Changed link formatting

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T03:31:46Z

Jessiessica: Added episode icon to ep 341, added links

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T03:15:02Z

Jessiessica:

{{transcribing all
|transcriber = jessiessica
}}

{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 341
|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
|episodeIcon = [[File:Example.jpg]]
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = SC: Sean Carroll
|downloadLink =
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink =
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness (18:30) ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/]

== Who's That Noisy? ()==

== Questions and Emails () ==
=== Question 1: Sounds in the Sky ()===
<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

== Interview with Sean Carroll () ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T02:59:06Z

Jessiessica: /* Psychogenic Illness (18:30) */

{{Editing required

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|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
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|downloadLink =
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink =
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness (18:30) ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/]

== Who's That Noisy? ()==

== Questions and Emails () ==
=== Question 1: Sounds in the Sky ()===
<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

== Interview with Sean Carroll () ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T02:58:35Z

Jessiessica: /* Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) */

{{Editing required

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|'Today I Learned' list = y
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|segment redirects = y 
|}}
{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 341
|episodeDate = 28th Jan 2013
|episodeIcon = [[File:Example.jpg]]
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = SC: Sean Carroll
|downloadLink =
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=341
|forumLink =
|qowText = There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov]
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday January 25th 2012 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: Bully. (editor - sp?)

S: How're you doing today Evan?

E: (laughs) I'm in a Winston Churchill kind of mood so I'm doing just fine.

S: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill said olé?

B: No, he said bully. (editor - sp?)

R: Oh, bully. (editor - sp?)

E: (laughs)

J: You know when I'm looking for quotes, I find tonnes of Winston Churchill quotes...

E: Oh, forget about it.

J: ...Not completely skeptically related but the guy said so many cool things at such a time in history when people really needed to hear those cool things. He was epic man.

E: Without a doubt.

S: (laughs) Alright Rebecca.

E: (laughs)

R: Winston Churchill, cool dude.

J: (laughs)

E: Yeah.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:00) ==
January 28th, 1887 In a snowstorm at Fort Keogh, Montana, the world's largest snowflakes are reported, 15 inches (38 cm) wide and 8 inches (20 cm) thick.

R: Hey guess what today is! On January 28th 1887 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest snowflake fell during a snowstorm in Fort Keogh in Montanna.

E: Just how big was this snowflake?

R: It was ''so'' big...

S&E: (laugh)

E: How big was it?

R: ...so big it got into the Guinness Book of Records.

B: Shouldn't you say it was the world's biggest recorded snowflake?

R: Actually, it's not even really well recorded. Basically just some guy said that he saw it. So it was a rancher called Matt Coleman...

E: While chewing on peyote or something.

J: For some reason I just picture some guy like sitting at his window during a snowstorm and he's looking up and he sees this gigantic-ass snowflake and he's like "Hello..." (British accent)

R&E: (snicker)

J: "...hello big boy" (British accent) You know, and he runs out and catches it he and measures it, and of course he touches it by accident and he melts the freaking thing.

R: Mmm, mmm hmm.

E: That's a sordid story.

J: How can it not be that?

R: Well Matt Coleman said that he saw a snowflake that was ''fifteen'' inches wide...

E: Whaat?

R: ...and some places I saw reported fifteen inches wide and eight inches thick?

J: Rebecca, does the diameter matter with a snowflake?

E: It's like a football (laughs).

R: But anyway, massive, a massive snowflake.

B: God, that's huge.

R: But you know, we don't really know because the problem is that in 1887, cell phone cameras were few and far between, so we really only have his word. But I wanted to look into whether there or not are have been any confirmed reports of snowflakes that were anywhere near that size. Since then, it turns out there have been confirmed snowflakes s of up to four inches, which is nowhere near the same, but still pretty massive. Four inches in Berlin in 1915, and also up to three inches in Laramie, Wyoming in 1970. And in 1992, field researchers used laser probes to measure snowflakes that were up to two inches wide with snow crystals the size of a pea in Newfoundland. And to make things clear, when I say 'snow crystal', I'm talking about the usual six arm star image that we all know and love, and the word 'snowflake' usually refers to many of those crystals all clustered together in mid-aid. And thousands of those crystals can cluster together to make up one giant snowflake that could be several inches across. So thanks to more and more field researchers out there studying climate and other things, we figured out the chain of events that lead to giant snowflakes. It happens when the temperature is just above freezing, and winds are calm enough to not break up the flakes. Dendrites are the largest of the snow crystals. What happens is that they can form really high up, like three miles in the sky. So that gives them a lot of time to fall and bump into smaller crystals, and accumulate, or 'snowball' if you will, and eventually you end up with massive flakes. But so far, nobody has any convincing evidence that they will get to fifteen inches across. However there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that it can't happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

S: Mmm hmm. Yeah it's pretty thin evidence though. I mean two to three inches sounds more plausible.

R: Right.

E: Much.

B: I'm surprised Guinness even accepted it.

R: Yeah, 'cause you know they're that bastion of proof.

E: (laughs) Of science, yeah.

B: No, they're generally, I thought they're fairly, you know they're generally strict in documenting and making sure that it was actually done.

R: I think they were just trying to pad out their book.

S: (laughs)

== News Items ==
=== Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43)===
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/stem-cells-for-blindness/]

S: Alright let's move on to some news items. Jay, you're gonna tell us about a stem cell treatment for blindness.

J: Yeah I was reading about a recent news item where some scientists were doing research on this stem cell treatment of the two most common types of blindness and this is world-wide. But real quick is this quick history on stem cells. So since 1998 when scientists figured out how to grow actual stem cells, stem cells have been considered a promising source of replacement cells for regenerative medicine. And when I say that they discovered how to grow stem cells, we knew that stem cells have existed much longer than that, but scientists actually figured out a way to take existing stem cells and basically culture them to make them grow so they had a population that they could actually draw from and do testing with. And since then, stem cells have proven to be very difficult to work with because of their complexity. I mean, the way that stem cells are unique are that they can become any other type of cell that's in the organism depending on the environment that they're in.

S: Well there are different kinds of stem cells. I mean the embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of stem cell. But then there are more specific types of stem cells, like there are blood stem cells that can become any kind of blood cell, but not non-blood cells.

J: So this recent study that we're talking about that was in the news uses embryonic stem cells on Stargardt's macular dystrophy, and dry age-related macular degeneration, and like I said these are the two leading causes of blindness in the developed world. The study was considered to be preliminary and designed to mostly take a look at the safety and the procedure how they would actually use it. And they do have concerns of course of injecting stem cells into any part of the body, particularly the eye because of the following reasons, and one of them of course is tumour formation, but they were saying there wasn't any hyper proliferation - this is they're language - which is an abnormally high rate of cell division, which is a cause of cancer or is cancer, abnormal cell growth, or the immune system rejection of the transplant itself in either of the two patients that they tested. They tested these people for four months after the procedures were done. Now Steve you were gonna talk about the results that they found from the test right?

S: So to be clear, this was a preliminary study looking at safety only. Their only concern was can we inject stem cells into patients' eyes basically, into their retinas, without them forming tumours or other bad effects, like you mentioned hypoplasia, also rejection, and will the cells survive and become the right kind of cells. So this is a preliminary test of two patients where they injected one eye and there were no negative outcomes to either of the two patients, so these stem cell injections appear to be safe. Although the study wasn't specifically looking at benefit, both patients also reported improved vision. The one patient, the scientists who did the study are saying that there appears to be a clear improvement in the vision of the eye that was injected

B: Did they get super vision?

S: They did not get super vision or x-ray vision.

B: Aaw crap, damn.

S: But the patient reported that for example she was able to read the time on her watch when she was not able to previously do that. The second patient also reported improved vision, but it's not clear that that's anything other than a placebo effect. She actually reported improved vision in the eye that was not injected...

B: Heh.

E: Wow.

S: ...in both eyes including the one that wasn't injected. So what's interesting about this study? One is that we're starting now to get the early reports of preliminary research of embryonic stem cell applications.

B: Took long enough.

S: Well this is about right actually, and we're still five to ten years away, even at this stage. If everything goes well, they have to look at this in ''many'' more patients, they have to follow outcomes much more thoroughly, the longer-term follow up to make sure these don't become tumours or increase the risk of developing cancer or have other problems. It takes five years to do a five year follow up...

J: How do you figure that?

B: (chuckles)

S: ...before this is considered safe for doing routinely.

J: But the good news is that in the four months that they were following the patients, they didn't see anything that raised any red flags, which is fantastic.

S: Yeah.

J: And also, I do believe that it legitimately did help one of the subjects. They're using very common eye tests on these people, and one of them is basically reading of the eye chart, which you can't fake.

S: The only way to fake it is to memorise it.

J: The point here is though once again, we're always saying "Five years, five years." you know, everything is seemingly five years away, but they did actually hit a milestone here.

S: Yeah, this is I think a recognisable milestone. The other thing I found interesting about it is the reporting of it by the scientists themselves. They were very conservative, very cautious, considering other interpretations, like you know 'this might be the placebo effect, we're not sure this is really a good effect', and emphasising how much more research has to be done. And it always strikes me, I think it's important to note the contrast between real scientists doing legitimate research, even here where you have...

B: (chuckles)

S: ...a very sexy breakthrough treatment - using stem cells to treat blindness - how ''cautious'' they're being, and to contrast that to the snake oil salesman who use flimsy evidence to make these bold, expansive claims without the qualifiers, and without the caution that these scientists are stating. So that says a lot about, that's a good sort of first approximation of when you're dealing with in my opinion, like legitimate scientific medical research and snake oil salesmen.

B: Yeah, if the snake oil salesmen had these results, they'd be asking for like a Nobel prize, they'd be selling the treatment on the internet, and then China, and anywhere else they could sell it.

S: Yeah, sometimes you know like people send me links, where they just find links to pseudoscientists, you know cranks and quacks who are selling whatever they're selling, and it's ''unbelievable'' how ''hyped up'' their claims and their credentials are. It's like "this is the greatest breakthrough perhaps in a thousand years", and they go over and over about how ''renowned'' this guy is and he was ''invited'' to speak to this eminent congregation of scientists who had to get together to see/hear what... It's like a ''movie'', the way they're presenting it. It's just ''ridiculous''. Whereas here you have actual scientists with this stunning milestone, I mean this is still gain a long way away from an actual treatment, and they're downplaying it, downplaying it as much as possible.

E: As they should.

S: Yeah, as they should.

=== Chiropractic Neurology (11:41) ===
[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/chiropractic-neurology/]

S: So Evan, tell us what's up with Sidney Crosby.

E: Yeah, well we're about to hit the other end of the spectrum now with this particular news item. Like you said Steve, Sidney Crosby's a big NHL superstar.

S: NHL?

E: NHL...

S: (laughs)

E: ...National Hockey League?

S: Aaaah. Hockey.

E: Yes. Now this guy was no slouch. He's the highly touted number one pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins - that's a hockey team - in 2005, and this guys was destined to become a big-time superstar, I mean he was being compared to Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux, I mean the guy was...

S: Wayne Gretzky? Let's not get crazy. (sarcastic)

E: Yeah, he scored a goal or two. But really, his impact was immediately felt on the team. He scored 100 points first season, he lead his team back from playoffs in 2007 after a long absence, he was the league's most valuable player that year, and then in 2009 they won the whole thing, the Stanley Cup Championships. So on this guy's back, he basically turned this franchise into a modern winner. But ''then'' in January of the 2010-2011 season, Crosby suffered a concussion during the NHL Winter Classic Game, which was a highly-watched televised game, it's annually held in an outdoor venue, which is unusual for the NHL. It was a blindside hit that was kind of brutal, but it wasn't vicious, so it wasn't a cheap shot per se, but it was just a really bad hit, and it was a substantial injury. Although he and the doctors didn't know it at the time, Crosby wound up finishing the gain, and he played for a whole 'nother week before he suffered another hit to the head, and that sent him off the ice indefinitely. So this is the NHL's biggest star, and he had to sit out the rest of the season in hopes that things would get better in time so he could return to play for the star of the next season. So the Summer of 2011, this is where the story becomes of interest to skeptics and the science-based medical community. In early September, Crosby and members of the Pittsburgh Penguins management held a press conference. But sitting across said Crosby at the conference was a person with the nametag of Dr Ted Carrick. Now Carrick is a "chiropractic neurologist". So what exactly ''is'' a chiropractic neurologist, right? Sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. It's a chiropractor who applies their trade to people suffering from neurological disorders. And Steve, you had blogged about chiropractic neurology back in November and about Dr Carrick specifically, and you found a very telling quote made by Dr Carrick during a PBS interview he had given in which he said "Well, we’re finding every day that more and more things that we didn’t think were associated with chiropractic treatment can be affected very nicely. There are testimonials from people who have had their eyesight and hearing back, and people waking up from comas."

S: So let's contract that with the eyesight researchers, the stem cells for vision who are trying to downplay it. This guy's like '''Oh yeah'', we can cure coma, we can wake people, give them their eyesight back, hearing, ''suuure''.'

E: (chuckles)

S: ...based on the flimsiest of testimonials, which is mostly what this guy has. He just has anecdotes and testimonials. So chiropractic neurology is as far as I can tell is 100% nonsense. It is not based upon any body of scientific knowledge, any understanding of neuroscience, neuroanatomy, or anything. It is just chiropractors trying to apply their voodoo to neurological disorders. Carrick has published a few studies, but they're laughably pseudoscientific. He published one study in which he claims that first of all, he claims that you can tell something about brain function by looking at the blind spot, by mapping the blind spot of the eye. This is simply not true. He then claims that you can improve i.e. reduce the size of the blind spot in the eye by doing a chiropractic adjustment, which is absurd...

E: Wow.

S: ...squared, yeah. So this is his evidence, this kind of nonsensical research which is terrible and testimony and anecdote leading him to blithely claim 'Oh yes, we can wake people from coma.' This is the guy treating Crosby, and also is relying upon just the placebo effect and testimony just to argue that his treatments are in fact helping, but there's no reason to think that Crosby's not just going through the normal period of recovery from a concussion.

E: Steve, even other chiropractors have spoken out against Carrick and his practises. We know that there are some chiropractors that are trying to apply...

S: Yeah.

e: ...a real scientific approach to chiropractic, and one such chiropractor, David Seaman had this to say about Carrick, he said "In recent years, the work of Dr Carrick...has resulted in a style of dogmatism that echoes that of BJ Palmer. In the case of Carrick, students believe that his words represent state-of-the-art, referenced material...when an instructor implies that he is correct and accepted scientific texts are wrong, he fosters an instructor/student relationship that leads to unbridled dogmatism." [http://www.chiro.org/ChiroZine/ABSTRACTS/Science_vs_dogmatism.shtml]

S: Right. Yeah, he's a guru.

E: Calling him out. As far as Crosby's concerned, at that press conference in September, Carrick boldly predicted that Sidney Crosby would be back and playing in time by Christmas, by around the Christmas season is his recovery. And he specifically said and I quote him, "Sidney shouldn't have any problems in the future." [http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/41675-Sidney-Crosby-getting-better-but-no-timeline-for-his-return-to-the-NHL.html], thanks to the practise of chiropractic neurology.

S: Mmm hmm

E: Well guess what. So much for not having any problems in the future for Sidney, because he did return to playing again in late November of 2011. He played in 8 games, and Sidney's symptoms all returned, and he's now once again inactive due to these symptoms recurring.

S: Just to clarify, it wasn't a new injury, it was a just a recurrence of his symptoms from the previous injury because he was being too active, he was playing.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah.

E: And the recent headlines from just last week said that Crosby is going back to Carrick ''again''...

S: Yeah.

E: ...for more treatment.

S: He has his hooks in him.

E: So it's really unfortunate. You've got the biggest star right now in the NHL, really helping carry the water for Carrick in this sense. He's making him legitimate in a lot of peoples' eyes.

S: Yeah, it's gonna be huge free advertising for him. He's getting so much press coverage. A lot of it, like Sports Illustrated covered him very uncritically, although in their earlier article, they did also quote a neurosurgeon who said, that was very critical of Carrick saying 'he's all based on anecdote, and what we do today is based on evidence based medicine.'

=== Psychogenic Illness () ===
[http://bethelbuzznews.com/2012/01/19/updated-cause-of-sick-leroy-ny-teens-remains-a-mystery-with-poll/]

== Who's That Noisy? ()==

== Questions and Emails () ==
=== Question 1: Sounds in the Sky ()===
<blockquote>Hello Skeptics guide, during my daily science news story search on the internet I came across a couple of stories about "strange apocalyptic sounds coming from the sky from canada to budapest..." Having some critical thinking I began to inspect the videos to try and discern what they were. After much failed research on more worthy sites I could not find a good answer. To me it sounds like it could be something simple like a plane flying overhead to something more atmospheric. But these are wild guesses. I thought you may want to look in to it so that you may have better luck than me finding out what it actually is. Here is the original link I came across that brought this to my knowledge http://io9.com/5876369/what-are-these-bizarre-sounds-coming-from-the-sky-in-countries-from-hungary-to-canada p.s. We all hope that it is as one commenter commented, the cthullu shai-hulud movie! Thanks for all your good work! Michael Ohio </blockquote>

== Interview with Sean Carroll () ==
http://preposterousuniverse.com/

== Science or Fiction () ==

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

{{Outro1}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T01:45:15Z

Jessiessica: /* Stem Cells for Blindness (4:43) */

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T00:38:17Z

Jessiessica: /* This Day in Skepticism () */

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-23T00:03:33Z

Jessiessica: /* Introduction */

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-22T23:49:47Z

Jessiessica:

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-22T23:46:06Z

Jessiessica: /* Stem Cells for Blindness (5:23) */

SGU Episode 341

2013-02-22T23:45:32Z

Jessiessica: Created page with "{{Editing required |transcription = y |formatting = y |time-stamps = y |links = y |'Today I Learned' list = y |categories ..."

Template:SGU episode list

2013-02-22T23:15:44Z

Jessiessica:

<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.

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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{|style="margin:1em 3em"
|style="padding-right: 6em;white-space:nowrap" valign="top"|<big>'''2013'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 396]], Feb 16,2013
* [[SGU Episode 395]], Feb 9, 2013 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 394]], Feb 2, 2013
* [[SGU Episode 393]], Jan 26 2013 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 392]], Jan 19 2013
* [[SGU Episode 391]], Jan 12 2013 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 390]], Jan 5 2013

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

<big>'''2011'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 337]], Dec 31 2011
* [[SGU Episode 335]], Dec 17 2011 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 331]], Nov 19 2011
* [[SGU Episode 330]], Nov 11 2011
* [[SGU Episode 328]], Oct 29 2011
* [[SGU 24hr]], Sep 23-24 2011
* [[SGU Episode 320]], Aug 29 2011
* [[SGU Episode 312]], Jul 5 2011 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 308]], Jun 08 2011 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 287]], Jan 12 2011 {{Open}}
|valign="top" style=white-space:nowrap|<big>'''2010'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 285]], Dec 29 2010 {{open}}
* [[SGU Episode 271]], Sep 22 2010
* [[SGU Episode 260]], Jun 30 2010 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 257]], Jun 14 2010
* [[SGU Episode 252]], May 12 2010
* [[SGU Episode 247]], Apr 7 2010 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 245]], Mar 25 2010 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 232]], Jan 1 2010

<big>'''2009'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 220]], Oct 7 2009 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 216]], Sep 9 2009 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 185]], Feb 4 2009
* [[SGU Episode 184]], Jan 28 2009
* [[SGU Episode 183]], Jan 21 2009 {{i}}

<big>'''2008'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 165]], Sep 17 2008
* [[SGU Episode 156]], Jul 16 2008 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 152]], Jun 11 2008 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 146]], May 7 2008 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 144]], Apr 23 2008 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 141]], Apr 2 2008
* [[SGU Episode 140]], Mar 26 2008 {{i}}

<big>'''2007'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 127]], Dec 26, 2007 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 123]], Nov 28, 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 116]], Oct 10, 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 113]], Sep 19, 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 111]], Sep 5, 2007 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 110]], Aug 28, 2007 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 109]], Aug 24, 2007
* [[SGU Episode 105]], Jul 25, 2007 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 103]], Jul 11, 2007
* [[SGU Episode 102]], Jul 3, 2007
* [[SGU Episode 100]], June 19, 2007 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 98]], June 6, 2007{{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 97]], May 30 2007
* [[SGU Episode 89]], Apr 4, 2007 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 79]], Jan 24, 2007

<big>'''2006'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 73]], Dec 13 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 68]], Nov 8 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 62]], Sep 27 2006
* [[SGU Episode 61]], Sep 20 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 55]], Aug 9 2006 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 49]], Jun 28 2006
* [[SGU Episode 47]], Jun 14 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 46]], Jun 7 2006 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 38]], Apr 12 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 31]], Feb 22 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 27]], Jan 25 2006 {{Open}}

<big>'''2005'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 18]], Nov 2 2005
* [[SGU Episode 17]], Oct 26 2005 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 16]], Oct 12 2005 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 15]], Oct 6 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 14]], Sep 28 2005
* [[SGU Episode 13]], Sep 14 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 12]], Sep 7 2005
* [[SGU Episode 11]], Aug 31 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 10]], Aug 23 2005
* [[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
* [[SGU Episode 4]], Jun 15 2005 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 3]], Jun 7 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 2]], Jun 1 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 1]], May 4 2005 {{tick}}
|}

SGU Episode 308

2013-02-22T08:05:55Z

Jessiessica: /* UFO Nazi Connection (50:59) */

{{Editing required
|transcription = y
|proof-reading = y 
|time-stamps = y
|links = y
|Today I Learned list = y
|categories = y
|segment redirects = y 
|}}
{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 308
|episodeDate = 8thJune 2011
|episodeIcon = File:Nazi_Spaceship.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = PP: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Plait Phil Plait]
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2011-06-08.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=308
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,36132.0.html
|qowText = Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are.
|qowAuthor = Eric Butterworth
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday June 8th, 2011 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: Yuan Shang Hao. Good evening to all of our listeners in China of which there are...

J: I like your intonation

S: Inflection

B: I'm not sure if it was accurate though but it sounded good

E: Does anyone listen to us in China?

R: Of course, yeah, we have some Chinese listeners

S: But if you use the wrong inflection you say, 'I wanna massage your grandmother', so you've gotta be careful

E: You know the thing about saying 'good evening' in Chinese is that I want to say it again in an hour. I don't know what it is

B: O.M.G.

R: Wow

J: That was so bad

R: He's been working on that joke all night

E: Where's my rim shot? Ah crud.
(cymbals)

R: You get a sad trombone
(sad trombone)

S: Rebecca you're joining us from London this week

J: I say

R: I am, yes, I'm back in Old Blighty, as no-one calls it

E: Rebecca Poppins

R: Yeah, so once again the listeners are being treated to Rebecca at one thirty in the morning. Awesome.

J: But you're still kind of on US time

R: No, not really

J: But you're not in a bad mood

R: No, not really

J: Well at least you're happy recording the show

R: No

== This Day in Skepticism ()==
June 11, 1854. G.F. Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved in a lecture titled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.

S: Alright. Evan tell us what is absolutely fascinating about this day in skepticism

E: Well on this day that you're listening to the show it was 1854 in which the famous mathematician Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved and he announced this in a lecture titled On the Hypothesis on which Geometry is Based, which is apparently a very famous lecture that he gave. And what he did is he described the old-fashioned, Euclidean two-dimensional plane geometry along with some other examples of old geometry and... well let me put it to you this way. There's an example in which on a piece of paper there lived a bookworm, right, and this bookworm was drawn on the piece of paper so it was drawn in two-dimensional. You take the paper and you fold it up and you crumple it up. Now the worm drawn on the paper has no sense of the cumbling and the distortion of space that's going on around him because he also exists in two dimensions. Right, follow me so far?

S: Right

R: Yeah

B: Gotcha

S: Oh yeah

E: Whereas actually that crumpled paper is in three dimensions. So extend that out, we live in a world of three dimensions, but actually everything going around us exists in, what we believe is four dimensions, the fourth dimensions being time. And this was important not only as an important discovery of his time but it also influenced scientists and physicists such as Einstein who used Riemann's work in his theory of general relativity in which he incorporated time as the fourth dimension.

S: Yeah but when Riemann was talking about higher dimension I think he was talking about higher spatial dimensions, not necessarily with time as the fourth dimension. That was something that Einstein inserted. He was saying that space itself is curved into a physical fourth dimension which we can't perceive because we're on the surface of the paper like the...

E: That's right, we're like the worm. The two-dimensional worm on the paper has no idea it's getting all crumpled and crushed up.

S: But it's interesting. Imagine being the first guy to think of space as not linear, that's it's not Euclidean, that it's curved. That's mind blowing, right?

E: Big deal

B: The way he did that was to... I guess he was the first one to actually think of introducing numbers at every point in space and that was how he came upon the idea of using that method to describe how it was bent. I guess a pretty key insight. I wonder how relativity would have been affected if he hadn't come up with that and whether it would have been delayed significantly.

R: I don't know. For some reason this reminds me a lot of, was it Plato? Plato's cave/wall idea of people who are...

E: Shadows?

R: Yeah, I guess seeing shadows on a cave/wall so they assume that that's all that life is are these two-dimensional shadows, so if you were to explain the three-dimensional world to them it would blow their minds. And of course you can't say that Plato was thinking in terms of, well maybe there was a fourth dimension, a fourth spatial dimension as such, but I mean he was thinking in those sorts of terms, don't you think?

S: Yeah well that... our perception of reality is shaped by the physical reality in which we live

J: Right

S: We may be ignorant of reality in the same way that the cave shadow people are ignorant of their ultimate reality

R: Right and that's not to suggest that Plato had any sort of evidence of a fourth spatial dimension. I just want to put that out there. For conspiracy theorists out there...

S: He was talking more in just general philosophical terms, not that specific manifestation

J: Bob, what about this thing where we have these three dimensions that we can easily perceive and understand. But why do the dimensions end there? In other words, why couldn't there have been a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth dimension that are physical dimensions?

B: There actually might be and some theories actually, string theory and things, actually consider that - have that as an integral part of that. But those dimensions are, it's kind of weird, they're actually wrapped up and compacted in such a small space that they're not visible easily, so higher dimensions can exist in our universe but we just can't really detect them yet, it's not obvious beyond the three spatial dimensions we're aware of now.

E: I've heard that membrane theory relies on 11 dimensions - they can calculate 11 dimensions based on those theories.

B: Yeah

J: How about - I've heard of other theories talking about other dimensions of time. Imagine two dimensions of time, say, four or five dimensions of say space and two of time. What would that be like?

R: Crazy. That would be...

B: Crazy. How many... two watches wherever you go

S: This kind of stuff only makes sense in the context of mathematics. We can't, you know, really think about it physically.

J: You know just because we can think of them mathematically does that mean that they actually exist?

S: No. No, but there is something to the fact that it makes the Math more elegant. It sort of solves problems to bump things up a dimension and think of the reality as a three dimensional manifestation of a four dimensional reality or however many you ultimately get up to. So what does this mean? I mean this is a big question in theoretical physics or science in general, you know, when things start to fit together and become more elegant and have more explanatory power. That's nice, but it's not the same thing as it being actually the case and that's where we get into the debate about whether or not string theory can be a real science because it's not empirical, just theoretical.

== News Items ==
=== SGU-24 (7:24)===
The first 24 hour Live SGU event. September 23, 2011, starting at 8:00pm

S: Well we have a couple of news items coming up. Phil Plait's going to be coming up in a while to talk about some astronomy news but first we have a couple of other news items. The first one is SGU related. Do you guys know... I know you guys know what's going to happen... I hope you know by now - September 23rd and 24th, this fall, 2011, a very special event will be occurring: we will be holding... we have decided for some crazy reason to do a 24 hour live streaming SGU event.

R: Extravaganza

B: Extreme is right

J: And I want everyone to know from the beginning that I'm totally against it

E: Yes, we are bringing J kicking and screaming to this event

R: Which should only make it more entertaining I think

E: Oh yeah

B: I thought of a name, I just thought of a name for it

S: What?

B: Skeptapalooza

S: Oh come on

R: That's a terrible name

B: Best one I've heard yet

S: Alright, our working title is SGU24 but we're certainly open to suggestions

J: And I get to play Jack Bower then

E: "Where's the bomb?"

S: Does that mean we get to torture you and stop your heart and then get it going again?

J: Jump my heart with a car battery and then I'll be able to do 14 hours of show?
(all laugh)

I loved every goddam season of that programme.

R: You know Jay, for some reason when I hear you mention 24 hours it doesn't really bother me that much, but when you mention 14 hours it occurs to me, like, we will have already been recording for ten hours and we'll have 14 to go and now I'm against it too.

S: Well that's like we were flying to Australia and we were on the plane for what seems like forever and we find out we still have ten more hours left on the plane. Yeah it's bad. This won't be quite that bad because it'll be in my house

E: We like doing the heavy lifting, these special events, things that other sane people would never try.

S: So more details will be unfolding over the ensuing months, but save the dates September 23rd at 8pm and for the following 24 hours you'll be able to eat, sleep and breathe the SGU. And it'll be video. And we'll be broadcasting from a very special location.

R: You already said, from your house

S: But it's a special location within my house.

E: Right...

B: And we haven't named it yet, we need a special name

J: Bob, we did name it!

S: It's the skeptilair.

R: (groans) Oh, please make it stop.

E: The skeptiman cave, with Rebecca

R: It's just gonna continue to get worse isn't it.

S: Unfortunately

J: This show will be fused... it'll be infused... with have Star Trek, with Star Wars, it'll have internet, it'll have TVs, it'll have computers, it'll have gadgets, it'll have things that pop and bubble

B: Skulls!

E: And it'll have no bathroom breaks. We'll all have to go down on one leg.

S: We'll all have catheters going to bottles strapped to our thighs

B: And one dead body

E: Oooo...

S: At least one dead body, yes

E: At least one, if not more

J: Yeah, SGU just jumped the shark

(all laugh)

R: Also we'll be introducing a young child onto the show. Our new, six-year-old love child.

(all chuckle nervously)

B: I thought you were referencing Oliver from the Brady Bunch

R: Oliver

B: The punk

R: The kid on married with children

E: You remember the Brady Bunch, Rebecca? No?

R: I've heard of the Brady Bunch

B: (gasp)

E: Heard of the Brady Bunch...

R: Anyway, the point is

J: 'Pork chops and applesauce'

(all laugh)

E: 'Oh, my nose!' (chuckles to self)

R: Are these... Are these Brady Bunch jokes? Is that what we...

J: Mum always said don't paintball in the house

E: That's why they're all zooming over your head

S: Yes

R: Yes. Alright, can we go back to Star Trek?

J: Oh woah.

E: 'He's dead Jim'

B: Never thought I'd hear her say that

S: But worse, can you imagine 24 hours of this?

R: I'm just gonna bring earplugs

(Steve laughs)

R: I'm going to bring a big pair of headphones. So I can just listen to my music.

S: Noise cancellation.

Alright, well, let's go on...

B: Geek cancellation

=== Psychic Tipster (12:06)===
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/usa-crime-bodies-idUSN0717557520110608 Reuters: UPDATE 6-Texas authorites find no bodies after psychic tip]

S: ...To another news item, Rebecca. A psychic gave a very interesting tip to the police

R: That's right, Steve. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies'. That was the headline that Reuters decided to run with. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies, including children, buried in a mass grave in a rural home East of Houston', local media reported.

(All laugh)

R: Ah, it goes on to say, 'It might not have been 30, it was 25 to 30, but preliminary reports did indicate that there were children.' So a really horrific scene there, Tuesday night, that was on June 7. And there was a lot of confusion as these reports were coming in, but it turns out that this amazing find was in fact discovered by a psychic. It came in through a psychic tip, the psychic told the police to go to this specific house in Texas and to search for bodies, the police went there, they didn't find anything so the same caller, the same anonymous psychic caller called back and again stated that there were bodies there it's just that the police were in slightly the wrong spot. So the psychic gave even more exact directions so the police went back and they found... Nothing.

S: Nothing?

Nothing. There was nothing. They found a small amount of blood on the porch of a house nearby and for some reason that turned into 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies including children', which is basically what the psychic had reported. But try as the might, the Texas authorities were actually unable to find any evidence of any bodies. The home-owners, the people who lived in the house on that property were truckers, cross-country truckers, who were out on the road when it happened. When reached for comment they said no, they were not murderers.

J: We don't know nothing about no bodies

B: Exactly

E: 'No bodies' (laughs)

R: But, apparently some slightly deranged person had cut his wrists on their porch a few weeks back.

S: Apparently it was the daughter's fiancée who was AWOL from the army

R: Yes

S: And cut himself deliberately and blood went all over the place and now is in a military psych facility, apparently.

R: Yes. And so, yeah, there was absolutely nothing. There was no sign of any bodies anywhere on the property. There was no reason to suspect that these people killed anyone. It was all thanks to one anonymous quote-unquote 'psychic'. So now after it's finally come out there were, in fact, no bodies, the police are discussing trying to charge the tipster. Although there's no real indication whether or not they'll be able to discover the identity of the caller. But hopefully they can and hopefully this person will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Because this is what we see again and again. You see, when people ask, 'What's the harm? Psychic detectives, they're just adding another, you know, another possibility of finding a body or finding a murderer', well this is the problem. You have somebody that thinks that they're a psychic offering what they think... And they might actually believe this, they may actually think that they're having psychic visions about something and think that they're helping. But what they're only doing, really, is that they're wasting the police's time. Can you imagine how many detectives and how many offices they had to be on this searching this property to find out that there's absolutely nothing? And that...

S: And the FBI get involved.

R: Yeah. Surely they had something better to do.

S: Yeah

E: There were aerial video pictures of the groups - all the cars and all the detectives and the personnel - it was throngs of people at this supposed place. It was a huge waste of resources. Huge.

R: Yeah. And, of course, to me it's still not as bad as the cases you have where there's been a disappearance of someone and there's been a quote-unquote 'psychic' contact the relatives or someone and say that they have evidence of where this person is.

J: (In character) The kid's dead.

R: Exactly, that causes an incredible amount of emotional, psychological damage to these families. In this case, at least the damage was just economic, I suppose. But that's your tax dollars at work. Tracking down the pointless tips from pychics.

S: Now Rebecca, there're a few details to this story that I found very interesting. Of course, I'm basing this... I've read multiple articles on this and they were shuffling around the same basic facts. And that one was the blood on the porch. Another one though, was that when the cops got there they described a quote-unquote 'Overwhelming smell of decomposition'.

R: Oh yeah, yeah I saw that noted as well.

S: Yeah, so... which leant... so now you have the blood and the decomp. which meant 'oh right, this is legit, there's something here', so that's how they justified the massive response. Yeah, initially it was just a couple of guys going to check it out, but these details led to the more... calling in the FBI and getting the bigger response. Plus they also noted that there were some details, some, you know, some geographic details relating to the layout of the house that the psychic got pretty accurately and that that convinced them also that this was a legitimate tip, and not just a lunatic.

R: Right. And of course maybe the psychic just had knowledge of this area, been by or something.

S: Yeah

R: There was also the fact that apparently the property owner's son is a convicted sex offender, though he hasn't lived there for over a year and that the smell, the foul stench that the police identified was found to be coming from piles of rotting garbage.

S: Yeah. They were truckers who were on the road, so they were...

R: Right

S: Yeah

R: There were a lot of little details that when combined with this quote-unquote 'psychic tip' led the police to realise they... you know, needed to do something because these were all adding to a sort-of confirmation bias

S: Yeah, exactly, it's circumstantial evidence, confirmation bias, and you think, 'What's the chance that the police checking out a tip are gonna find blood on the porch?' Well it turns out it's probably not... You know first it asks the wrong question. The question is not, 'What's the chance of finding blood?', it's 'What's the chance of finding something suspcious?'

R: Right

S: And all the different things that could be suspicious. And the fact that somebody bled sometime in the last week or so was not that remarkable. And the quote-unquote 'decomp' was just the truckers on the road left the garbage behind which was rotting and smelling.

R: Yeah

S: So those, kind of, circumstantial things, you know, it's actually pretty likely, but when you're hunting for confirmation of your suspicions it's amazing how many connections you can make even on something apparently random like this. My only other question is, as you say, was this really just a random tip from an alleged psychic or did she have reason to point the police out to this house?

R: Yeah, I mean I, not knowing anything about... anything... (laughs)

S: You know, we don't have the details

R: Yeah, it's hard to say

E: It's unfolding, you know, it's still unfolding

R: I'm hoping that maybe somebody is looking into the guy who slit his wrists on the porch - I mean, it was a woman who called in but it's obviously some bad blood, so to speak, happening around there. So it's not out of the question to imagine that there might be someone who had reason to want to disrupt the people who lived there. That could be a cause.

S: And the police said specifically that somebody was looking into the revenge angle. That this was done to make trouble for the home-owners

R: Yeah

S: Okay. Well we're going to bring in Phil Plait the Bad Astronomy to cover these next few items because they have an Astronomy-theme. So Phil, welcome to Skeptics' Guide.

21:20

PP: Hey, thanks for having me on once again

S: It's always great to have you, Phil Plat

PP: Kay, thanks

R: Oh, yeah, right, rings a bell

E: Phil Prat, what a good gag

PP: You know I don't care if people mispronounce my name so long as they can spell it and can find it online

R: Right, spoken like a true nerd

E: Can we call you Philip?

PP: No

S: Is your name Philip or is it really legally just Phil?

E: I don't know, I'd have to check my birth certificate. Which I know actually has my middle name misspelled on it but there you go

R: Phil Plait doesn't know his own name

PP: Those details are irrelevant

=== Explosion on the Sun (21:57)===
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-a-huge-explosion/ Bad Astronomy, Discover magazine: The Sun lets loose a HUGE explosion]

S: So Phil, we were going to talk about this news item about this massive explosion on the sun we just had to talk about with you so won't you tell us about it?

PP: This is a pretty good story. The sun goes through these cycles, it has a magnetic field like a... like a magnet. And the magnetic field goes through cycles and it gets stronger every few years. It's an 11 year cycle. So it gets stronger then it fades, it gets stronger then it fades and we're sort of on the ramp up to the peak solar activity and we see this manifested on the surface of the sun with sunspots and solar flares and all kinds of cool stuff like that.

S: Phil, do we know what causes that cycle?

PP: No (laughs). That's the good part.

S: Okay...

PP: Well, there's some models that indicate why the sun's solar cycle goes up and down, it has to do with the way that the gas... is actually a plasma, it's an ionised gas inside the sun, is circulating around and when you move charged particles you generate a magnetic field and so this movement is very complicated and it has to do with the way that this gas is being transported in the solar interior. And what happens is is that the magnetic field gets dragged along with the stuff inside the sun, breaks through the sun's surface and that's why we see sunspots and various things, and magnetic field effects, it's the gas itself.

S: Is it an oscillation like a Cepheid variable's an oscillation, is that the theory?

PP: No, it has more to do with the way gas is flowing through the centre of the sun... well not through the centre, not through the core itself, but at the core the gas is very hot, it radiates that heat away. The gas above that then convects. The hot stuff rises and the cool stuff sinks just like in the Earth's atmosphere or in a boiling pot of water, and the problem is that that's not a simple system – the sun is rotating so there're rivers of gas like jet streams that are moving underneath the sun's surface. It's really complicated and the models that are trying to figure out how that works... They're not bad, they're doing a decent job but it's really really hard to figure out exactly all the motions that are going on inside, you know, this star that we're living nearby.

S: Right

PP: So what happens is as the magnetic field pokes through the surface of the sun it creates sunspots and these magnetic lines, you can think of them as like field lines, get tangled up and there's energy stored in them and if they get too tangled up they can actually sort of erupt – one of them snaps and it sets up a cascade or a lot of them snap and they all release their energy. You can imagine them like a bunch of mousetraps sitting on your floor and you throw a ping pong ball in there and as everything bounces around the mousetraps release all their energy you get a lot of snapping and motion and all kinds of craziness. Well that's what happens. And this can form a solar flare. It's a gigantic explosion on the surface of the sun. And it can be billions of megatons of energy released in just a few minutes. That's what happened on the sun and it wasn't actually that big of a flare as they go, they're different classes and this was a fare-to-middling sized explosion. But what happened, it was pretty unusual, is that there was an enormous fountain of gas that erupted off the surface of the sun and that's not usually associated with these types of events and now NASA has the Solar Dynamics Observatory which is this really phenomenal satellite and it's observing the sun at a lot of different wavelengths. So we have a high resolution, really gorgeous basically video, just images taken every couple of minutes or something like that, and you can string them together to make videos so you can see this flare. The eruption, this fountain of material flowing out from the sun and falling back down. And in different wavelengths it's just unbelievable it looks like, you know, ink flowing through water in one wavelength of light and in another it looks like fiery gas blowing out, it's just spectacular.

R: So Phil, how long until we all die?

PP: Ah, for you? Well it depends on your lifestyle habits – is there something you need to tell us?

R: Well, you know now I'm just a bit concerned about crazy things flying out of the sun at me.

PP: Well in this case, this particular event wasn't energetic enough to really do much. It did blow out a cloud of particles called coronal mass ejection, and that's gonna kinda sorta nick the Earth. It's not really directed at us. There maybe some aurorae associated with this, probably not much. On the other hand, you know, big flares, something that's bigger than this, we saw bigger ones earlier this year in February, they can damage satellites, they can affect the Earth's magnetic field. They can't really cause any specific problems here on Earth directly – you're not going to get irradiated, you're not going to turn into the Incredible Hulk, you're not going to melt, you're not going to turn into chud or morlocks or anything like that. Sorry.

B: Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.

PP: I know I know, a couple of you guys would probably love to see that happen.

(All laugh)

PP: But it can have effects you know. We have satellites up in space that can be damaged by this. You're basically zapping them with excess current and that can fry their electronics and we depend on a lot of the satellites like GPS, for financial transactions and all kinds of stuff like that. So corporations take this pretty seriously, they try to make sure their satellites are safeguarded against these kinds of events. Not all of them are. So we have to be careful about this and understand these sorts of events better so that we can build better satellites and protect them. Plus, you know, there're astronauts the International Space Station and they can be in danger of radioactive... well not radioactive, it's radiation, it's different than what we might we might think of as radioactivity, but these bizarre floods of subatomic particles that can come through the metal and whatnot, and I can't believe I just said whatnot, but the metal and other materials if I want to be a little more scientific, umm, in the space station - they may have to go to a better protected section of the station so that they don't get irradiated.

S: Yeah, or otherwise they might turn into the Fantastic Four

PP: I think that's true, yeah

E: Oh god

PP: Although I hope they make a better movie with actual astronauts than they would from the comic books.

S: Phil, if this explosion were aimed right at the Earth how bad would it have been?

PP: This one wouldn't have been as bad. We get some pretty spectacular aurora you know you can never say it's completely safe, we might lose a satellite, some of them might get damaged, sometimes satellites like Hubble and a lot of other ones, when they detect that there's excess current or that there's a problem they shut down automatically, they go into what's called 'safe-mode'. Sometimes, if we have enough advance warning, if there's a big flare, an X-class flare, one of these gigantic ones like we had earlier this year, or back in 2003 when the sun was just popping them off like popcorn it was really amazing, if you have enough warning you can shut down sensitive satellites and that's something that a lot of people are looking into. There's a space weather centre actually here in Boulder, it's not far from where I live, and they monitor the sun very careful, they issue warnings all the time in the hope that even just a few minutes warning can be enough to shut down these satellites and potentially save, you know, billions or tens of billions of dollars of assets in space.

E: Hey Phil just a few years ago we were talking about the lack of activity going on in the sun and how that was very unusual that low amount of activity for a long time, no sunspots for many months in a row. Now that we're seeing... since then the sun has been active with sunspots and all these other things that the sun does. What can we expect? Does the sun make up for lost time in a sense because of that lower activity and is it, like, trying to catch up to an equilibrium now?

PP: Nobody knows. I remember a couple of years ago people were arguing about this, that this long period of solar minimum which we kind of understand why it happened, or at least how it happened, but why the circumstances were set up for it to happen or not are not terribly well understood, but we do know that it was a record length of time with basically minimal solar activity. And so people were arguing, does this mean that the solar cycle will be also, you know, lower activity? when it reaches its peak will it be a lower than usual peak? Or will this mean that sun is building up energy and it's going to explode? Not literally, but you know, do something equally serious, and nobody really knows, and the thing is you have to be careful, I know you guys talk about anomaly hunting, the sun is going to do stuff like this. In February we had a bunch of X-class flares, there was a lower energy M-class flare. It was an unusual event because of that fountain of material that had never been seen before but, you know, who knows if it's actually happened before and we missed it, we just didn't have the equipment to see it, so you can't put too much credit to a single event or even a series of events. We just have to keep, you know, averaging up what's going on and see what's gonna happen. The peak of this cycle should happen in mid- to late-2013 and then into 2014 and it's actually after the peak that we usually see the strongest flares. And we'll just have to see what happens in, you know, 2014/2015 when the sun really starts to pop these guys off.

R: It seems a lot like climate science where we can't really look at it on a day-to-day scale. We have to look at it at... it's such a complex system. You know you have to look at it at a much larger scale. But, you know, I think scientists can understand that but from the perspective of someone who doesn't necessarily know how these things work I think it's easy for the media to, sort of, blow things like this out of proportion. Have you seen anything... any terrible reporting on this in that respect, Phil?

PP: Duh. Actually, this particular event... I poked around a few websites and it was being reported fairly well, but I can't remember which one it was, you know, I wanna say it was the Daily Mail but that's sort of my go-to garbage tabloid, that basically said we're all gonna die. I can't remember if that's the one I saw or not so I don't wanna cast aspersions on them when it's not deserved because usually it is the Daily Mail. But people... you're right in a lot of the things you said, people don't necessarily understand what's going on when they see this they panic. I got some emails from some people who were concerned about this and I had to say, no, you know, this was not that big of a deal. And you're right that we have to look at the long time scale. Just because a bunch of tornadoes broke out across the Mid West or in New England over the past few weeks doesn't mean they were swarming even if we get stronger hurricanes or more hurricanes this season, or a longer hurricane season doesn't mean that global warming is affecting you. You can't look at it that way, you've just got to take a step back, use longer time scale bins and hope that these trends are enough to see what's going on.

S: Yeah, and how many 11 year cycles have we been able to observe? How long have we had good observation of the sun?

PP: Well the first observations of the solar magnetic activity were actually in 1859 and it's pretty interesting actually, the guy, Carrington, looked at the sun with a visible light telescope and saw a flare – which is extremely rare for a flare to actually be seen with visible light. It's still to this day the strongest solar flare that's ever been seen. It caused all kinds of havoc on the earth at the time the telegraph... and stuff. And so we've been measuring the sun's activity now for about 150 years and when you look at the cycles they're all over the place, some are really strong some last longer some are weaker, it's just difficult to know what any given cycle's gonna do. We can only say that it's roughly 11 years it's not exactly 11 years. The activity tends to be strongest after the peak, that sort of stuff, but for any given event you can't really predict it. You can see, 'Hey look, there's a big old sun spot cluster there, and magnetic fields that are really strong, we ought to be keeping our eyes on it'. But that's no different from your tropical depression appearing in the Atlantic and the conditions look good to form a hurricane.

S: Yeah.

PP: You never now what's gonna happen. You've just gotta keep your eyes open for the precursors and hope for the best.

S: Well there's a couple of the news items we'd like you to hang around for if that's okay.

=== How Common is the Moon? (34:25)===
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13609153 BBC news: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought]

S: Bob, give us the summary on the new computer models about the formation of the moon.

B: Define summary.

S: (laughs)

E: The opposite of wintry.

(all laugh)

S: All right, not Bob length.

B: Researchers are redefining the rarity of Earth-moon system. They're saying that a whopping one in ten rocky planets may have satellites that's as big as our moon when compared to the Earth. Using these new sophisticated computer simulations it seems that the massive impacts that resulted in our relatively huge moon may be common, actually, throughout the universe. This research is coming from the Scientists from the Zurich Institute of Theoretical Physics in Switzerland and the Morishma at the University of Colorado in the US. They simulated planet formation from gas and chunks of planetesimal and they took these results and they factored them into another simulation, an N-body simulation, to see what the chances were that large satellites could form for that. And they were quite surprised to find that there was about a one in twelve chance of forming a planet and the satellite moon with both having more than half the mass of the Earth and the moon respectively. Now I liked how the BBC news article I read went into a little bit more statistical information about this. They were saying that the one in twelve or one in ten figure that you read everywhere else, they were saying that for the full range of possibilities it was between one in 45 and one in four. So that's kind of what the statistics were telling them, and they kinda distilled that down to about one in twelve. So now this is all tied, of course, to the once controversial and now pretty much generally accepted theory about how our moon formed. The common wisdom now is that it was a collision between the Earth Mark I, which some people refer to as Earth Mark I, colliding with this Mars-sized object and creating a huge debris ring which kind of coalesced in about a hundred years to form the moon as we know it. Of course it was a lot closer, about 15 times larger – the parent size is about 15 times larger than the way we see it now. The cool thing is that this could actually help with planet hunting – I wasn't aware of this. Large moons can distort the measurements that are made to find planets. This new knowledge could actually make finding them easier. Now Phil wasn't sure, I mean, just because you know this fact, how could this make it easier? I mean what is it about the distortion, how could the moon distort the measurements of finding a planet? A planet and a moon are pretty much like one system from a distance anyway. You know, I was having a hard time trying to figure out how a big moon could distort planet hunter measurements.

PP: Actually I'm with you, I don't now. I read the press release and it's pretty vague on that. I've not read the actual paper or talked to anybody about this. The way you find planets are actually a bunch of ways, but the two big ones are either the way the planet is pulling on the star and as it orbits the star the star is making a little circle and it creates a dopplar shift and you can see that sort of red and blue shift in the spectrum. But that should not be affected very much by a big moon. It's hard enough to see that with a low mass planet like the Earth around a star it's a very very tiny effect.

B: Right

PP: The bigger the planet the closer in it is the more that effect is and the easier it is to see. And it's hard to see how the moon would affect this – I don't know, I'm not that familiar with it. The other way is through transits where the planet literally gets between us and the star and it blocks a little bit of the starlight. Now for a Jupiter-sized planet and a star like the sun - it'll block about one percent of the star's light which is actually fairly easy to measure, you can use equipment you can buy off the shelf, which is really cool. For an Earth-like planet the effect is actually, I think, a ten thousandth the brightness of the star which is a lot harder to measure. If there's a moon that's orbiting that planet and the moon is, like, like, our moon, a significant fraction of the planet's size, then you might see more or less light dropping. If the planet and the moon transit the star you get a slightly bigger dip than if the moon is lined up with the planet from our point of view, if that makes any sense.

B: Yeah.

PP: That's the only way I can see off the top of my head there may be other things. You need to talk to an exoplanet hunter to get the deal on this.

B: Exoplanet hunter – what a cool job.

R: It's a great name.

B: The other thing that this highlights is the importance of the moon itself. Without the moon the Earth would be a very different place and I think it's a pretty safe bet that homosapiens would not be here without the moon. One of the big things that it does is that it stabilises the tilt of the Earth's axis, what's referred to as its obliquity. Without this the tilt would over greatly extended time-spans would mess with the overall heating of the Earth in ways that could make it fairly inimical to life, although I'm sure it would find ways around it.

R: Umm, would that be needed though, if nothing had smashed into the Earth in the first place to create the moon? In other words, is the moon just balancing out the wobble that was created by its own creation?

B: No. No, without the moon and without any impact they think they found some good examples that ummm... Yeah, the tilt would vary over great periods of time.

R: Because there are lot of planets without moons. What is it about the Earth that makes it require a moon?

PP: Well think of it this way. If you have a spinning top and it's perfectly balanced it'll spin really well. But if you put a lump of clay on one side of it and let it spin it'll start to wobble and that wobble can become chaotic. And so that's kinda what's happening with the Earth. You've got continents that are moving around and they cause it to be off-balance. As the Earth spins and as the moon pulls on the Earth you get a bulge around the middle of the Earth and it's the torque of the moon on that bulge, I think, that stabilises it. I'm not an expert on this but that's how I understand it. And that prevents the Earth's wobble from becoming chaotic. Venus spins much more slowly than the Earth, so I don't think it's as big of a deal. Mars, on the other hand, has roughly the same rate of spin as the Earth – it spins once a day – and there is evidence that in the past the axis of its spin has changed and some times a lot, indicating that... and I should add that it does not have a big moon it has too little dinky moons, and so it's possible that without that big moon torquing the Earth and keeping the spin from going all wobbly you get a planet that flips over and that has drastic effects on the seasons. It's not obvious, it's certainly not easy to understand how that all works, but it does seem to be the way the science is pointing right now.

S: Yeah, I remember when I was reading about the stabilising effect of the moon on the Earth, and how nice it is to have that. And at the same time, how rare the previous thinking was about how common we would see an Earth-Moon type of system. I was depressed as it would probably be very very few worlds out there that are as compatible to human life as our own system so if this is true, if these computer models are correct, and it's actually far more common, maybe, on average, one per solar system or something of that order of magnitude, that's reassuring for prospects of habitable planets out there.

B: Absolutely.

PP: You know it's reassuring, but it's not surprising at all. I've never bought into the Rare Earth idea.

S: Yeah

PP: You can say Earths must be common because we're on one – what are the odds? But that's, you know, you guys know all about that – it's like the water in the puddle saying “How remarkable it is that there's just enough water in here to fit the puddle” - you're looking at it the wrong way. So the idea that we're just the right size, just the right distance from the sun, with the moon and the magnetic field, and, and, and... it's like, you know, I'm not buying into all this. I think that there are lots of Earths out there. It's not uncommon to see stars like the sun. 10% of the stars in the galaxy are like the sun. We're starting to see that planets are common. We're starting to get an idea that planets the size of the Earth are common. If they're spinning rapidly and they have enough radioactive materials in their core they're gonna have a magnetic field. And so I think that that's something we're gonna see as common. And now, you know, if the moon is important for us to be here it seems very unlikely that we'd be the only planet in the galaxy like that, and we know that collisions are common, we know that planets are moving around in their star systems early on in the history of these things and so all of this stuff does not strike me as being all that surprising. I would have expected it. I don't know if I would have said as many as one in four Earth-like planets might have big moons, but the way objects get tossed around and the recent finding that there may be more planets wandering interstellar space than there are stars in the galaxy...

S: Yeah, how cool is that?

B: That is awesome

PP: ...Lends credence to this. The planets are moving around, they interact with each other, they change positions in the solar system, they toss each other out gravitationally, so we know that this stuff happens. So I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I would say that this finding is not surprising. It's just cool.

S: Yeah, it's just never been aesthetically pleasing to me to think that the Earth is really really rare. For all the reasons that you said. There's sort of the principle of mediocrity or whatever you call it, that chances are we're an unremarkable planet around an unremarkable star, around an unremarkable galaxy, you know. There's never any reason to think that we have a very special position in the universe. But there is a bit of the lottery fallacy that you were alluding to. If life were very rare, any life that did arise would marvel at how rare it was. Right?

PP: Unless there were two planets in that system that had life on them

S: Right

B: Right

S: But the premise is that life is rare, so that would be possible but exceedingly unlikely. But the billions of planets roaming around interstellar space is fascinating but it's also a bit scary because you think what's the possibility that, like, a Jupiter-sized planet will come ripping through the solar system.

PP: Very very rare. The universe is a very big place, the odds of that happening are extremely low. If they were high we probably wouldn't be here, right?

S: Right

PP: If over four and half billion years, the age of the Earth, some Jupiter-sized planet... if the odds were 100% that it would scream through the solar system it would have happened by now. So the odds of it happening are very very low. It makes for a great science-fiction movie.

S: Yeah

PP: Or a good novel or something like that, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it as a certainty. Certainly they're out there. That's something I've been wondering about for a long time – if there are frozen planets out there, and it's nice to see this big study. I mean this is not theoretical – these were observations that...

S: Yeah

PP: These planets gave themselves away through their gravity, effecting stars behind them and magnifying that light using basically a relativistic lens to... gravitational lens that Einstein predicted. So this is a direct observation and extrapolating to the entire sky you get this number of hundreds of billions of planets like this, which is awesome. But I don't think that hundreds of billions of planets spread out over the volume of a galaxy... it's still pretty thin stuff, so I don't think that this is that big of a problem for us.

E: What are the chances of any of those planets having life? You've gotta consider it small to none.

PP: Hard to say, you know. Jupiter is warmer than it would be... Let me rephrase that, it's actually radiating more heat than it receives from the sun. Left over heat from its formation, as well as some other sources of heat, so a giant planet could still be fairly warm, but there are other problems – there are gigantic convection currents bringing gas up and down so any life in a temperate zone would be dragged down to the hotter interior, so that's always been the problem with the theoretical models of how life might be inside a Jupiter-like planet. But you know what? I've learnt not to bet against nature. And I think that's the way to go. If they're out there, who knows? We'd have to go and take a look to be sure.

B: So this is all good but what's with the attitude?

PP: Shut up! What attitude?

E: You tell him

S: It was my attitude!

PP: My attitude of wonder and joy about the wonders of the universe? Is that what you're complaining about?

J: I'm pretty sure I've asked you this before but I live like a moment to moment life, which means that you could tell me the same joke, but, Phil because you really understand things, you know what's out there, you can write books like you did about the 59 ways you can get killed. Do you ever legitimately get frightened?

R: Like clowns, things like that?

E: Like crying in your bed at night?

J: No, I mean, you know... Is there anything that occurs that you're like, 'you know what, that is down right frightening - I don't like the idea that that might be coming at us at like a million miles an hour right now', you know what I mean?

PP: Oh, there's a ton of stuff like that. But you gotta differentiate between that stuff existing and that stuff being an actual danger – a threat to the Earth. Gamma ray bursts, supernovae and, my favourite, magnetars are these incredibly charged neutron stars that have field strengths that is quadrillions of times stronger than the Earth's magnetic fields, and they release super enormous blasts of energy and we got hit by one in 2004 actually, although it didn't really damage us. If there was one closer to us it could. But, you know what, we haven't been damaged by one of those things, there hasn't been a gamma ray burst in human history that has hurt us. There are no stars close enough to go supernova that can hurt us in this way, so this is not the kind of stuff that worries us. An asteroid impact, yeah, that could happen, a solar flare damaging our satellites and causing issues down here because of that – that's a legitimate worry, but that's also the sort of thing we can choose to protect ourselves from, we just haven't made that choice yet. So I don't lie awake at night fretting about these things. I have to worry about paying my taxes and worrying about what my kid is doing. Those are more the day-to-day things I'm worried about.

S: Yeah, Jay, it's far worse being a physician, knowing all the ways the body can fail, and knowing that one of those will happen to you soon.

J: Soon! (Laughs)

R: You make it sound like a threat

S: Soon-ish, within decades, which on astronomical scales is much quicker than anything that Phil has to worry about.

J: Steve, do you lie in bed at night going, “Nooo!!”

S: There definitely are times when I get little symptoms where I know all the horrible things it could be a symptom of, and I just have to say alright, don't worry about it, it's probably nothing and so far it has been.

J: Yeah, I find as I get older I ask myself a lot, and I mean this dead seriously, 'am I having a heart attack right now?' Is that pain right there the beginning of the end?

S: That's true, when you're in your 20's and you get a little left-sided chest pain you don't worry about it, you're like, I'm 25, you know, I'm not having a heart attack. But when you're 46 and the same exact thing happens you're like, okay, how much do I gotta worry about this?

PP: Hey wait a minute, why choose the age of 46?

S: Because that's my current age.

PP: Okay, yeah, that's my age as well.

S: Yeah. Yeah we're getting to that age where, you know, little things like that crop up and it's actually statistally plausible that it could be something serious.

PP: Everything is cancer. You know every time I look and I see a new mole on my shoulder it's like, 'Oh no!'

R: I don't even do that just with moles, with me it's just whatever random pain I have. Well it's cancer of the whatever-that-is.

B: 'Whatever-that-is'! God!(laughs)

S: ...Of the connectigizoid!

J: The claven.

B: “The clay-ven” (in mock-Jewish voice)

=== UFO Nazi Connection (50:59)===
[http://weirdnews.aol.com/2011/06/07/area-51-ufos-aliens-annie-jacobsen-nazi-soviet_n_869706.html#s285846&title=Area_51_Warning Huffington Post: Area 51 personnel feel 'betrayed' by Annie Jacobsen's Soviet-Nazi UFO connection]

S: Alright, one more news item. We have to end on a funny one for Phil. Alright Evan, tell us about UFO Nazis.

E: Well how about this one? So there's an author and her name is Annie Jacobson, and she has a new book that is out called 'Area 51 – An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base'. She spends the majority of her time in this book talking the legitimate science and projects and experimental aircraft and other things that have been taking place at this facility for the past sixty years. She got together with some people who used to work there who had declassified information and they would share it. However, it's the last chapter of the book which is making headlines. Because she is drawing the conclusion that the famous saucer crash involved with Area 51 Roswell is actually a conspiracy in which the Auschwitz doctor Joseph Mengele, the German aircraft designing brothers the Haughton brothers and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin formed a conspiracy in the late 1940's to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer which was crowded, get this, with 13-year olds which were surgically altered under the...

S: By Joseph Mengele.

E: ...By Joseph Mengele.

S: Yeah. To look alien.

E: ...To look alien. And that is actually the recovered pieces of the famous crash. And those people, the surgically altered people are the supposed aliens that were recovered from the crash.

R: Well I'll never again say that the 911 Truthers have the dumbest conspiracy theory out there.

S: Well you know there's always gotta be one dumber than whatever you're currently talking about.

R: That's true.

E: Now Annie Jacobson is a journalist. And the reviews I've read about the book say that she's done a decent, not perfect, job in the various chapters of the book that have to deal with the hard sciences. But this last chapter in which she draws this conclusion, she's basing it entirely upon an unnamed source, one person, an unnamed source.

PP: Glen Beck (coughs).

(all laugh)

PP: Sorry, something in my throat there.

E: Might as well be. ...Who apparently fed her all this information and that's what she's going by. And she says "Oh I totally trust this source, I mean he's very, very reliable."

R: I think I know who this source is; the source is her publicist.

S: (laughs) I was gonna say that.

B: That's right Rebecca.

E: Exactly.

R: No one would be talking about this if it weren't for that last chapter.

E; Right? Because you have to have a new angle to this whole story...

S: Exactly.

E: ...if you want your book to sell well in these days.

R: Yeah, especially 'cause it was that last chapter. I's like you know she turned in the completed book and it was all sourced and nice and ready to go, and they're like "This is good, but..."

PP: "It's ''way'' too accurate."

R: "...can't you just throw in one giant lie at the end? Just tack it on. Good job."

Steve: It's like Steve Martin tells that joke - if you're making demands, you have to always throw in that one crazy one. "I want the letter M ''stricken'' from the alphabet!" That way you can always claim insanity afterwards.

(laughter)

S: It's sort of a simple thing. In the last chapter you gotta go totally off the rails and start making crazy conspiracy theories 'cause that's what's gonna sell your book.

PP: I actually have two comments on this. One is that this idea that Nazis are tied with UFOs has been around for a long time. I remember reading a novel based on this conspiracy theory back when I was in grad school in the 90s. And the book wasn't new then. I think it was called "Genesis". It was this ginormous 800 page science fiction novel. It sounded fun and it was just basically the Nazi scientists that were behind all this escaped, they moved to Antarctica, they built a base there, they perfected UFO technology, and we're gonna rise again basically, so this has been around a while.

S: This is Richard Hoagland. He wrote "Our Breakaway Nazi Civilisation". He thinks NASA's run by Nazis and they're the shadow government that's doing all this UFO/face on Mars stuff.

PP: As soon as you say "Richard Hoagland", you can just put a period after that and we're done as far as I'm concerned.

(laughter)

S: ''Hoaglaaaand''!

B: Oh yeah.

E: (laughs)

J: Steve, when you say that, just quickly going through your mind, like okay, he really believes that there's Nazis out there, and I have to make light of this real quick, but does he actually think they're still wearing their badass clothes with the leather and the boots, you know they still have (inaudible) and...?

R: You know there are still Nazis out there, let's (laughs) not suggest that there's no such thing as Nazis anymore.

S: Jay, I'm looking at a picture on his website, and it's a spaceship - a Nazi spaceship, that looks like a modified Nazi helmet with the skull and crossbones on the front.

(all laugh)

J: Right, there's my answer!

E: That would not be difficult mein Fuhrer (German accent).

J: A Nazi spaceship!

PP: There's a movie about Nazi UFOs from the Moon. It actually looks like a pretty fun movie.

E: Is it a porn, what the hell?

S: Nazi UFOs from the Moon?

PP: Does anyone know? It was announced about a year ago. I think it's an independent project. This is a great idea for a fictionalised novel or movie, but then on the other hand most of the stuff that Hoagland does is heavily fictionalised so there you go.

E: You know Phil, also there have been stories in the past drawn up by the UFO crowd that the Soviets had something to do with the famous crash that took place at Roswell as well. So what's happening is kind of blending all of these different aspects together and the alien bodies that were supposedly recovered. She's picking out these pieces and forming her own little opinion as to what this all means to her

PP: You know it was the expanding time waves from the Roswell crash that caused building 7 to collapse on September 11.

(sounds of agreement)

R: Yeah that makes sense actually.

B: I hate when time waves do that!

PP: I've got the equations right here. It's quite simple. I actually... to even the most dimmest person to do a second (inaudible).

B: Most dimmest!

PP: I want to say one other thing about this too. In the article on weirdnews.aol.com where Ms Jacobson is being quoted, she says "I don't have to..." Well what happened was these guys basically came out and said "Listen, we were sources for some of her information in the book, the good stuff in the book, and we were shocked by this last chapter, and I can't believe she took our information and did this, and she didn't ask us about this." And she is ''quoted'' here as saying, this is a quote, "For starters, journalists don't share their information with their sources prior to publication,. That's a standard rule." she said "...so I'm following journalist tradition." So what she's really saying is "I got this information. I'm not going to go check with the experts on it to find out what's going on because journalists don't do that." You know what? ''I think they do'' I think that's ''exactly'' what journalists do. They check their sources. So that quotation by her really sets off a lot of alarms in my head, and she goes on to say "What others think of my book can't matter to me in terms of being a journalist." (laughs) The word journalist is not a shield to be able to say whatever you want.

R: Maybe if she calls herself a journalist enough times, she'll actually become a journalist. That must be what she's thinking.

PP: You know, I've seen stuff like this happen before and I always want to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. I don't know what's going on, I haven't read the book, I've only read this article. The article could be sensationalising the last chapter. It could be relatively harmless and being misinterpreted, whatever. But these quotations from her ''really'' make me suspicious about the integrity of that last chapter. I think I'm safe in saying that.

S: Well Phil thank you for joining us it's always a pleasure.

PP: Thanks everybody. Thanks for having me on, it's always fun.

E: Thank you Phil.

S: We're gonna see you at TAM in about four weeks.

PP: I'll see you guys at TAM. I'm gonna see you at CSICon in New Orleans in October...

S: And DragonCon.

B: DragonConnn!

PP: ...and DragonCon yeah, I can't wait for DragonCon that's gonna be great.

S: You're gonna be sick of us.

R: Yeah.

E: Gonna be?

PP: I'm sorry, gonna be?

R: He's already sick of all of you.

E: Hello? Hello? More so.

J: Hello? (laughs)

S: (laughter) Alright goodnight Phil.

PP: Thanks folks...

J: Later!

PP: ...talk to you later.

B: Night buddy.

== Who's That Noisy? (59:23)==

== Science or Fiction ( ) ==

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110606171416.htm Item number one]. Astronomers find evidence that some or perhaps all of the large moons of Jupiter were proto-planets captured from the inner solar system in the early days of the solar system when Jupiter was much closer to the sun. [http://news.byu.edu/archive11-jun-redbluestates.aspx Item number two]. Research finds that citizens from so-called "blue" states are just as likely to hold liberal or conservative views on specific issues as citizens from "red" states. And [http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=24890&news_item=5619 item number three]. Scientists discover that dolphins actually project two beams of ultrasound for use in echolocation.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:17:13) ==
<blockquote>"Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are."</blockquote>
J: Eric Butterworth!

== Announcements ( ) ==

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SGU Episode 308

2013-02-22T08:02:11Z

Jessiessica: /* UFO Nazi Connection (50:59) */

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{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 308
|episodeDate = 8thJune 2011
|episodeIcon = File:Nazi_Spaceship.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = PP: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Plait Phil Plait]
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2011-06-08.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=308
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,36132.0.html
|qowText = Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are.
|qowAuthor = Eric Butterworth
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday June 8th, 2011 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: Yuan Shang Hao. Good evening to all of our listeners in China of which there are...

J: I like your intonation

S: Inflection

B: I'm not sure if it was accurate though but it sounded good

E: Does anyone listen to us in China?

R: Of course, yeah, we have some Chinese listeners

S: But if you use the wrong inflection you say, 'I wanna massage your grandmother', so you've gotta be careful

E: You know the thing about saying 'good evening' in Chinese is that I want to say it again in an hour. I don't know what it is

B: O.M.G.

R: Wow

J: That was so bad

R: He's been working on that joke all night

E: Where's my rim shot? Ah crud.
(cymbals)

R: You get a sad trombone
(sad trombone)

S: Rebecca you're joining us from London this week

J: I say

R: I am, yes, I'm back in Old Blighty, as no-one calls it

E: Rebecca Poppins

R: Yeah, so once again the listeners are being treated to Rebecca at one thirty in the morning. Awesome.

J: But you're still kind of on US time

R: No, not really

J: But you're not in a bad mood

R: No, not really

J: Well at least you're happy recording the show

R: No

== This Day in Skepticism ()==
June 11, 1854. G.F. Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved in a lecture titled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.

S: Alright. Evan tell us what is absolutely fascinating about this day in skepticism

E: Well on this day that you're listening to the show it was 1854 in which the famous mathematician Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved and he announced this in a lecture titled On the Hypothesis on which Geometry is Based, which is apparently a very famous lecture that he gave. And what he did is he described the old-fashioned, Euclidean two-dimensional plane geometry along with some other examples of old geometry and... well let me put it to you this way. There's an example in which on a piece of paper there lived a bookworm, right, and this bookworm was drawn on the piece of paper so it was drawn in two-dimensional. You take the paper and you fold it up and you crumple it up. Now the worm drawn on the paper has no sense of the cumbling and the distortion of space that's going on around him because he also exists in two dimensions. Right, follow me so far?

S: Right

R: Yeah

B: Gotcha

S: Oh yeah

E: Whereas actually that crumpled paper is in three dimensions. So extend that out, we live in a world of three dimensions, but actually everything going around us exists in, what we believe is four dimensions, the fourth dimensions being time. And this was important not only as an important discovery of his time but it also influenced scientists and physicists such as Einstein who used Riemann's work in his theory of general relativity in which he incorporated time as the fourth dimension.

S: Yeah but when Riemann was talking about higher dimension I think he was talking about higher spatial dimensions, not necessarily with time as the fourth dimension. That was something that Einstein inserted. He was saying that space itself is curved into a physical fourth dimension which we can't perceive because we're on the surface of the paper like the...

E: That's right, we're like the worm. The two-dimensional worm on the paper has no idea it's getting all crumpled and crushed up.

S: But it's interesting. Imagine being the first guy to think of space as not linear, that's it's not Euclidean, that it's curved. That's mind blowing, right?

E: Big deal

B: The way he did that was to... I guess he was the first one to actually think of introducing numbers at every point in space and that was how he came upon the idea of using that method to describe how it was bent. I guess a pretty key insight. I wonder how relativity would have been affected if he hadn't come up with that and whether it would have been delayed significantly.

R: I don't know. For some reason this reminds me a lot of, was it Plato? Plato's cave/wall idea of people who are...

E: Shadows?

R: Yeah, I guess seeing shadows on a cave/wall so they assume that that's all that life is are these two-dimensional shadows, so if you were to explain the three-dimensional world to them it would blow their minds. And of course you can't say that Plato was thinking in terms of, well maybe there was a fourth dimension, a fourth spatial dimension as such, but I mean he was thinking in those sorts of terms, don't you think?

S: Yeah well that... our perception of reality is shaped by the physical reality in which we live

J: Right

S: We may be ignorant of reality in the same way that the cave shadow people are ignorant of their ultimate reality

R: Right and that's not to suggest that Plato had any sort of evidence of a fourth spatial dimension. I just want to put that out there. For conspiracy theorists out there...

S: He was talking more in just general philosophical terms, not that specific manifestation

J: Bob, what about this thing where we have these three dimensions that we can easily perceive and understand. But why do the dimensions end there? In other words, why couldn't there have been a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth dimension that are physical dimensions?

B: There actually might be and some theories actually, string theory and things, actually consider that - have that as an integral part of that. But those dimensions are, it's kind of weird, they're actually wrapped up and compacted in such a small space that they're not visible easily, so higher dimensions can exist in our universe but we just can't really detect them yet, it's not obvious beyond the three spatial dimensions we're aware of now.

E: I've heard that membrane theory relies on 11 dimensions - they can calculate 11 dimensions based on those theories.

B: Yeah

J: How about - I've heard of other theories talking about other dimensions of time. Imagine two dimensions of time, say, four or five dimensions of say space and two of time. What would that be like?

R: Crazy. That would be...

B: Crazy. How many... two watches wherever you go

S: This kind of stuff only makes sense in the context of mathematics. We can't, you know, really think about it physically.

J: You know just because we can think of them mathematically does that mean that they actually exist?

S: No. No, but there is something to the fact that it makes the Math more elegant. It sort of solves problems to bump things up a dimension and think of the reality as a three dimensional manifestation of a four dimensional reality or however many you ultimately get up to. So what does this mean? I mean this is a big question in theoretical physics or science in general, you know, when things start to fit together and become more elegant and have more explanatory power. That's nice, but it's not the same thing as it being actually the case and that's where we get into the debate about whether or not string theory can be a real science because it's not empirical, just theoretical.

== News Items ==
=== SGU-24 (7:24)===
The first 24 hour Live SGU event. September 23, 2011, starting at 8:00pm

S: Well we have a couple of news items coming up. Phil Plait's going to be coming up in a while to talk about some astronomy news but first we have a couple of other news items. The first one is SGU related. Do you guys know... I know you guys know what's going to happen... I hope you know by now - September 23rd and 24th, this fall, 2011, a very special event will be occurring: we will be holding... we have decided for some crazy reason to do a 24 hour live streaming SGU event.

R: Extravaganza

B: Extreme is right

J: And I want everyone to know from the beginning that I'm totally against it

E: Yes, we are bringing J kicking and screaming to this event

R: Which should only make it more entertaining I think

E: Oh yeah

B: I thought of a name, I just thought of a name for it

S: What?

B: Skeptapalooza

S: Oh come on

R: That's a terrible name

B: Best one I've heard yet

S: Alright, our working title is SGU24 but we're certainly open to suggestions

J: And I get to play Jack Bower then

E: "Where's the bomb?"

S: Does that mean we get to torture you and stop your heart and then get it going again?

J: Jump my heart with a car battery and then I'll be able to do 14 hours of show?
(all laugh)

I loved every goddam season of that programme.

R: You know Jay, for some reason when I hear you mention 24 hours it doesn't really bother me that much, but when you mention 14 hours it occurs to me, like, we will have already been recording for ten hours and we'll have 14 to go and now I'm against it too.

S: Well that's like we were flying to Australia and we were on the plane for what seems like forever and we find out we still have ten more hours left on the plane. Yeah it's bad. This won't be quite that bad because it'll be in my house

E: We like doing the heavy lifting, these special events, things that other sane people would never try.

S: So more details will be unfolding over the ensuing months, but save the dates September 23rd at 8pm and for the following 24 hours you'll be able to eat, sleep and breathe the SGU. And it'll be video. And we'll be broadcasting from a very special location.

R: You already said, from your house

S: But it's a special location within my house.

E: Right...

B: And we haven't named it yet, we need a special name

J: Bob, we did name it!

S: It's the skeptilair.

R: (groans) Oh, please make it stop.

E: The skeptiman cave, with Rebecca

R: It's just gonna continue to get worse isn't it.

S: Unfortunately

J: This show will be fused... it'll be infused... with have Star Trek, with Star Wars, it'll have internet, it'll have TVs, it'll have computers, it'll have gadgets, it'll have things that pop and bubble

B: Skulls!

E: And it'll have no bathroom breaks. We'll all have to go down on one leg.

S: We'll all have catheters going to bottles strapped to our thighs

B: And one dead body

E: Oooo...

S: At least one dead body, yes

E: At least one, if not more

J: Yeah, SGU just jumped the shark

(all laugh)

R: Also we'll be introducing a young child onto the show. Our new, six-year-old love child.

(all chuckle nervously)

B: I thought you were referencing Oliver from the Brady Bunch

R: Oliver

B: The punk

R: The kid on married with children

E: You remember the Brady Bunch, Rebecca? No?

R: I've heard of the Brady Bunch

B: (gasp)

E: Heard of the Brady Bunch...

R: Anyway, the point is

J: 'Pork chops and applesauce'

(all laugh)

E: 'Oh, my nose!' (chuckles to self)

R: Are these... Are these Brady Bunch jokes? Is that what we...

J: Mum always said don't paintball in the house

E: That's why they're all zooming over your head

S: Yes

R: Yes. Alright, can we go back to Star Trek?

J: Oh woah.

E: 'He's dead Jim'

B: Never thought I'd hear her say that

S: But worse, can you imagine 24 hours of this?

R: I'm just gonna bring earplugs

(Steve laughs)

R: I'm going to bring a big pair of headphones. So I can just listen to my music.

S: Noise cancellation.

Alright, well, let's go on...

B: Geek cancellation

=== Psychic Tipster (12:06)===
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/usa-crime-bodies-idUSN0717557520110608 Reuters: UPDATE 6-Texas authorites find no bodies after psychic tip]

S: ...To another news item, Rebecca. A psychic gave a very interesting tip to the police

R: That's right, Steve. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies'. That was the headline that Reuters decided to run with. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies, including children, buried in a mass grave in a rural home East of Houston', local media reported.

(All laugh)

R: Ah, it goes on to say, 'It might not have been 30, it was 25 to 30, but preliminary reports did indicate that there were children.' So a really horrific scene there, Tuesday night, that was on June 7. And there was a lot of confusion as these reports were coming in, but it turns out that this amazing find was in fact discovered by a psychic. It came in through a psychic tip, the psychic told the police to go to this specific house in Texas and to search for bodies, the police went there, they didn't find anything so the same caller, the same anonymous psychic caller called back and again stated that there were bodies there it's just that the police were in slightly the wrong spot. So the psychic gave even more exact directions so the police went back and they found... Nothing.

S: Nothing?

Nothing. There was nothing. They found a small amount of blood on the porch of a house nearby and for some reason that turned into 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies including children', which is basically what the psychic had reported. But try as the might, the Texas authorities were actually unable to find any evidence of any bodies. The home-owners, the people who lived in the house on that property were truckers, cross-country truckers, who were out on the road when it happened. When reached for comment they said no, they were not murderers.

J: We don't know nothing about no bodies

B: Exactly

E: 'No bodies' (laughs)

R: But, apparently some slightly deranged person had cut his wrists on their porch a few weeks back.

S: Apparently it was the daughter's fiancée who was AWOL from the army

R: Yes

S: And cut himself deliberately and blood went all over the place and now is in a military psych facility, apparently.

R: Yes. And so, yeah, there was absolutely nothing. There was no sign of any bodies anywhere on the property. There was no reason to suspect that these people killed anyone. It was all thanks to one anonymous quote-unquote 'psychic'. So now after it's finally come out there were, in fact, no bodies, the police are discussing trying to charge the tipster. Although there's no real indication whether or not they'll be able to discover the identity of the caller. But hopefully they can and hopefully this person will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Because this is what we see again and again. You see, when people ask, 'What's the harm? Psychic detectives, they're just adding another, you know, another possibility of finding a body or finding a murderer', well this is the problem. You have somebody that thinks that they're a psychic offering what they think... And they might actually believe this, they may actually think that they're having psychic visions about something and think that they're helping. But what they're only doing, really, is that they're wasting the police's time. Can you imagine how many detectives and how many offices they had to be on this searching this property to find out that there's absolutely nothing? And that...

S: And the FBI get involved.

R: Yeah. Surely they had something better to do.

S: Yeah

E: There were aerial video pictures of the groups - all the cars and all the detectives and the personnel - it was throngs of people at this supposed place. It was a huge waste of resources. Huge.

R: Yeah. And, of course, to me it's still not as bad as the cases you have where there's been a disappearance of someone and there's been a quote-unquote 'psychic' contact the relatives or someone and say that they have evidence of where this person is.

J: (In character) The kid's dead.

R: Exactly, that causes an incredible amount of emotional, psychological damage to these families. In this case, at least the damage was just economic, I suppose. But that's your tax dollars at work. Tracking down the pointless tips from pychics.

S: Now Rebecca, there're a few details to this story that I found very interesting. Of course, I'm basing this... I've read multiple articles on this and they were shuffling around the same basic facts. And that one was the blood on the porch. Another one though, was that when the cops got there they described a quote-unquote 'Overwhelming smell of decomposition'.

R: Oh yeah, yeah I saw that noted as well.

S: Yeah, so... which leant... so now you have the blood and the decomp. which meant 'oh right, this is legit, there's something here', so that's how they justified the massive response. Yeah, initially it was just a couple of guys going to check it out, but these details led to the more... calling in the FBI and getting the bigger response. Plus they also noted that there were some details, some, you know, some geographic details relating to the layout of the house that the psychic got pretty accurately and that that convinced them also that this was a legitimate tip, and not just a lunatic.

R: Right. And of course maybe the psychic just had knowledge of this area, been by or something.

S: Yeah

R: There was also the fact that apparently the property owner's son is a convicted sex offender, though he hasn't lived there for over a year and that the smell, the foul stench that the police identified was found to be coming from piles of rotting garbage.

S: Yeah. They were truckers who were on the road, so they were...

R: Right

S: Yeah

R: There were a lot of little details that when combined with this quote-unquote 'psychic tip' led the police to realise they... you know, needed to do something because these were all adding to a sort-of confirmation bias

S: Yeah, exactly, it's circumstantial evidence, confirmation bias, and you think, 'What's the chance that the police checking out a tip are gonna find blood on the porch?' Well it turns out it's probably not... You know first it asks the wrong question. The question is not, 'What's the chance of finding blood?', it's 'What's the chance of finding something suspcious?'

R: Right

S: And all the different things that could be suspicious. And the fact that somebody bled sometime in the last week or so was not that remarkable. And the quote-unquote 'decomp' was just the truckers on the road left the garbage behind which was rotting and smelling.

R: Yeah

S: So those, kind of, circumstantial things, you know, it's actually pretty likely, but when you're hunting for confirmation of your suspicions it's amazing how many connections you can make even on something apparently random like this. My only other question is, as you say, was this really just a random tip from an alleged psychic or did she have reason to point the police out to this house?

R: Yeah, I mean I, not knowing anything about... anything... (laughs)

S: You know, we don't have the details

R: Yeah, it's hard to say

E: It's unfolding, you know, it's still unfolding

R: I'm hoping that maybe somebody is looking into the guy who slit his wrists on the porch - I mean, it was a woman who called in but it's obviously some bad blood, so to speak, happening around there. So it's not out of the question to imagine that there might be someone who had reason to want to disrupt the people who lived there. That could be a cause.

S: And the police said specifically that somebody was looking into the revenge angle. That this was done to make trouble for the home-owners

R: Yeah

S: Okay. Well we're going to bring in Phil Plait the Bad Astronomy to cover these next few items because they have an Astronomy-theme. So Phil, welcome to Skeptics' Guide.

21:20

PP: Hey, thanks for having me on once again

S: It's always great to have you, Phil Plat

PP: Kay, thanks

R: Oh, yeah, right, rings a bell

E: Phil Prat, what a good gag

PP: You know I don't care if people mispronounce my name so long as they can spell it and can find it online

R: Right, spoken like a true nerd

E: Can we call you Philip?

PP: No

S: Is your name Philip or is it really legally just Phil?

E: I don't know, I'd have to check my birth certificate. Which I know actually has my middle name misspelled on it but there you go

R: Phil Plait doesn't know his own name

PP: Those details are irrelevant

=== Explosion on the Sun (21:57)===
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-a-huge-explosion/ Bad Astronomy, Discover magazine: The Sun lets loose a HUGE explosion]

S: So Phil, we were going to talk about this news item about this massive explosion on the sun we just had to talk about with you so won't you tell us about it?

PP: This is a pretty good story. The sun goes through these cycles, it has a magnetic field like a... like a magnet. And the magnetic field goes through cycles and it gets stronger every few years. It's an 11 year cycle. So it gets stronger then it fades, it gets stronger then it fades and we're sort of on the ramp up to the peak solar activity and we see this manifested on the surface of the sun with sunspots and solar flares and all kinds of cool stuff like that.

S: Phil, do we know what causes that cycle?

PP: No (laughs). That's the good part.

S: Okay...

PP: Well, there's some models that indicate why the sun's solar cycle goes up and down, it has to do with the way that the gas... is actually a plasma, it's an ionised gas inside the sun, is circulating around and when you move charged particles you generate a magnetic field and so this movement is very complicated and it has to do with the way that this gas is being transported in the solar interior. And what happens is is that the magnetic field gets dragged along with the stuff inside the sun, breaks through the sun's surface and that's why we see sunspots and various things, and magnetic field effects, it's the gas itself.

S: Is it an oscillation like a Cepheid variable's an oscillation, is that the theory?

PP: No, it has more to do with the way gas is flowing through the centre of the sun... well not through the centre, not through the core itself, but at the core the gas is very hot, it radiates that heat away. The gas above that then convects. The hot stuff rises and the cool stuff sinks just like in the Earth's atmosphere or in a boiling pot of water, and the problem is that that's not a simple system – the sun is rotating so there're rivers of gas like jet streams that are moving underneath the sun's surface. It's really complicated and the models that are trying to figure out how that works... They're not bad, they're doing a decent job but it's really really hard to figure out exactly all the motions that are going on inside, you know, this star that we're living nearby.

S: Right

PP: So what happens is as the magnetic field pokes through the surface of the sun it creates sunspots and these magnetic lines, you can think of them as like field lines, get tangled up and there's energy stored in them and if they get too tangled up they can actually sort of erupt – one of them snaps and it sets up a cascade or a lot of them snap and they all release their energy. You can imagine them like a bunch of mousetraps sitting on your floor and you throw a ping pong ball in there and as everything bounces around the mousetraps release all their energy you get a lot of snapping and motion and all kinds of craziness. Well that's what happens. And this can form a solar flare. It's a gigantic explosion on the surface of the sun. And it can be billions of megatons of energy released in just a few minutes. That's what happened on the sun and it wasn't actually that big of a flare as they go, they're different classes and this was a fare-to-middling sized explosion. But what happened, it was pretty unusual, is that there was an enormous fountain of gas that erupted off the surface of the sun and that's not usually associated with these types of events and now NASA has the Solar Dynamics Observatory which is this really phenomenal satellite and it's observing the sun at a lot of different wavelengths. So we have a high resolution, really gorgeous basically video, just images taken every couple of minutes or something like that, and you can string them together to make videos so you can see this flare. The eruption, this fountain of material flowing out from the sun and falling back down. And in different wavelengths it's just unbelievable it looks like, you know, ink flowing through water in one wavelength of light and in another it looks like fiery gas blowing out, it's just spectacular.

R: So Phil, how long until we all die?

PP: Ah, for you? Well it depends on your lifestyle habits – is there something you need to tell us?

R: Well, you know now I'm just a bit concerned about crazy things flying out of the sun at me.

PP: Well in this case, this particular event wasn't energetic enough to really do much. It did blow out a cloud of particles called coronal mass ejection, and that's gonna kinda sorta nick the Earth. It's not really directed at us. There maybe some aurorae associated with this, probably not much. On the other hand, you know, big flares, something that's bigger than this, we saw bigger ones earlier this year in February, they can damage satellites, they can affect the Earth's magnetic field. They can't really cause any specific problems here on Earth directly – you're not going to get irradiated, you're not going to turn into the Incredible Hulk, you're not going to melt, you're not going to turn into chud or morlocks or anything like that. Sorry.

B: Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.

PP: I know I know, a couple of you guys would probably love to see that happen.

(All laugh)

PP: But it can have effects you know. We have satellites up in space that can be damaged by this. You're basically zapping them with excess current and that can fry their electronics and we depend on a lot of the satellites like GPS, for financial transactions and all kinds of stuff like that. So corporations take this pretty seriously, they try to make sure their satellites are safeguarded against these kinds of events. Not all of them are. So we have to be careful about this and understand these sorts of events better so that we can build better satellites and protect them. Plus, you know, there're astronauts the International Space Station and they can be in danger of radioactive... well not radioactive, it's radiation, it's different than what we might we might think of as radioactivity, but these bizarre floods of subatomic particles that can come through the metal and whatnot, and I can't believe I just said whatnot, but the metal and other materials if I want to be a little more scientific, umm, in the space station - they may have to go to a better protected section of the station so that they don't get irradiated.

S: Yeah, or otherwise they might turn into the Fantastic Four

PP: I think that's true, yeah

E: Oh god

PP: Although I hope they make a better movie with actual astronauts than they would from the comic books.

S: Phil, if this explosion were aimed right at the Earth how bad would it have been?

PP: This one wouldn't have been as bad. We get some pretty spectacular aurora you know you can never say it's completely safe, we might lose a satellite, some of them might get damaged, sometimes satellites like Hubble and a lot of other ones, when they detect that there's excess current or that there's a problem they shut down automatically, they go into what's called 'safe-mode'. Sometimes, if we have enough advance warning, if there's a big flare, an X-class flare, one of these gigantic ones like we had earlier this year, or back in 2003 when the sun was just popping them off like popcorn it was really amazing, if you have enough warning you can shut down sensitive satellites and that's something that a lot of people are looking into. There's a space weather centre actually here in Boulder, it's not far from where I live, and they monitor the sun very careful, they issue warnings all the time in the hope that even just a few minutes warning can be enough to shut down these satellites and potentially save, you know, billions or tens of billions of dollars of assets in space.

E: Hey Phil just a few years ago we were talking about the lack of activity going on in the sun and how that was very unusual that low amount of activity for a long time, no sunspots for many months in a row. Now that we're seeing... since then the sun has been active with sunspots and all these other things that the sun does. What can we expect? Does the sun make up for lost time in a sense because of that lower activity and is it, like, trying to catch up to an equilibrium now?

PP: Nobody knows. I remember a couple of years ago people were arguing about this, that this long period of solar minimum which we kind of understand why it happened, or at least how it happened, but why the circumstances were set up for it to happen or not are not terribly well understood, but we do know that it was a record length of time with basically minimal solar activity. And so people were arguing, does this mean that the solar cycle will be also, you know, lower activity? when it reaches its peak will it be a lower than usual peak? Or will this mean that sun is building up energy and it's going to explode? Not literally, but you know, do something equally serious, and nobody really knows, and the thing is you have to be careful, I know you guys talk about anomaly hunting, the sun is going to do stuff like this. In February we had a bunch of X-class flares, there was a lower energy M-class flare. It was an unusual event because of that fountain of material that had never been seen before but, you know, who knows if it's actually happened before and we missed it, we just didn't have the equipment to see it, so you can't put too much credit to a single event or even a series of events. We just have to keep, you know, averaging up what's going on and see what's gonna happen. The peak of this cycle should happen in mid- to late-2013 and then into 2014 and it's actually after the peak that we usually see the strongest flares. And we'll just have to see what happens in, you know, 2014/2015 when the sun really starts to pop these guys off.

R: It seems a lot like climate science where we can't really look at it on a day-to-day scale. We have to look at it at... it's such a complex system. You know you have to look at it at a much larger scale. But, you know, I think scientists can understand that but from the perspective of someone who doesn't necessarily know how these things work I think it's easy for the media to, sort of, blow things like this out of proportion. Have you seen anything... any terrible reporting on this in that respect, Phil?

PP: Duh. Actually, this particular event... I poked around a few websites and it was being reported fairly well, but I can't remember which one it was, you know, I wanna say it was the Daily Mail but that's sort of my go-to garbage tabloid, that basically said we're all gonna die. I can't remember if that's the one I saw or not so I don't wanna cast aspersions on them when it's not deserved because usually it is the Daily Mail. But people... you're right in a lot of the things you said, people don't necessarily understand what's going on when they see this they panic. I got some emails from some people who were concerned about this and I had to say, no, you know, this was not that big of a deal. And you're right that we have to look at the long time scale. Just because a bunch of tornadoes broke out across the Mid West or in New England over the past few weeks doesn't mean they were swarming even if we get stronger hurricanes or more hurricanes this season, or a longer hurricane season doesn't mean that global warming is affecting you. You can't look at it that way, you've just got to take a step back, use longer time scale bins and hope that these trends are enough to see what's going on.

S: Yeah, and how many 11 year cycles have we been able to observe? How long have we had good observation of the sun?

PP: Well the first observations of the solar magnetic activity were actually in 1859 and it's pretty interesting actually, the guy, Carrington, looked at the sun with a visible light telescope and saw a flare – which is extremely rare for a flare to actually be seen with visible light. It's still to this day the strongest solar flare that's ever been seen. It caused all kinds of havoc on the earth at the time the telegraph... and stuff. And so we've been measuring the sun's activity now for about 150 years and when you look at the cycles they're all over the place, some are really strong some last longer some are weaker, it's just difficult to know what any given cycle's gonna do. We can only say that it's roughly 11 years it's not exactly 11 years. The activity tends to be strongest after the peak, that sort of stuff, but for any given event you can't really predict it. You can see, 'Hey look, there's a big old sun spot cluster there, and magnetic fields that are really strong, we ought to be keeping our eyes on it'. But that's no different from your tropical depression appearing in the Atlantic and the conditions look good to form a hurricane.

S: Yeah.

PP: You never now what's gonna happen. You've just gotta keep your eyes open for the precursors and hope for the best.

S: Well there's a couple of the news items we'd like you to hang around for if that's okay.

=== How Common is the Moon? (34:25)===
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13609153 BBC news: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought]

S: Bob, give us the summary on the new computer models about the formation of the moon.

B: Define summary.

S: (laughs)

E: The opposite of wintry.

(all laugh)

S: All right, not Bob length.

B: Researchers are redefining the rarity of Earth-moon system. They're saying that a whopping one in ten rocky planets may have satellites that's as big as our moon when compared to the Earth. Using these new sophisticated computer simulations it seems that the massive impacts that resulted in our relatively huge moon may be common, actually, throughout the universe. This research is coming from the Scientists from the Zurich Institute of Theoretical Physics in Switzerland and the Morishma at the University of Colorado in the US. They simulated planet formation from gas and chunks of planetesimal and they took these results and they factored them into another simulation, an N-body simulation, to see what the chances were that large satellites could form for that. And they were quite surprised to find that there was about a one in twelve chance of forming a planet and the satellite moon with both having more than half the mass of the Earth and the moon respectively. Now I liked how the BBC news article I read went into a little bit more statistical information about this. They were saying that the one in twelve or one in ten figure that you read everywhere else, they were saying that for the full range of possibilities it was between one in 45 and one in four. So that's kind of what the statistics were telling them, and they kinda distilled that down to about one in twelve. So now this is all tied, of course, to the once controversial and now pretty much generally accepted theory about how our moon formed. The common wisdom now is that it was a collision between the Earth Mark I, which some people refer to as Earth Mark I, colliding with this Mars-sized object and creating a huge debris ring which kind of coalesced in about a hundred years to form the moon as we know it. Of course it was a lot closer, about 15 times larger – the parent size is about 15 times larger than the way we see it now. The cool thing is that this could actually help with planet hunting – I wasn't aware of this. Large moons can distort the measurements that are made to find planets. This new knowledge could actually make finding them easier. Now Phil wasn't sure, I mean, just because you know this fact, how could this make it easier? I mean what is it about the distortion, how could the moon distort the measurements of finding a planet? A planet and a moon are pretty much like one system from a distance anyway. You know, I was having a hard time trying to figure out how a big moon could distort planet hunter measurements.

PP: Actually I'm with you, I don't now. I read the press release and it's pretty vague on that. I've not read the actual paper or talked to anybody about this. The way you find planets are actually a bunch of ways, but the two big ones are either the way the planet is pulling on the star and as it orbits the star the star is making a little circle and it creates a dopplar shift and you can see that sort of red and blue shift in the spectrum. But that should not be affected very much by a big moon. It's hard enough to see that with a low mass planet like the Earth around a star it's a very very tiny effect.

B: Right

PP: The bigger the planet the closer in it is the more that effect is and the easier it is to see. And it's hard to see how the moon would affect this – I don't know, I'm not that familiar with it. The other way is through transits where the planet literally gets between us and the star and it blocks a little bit of the starlight. Now for a Jupiter-sized planet and a star like the sun - it'll block about one percent of the star's light which is actually fairly easy to measure, you can use equipment you can buy off the shelf, which is really cool. For an Earth-like planet the effect is actually, I think, a ten thousandth the brightness of the star which is a lot harder to measure. If there's a moon that's orbiting that planet and the moon is, like, like, our moon, a significant fraction of the planet's size, then you might see more or less light dropping. If the planet and the moon transit the star you get a slightly bigger dip than if the moon is lined up with the planet from our point of view, if that makes any sense.

B: Yeah.

PP: That's the only way I can see off the top of my head there may be other things. You need to talk to an exoplanet hunter to get the deal on this.

B: Exoplanet hunter – what a cool job.

R: It's a great name.

B: The other thing that this highlights is the importance of the moon itself. Without the moon the Earth would be a very different place and I think it's a pretty safe bet that homosapiens would not be here without the moon. One of the big things that it does is that it stabilises the tilt of the Earth's axis, what's referred to as its obliquity. Without this the tilt would over greatly extended time-spans would mess with the overall heating of the Earth in ways that could make it fairly inimical to life, although I'm sure it would find ways around it.

R: Umm, would that be needed though, if nothing had smashed into the Earth in the first place to create the moon? In other words, is the moon just balancing out the wobble that was created by its own creation?

B: No. No, without the moon and without any impact they think they found some good examples that ummm... Yeah, the tilt would vary over great periods of time.

R: Because there are lot of planets without moons. What is it about the Earth that makes it require a moon?

PP: Well think of it this way. If you have a spinning top and it's perfectly balanced it'll spin really well. But if you put a lump of clay on one side of it and let it spin it'll start to wobble and that wobble can become chaotic. And so that's kinda what's happening with the Earth. You've got continents that are moving around and they cause it to be off-balance. As the Earth spins and as the moon pulls on the Earth you get a bulge around the middle of the Earth and it's the torque of the moon on that bulge, I think, that stabilises it. I'm not an expert on this but that's how I understand it. And that prevents the Earth's wobble from becoming chaotic. Venus spins much more slowly than the Earth, so I don't think it's as big of a deal. Mars, on the other hand, has roughly the same rate of spin as the Earth – it spins once a day – and there is evidence that in the past the axis of its spin has changed and some times a lot, indicating that... and I should add that it does not have a big moon it has too little dinky moons, and so it's possible that without that big moon torquing the Earth and keeping the spin from going all wobbly you get a planet that flips over and that has drastic effects on the seasons. It's not obvious, it's certainly not easy to understand how that all works, but it does seem to be the way the science is pointing right now.

S: Yeah, I remember when I was reading about the stabilising effect of the moon on the Earth, and how nice it is to have that. And at the same time, how rare the previous thinking was about how common we would see an Earth-Moon type of system. I was depressed as it would probably be very very few worlds out there that are as compatible to human life as our own system so if this is true, if these computer models are correct, and it's actually far more common, maybe, on average, one per solar system or something of that order of magnitude, that's reassuring for prospects of habitable planets out there.

B: Absolutely.

PP: You know it's reassuring, but it's not surprising at all. I've never bought into the Rare Earth idea.

S: Yeah

PP: You can say Earths must be common because we're on one – what are the odds? But that's, you know, you guys know all about that – it's like the water in the puddle saying “How remarkable it is that there's just enough water in here to fit the puddle” - you're looking at it the wrong way. So the idea that we're just the right size, just the right distance from the sun, with the moon and the magnetic field, and, and, and... it's like, you know, I'm not buying into all this. I think that there are lots of Earths out there. It's not uncommon to see stars like the sun. 10% of the stars in the galaxy are like the sun. We're starting to see that planets are common. We're starting to get an idea that planets the size of the Earth are common. If they're spinning rapidly and they have enough radioactive materials in their core they're gonna have a magnetic field. And so I think that that's something we're gonna see as common. And now, you know, if the moon is important for us to be here it seems very unlikely that we'd be the only planet in the galaxy like that, and we know that collisions are common, we know that planets are moving around in their star systems early on in the history of these things and so all of this stuff does not strike me as being all that surprising. I would have expected it. I don't know if I would have said as many as one in four Earth-like planets might have big moons, but the way objects get tossed around and the recent finding that there may be more planets wandering interstellar space than there are stars in the galaxy...

S: Yeah, how cool is that?

B: That is awesome

PP: ...Lends credence to this. The planets are moving around, they interact with each other, they change positions in the solar system, they toss each other out gravitationally, so we know that this stuff happens. So I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I would say that this finding is not surprising. It's just cool.

S: Yeah, it's just never been aesthetically pleasing to me to think that the Earth is really really rare. For all the reasons that you said. There's sort of the principle of mediocrity or whatever you call it, that chances are we're an unremarkable planet around an unremarkable star, around an unremarkable galaxy, you know. There's never any reason to think that we have a very special position in the universe. But there is a bit of the lottery fallacy that you were alluding to. If life were very rare, any life that did arise would marvel at how rare it was. Right?

PP: Unless there were two planets in that system that had life on them

S: Right

B: Right

S: But the premise is that life is rare, so that would be possible but exceedingly unlikely. But the billions of planets roaming around interstellar space is fascinating but it's also a bit scary because you think what's the possibility that, like, a Jupiter-sized planet will come ripping through the solar system.

PP: Very very rare. The universe is a very big place, the odds of that happening are extremely low. If they were high we probably wouldn't be here, right?

S: Right

PP: If over four and half billion years, the age of the Earth, some Jupiter-sized planet... if the odds were 100% that it would scream through the solar system it would have happened by now. So the odds of it happening are very very low. It makes for a great science-fiction movie.

S: Yeah

PP: Or a good novel or something like that, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it as a certainty. Certainly they're out there. That's something I've been wondering about for a long time – if there are frozen planets out there, and it's nice to see this big study. I mean this is not theoretical – these were observations that...

S: Yeah

PP: These planets gave themselves away through their gravity, effecting stars behind them and magnifying that light using basically a relativistic lens to... gravitational lens that Einstein predicted. So this is a direct observation and extrapolating to the entire sky you get this number of hundreds of billions of planets like this, which is awesome. But I don't think that hundreds of billions of planets spread out over the volume of a galaxy... it's still pretty thin stuff, so I don't think that this is that big of a problem for us.

E: What are the chances of any of those planets having life? You've gotta consider it small to none.

PP: Hard to say, you know. Jupiter is warmer than it would be... Let me rephrase that, it's actually radiating more heat than it receives from the sun. Left over heat from its formation, as well as some other sources of heat, so a giant planet could still be fairly warm, but there are other problems – there are gigantic convection currents bringing gas up and down so any life in a temperate zone would be dragged down to the hotter interior, so that's always been the problem with the theoretical models of how life might be inside a Jupiter-like planet. But you know what? I've learnt not to bet against nature. And I think that's the way to go. If they're out there, who knows? We'd have to go and take a look to be sure.

B: So this is all good but what's with the attitude?

PP: Shut up! What attitude?

E: You tell him

S: It was my attitude!

PP: My attitude of wonder and joy about the wonders of the universe? Is that what you're complaining about?

J: I'm pretty sure I've asked you this before but I live like a moment to moment life, which means that you could tell me the same joke, but, Phil because you really understand things, you know what's out there, you can write books like you did about the 59 ways you can get killed. Do you ever legitimately get frightened?

R: Like clowns, things like that?

E: Like crying in your bed at night?

J: No, I mean, you know... Is there anything that occurs that you're like, 'you know what, that is down right frightening - I don't like the idea that that might be coming at us at like a million miles an hour right now', you know what I mean?

PP: Oh, there's a ton of stuff like that. But you gotta differentiate between that stuff existing and that stuff being an actual danger – a threat to the Earth. Gamma ray bursts, supernovae and, my favourite, magnetars are these incredibly charged neutron stars that have field strengths that is quadrillions of times stronger than the Earth's magnetic fields, and they release super enormous blasts of energy and we got hit by one in 2004 actually, although it didn't really damage us. If there was one closer to us it could. But, you know what, we haven't been damaged by one of those things, there hasn't been a gamma ray burst in human history that has hurt us. There are no stars close enough to go supernova that can hurt us in this way, so this is not the kind of stuff that worries us. An asteroid impact, yeah, that could happen, a solar flare damaging our satellites and causing issues down here because of that – that's a legitimate worry, but that's also the sort of thing we can choose to protect ourselves from, we just haven't made that choice yet. So I don't lie awake at night fretting about these things. I have to worry about paying my taxes and worrying about what my kid is doing. Those are more the day-to-day things I'm worried about.

S: Yeah, Jay, it's far worse being a physician, knowing all the ways the body can fail, and knowing that one of those will happen to you soon.

J: Soon! (Laughs)

R: You make it sound like a threat

S: Soon-ish, within decades, which on astronomical scales is much quicker than anything that Phil has to worry about.

J: Steve, do you lie in bed at night going, “Nooo!!”

S: There definitely are times when I get little symptoms where I know all the horrible things it could be a symptom of, and I just have to say alright, don't worry about it, it's probably nothing and so far it has been.

J: Yeah, I find as I get older I ask myself a lot, and I mean this dead seriously, 'am I having a heart attack right now?' Is that pain right there the beginning of the end?

S: That's true, when you're in your 20's and you get a little left-sided chest pain you don't worry about it, you're like, I'm 25, you know, I'm not having a heart attack. But when you're 46 and the same exact thing happens you're like, okay, how much do I gotta worry about this?

PP: Hey wait a minute, why choose the age of 46?

S: Because that's my current age.

PP: Okay, yeah, that's my age as well.

S: Yeah. Yeah we're getting to that age where, you know, little things like that crop up and it's actually statistally plausible that it could be something serious.

PP: Everything is cancer. You know every time I look and I see a new mole on my shoulder it's like, 'Oh no!'

R: I don't even do that just with moles, with me it's just whatever random pain I have. Well it's cancer of the whatever-that-is.

B: 'Whatever-that-is'! God!(laughs)

S: ...Of the connectigizoid!

J: The claven.

B: “The clay-ven” (in mock-Jewish voice)

=== UFO Nazi Connection (50:59)===
[http://weirdnews.aol.com/2011/06/07/area-51-ufos-aliens-annie-jacobsen-nazi-soviet_n_869706.html#s285846&title=Area_51_Warning Huffington Post: Area 51 personnel feel 'betrayed' by Annie Jacobsen's Soviet-Nazi UFO connection]

S: Alright, one more news item. We have to end on a funny one for Phil. Alright Evan, tell us about UFO Nazis.

E: Well how about this one? So there's an author and her name is Annie Jacobson, and she has a new book that is out called 'Area 51 – An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base'. She spends the majority of her time in this book talking the legitimate science and projects and experimental aircraft and other things that have been taking place at this facility for the past sixty years. She got together with some people who used to work there who had declassified information and they would share it. However, it's the last chapter of the book which is making headlines. Because she is drawing the conclusion that the famous saucer crash involved with Area 51 Roswell is actually a conspiracy in which the Auschwitz doctor Joseph Mengele, the German aircraft designing brothers the Haughton brothers and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin formed a conspiracy in the late 1940's to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer which was crowded, get this, with 13-year olds which were surgically altered under the...

S: By Joseph Mengele.

E: ...By Joseph Mengele.

S: Yeah. To look alien.

E: ...To look alien. And that is actually the recovered pieces of the famous crash. And those people, the surgically altered people are the supposed aliens that were recovered from the crash.

R: Well I'll never again say that the 911 Truthers have the dumbest conspiracy theory out there.

S: Well you know there's always gotta be one dumber than whatever you're currently talking about.

R: That's true.

E: Now Annie Jacobson is a journalist. And the reviews I've read about the book say that she's done a decent, not perfect, job in the various chapters of the book that have to deal with the hard sciences. But this last chapter in which she draws this conclusion, she's basing it entirely upon an unnamed source, one person, an unnamed source.

PP: Glen Beck (coughs).

(all laugh)

PP: Sorry, something in my throat there.

E: Might as well be. ...Who apparently fed her all this information and that's what she's going by. And she says "Oh I totally trust this source, I mean he's very, very reliable."

R: I think I know who this source is; the source is her publicist.

S: (laughs) I was gonna say that.

B: That's right Rebecca.

E: Exactly.

R: No one would be talking about this if it weren't for that last chapter.

E; Right? Because you have to have a new angle to this whole story...

S: Exactly.

E: ...if you want your book to sell well in these days.

R: Yeah, especially 'cause it was that last chapter. I's like you know she turned in the completed book and it was all sourced and nice and ready to go, and they're like "This is good, but..."

PP: "It's ''way'' too accurate."

R: "...can't you just throw in one giant lie at the end? Just tack it on. Good job."

Steve: It's like Steve Martin tells that joke - if you're making demands, you have to always throw in that one crazy one. "I want the letter M ''stricken'' from the alphabet!" That way you can always claim insanity afterwards.

(laughter)

S: It's sort of a simple thing. In the last chapter you gotta go totally off the rails and start making crazy conspiracy theories 'cause that's what's gonna sell your book.

PP: I actually have two comments on this. One is that this idea that Nazis are tied with UFOs has been around for a long time. I remember reading a novel based on this conspiracy theory back when I was in grad school in the 90s. And the book wasn't new then. I think it was called "Genesis". It was this ginormous 800 page science fiction novel. It sounded fun and it was just basically the Nazi scientists that were behind all this escaped, they moved to Antarctica, they built a base there, they perfected UFO technology, and we're gonna rise again basically, so this has been around a while.

S: This is Richard Hoagland. He wrote "Our Breakaway Nazi Civilisation". He thinks NASA's run by Nazis and they're the shadow government that's doing all this UFO/face on Mars stuff.

PP: As soon as you say "Richard Hoagland", you can just put a period after that and we're done as far as I'm concerned.

(laughter)

S: ''Hoaglaaaand''!

B: Oh yeah.

E: (laughs)

J: Steve, when you say that, just quickly going through your mind, like okay, he really believes that there's Nazis out there, and I have to make light of this real quick, but does he actually think they're still wearing their badass clothes with the leather and the boots, you know they still have (inaudible) and...?

R: You know there are still Nazis out there, let's (laughs) not suggest that there's no such thing as Nazis anymore.

S: Jay, I'm looking at a picture on his website, and it's a spaceship - a Nazi spaceship, that looks like a modified Nazi helmet with the skull and crossbones on the front.

(all laugh)

J: Right, there's my answer!

E: That would not be difficult mein Fuhrer (German accent).

J: A Nazi spaceship!

PP: There's a movie about Nazi UFOs from the Moon. It actually looks like a pretty fun movie.

E: Is it a porn, what the hell?

S: Nazi UFOs from the Moon?

PP: Does anyone know? It was announced about a year ago. I think it's an independent project. This is a great idea for a fictionalised novel or movie, but then on the other hand most of the stuff that Hoagland does is heavily fictionalised so there you go.

E: You know Phil, also there have been stories in the past drawn up by the UFO crowd that the Soviets had something to do with the crash at the famous crash that took place at Roswell as well. So what's happening is kind of blending all of these different aspects together and the alien bodies that were supposedly recovered. She's picking out these pieces and forming her own little opinion as to what this all means to her

PP: You know it was the expanding time waves from the Roswell crash that caused building 7 to collapse on September 11.

(sounds of agreement)

R: Yeah that makes sense actually.

B: I hate when time waves do that!

PP: I've got the equations right here. It's quite simple. I actually... to even the most dimmest person to do a second (inaudible).

B: Most dimmest!

PP: I want to say one other thing about this too. In the article on weirdnews.aol.com where Ms Jacobson is being quoted, she says "I don't have to..." Well what happened was these guys basically came out and said "Listen, we were sources for some of her information in the book, the good stuff in the book, and we were shocked by this last chapter, and I can't believe she took our information and did this, and she didn't ask us about this." And she is ''quoted'' here as saying, this is a quote, "For starters, journalists don't share their information with their sources prior to publication,. That's a standard rule." she said "...so I'm following journalist tradition." So what she's really saying is "I got this information. I'm not going to go check with the experts on it to find out what's going on because journalists don't do that." You know what? ''I think they do'' I think that's ''exactly'' what journalists do. They check their sources. So that quotation by her really sets off a lot of alarms in my head, and she goes on to say "What others think of my book can't matter to me in terms of being a journalist." (laughs) The word journalist is not a shield to be able to say whatever you want.

R: Maybe if she calls herself a journalist enough times, she'll actually become a journalist. That must be what she's thinking.

PP: You know, I've seen stuff like this happen before and I always want to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. I don't know what's going on, I haven't read the book, I've only read this article. The article could be sensationalising the last chapter. It could be relatively harmless and being misinterpreted, whatever. But these quotations from her ''really'' make me suspicious about the integrity of that last chapter. I think I'm safe in saying that.

S: Well Phil thank you for joining us it's always a pleasure.

PP: Thanks everybody. Thanks for having me on, it's always fun.

E: Thank you Phil.

S: We're gonna see you at TAM in about four weeks.

PP: I'll see you guys at TAM. I'm gonna see you at CSICon in New Orleans in October...

S: And DragonCon.

B: DragonConnn!

PP: ...and DragonCon yeah, I can't wait for DragonCon that's gonna be great.

S: You're gonna be sick of us.

R: Yeah.

E: Gonna be?

PP: I'm sorry, gonna be?

R: He's already sick of all of you.

E: Hello? Hello? More so.

J: Hello? (laughs)

S: (laughter) Alright goodnight Phil.

PP: Thanks folks...

J: Later!

PP: ...talk to you later.

B: Night buddy.

== Who's That Noisy? (59:23)==

== Science or Fiction ( ) ==

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110606171416.htm Item number one]. Astronomers find evidence that some or perhaps all of the large moons of Jupiter were proto-planets captured from the inner solar system in the early days of the solar system when Jupiter was much closer to the sun. [http://news.byu.edu/archive11-jun-redbluestates.aspx Item number two]. Research finds that citizens from so-called "blue" states are just as likely to hold liberal or conservative views on specific issues as citizens from "red" states. And [http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=24890&news_item=5619 item number three]. Scientists discover that dolphins actually project two beams of ultrasound for use in echolocation.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:17:13) ==
<blockquote>"Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are."</blockquote>
J: Eric Butterworth!

== Announcements ( ) ==

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SGU Episode 308

2013-02-22T05:57:26Z

Jessiessica: /* UFO Nazi Connection (50:59) */

{{Editing required
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{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 308
|episodeDate = 8thJune 2011
|episodeIcon = File:Nazi_Spaceship.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = PP: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Plait Phil Plait]
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2011-06-08.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=308
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,36132.0.html
|qowText = Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are.
|qowAuthor = Eric Butterworth
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday June 8th, 2011 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: Yuan Shang Hao. Good evening to all of our listeners in China of which there are...

J: I like your intonation

S: Inflection

B: I'm not sure if it was accurate though but it sounded good

E: Does anyone listen to us in China?

R: Of course, yeah, we have some Chinese listeners

S: But if you use the wrong inflection you say, 'I wanna massage your grandmother', so you've gotta be careful

E: You know the thing about saying 'good evening' in Chinese is that I want to say it again in an hour. I don't know what it is

B: O.M.G.

R: Wow

J: That was so bad

R: He's been working on that joke all night

E: Where's my rim shot? Ah crud.
(cymbals)

R: You get a sad trombone
(sad trombone)

S: Rebecca you're joining us from London this week

J: I say

R: I am, yes, I'm back in Old Blighty, as no-one calls it

E: Rebecca Poppins

R: Yeah, so once again the listeners are being treated to Rebecca at one thirty in the morning. Awesome.

J: But you're still kind of on US time

R: No, not really

J: But you're not in a bad mood

R: No, not really

J: Well at least you're happy recording the show

R: No

== This Day in Skepticism ()==
June 11, 1854. G.F. Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved in a lecture titled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.

S: Alright. Evan tell us what is absolutely fascinating about this day in skepticism

E: Well on this day that you're listening to the show it was 1854 in which the famous mathematician Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved and he announced this in a lecture titled On the Hypothesis on which Geometry is Based, which is apparently a very famous lecture that he gave. And what he did is he described the old-fashioned, Euclidean two-dimensional plane geometry along with some other examples of old geometry and... well let me put it to you this way. There's an example in which on a piece of paper there lived a bookworm, right, and this bookworm was drawn on the piece of paper so it was drawn in two-dimensional. You take the paper and you fold it up and you crumple it up. Now the worm drawn on the paper has no sense of the cumbling and the distortion of space that's going on around him because he also exists in two dimensions. Right, follow me so far?

S: Right

R: Yeah

B: Gotcha

S: Oh yeah

E: Whereas actually that crumpled paper is in three dimensions. So extend that out, we live in a world of three dimensions, but actually everything going around us exists in, what we believe is four dimensions, the fourth dimensions being time. And this was important not only as an important discovery of his time but it also influenced scientists and physicists such as Einstein who used Riemann's work in his theory of general relativity in which he incorporated time as the fourth dimension.

S: Yeah but when Riemann was talking about higher dimension I think he was talking about higher spatial dimensions, not necessarily with time as the fourth dimension. That was something that Einstein inserted. He was saying that space itself is curved into a physical fourth dimension which we can't perceive because we're on the surface of the paper like the...

E: That's right, we're like the worm. The two-dimensional worm on the paper has no idea it's getting all crumpled and crushed up.

S: But it's interesting. Imagine being the first guy to think of space as not linear, that's it's not Euclidean, that it's curved. That's mind blowing, right?

E: Big deal

B: The way he did that was to... I guess he was the first one to actually think of introducing numbers at every point in space and that was how he came upon the idea of using that method to describe how it was bent. I guess a pretty key insight. I wonder how relativity would have been affected if he hadn't come up with that and whether it would have been delayed significantly.

R: I don't know. For some reason this reminds me a lot of, was it Plato? Plato's cave/wall idea of people who are...

E: Shadows?

R: Yeah, I guess seeing shadows on a cave/wall so they assume that that's all that life is are these two-dimensional shadows, so if you were to explain the three-dimensional world to them it would blow their minds. And of course you can't say that Plato was thinking in terms of, well maybe there was a fourth dimension, a fourth spatial dimension as such, but I mean he was thinking in those sorts of terms, don't you think?

S: Yeah well that... our perception of reality is shaped by the physical reality in which we live

J: Right

S: We may be ignorant of reality in the same way that the cave shadow people are ignorant of their ultimate reality

R: Right and that's not to suggest that Plato had any sort of evidence of a fourth spatial dimension. I just want to put that out there. For conspiracy theorists out there...

S: He was talking more in just general philosophical terms, not that specific manifestation

J: Bob, what about this thing where we have these three dimensions that we can easily perceive and understand. But why do the dimensions end there? In other words, why couldn't there have been a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth dimension that are physical dimensions?

B: There actually might be and some theories actually, string theory and things, actually consider that - have that as an integral part of that. But those dimensions are, it's kind of weird, they're actually wrapped up and compacted in such a small space that they're not visible easily, so higher dimensions can exist in our universe but we just can't really detect them yet, it's not obvious beyond the three spatial dimensions we're aware of now.

E: I've heard that membrane theory relies on 11 dimensions - they can calculate 11 dimensions based on those theories.

B: Yeah

J: How about - I've heard of other theories talking about other dimensions of time. Imagine two dimensions of time, say, four or five dimensions of say space and two of time. What would that be like?

R: Crazy. That would be...

B: Crazy. How many... two watches wherever you go

S: This kind of stuff only makes sense in the context of mathematics. We can't, you know, really think about it physically.

J: You know just because we can think of them mathematically does that mean that they actually exist?

S: No. No, but there is something to the fact that it makes the Math more elegant. It sort of solves problems to bump things up a dimension and think of the reality as a three dimensional manifestation of a four dimensional reality or however many you ultimately get up to. So what does this mean? I mean this is a big question in theoretical physics or science in general, you know, when things start to fit together and become more elegant and have more explanatory power. That's nice, but it's not the same thing as it being actually the case and that's where we get into the debate about whether or not string theory can be a real science because it's not empirical, just theoretical.

== News Items ==
=== SGU-24 (7:24)===
The first 24 hour Live SGU event. September 23, 2011, starting at 8:00pm

S: Well we have a couple of news items coming up. Phil Plait's going to be coming up in a while to talk about some astronomy news but first we have a couple of other news items. The first one is SGU related. Do you guys know... I know you guys know what's going to happen... I hope you know by now - September 23rd and 24th, this fall, 2011, a very special event will be occurring: we will be holding... we have decided for some crazy reason to do a 24 hour live streaming SGU event.

R: Extravaganza

B: Extreme is right

J: And I want everyone to know from the beginning that I'm totally against it

E: Yes, we are bringing J kicking and screaming to this event

R: Which should only make it more entertaining I think

E: Oh yeah

B: I thought of a name, I just thought of a name for it

S: What?

B: Skeptapalooza

S: Oh come on

R: That's a terrible name

B: Best one I've heard yet

S: Alright, our working title is SGU24 but we're certainly open to suggestions

J: And I get to play Jack Bower then

E: "Where's the bomb?"

S: Does that mean we get to torture you and stop your heart and then get it going again?

J: Jump my heart with a car battery and then I'll be able to do 14 hours of show?
(all laugh)

I loved every goddam season of that programme.

R: You know Jay, for some reason when I hear you mention 24 hours it doesn't really bother me that much, but when you mention 14 hours it occurs to me, like, we will have already been recording for ten hours and we'll have 14 to go and now I'm against it too.

S: Well that's like we were flying to Australia and we were on the plane for what seems like forever and we find out we still have ten more hours left on the plane. Yeah it's bad. This won't be quite that bad because it'll be in my house

E: We like doing the heavy lifting, these special events, things that other sane people would never try.

S: So more details will be unfolding over the ensuing months, but save the dates September 23rd at 8pm and for the following 24 hours you'll be able to eat, sleep and breathe the SGU. And it'll be video. And we'll be broadcasting from a very special location.

R: You already said, from your house

S: But it's a special location within my house.

E: Right...

B: And we haven't named it yet, we need a special name

J: Bob, we did name it!

S: It's the skeptilair.

R: (groans) Oh, please make it stop.

E: The skeptiman cave, with Rebecca

R: It's just gonna continue to get worse isn't it.

S: Unfortunately

J: This show will be fused... it'll be infused... with have Star Trek, with Star Wars, it'll have internet, it'll have TVs, it'll have computers, it'll have gadgets, it'll have things that pop and bubble

B: Skulls!

E: And it'll have no bathroom breaks. We'll all have to go down on one leg.

S: We'll all have catheters going to bottles strapped to our thighs

B: And one dead body

E: Oooo...

S: At least one dead body, yes

E: At least one, if not more

J: Yeah, SGU just jumped the shark

(all laugh)

R: Also we'll be introducing a young child onto the show. Our new, six-year-old love child.

(all chuckle nervously)

B: I thought you were referencing Oliver from the Brady Bunch

R: Oliver

B: The punk

R: The kid on married with children

E: You remember the Brady Bunch, Rebecca? No?

R: I've heard of the Brady Bunch

B: (gasp)

E: Heard of the Brady Bunch...

R: Anyway, the point is

J: 'Pork chops and applesauce'

(all laugh)

E: 'Oh, my nose!' (chuckles to self)

R: Are these... Are these Brady Bunch jokes? Is that what we...

J: Mum always said don't paintball in the house

E: That's why they're all zooming over your head

S: Yes

R: Yes. Alright, can we go back to Star Trek?

J: Oh woah.

E: 'He's dead Jim'

B: Never thought I'd hear her say that

S: But worse, can you imagine 24 hours of this?

R: I'm just gonna bring earplugs

(Steve laughs)

R: I'm going to bring a big pair of headphones. So I can just listen to my music.

S: Noise cancellation.

Alright, well, let's go on...

B: Geek cancellation

=== Psychic Tipster (12:06)===
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/usa-crime-bodies-idUSN0717557520110608 Reuters: UPDATE 6-Texas authorites find no bodies after psychic tip]

S: ...To another news item, Rebecca. A psychic gave a very interesting tip to the police

R: That's right, Steve. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies'. That was the headline that Reuters decided to run with. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies, including children, buried in a mass grave in a rural home East of Houston', local media reported.

(All laugh)

R: Ah, it goes on to say, 'It might not have been 30, it was 25 to 30, but preliminary reports did indicate that there were children.' So a really horrific scene there, Tuesday night, that was on June 7. And there was a lot of confusion as these reports were coming in, but it turns out that this amazing find was in fact discovered by a psychic. It came in through a psychic tip, the psychic told the police to go to this specific house in Texas and to search for bodies, the police went there, they didn't find anything so the same caller, the same anonymous psychic caller called back and again stated that there were bodies there it's just that the police were in slightly the wrong spot. So the psychic gave even more exact directions so the police went back and they found... Nothing.

S: Nothing?

Nothing. There was nothing. They found a small amount of blood on the porch of a house nearby and for some reason that turned into 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies including children', which is basically what the psychic had reported. But try as the might, the Texas authorities were actually unable to find any evidence of any bodies. The home-owners, the people who lived in the house on that property were truckers, cross-country truckers, who were out on the road when it happened. When reached for comment they said no, they were not murderers.

J: We don't know nothing about no bodies

B: Exactly

E: 'No bodies' (laughs)

R: But, apparently some slightly deranged person had cut his wrists on their porch a few weeks back.

S: Apparently it was the daughter's fiancée who was AWOL from the army

R: Yes

S: And cut himself deliberately and blood went all over the place and now is in a military psych facility, apparently.

R: Yes. And so, yeah, there was absolutely nothing. There was no sign of any bodies anywhere on the property. There was no reason to suspect that these people killed anyone. It was all thanks to one anonymous quote-unquote 'psychic'. So now after it's finally come out there were, in fact, no bodies, the police are discussing trying to charge the tipster. Although there's no real indication whether or not they'll be able to discover the identity of the caller. But hopefully they can and hopefully this person will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Because this is what we see again and again. You see, when people ask, 'What's the harm? Psychic detectives, they're just adding another, you know, another possibility of finding a body or finding a murderer', well this is the problem. You have somebody that thinks that they're a psychic offering what they think... And they might actually believe this, they may actually think that they're having psychic visions about something and think that they're helping. But what they're only doing, really, is that they're wasting the police's time. Can you imagine how many detectives and how many offices they had to be on this searching this property to find out that there's absolutely nothing? And that...

S: And the FBI get involved.

R: Yeah. Surely they had something better to do.

S: Yeah

E: There were aerial video pictures of the groups - all the cars and all the detectives and the personnel - it was throngs of people at this supposed place. It was a huge waste of resources. Huge.

R: Yeah. And, of course, to me it's still not as bad as the cases you have where there's been a disappearance of someone and there's been a quote-unquote 'psychic' contact the relatives or someone and say that they have evidence of where this person is.

J: (In character) The kid's dead.

R: Exactly, that causes an incredible amount of emotional, psychological damage to these families. In this case, at least the damage was just economic, I suppose. But that's your tax dollars at work. Tracking down the pointless tips from pychics.

S: Now Rebecca, there're a few details to this story that I found very interesting. Of course, I'm basing this... I've read multiple articles on this and they were shuffling around the same basic facts. And that one was the blood on the porch. Another one though, was that when the cops got there they described a quote-unquote 'Overwhelming smell of decomposition'.

R: Oh yeah, yeah I saw that noted as well.

S: Yeah, so... which leant... so now you have the blood and the decomp. which meant 'oh right, this is legit, there's something here', so that's how they justified the massive response. Yeah, initially it was just a couple of guys going to check it out, but these details led to the more... calling in the FBI and getting the bigger response. Plus they also noted that there were some details, some, you know, some geographic details relating to the layout of the house that the psychic got pretty accurately and that that convinced them also that this was a legitimate tip, and not just a lunatic.

R: Right. And of course maybe the psychic just had knowledge of this area, been by or something.

S: Yeah

R: There was also the fact that apparently the property owner's son is a convicted sex offender, though he hasn't lived there for over a year and that the smell, the foul stench that the police identified was found to be coming from piles of rotting garbage.

S: Yeah. They were truckers who were on the road, so they were...

R: Right

S: Yeah

R: There were a lot of little details that when combined with this quote-unquote 'psychic tip' led the police to realise they... you know, needed to do something because these were all adding to a sort-of confirmation bias

S: Yeah, exactly, it's circumstantial evidence, confirmation bias, and you think, 'What's the chance that the police checking out a tip are gonna find blood on the porch?' Well it turns out it's probably not... You know first it asks the wrong question. The question is not, 'What's the chance of finding blood?', it's 'What's the chance of finding something suspcious?'

R: Right

S: And all the different things that could be suspicious. And the fact that somebody bled sometime in the last week or so was not that remarkable. And the quote-unquote 'decomp' was just the truckers on the road left the garbage behind which was rotting and smelling.

R: Yeah

S: So those, kind of, circumstantial things, you know, it's actually pretty likely, but when you're hunting for confirmation of your suspicions it's amazing how many connections you can make even on something apparently random like this. My only other question is, as you say, was this really just a random tip from an alleged psychic or did she have reason to point the police out to this house?

R: Yeah, I mean I, not knowing anything about... anything... (laughs)

S: You know, we don't have the details

R: Yeah, it's hard to say

E: It's unfolding, you know, it's still unfolding

R: I'm hoping that maybe somebody is looking into the guy who slit his wrists on the porch - I mean, it was a woman who called in but it's obviously some bad blood, so to speak, happening around there. So it's not out of the question to imagine that there might be someone who had reason to want to disrupt the people who lived there. That could be a cause.

S: And the police said specifically that somebody was looking into the revenge angle. That this was done to make trouble for the home-owners

R: Yeah

S: Okay. Well we're going to bring in Phil Plait the Bad Astronomy to cover these next few items because they have an Astronomy-theme. So Phil, welcome to Skeptics' Guide.

21:20

PP: Hey, thanks for having me on once again

S: It's always great to have you, Phil Plat

PP: Kay, thanks

R: Oh, yeah, right, rings a bell

E: Phil Prat, what a good gag

PP: You know I don't care if people mispronounce my name so long as they can spell it and can find it online

R: Right, spoken like a true nerd

E: Can we call you Philip?

PP: No

S: Is your name Philip or is it really legally just Phil?

E: I don't know, I'd have to check my birth certificate. Which I know actually has my middle name misspelled on it but there you go

R: Phil Plait doesn't know his own name

PP: Those details are irrelevant

=== Explosion on the Sun (21:57)===
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-a-huge-explosion/ Bad Astronomy, Discover magazine: The Sun lets loose a HUGE explosion]

S: So Phil, we were going to talk about this news item about this massive explosion on the sun we just had to talk about with you so won't you tell us about it?

PP: This is a pretty good story. The sun goes through these cycles, it has a magnetic field like a... like a magnet. And the magnetic field goes through cycles and it gets stronger every few years. It's an 11 year cycle. So it gets stronger then it fades, it gets stronger then it fades and we're sort of on the ramp up to the peak solar activity and we see this manifested on the surface of the sun with sunspots and solar flares and all kinds of cool stuff like that.

S: Phil, do we know what causes that cycle?

PP: No (laughs). That's the good part.

S: Okay...

PP: Well, there's some models that indicate why the sun's solar cycle goes up and down, it has to do with the way that the gas... is actually a plasma, it's an ionised gas inside the sun, is circulating around and when you move charged particles you generate a magnetic field and so this movement is very complicated and it has to do with the way that this gas is being transported in the solar interior. And what happens is is that the magnetic field gets dragged along with the stuff inside the sun, breaks through the sun's surface and that's why we see sunspots and various things, and magnetic field effects, it's the gas itself.

S: Is it an oscillation like a Cepheid variable's an oscillation, is that the theory?

PP: No, it has more to do with the way gas is flowing through the centre of the sun... well not through the centre, not through the core itself, but at the core the gas is very hot, it radiates that heat away. The gas above that then convects. The hot stuff rises and the cool stuff sinks just like in the Earth's atmosphere or in a boiling pot of water, and the problem is that that's not a simple system – the sun is rotating so there're rivers of gas like jet streams that are moving underneath the sun's surface. It's really complicated and the models that are trying to figure out how that works... They're not bad, they're doing a decent job but it's really really hard to figure out exactly all the motions that are going on inside, you know, this star that we're living nearby.

S: Right

PP: So what happens is as the magnetic field pokes through the surface of the sun it creates sunspots and these magnetic lines, you can think of them as like field lines, get tangled up and there's energy stored in them and if they get too tangled up they can actually sort of erupt – one of them snaps and it sets up a cascade or a lot of them snap and they all release their energy. You can imagine them like a bunch of mousetraps sitting on your floor and you throw a ping pong ball in there and as everything bounces around the mousetraps release all their energy you get a lot of snapping and motion and all kinds of craziness. Well that's what happens. And this can form a solar flare. It's a gigantic explosion on the surface of the sun. And it can be billions of megatons of energy released in just a few minutes. That's what happened on the sun and it wasn't actually that big of a flare as they go, they're different classes and this was a fare-to-middling sized explosion. But what happened, it was pretty unusual, is that there was an enormous fountain of gas that erupted off the surface of the sun and that's not usually associated with these types of events and now NASA has the Solar Dynamics Observatory which is this really phenomenal satellite and it's observing the sun at a lot of different wavelengths. So we have a high resolution, really gorgeous basically video, just images taken every couple of minutes or something like that, and you can string them together to make videos so you can see this flare. The eruption, this fountain of material flowing out from the sun and falling back down. And in different wavelengths it's just unbelievable it looks like, you know, ink flowing through water in one wavelength of light and in another it looks like fiery gas blowing out, it's just spectacular.

R: So Phil, how long until we all die?

PP: Ah, for you? Well it depends on your lifestyle habits – is there something you need to tell us?

R: Well, you know now I'm just a bit concerned about crazy things flying out of the sun at me.

PP: Well in this case, this particular event wasn't energetic enough to really do much. It did blow out a cloud of particles called coronal mass ejection, and that's gonna kinda sorta nick the Earth. It's not really directed at us. There maybe some aurorae associated with this, probably not much. On the other hand, you know, big flares, something that's bigger than this, we saw bigger ones earlier this year in February, they can damage satellites, they can affect the Earth's magnetic field. They can't really cause any specific problems here on Earth directly – you're not going to get irradiated, you're not going to turn into the Incredible Hulk, you're not going to melt, you're not going to turn into chud or morlocks or anything like that. Sorry.

B: Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.

PP: I know I know, a couple of you guys would probably love to see that happen.

(All laugh)

PP: But it can have effects you know. We have satellites up in space that can be damaged by this. You're basically zapping them with excess current and that can fry their electronics and we depend on a lot of the satellites like GPS, for financial transactions and all kinds of stuff like that. So corporations take this pretty seriously, they try to make sure their satellites are safeguarded against these kinds of events. Not all of them are. So we have to be careful about this and understand these sorts of events better so that we can build better satellites and protect them. Plus, you know, there're astronauts the International Space Station and they can be in danger of radioactive... well not radioactive, it's radiation, it's different than what we might we might think of as radioactivity, but these bizarre floods of subatomic particles that can come through the metal and whatnot, and I can't believe I just said whatnot, but the metal and other materials if I want to be a little more scientific, umm, in the space station - they may have to go to a better protected section of the station so that they don't get irradiated.

S: Yeah, or otherwise they might turn into the Fantastic Four

PP: I think that's true, yeah

E: Oh god

PP: Although I hope they make a better movie with actual astronauts than they would from the comic books.

S: Phil, if this explosion were aimed right at the Earth how bad would it have been?

PP: This one wouldn't have been as bad. We get some pretty spectacular aurora you know you can never say it's completely safe, we might lose a satellite, some of them might get damaged, sometimes satellites like Hubble and a lot of other ones, when they detect that there's excess current or that there's a problem they shut down automatically, they go into what's called 'safe-mode'. Sometimes, if we have enough advance warning, if there's a big flare, an X-class flare, one of these gigantic ones like we had earlier this year, or back in 2003 when the sun was just popping them off like popcorn it was really amazing, if you have enough warning you can shut down sensitive satellites and that's something that a lot of people are looking into. There's a space weather centre actually here in Boulder, it's not far from where I live, and they monitor the sun very careful, they issue warnings all the time in the hope that even just a few minutes warning can be enough to shut down these satellites and potentially save, you know, billions or tens of billions of dollars of assets in space.

E: Hey Phil just a few years ago we were talking about the lack of activity going on in the sun and how that was very unusual that low amount of activity for a long time, no sunspots for many months in a row. Now that we're seeing... since then the sun has been active with sunspots and all these other things that the sun does. What can we expect? Does the sun make up for lost time in a sense because of that lower activity and is it, like, trying to catch up to an equilibrium now?

PP: Nobody knows. I remember a couple of years ago people were arguing about this, that this long period of solar minimum which we kind of understand why it happened, or at least how it happened, but why the circumstances were set up for it to happen or not are not terribly well understood, but we do know that it was a record length of time with basically minimal solar activity. And so people were arguing, does this mean that the solar cycle will be also, you know, lower activity? when it reaches its peak will it be a lower than usual peak? Or will this mean that sun is building up energy and it's going to explode? Not literally, but you know, do something equally serious, and nobody really knows, and the thing is you have to be careful, I know you guys talk about anomaly hunting, the sun is going to do stuff like this. In February we had a bunch of X-class flares, there was a lower energy M-class flare. It was an unusual event because of that fountain of material that had never been seen before but, you know, who knows if it's actually happened before and we missed it, we just didn't have the equipment to see it, so you can't put too much credit to a single event or even a series of events. We just have to keep, you know, averaging up what's going on and see what's gonna happen. The peak of this cycle should happen in mid- to late-2013 and then into 2014 and it's actually after the peak that we usually see the strongest flares. And we'll just have to see what happens in, you know, 2014/2015 when the sun really starts to pop these guys off.

R: It seems a lot like climate science where we can't really look at it on a day-to-day scale. We have to look at it at... it's such a complex system. You know you have to look at it at a much larger scale. But, you know, I think scientists can understand that but from the perspective of someone who doesn't necessarily know how these things work I think it's easy for the media to, sort of, blow things like this out of proportion. Have you seen anything... any terrible reporting on this in that respect, Phil?

PP: Duh. Actually, this particular event... I poked around a few websites and it was being reported fairly well, but I can't remember which one it was, you know, I wanna say it was the Daily Mail but that's sort of my go-to garbage tabloid, that basically said we're all gonna die. I can't remember if that's the one I saw or not so I don't wanna cast aspersions on them when it's not deserved because usually it is the Daily Mail. But people... you're right in a lot of the things you said, people don't necessarily understand what's going on when they see this they panic. I got some emails from some people who were concerned about this and I had to say, no, you know, this was not that big of a deal. And you're right that we have to look at the long time scale. Just because a bunch of tornadoes broke out across the Mid West or in New England over the past few weeks doesn't mean they were swarming even if we get stronger hurricanes or more hurricanes this season, or a longer hurricane season doesn't mean that global warming is affecting you. You can't look at it that way, you've just got to take a step back, use longer time scale bins and hope that these trends are enough to see what's going on.

S: Yeah, and how many 11 year cycles have we been able to observe? How long have we had good observation of the sun?

PP: Well the first observations of the solar magnetic activity were actually in 1859 and it's pretty interesting actually, the guy, Carrington, looked at the sun with a visible light telescope and saw a flare – which is extremely rare for a flare to actually be seen with visible light. It's still to this day the strongest solar flare that's ever been seen. It caused all kinds of havoc on the earth at the time the telegraph... and stuff. And so we've been measuring the sun's activity now for about 150 years and when you look at the cycles they're all over the place, some are really strong some last longer some are weaker, it's just difficult to know what any given cycle's gonna do. We can only say that it's roughly 11 years it's not exactly 11 years. The activity tends to be strongest after the peak, that sort of stuff, but for any given event you can't really predict it. You can see, 'Hey look, there's a big old sun spot cluster there, and magnetic fields that are really strong, we ought to be keeping our eyes on it'. But that's no different from your tropical depression appearing in the Atlantic and the conditions look good to form a hurricane.

S: Yeah.

PP: You never now what's gonna happen. You've just gotta keep your eyes open for the precursors and hope for the best.

S: Well there's a couple of the news items we'd like you to hang around for if that's okay.

=== How Common is the Moon? (34:25)===
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13609153 BBC news: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought]

S: Bob, give us the summary on the new computer models about the formation of the moon.

B: Define summary.

S: (laughs)

E: The opposite of wintry.

(all laugh)

S: All right, not Bob length.

B: Researchers are redefining the rarity of Earth-moon system. They're saying that a whopping one in ten rocky planets may have satellites that's as big as our moon when compared to the Earth. Using these new sophisticated computer simulations it seems that the massive impacts that resulted in our relatively huge moon may be common, actually, throughout the universe. This research is coming from the Scientists from the Zurich Institute of Theoretical Physics in Switzerland and the Morishma at the University of Colorado in the US. They simulated planet formation from gas and chunks of planetesimal and they took these results and they factored them into another simulation, an N-body simulation, to see what the chances were that large satellites could form for that. And they were quite surprised to find that there was about a one in twelve chance of forming a planet and the satellite moon with both having more than half the mass of the Earth and the moon respectively. Now I liked how the BBC news article I read went into a little bit more statistical information about this. They were saying that the one in twelve or one in ten figure that you read everywhere else, they were saying that for the full range of possibilities it was between one in 45 and one in four. So that's kind of what the statistics were telling them, and they kinda distilled that down to about one in twelve. So now this is all tied, of course, to the once controversial and now pretty much generally accepted theory about how our moon formed. The common wisdom now is that it was a collision between the Earth Mark I, which some people refer to as Earth Mark I, colliding with this Mars-sized object and creating a huge debris ring which kind of coalesced in about a hundred years to form the moon as we know it. Of course it was a lot closer, about 15 times larger – the parent size is about 15 times larger than the way we see it now. The cool thing is that this could actually help with planet hunting – I wasn't aware of this. Large moons can distort the measurements that are made to find planets. This new knowledge could actually make finding them easier. Now Phil wasn't sure, I mean, just because you know this fact, how could this make it easier? I mean what is it about the distortion, how could the moon distort the measurements of finding a planet? A planet and a moon are pretty much like one system from a distance anyway. You know, I was having a hard time trying to figure out how a big moon could distort planet hunter measurements.

PP: Actually I'm with you, I don't now. I read the press release and it's pretty vague on that. I've not read the actual paper or talked to anybody about this. The way you find planets are actually a bunch of ways, but the two big ones are either the way the planet is pulling on the star and as it orbits the star the star is making a little circle and it creates a dopplar shift and you can see that sort of red and blue shift in the spectrum. But that should not be affected very much by a big moon. It's hard enough to see that with a low mass planet like the Earth around a star it's a very very tiny effect.

B: Right

PP: The bigger the planet the closer in it is the more that effect is and the easier it is to see. And it's hard to see how the moon would affect this – I don't know, I'm not that familiar with it. The other way is through transits where the planet literally gets between us and the star and it blocks a little bit of the starlight. Now for a Jupiter-sized planet and a star like the sun - it'll block about one percent of the star's light which is actually fairly easy to measure, you can use equipment you can buy off the shelf, which is really cool. For an Earth-like planet the effect is actually, I think, a ten thousandth the brightness of the star which is a lot harder to measure. If there's a moon that's orbiting that planet and the moon is, like, like, our moon, a significant fraction of the planet's size, then you might see more or less light dropping. If the planet and the moon transit the star you get a slightly bigger dip than if the moon is lined up with the planet from our point of view, if that makes any sense.

B: Yeah.

PP: That's the only way I can see off the top of my head there may be other things. You need to talk to an exoplanet hunter to get the deal on this.

B: Exoplanet hunter – what a cool job.

R: It's a great name.

B: The other thing that this highlights is the importance of the moon itself. Without the moon the Earth would be a very different place and I think it's a pretty safe bet that homosapiens would not be here without the moon. One of the big things that it does is that it stabilises the tilt of the Earth's axis, what's referred to as its obliquity. Without this the tilt would over greatly extended time-spans would mess with the overall heating of the Earth in ways that could make it fairly inimical to life, although I'm sure it would find ways around it.

R: Umm, would that be needed though, if nothing had smashed into the Earth in the first place to create the moon? In other words, is the moon just balancing out the wobble that was created by its own creation?

B: No. No, without the moon and without any impact they think they found some good examples that ummm... Yeah, the tilt would vary over great periods of time.

R: Because there are lot of planets without moons. What is it about the Earth that makes it require a moon?

PP: Well think of it this way. If you have a spinning top and it's perfectly balanced it'll spin really well. But if you put a lump of clay on one side of it and let it spin it'll start to wobble and that wobble can become chaotic. And so that's kinda what's happening with the Earth. You've got continents that are moving around and they cause it to be off-balance. As the Earth spins and as the moon pulls on the Earth you get a bulge around the middle of the Earth and it's the torque of the moon on that bulge, I think, that stabilises it. I'm not an expert on this but that's how I understand it. And that prevents the Earth's wobble from becoming chaotic. Venus spins much more slowly than the Earth, so I don't think it's as big of a deal. Mars, on the other hand, has roughly the same rate of spin as the Earth – it spins once a day – and there is evidence that in the past the axis of its spin has changed and some times a lot, indicating that... and I should add that it does not have a big moon it has too little dinky moons, and so it's possible that without that big moon torquing the Earth and keeping the spin from going all wobbly you get a planet that flips over and that has drastic effects on the seasons. It's not obvious, it's certainly not easy to understand how that all works, but it does seem to be the way the science is pointing right now.

S: Yeah, I remember when I was reading about the stabilising effect of the moon on the Earth, and how nice it is to have that. And at the same time, how rare the previous thinking was about how common we would see an Earth-Moon type of system. I was depressed as it would probably be very very few worlds out there that are as compatible to human life as our own system so if this is true, if these computer models are correct, and it's actually far more common, maybe, on average, one per solar system or something of that order of magnitude, that's reassuring for prospects of habitable planets out there.

B: Absolutely.

PP: You know it's reassuring, but it's not surprising at all. I've never bought into the Rare Earth idea.

S: Yeah

PP: You can say Earths must be common because we're on one – what are the odds? But that's, you know, you guys know all about that – it's like the water in the puddle saying “How remarkable it is that there's just enough water in here to fit the puddle” - you're looking at it the wrong way. So the idea that we're just the right size, just the right distance from the sun, with the moon and the magnetic field, and, and, and... it's like, you know, I'm not buying into all this. I think that there are lots of Earths out there. It's not uncommon to see stars like the sun. 10% of the stars in the galaxy are like the sun. We're starting to see that planets are common. We're starting to get an idea that planets the size of the Earth are common. If they're spinning rapidly and they have enough radioactive materials in their core they're gonna have a magnetic field. And so I think that that's something we're gonna see as common. And now, you know, if the moon is important for us to be here it seems very unlikely that we'd be the only planet in the galaxy like that, and we know that collisions are common, we know that planets are moving around in their star systems early on in the history of these things and so all of this stuff does not strike me as being all that surprising. I would have expected it. I don't know if I would have said as many as one in four Earth-like planets might have big moons, but the way objects get tossed around and the recent finding that there may be more planets wandering interstellar space than there are stars in the galaxy...

S: Yeah, how cool is that?

B: That is awesome

PP: ...Lends credence to this. The planets are moving around, they interact with each other, they change positions in the solar system, they toss each other out gravitationally, so we know that this stuff happens. So I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I would say that this finding is not surprising. It's just cool.

S: Yeah, it's just never been aesthetically pleasing to me to think that the Earth is really really rare. For all the reasons that you said. There's sort of the principle of mediocrity or whatever you call it, that chances are we're an unremarkable planet around an unremarkable star, around an unremarkable galaxy, you know. There's never any reason to think that we have a very special position in the universe. But there is a bit of the lottery fallacy that you were alluding to. If life were very rare, any life that did arise would marvel at how rare it was. Right?

PP: Unless there were two planets in that system that had life on them

S: Right

B: Right

S: But the premise is that life is rare, so that would be possible but exceedingly unlikely. But the billions of planets roaming around interstellar space is fascinating but it's also a bit scary because you think what's the possibility that, like, a Jupiter-sized planet will come ripping through the solar system.

PP: Very very rare. The universe is a very big place, the odds of that happening are extremely low. If they were high we probably wouldn't be here, right?

S: Right

PP: If over four and half billion years, the age of the Earth, some Jupiter-sized planet... if the odds were 100% that it would scream through the solar system it would have happened by now. So the odds of it happening are very very low. It makes for a great science-fiction movie.

S: Yeah

PP: Or a good novel or something like that, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it as a certainty. Certainly they're out there. That's something I've been wondering about for a long time – if there are frozen planets out there, and it's nice to see this big study. I mean this is not theoretical – these were observations that...

S: Yeah

PP: These planets gave themselves away through their gravity, effecting stars behind them and magnifying that light using basically a relativistic lens to... gravitational lens that Einstein predicted. So this is a direct observation and extrapolating to the entire sky you get this number of hundreds of billions of planets like this, which is awesome. But I don't think that hundreds of billions of planets spread out over the volume of a galaxy... it's still pretty thin stuff, so I don't think that this is that big of a problem for us.

E: What are the chances of any of those planets having life? You've gotta consider it small to none.

PP: Hard to say, you know. Jupiter is warmer than it would be... Let me rephrase that, it's actually radiating more heat than it receives from the sun. Left over heat from its formation, as well as some other sources of heat, so a giant planet could still be fairly warm, but there are other problems – there are gigantic convection currents bringing gas up and down so any life in a temperate zone would be dragged down to the hotter interior, so that's always been the problem with the theoretical models of how life might be inside a Jupiter-like planet. But you know what? I've learnt not to bet against nature. And I think that's the way to go. If they're out there, who knows? We'd have to go and take a look to be sure.

B: So this is all good but what's with the attitude?

PP: Shut up! What attitude?

E: You tell him

S: It was my attitude!

PP: My attitude of wonder and joy about the wonders of the universe? Is that what you're complaining about?

J: I'm pretty sure I've asked you this before but I live like a moment to moment life, which means that you could tell me the same joke, but, Phil because you really understand things, you know what's out there, you can write books like you did about the 59 ways you can get killed. Do you ever legitimately get frightened?

R: Like clowns, things like that?

E: Like crying in your bed at night?

J: No, I mean, you know... Is there anything that occurs that you're like, 'you know what, that is down right frightening - I don't like the idea that that might be coming at us at like a million miles an hour right now', you know what I mean?

PP: Oh, there's a ton of stuff like that. But you gotta differentiate between that stuff existing and that stuff being an actual danger – a threat to the Earth. Gamma ray bursts, supernovae and, my favourite, magnetars are these incredibly charged neutron stars that have field strengths that is quadrillions of times stronger than the Earth's magnetic fields, and they release super enormous blasts of energy and we got hit by one in 2004 actually, although it didn't really damage us. If there was one closer to us it could. But, you know what, we haven't been damaged by one of those things, there hasn't been a gamma ray burst in human history that has hurt us. There are no stars close enough to go supernova that can hurt us in this way, so this is not the kind of stuff that worries us. An asteroid impact, yeah, that could happen, a solar flare damaging our satellites and causing issues down here because of that – that's a legitimate worry, but that's also the sort of thing we can choose to protect ourselves from, we just haven't made that choice yet. So I don't lie awake at night fretting about these things. I have to worry about paying my taxes and worrying about what my kid is doing. Those are more the day-to-day things I'm worried about.

S: Yeah, Jay, it's far worse being a physician, knowing all the ways the body can fail, and knowing that one of those will happen to you soon.

J: Soon! (Laughs)

R: You make it sound like a threat

S: Soon-ish, within decades, which on astronomical scales is much quicker than anything that Phil has to worry about.

J: Steve, do you lie in bed at night going, “Nooo!!”

S: There definitely are times when I get little symptoms where I know all the horrible things it could be a symptom of, and I just have to say alright, don't worry about it, it's probably nothing and so far it has been.

J: Yeah, I find as I get older I ask myself a lot, and I mean this dead seriously, 'am I having a heart attack right now?' Is that pain right there the beginning of the end?

S: That's true, when you're in your 20's and you get a little left-sided chest pain you don't worry about it, you're like, I'm 25, you know, I'm not having a heart attack. But when you're 46 and the same exact thing happens you're like, okay, how much do I gotta worry about this?

PP: Hey wait a minute, why choose the age of 46?

S: Because that's my current age.

PP: Okay, yeah, that's my age as well.

S: Yeah. Yeah we're getting to that age where, you know, little things like that crop up and it's actually statistally plausible that it could be something serious.

PP: Everything is cancer. You know every time I look and I see a new mole on my shoulder it's like, 'Oh no!'

R: I don't even do that just with moles, with me it's just whatever random pain I have. Well it's cancer of the whatever-that-is.

B: 'Whatever-that-is'! God!(laughs)

S: ...Of the connectigizoid!

J: The claven.

B: “The clay-ven” (in mock-Jewish voice)

=== UFO Nazi Connection (50:59)===
[http://weirdnews.aol.com/2011/06/07/area-51-ufos-aliens-annie-jacobsen-nazi-soviet_n_869706.html#s285846&title=Area_51_Warning Huffington Post: Area 51 personnel feel 'betrayed' by Annie Jacobsen's Soviet-Nazi UFO connection]

S: Alright, one more news item. We have to end on a funny one for Phil. Alright Evan, tell us about UFO Nazis.

E: Well how about this one? So there's an author and her name is Annie Jacobson, and she has a new book that is out called 'Area 51 – An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base'. She spends the majority of her time in this book talking the legitimate science and projects and experimental aircraft and other things that have been taking place at this facility for the past sixty years. She got together with some people who used to work there who had declassified information and they would share it. However, it's the last chapter of the book which is making headlines. Because she is drawing the conclusion that the famous saucer crash involved with Area 51 Roswell is actually a conspiracy in which the Auschwitz doctor Joseph Mengele, the German aircraft designing brothers the Haughton brothers and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin formed a conspiracy in the late 1940's to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer which was crowded, get this, with 13-year olds which were surgically altered under the...

S: By Joseph Mengele.

E: ...By Joseph Mengele.

S: Yeah. To look alien.

E: ...To look alien. And that is actually the recovered pieces of the famous crash. And those people, the surgically altered people are the supposed aliens that were recovered from the crash.

R: Well I'll never again say that the 911 Truthers have the dumbest conspiracy theory out there.

S: Well you know there's always gotta be one dumber than whatever you're currently talking about.

R: That's true.

E: Now Annie Jacobson is a journalist. And the reviews I've read about the book say that she's done a decent, not perfect, job in the various chapters of the book that have to deal with the hard sciences. But this last chapter in which she draws this conclusion, she's basing it entirely upon an unnamed source, one person, an unnamed source.

PP: Glen Beck (coughs).

(all laugh)

PP: Sorry, something in my throat there.

E: Might as well be. ...Who apparently fed her all this information and that's what she's going by. And she says "Oh I totally trust this source, I mean he's very, very reliable."

R: I think I know who this source is; the source is her publicist.

S: (laughs) I was gonna say that.

B: That's right Rebecca.

E: Exactly.

R: No one would be talking about this if it weren't for that last chapter.

E; Right? Because you have to have a new angle to this whole story...

S: Exactly.

E: ...if you want your book to sell well in these days.

R: Yeah, especially 'cause it was that last chapter. I's like you know she turned in the completed book and it was all sourced and nice and ready to go, and they're like "This is good, but..."

PP: "It's ''way'' too accurate."

R: "...can't you just throw in one giant lie at the end? Just tack it on. Good job."

Steve: It's like Steve Martin tells that joke - if you're making demands, you have to always throw in that one crazy one. "I want the letter M ''stricken'' from the alphabet!" That way you can always claim insanity afterwards.

(laughter)

S: It's sort of a simple thing. In the last chapter you gotta go totally off the rails and start making crazy conspiracy theories 'cause that's what's gonna sell your book.

PP: I actually have two comments on this. One is that this idea that Nazis are tied with UFOs has been around for a long time. I remember reading a novel based on this conspiracy theory back when I was in grad school in the 90s. And the book wasn't new then. I think it was called "Genesis". It was this ginormous 800 page science fiction novel. It sounded fun and it was just basically the Nazi scientists that were behind all this escaped, they moved to Antarctica, they built a base there, they perfected UFO technology, and we're gonna rise again basically, so this has been around a while.

S: This is Richard Hoagland. He wrote "Our Breakaway Nazi Civilisation". He thinks NASA's run by Nazis and they're the shadow government that's doing all this UFO/face on Mars stuff.

PP: As soon as you say "Richard Hoagland", you can just put a period after that and we're done as far as I'm concerned.

(laughter)

S: ''Hoaglaaaand''!

B: Oh yeah.

E: (laughs)

J: Steve, when you say that, just quickly going through your mind, like okay, he really believes that there's Nazis out there, and I have to make light of this real quick, but does he actually think they're still wearing their badass clothes with the leather and the boots, you know they still have (inaudible) and...?

R: You know there are still Nazis out there, let's (laughs) not suggest that there's no such thing as NAZIs anymore.

S: Jay, I'm looking at a picture on his website, and it's a spaceship - a Nazi spaceship, that looks like a modified Nazi helmet with the skull and crossbones on the front.

(all laugh)

J: Right, there's my answer!

E: That would not be difficult mein Fuhrer (German accent).

J: A Nazi spaceship!

PP: There's a movie about Nazi UFOs from the Moon. It actually looks like a pretty fun movie.

E: Is it a porn, what the hell?

S: Nazi UFOs from the Moon?

PP: Does anyone know? It was announced about a year ago. I think it's an independent project. This is a great idea for a fictionalised novel or movie, but then on the other hand most of the stuff that Hoagland does is heavily fictionalised so there you go.

E: You know Phil, also there have been stories in the past drawn up by the UFO crowd that the Soviets had something to do with the crash at the famous crash that took place at Roswell as well. So what's happening is kind of blending all of these different aspects together and the alien bodies that were supposedly recovered. She's picking out these pieces and forming her own little opinion as to what this all means to her

PP: You know it was the expanding time waves from the Roswell crash that caused building 7 to collapse on September 11.

(sounds of agreement)

R: Yeah that makes sense actually.

B: I hate when time waves do that!

PP: I've got the equations right here. It's quite simple. I actually... to even the most dimmest person to do a second (inaudible).

B: Most dimmest!

PP: I want to say one other thing about this too. In the article on weirdnews.aol.com where Ms Jacobson is being quoted, she says "I don't have to..." Well what happened was these guys basically came out and said "Listen, we were sources for some of her information in the book, the good stuff in the book, and we were shocked by this last chapter, and I can't believe she took our information and did this, and she didn't ask us about this." And she is ''quoted'' here as saying, this is a quote, "For starters, journalists don't share their information with their sources prior to publication,. That's a standard rule." she said "...so I'm following journalist tradition." So what she's really saying is "I got this information. I'm not going to go check with the experts on it to find out what's going on because journalists don't do that." You know what? ''I think they do'' I think that's ''exactly'' what journalists do. They check their sources. So that quotation by her really sets off a lot of alarms in my head, and she goes on to say "What others think of my book can't matter to me in terms of being a journalist." (laughs) The word journalist is not a shield to be able to say whatever you want.

R: Maybe if she calls herself a journalist enough times, she'll actually become a journalist. That must be what she's thinking.

PP: You know, I've seen stuff like this happen before and I always want to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. I don't know what's going on, I haven't read the book, I've only read this article. The article could be sensationalising the last chapter. It could be relatively harmless and being misinterpreted, whatever. But these quotations from her ''really'' make me suspicious about the integrity of that last chapter. I think I'm safe in saying that.

S: Well Phil thank you for joining us it's always a pleasure.

PP: Thanks everybody. Thanks for having me on, it's always fun.

E: Thank you Phil.

S: We're gonna see you at TAM in about four weeks.

PP: I'll see you guys at TAM. I'm gonna see you at CSICon in New Orleans in October...

S: And DragonCon.

B: DragonConnn!

PP: ...and DragonCon yeah, I can't wait for DragonCon that's gonna be great.

S: You're gonna be sick of us.

R: Yeah.

E: Gonna be?

PP: I'm sorry, gonna be?

R: He's already sick of all of you.

E: Hello? Hello? More so.

J: Hello? (laughs)

S: (laughter) Alright goodnight Phil.

PP: Thanks folks...

J: Later!

PP: ...talk to you later.

B: Night buddy.

== Who's That Noisy? (59:23)==

== Science or Fiction ( ) ==

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110606171416.htm Item number one]. Astronomers find evidence that some or perhaps all of the large moons of Jupiter were proto-planets captured from the inner solar system in the early days of the solar system when Jupiter was much closer to the sun. [http://news.byu.edu/archive11-jun-redbluestates.aspx Item number two]. Research finds that citizens from so-called "blue" states are just as likely to hold liberal or conservative views on specific issues as citizens from "red" states. And [http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=24890&news_item=5619 item number three]. Scientists discover that dolphins actually project two beams of ultrasound for use in echolocation.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:17:13) ==
<blockquote>"Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are."</blockquote>
J: Eric Butterworth!

== Announcements ( ) ==

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SGU Episode 308

2013-02-22T05:46:24Z

Jessiessica: /* UFO Nazi Connection (50:59) */

{{Editing required
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{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 308
|episodeDate = 8thJune 2011
|episodeIcon = File:Nazi_Spaceship.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = PP: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Plait Phil Plait]
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2011-06-08.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=308
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,36132.0.html
|qowText = Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are.
|qowAuthor = Eric Butterworth
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday June 8th, 2011 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: Yuan Shang Hao. Good evening to all of our listeners in China of which there are...

J: I like your intonation

S: Inflection

B: I'm not sure if it was accurate though but it sounded good

E: Does anyone listen to us in China?

R: Of course, yeah, we have some Chinese listeners

S: But if you use the wrong inflection you say, 'I wanna massage your grandmother', so you've gotta be careful

E: You know the thing about saying 'good evening' in Chinese is that I want to say it again in an hour. I don't know what it is

B: O.M.G.

R: Wow

J: That was so bad

R: He's been working on that joke all night

E: Where's my rim shot? Ah crud.
(cymbals)

R: You get a sad trombone
(sad trombone)

S: Rebecca you're joining us from London this week

J: I say

R: I am, yes, I'm back in Old Blighty, as no-one calls it

E: Rebecca Poppins

R: Yeah, so once again the listeners are being treated to Rebecca at one thirty in the morning. Awesome.

J: But you're still kind of on US time

R: No, not really

J: But you're not in a bad mood

R: No, not really

J: Well at least you're happy recording the show

R: No

== This Day in Skepticism ()==
June 11, 1854. G.F. Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved in a lecture titled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.

S: Alright. Evan tell us what is absolutely fascinating about this day in skepticism

E: Well on this day that you're listening to the show it was 1854 in which the famous mathematician Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved and he announced this in a lecture titled On the Hypothesis on which Geometry is Based, which is apparently a very famous lecture that he gave. And what he did is he described the old-fashioned, Euclidean two-dimensional plane geometry along with some other examples of old geometry and... well let me put it to you this way. There's an example in which on a piece of paper there lived a bookworm, right, and this bookworm was drawn on the piece of paper so it was drawn in two-dimensional. You take the paper and you fold it up and you crumple it up. Now the worm drawn on the paper has no sense of the cumbling and the distortion of space that's going on around him because he also exists in two dimensions. Right, follow me so far?

S: Right

R: Yeah

B: Gotcha

S: Oh yeah

E: Whereas actually that crumpled paper is in three dimensions. So extend that out, we live in a world of three dimensions, but actually everything going around us exists in, what we believe is four dimensions, the fourth dimensions being time. And this was important not only as an important discovery of his time but it also influenced scientists and physicists such as Einstein who used Riemann's work in his theory of general relativity in which he incorporated time as the fourth dimension.

S: Yeah but when Riemann was talking about higher dimension I think he was talking about higher spatial dimensions, not necessarily with time as the fourth dimension. That was something that Einstein inserted. He was saying that space itself is curved into a physical fourth dimension which we can't perceive because we're on the surface of the paper like the...

E: That's right, we're like the worm. The two-dimensional worm on the paper has no idea it's getting all crumpled and crushed up.

S: But it's interesting. Imagine being the first guy to think of space as not linear, that's it's not Euclidean, that it's curved. That's mind blowing, right?

E: Big deal

B: The way he did that was to... I guess he was the first one to actually think of introducing numbers at every point in space and that was how he came upon the idea of using that method to describe how it was bent. I guess a pretty key insight. I wonder how relativity would have been affected if he hadn't come up with that and whether it would have been delayed significantly.

R: I don't know. For some reason this reminds me a lot of, was it Plato? Plato's cave/wall idea of people who are...

E: Shadows?

R: Yeah, I guess seeing shadows on a cave/wall so they assume that that's all that life is are these two-dimensional shadows, so if you were to explain the three-dimensional world to them it would blow their minds. And of course you can't say that Plato was thinking in terms of, well maybe there was a fourth dimension, a fourth spatial dimension as such, but I mean he was thinking in those sorts of terms, don't you think?

S: Yeah well that... our perception of reality is shaped by the physical reality in which we live

J: Right

S: We may be ignorant of reality in the same way that the cave shadow people are ignorant of their ultimate reality

R: Right and that's not to suggest that Plato had any sort of evidence of a fourth spatial dimension. I just want to put that out there. For conspiracy theorists out there...

S: He was talking more in just general philosophical terms, not that specific manifestation

J: Bob, what about this thing where we have these three dimensions that we can easily perceive and understand. But why do the dimensions end there? In other words, why couldn't there have been a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth dimension that are physical dimensions?

B: There actually might be and some theories actually, string theory and things, actually consider that - have that as an integral part of that. But those dimensions are, it's kind of weird, they're actually wrapped up and compacted in such a small space that they're not visible easily, so higher dimensions can exist in our universe but we just can't really detect them yet, it's not obvious beyond the three spatial dimensions we're aware of now.

E: I've heard that membrane theory relies on 11 dimensions - they can calculate 11 dimensions based on those theories.

B: Yeah

J: How about - I've heard of other theories talking about other dimensions of time. Imagine two dimensions of time, say, four or five dimensions of say space and two of time. What would that be like?

R: Crazy. That would be...

B: Crazy. How many... two watches wherever you go

S: This kind of stuff only makes sense in the context of mathematics. We can't, you know, really think about it physically.

J: You know just because we can think of them mathematically does that mean that they actually exist?

S: No. No, but there is something to the fact that it makes the Math more elegant. It sort of solves problems to bump things up a dimension and think of the reality as a three dimensional manifestation of a four dimensional reality or however many you ultimately get up to. So what does this mean? I mean this is a big question in theoretical physics or science in general, you know, when things start to fit together and become more elegant and have more explanatory power. That's nice, but it's not the same thing as it being actually the case and that's where we get into the debate about whether or not string theory can be a real science because it's not empirical, just theoretical.

== News Items ==
=== SGU-24 (7:24)===
The first 24 hour Live SGU event. September 23, 2011, starting at 8:00pm

S: Well we have a couple of news items coming up. Phil Plait's going to be coming up in a while to talk about some astronomy news but first we have a couple of other news items. The first one is SGU related. Do you guys know... I know you guys know what's going to happen... I hope you know by now - September 23rd and 24th, this fall, 2011, a very special event will be occurring: we will be holding... we have decided for some crazy reason to do a 24 hour live streaming SGU event.

R: Extravaganza

B: Extreme is right

J: And I want everyone to know from the beginning that I'm totally against it

E: Yes, we are bringing J kicking and screaming to this event

R: Which should only make it more entertaining I think

E: Oh yeah

B: I thought of a name, I just thought of a name for it

S: What?

B: Skeptapalooza

S: Oh come on

R: That's a terrible name

B: Best one I've heard yet

S: Alright, our working title is SGU24 but we're certainly open to suggestions

J: And I get to play Jack Bower then

E: "Where's the bomb?"

S: Does that mean we get to torture you and stop your heart and then get it going again?

J: Jump my heart with a car battery and then I'll be able to do 14 hours of show?
(all laugh)

I loved every goddam season of that programme.

R: You know Jay, for some reason when I hear you mention 24 hours it doesn't really bother me that much, but when you mention 14 hours it occurs to me, like, we will have already been recording for ten hours and we'll have 14 to go and now I'm against it too.

S: Well that's like we were flying to Australia and we were on the plane for what seems like forever and we find out we still have ten more hours left on the plane. Yeah it's bad. This won't be quite that bad because it'll be in my house

E: We like doing the heavy lifting, these special events, things that other sane people would never try.

S: So more details will be unfolding over the ensuing months, but save the dates September 23rd at 8pm and for the following 24 hours you'll be able to eat, sleep and breathe the SGU. And it'll be video. And we'll be broadcasting from a very special location.

R: You already said, from your house

S: But it's a special location within my house.

E: Right...

B: And we haven't named it yet, we need a special name

J: Bob, we did name it!

S: It's the skeptilair.

R: (groans) Oh, please make it stop.

E: The skeptiman cave, with Rebecca

R: It's just gonna continue to get worse isn't it.

S: Unfortunately

J: This show will be fused... it'll be infused... with have Star Trek, with Star Wars, it'll have internet, it'll have TVs, it'll have computers, it'll have gadgets, it'll have things that pop and bubble

B: Skulls!

E: And it'll have no bathroom breaks. We'll all have to go down on one leg.

S: We'll all have catheters going to bottles strapped to our thighs

B: And one dead body

E: Oooo...

S: At least one dead body, yes

E: At least one, if not more

J: Yeah, SGU just jumped the shark

(all laugh)

R: Also we'll be introducing a young child onto the show. Our new, six-year-old love child.

(all chuckle nervously)

B: I thought you were referencing Oliver from the Brady Bunch

R: Oliver

B: The punk

R: The kid on married with children

E: You remember the Brady Bunch, Rebecca? No?

R: I've heard of the Brady Bunch

B: (gasp)

E: Heard of the Brady Bunch...

R: Anyway, the point is

J: 'Pork chops and applesauce'

(all laugh)

E: 'Oh, my nose!' (chuckles to self)

R: Are these... Are these Brady Bunch jokes? Is that what we...

J: Mum always said don't paintball in the house

E: That's why they're all zooming over your head

S: Yes

R: Yes. Alright, can we go back to Star Trek?

J: Oh woah.

E: 'He's dead Jim'

B: Never thought I'd hear her say that

S: But worse, can you imagine 24 hours of this?

R: I'm just gonna bring earplugs

(Steve laughs)

R: I'm going to bring a big pair of headphones. So I can just listen to my music.

S: Noise cancellation.

Alright, well, let's go on...

B: Geek cancellation

=== Psychic Tipster (12:06)===
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/usa-crime-bodies-idUSN0717557520110608 Reuters: UPDATE 6-Texas authorites find no bodies after psychic tip]

S: ...To another news item, Rebecca. A psychic gave a very interesting tip to the police

R: That's right, Steve. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies'. That was the headline that Reuters decided to run with. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies, including children, buried in a mass grave in a rural home East of Houston', local media reported.

(All laugh)

R: Ah, it goes on to say, 'It might not have been 30, it was 25 to 30, but preliminary reports did indicate that there were children.' So a really horrific scene there, Tuesday night, that was on June 7. And there was a lot of confusion as these reports were coming in, but it turns out that this amazing find was in fact discovered by a psychic. It came in through a psychic tip, the psychic told the police to go to this specific house in Texas and to search for bodies, the police went there, they didn't find anything so the same caller, the same anonymous psychic caller called back and again stated that there were bodies there it's just that the police were in slightly the wrong spot. So the psychic gave even more exact directions so the police went back and they found... Nothing.

S: Nothing?

Nothing. There was nothing. They found a small amount of blood on the porch of a house nearby and for some reason that turned into 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies including children', which is basically what the psychic had reported. But try as the might, the Texas authorities were actually unable to find any evidence of any bodies. The home-owners, the people who lived in the house on that property were truckers, cross-country truckers, who were out on the road when it happened. When reached for comment they said no, they were not murderers.

J: We don't know nothing about no bodies

B: Exactly

E: 'No bodies' (laughs)

R: But, apparently some slightly deranged person had cut his wrists on their porch a few weeks back.

S: Apparently it was the daughter's fiancée who was AWOL from the army

R: Yes

S: And cut himself deliberately and blood went all over the place and now is in a military psych facility, apparently.

R: Yes. And so, yeah, there was absolutely nothing. There was no sign of any bodies anywhere on the property. There was no reason to suspect that these people killed anyone. It was all thanks to one anonymous quote-unquote 'psychic'. So now after it's finally come out there were, in fact, no bodies, the police are discussing trying to charge the tipster. Although there's no real indication whether or not they'll be able to discover the identity of the caller. But hopefully they can and hopefully this person will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Because this is what we see again and again. You see, when people ask, 'What's the harm? Psychic detectives, they're just adding another, you know, another possibility of finding a body or finding a murderer', well this is the problem. You have somebody that thinks that they're a psychic offering what they think... And they might actually believe this, they may actually think that they're having psychic visions about something and think that they're helping. But what they're only doing, really, is that they're wasting the police's time. Can you imagine how many detectives and how many offices they had to be on this searching this property to find out that there's absolutely nothing? And that...

S: And the FBI get involved.

R: Yeah. Surely they had something better to do.

S: Yeah

E: There were aerial video pictures of the groups - all the cars and all the detectives and the personnel - it was throngs of people at this supposed place. It was a huge waste of resources. Huge.

R: Yeah. And, of course, to me it's still not as bad as the cases you have where there's been a disappearance of someone and there's been a quote-unquote 'psychic' contact the relatives or someone and say that they have evidence of where this person is.

J: (In character) The kid's dead.

R: Exactly, that causes an incredible amount of emotional, psychological damage to these families. In this case, at least the damage was just economic, I suppose. But that's your tax dollars at work. Tracking down the pointless tips from pychics.

S: Now Rebecca, there're a few details to this story that I found very interesting. Of course, I'm basing this... I've read multiple articles on this and they were shuffling around the same basic facts. And that one was the blood on the porch. Another one though, was that when the cops got there they described a quote-unquote 'Overwhelming smell of decomposition'.

R: Oh yeah, yeah I saw that noted as well.

S: Yeah, so... which leant... so now you have the blood and the decomp. which meant 'oh right, this is legit, there's something here', so that's how they justified the massive response. Yeah, initially it was just a couple of guys going to check it out, but these details led to the more... calling in the FBI and getting the bigger response. Plus they also noted that there were some details, some, you know, some geographic details relating to the layout of the house that the psychic got pretty accurately and that that convinced them also that this was a legitimate tip, and not just a lunatic.

R: Right. And of course maybe the psychic just had knowledge of this area, been by or something.

S: Yeah

R: There was also the fact that apparently the property owner's son is a convicted sex offender, though he hasn't lived there for over a year and that the smell, the foul stench that the police identified was found to be coming from piles of rotting garbage.

S: Yeah. They were truckers who were on the road, so they were...

R: Right

S: Yeah

R: There were a lot of little details that when combined with this quote-unquote 'psychic tip' led the police to realise they... you know, needed to do something because these were all adding to a sort-of confirmation bias

S: Yeah, exactly, it's circumstantial evidence, confirmation bias, and you think, 'What's the chance that the police checking out a tip are gonna find blood on the porch?' Well it turns out it's probably not... You know first it asks the wrong question. The question is not, 'What's the chance of finding blood?', it's 'What's the chance of finding something suspcious?'

R: Right

S: And all the different things that could be suspicious. And the fact that somebody bled sometime in the last week or so was not that remarkable. And the quote-unquote 'decomp' was just the truckers on the road left the garbage behind which was rotting and smelling.

R: Yeah

S: So those, kind of, circumstantial things, you know, it's actually pretty likely, but when you're hunting for confirmation of your suspicions it's amazing how many connections you can make even on something apparently random like this. My only other question is, as you say, was this really just a random tip from an alleged psychic or did she have reason to point the police out to this house?

R: Yeah, I mean I, not knowing anything about... anything... (laughs)

S: You know, we don't have the details

R: Yeah, it's hard to say

E: It's unfolding, you know, it's still unfolding

R: I'm hoping that maybe somebody is looking into the guy who slit his wrists on the porch - I mean, it was a woman who called in but it's obviously some bad blood, so to speak, happening around there. So it's not out of the question to imagine that there might be someone who had reason to want to disrupt the people who lived there. That could be a cause.

S: And the police said specifically that somebody was looking into the revenge angle. That this was done to make trouble for the home-owners

R: Yeah

S: Okay. Well we're going to bring in Phil Plait the Bad Astronomy to cover these next few items because they have an Astronomy-theme. So Phil, welcome to Skeptics' Guide.

21:20

PP: Hey, thanks for having me on once again

S: It's always great to have you, Phil Plat

PP: Kay, thanks

R: Oh, yeah, right, rings a bell

E: Phil Prat, what a good gag

PP: You know I don't care if people mispronounce my name so long as they can spell it and can find it online

R: Right, spoken like a true nerd

E: Can we call you Philip?

PP: No

S: Is your name Philip or is it really legally just Phil?

E: I don't know, I'd have to check my birth certificate. Which I know actually has my middle name misspelled on it but there you go

R: Phil Plait doesn't know his own name

PP: Those details are irrelevant

=== Explosion on the Sun (21:57)===
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-a-huge-explosion/ Bad Astronomy, Discover magazine: The Sun lets loose a HUGE explosion]

S: So Phil, we were going to talk about this news item about this massive explosion on the sun we just had to talk about with you so won't you tell us about it?

PP: This is a pretty good story. The sun goes through these cycles, it has a magnetic field like a... like a magnet. And the magnetic field goes through cycles and it gets stronger every few years. It's an 11 year cycle. So it gets stronger then it fades, it gets stronger then it fades and we're sort of on the ramp up to the peak solar activity and we see this manifested on the surface of the sun with sunspots and solar flares and all kinds of cool stuff like that.

S: Phil, do we know what causes that cycle?

PP: No (laughs). That's the good part.

S: Okay...

PP: Well, there's some models that indicate why the sun's solar cycle goes up and down, it has to do with the way that the gas... is actually a plasma, it's an ionised gas inside the sun, is circulating around and when you move charged particles you generate a magnetic field and so this movement is very complicated and it has to do with the way that this gas is being transported in the solar interior. And what happens is is that the magnetic field gets dragged along with the stuff inside the sun, breaks through the sun's surface and that's why we see sunspots and various things, and magnetic field effects, it's the gas itself.

S: Is it an oscillation like a Cepheid variable's an oscillation, is that the theory?

PP: No, it has more to do with the way gas is flowing through the centre of the sun... well not through the centre, not through the core itself, but at the core the gas is very hot, it radiates that heat away. The gas above that then convects. The hot stuff rises and the cool stuff sinks just like in the Earth's atmosphere or in a boiling pot of water, and the problem is that that's not a simple system – the sun is rotating so there're rivers of gas like jet streams that are moving underneath the sun's surface. It's really complicated and the models that are trying to figure out how that works... They're not bad, they're doing a decent job but it's really really hard to figure out exactly all the motions that are going on inside, you know, this star that we're living nearby.

S: Right

PP: So what happens is as the magnetic field pokes through the surface of the sun it creates sunspots and these magnetic lines, you can think of them as like field lines, get tangled up and there's energy stored in them and if they get too tangled up they can actually sort of erupt – one of them snaps and it sets up a cascade or a lot of them snap and they all release their energy. You can imagine them like a bunch of mousetraps sitting on your floor and you throw a ping pong ball in there and as everything bounces around the mousetraps release all their energy you get a lot of snapping and motion and all kinds of craziness. Well that's what happens. And this can form a solar flare. It's a gigantic explosion on the surface of the sun. And it can be billions of megatons of energy released in just a few minutes. That's what happened on the sun and it wasn't actually that big of a flare as they go, they're different classes and this was a fare-to-middling sized explosion. But what happened, it was pretty unusual, is that there was an enormous fountain of gas that erupted off the surface of the sun and that's not usually associated with these types of events and now NASA has the Solar Dynamics Observatory which is this really phenomenal satellite and it's observing the sun at a lot of different wavelengths. So we have a high resolution, really gorgeous basically video, just images taken every couple of minutes or something like that, and you can string them together to make videos so you can see this flare. The eruption, this fountain of material flowing out from the sun and falling back down. And in different wavelengths it's just unbelievable it looks like, you know, ink flowing through water in one wavelength of light and in another it looks like fiery gas blowing out, it's just spectacular.

R: So Phil, how long until we all die?

PP: Ah, for you? Well it depends on your lifestyle habits – is there something you need to tell us?

R: Well, you know now I'm just a bit concerned about crazy things flying out of the sun at me.

PP: Well in this case, this particular event wasn't energetic enough to really do much. It did blow out a cloud of particles called coronal mass ejection, and that's gonna kinda sorta nick the Earth. It's not really directed at us. There maybe some aurorae associated with this, probably not much. On the other hand, you know, big flares, something that's bigger than this, we saw bigger ones earlier this year in February, they can damage satellites, they can affect the Earth's magnetic field. They can't really cause any specific problems here on Earth directly – you're not going to get irradiated, you're not going to turn into the Incredible Hulk, you're not going to melt, you're not going to turn into chud or morlocks or anything like that. Sorry.

B: Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.

PP: I know I know, a couple of you guys would probably love to see that happen.

(All laugh)

PP: But it can have effects you know. We have satellites up in space that can be damaged by this. You're basically zapping them with excess current and that can fry their electronics and we depend on a lot of the satellites like GPS, for financial transactions and all kinds of stuff like that. So corporations take this pretty seriously, they try to make sure their satellites are safeguarded against these kinds of events. Not all of them are. So we have to be careful about this and understand these sorts of events better so that we can build better satellites and protect them. Plus, you know, there're astronauts the International Space Station and they can be in danger of radioactive... well not radioactive, it's radiation, it's different than what we might we might think of as radioactivity, but these bizarre floods of subatomic particles that can come through the metal and whatnot, and I can't believe I just said whatnot, but the metal and other materials if I want to be a little more scientific, umm, in the space station - they may have to go to a better protected section of the station so that they don't get irradiated.

S: Yeah, or otherwise they might turn into the Fantastic Four

PP: I think that's true, yeah

E: Oh god

PP: Although I hope they make a better movie with actual astronauts than they would from the comic books.

S: Phil, if this explosion were aimed right at the Earth how bad would it have been?

PP: This one wouldn't have been as bad. We get some pretty spectacular aurora you know you can never say it's completely safe, we might lose a satellite, some of them might get damaged, sometimes satellites like Hubble and a lot of other ones, when they detect that there's excess current or that there's a problem they shut down automatically, they go into what's called 'safe-mode'. Sometimes, if we have enough advance warning, if there's a big flare, an X-class flare, one of these gigantic ones like we had earlier this year, or back in 2003 when the sun was just popping them off like popcorn it was really amazing, if you have enough warning you can shut down sensitive satellites and that's something that a lot of people are looking into. There's a space weather centre actually here in Boulder, it's not far from where I live, and they monitor the sun very careful, they issue warnings all the time in the hope that even just a few minutes warning can be enough to shut down these satellites and potentially save, you know, billions or tens of billions of dollars of assets in space.

E: Hey Phil just a few years ago we were talking about the lack of activity going on in the sun and how that was very unusual that low amount of activity for a long time, no sunspots for many months in a row. Now that we're seeing... since then the sun has been active with sunspots and all these other things that the sun does. What can we expect? Does the sun make up for lost time in a sense because of that lower activity and is it, like, trying to catch up to an equilibrium now?

PP: Nobody knows. I remember a couple of years ago people were arguing about this, that this long period of solar minimum which we kind of understand why it happened, or at least how it happened, but why the circumstances were set up for it to happen or not are not terribly well understood, but we do know that it was a record length of time with basically minimal solar activity. And so people were arguing, does this mean that the solar cycle will be also, you know, lower activity? when it reaches its peak will it be a lower than usual peak? Or will this mean that sun is building up energy and it's going to explode? Not literally, but you know, do something equally serious, and nobody really knows, and the thing is you have to be careful, I know you guys talk about anomaly hunting, the sun is going to do stuff like this. In February we had a bunch of X-class flares, there was a lower energy M-class flare. It was an unusual event because of that fountain of material that had never been seen before but, you know, who knows if it's actually happened before and we missed it, we just didn't have the equipment to see it, so you can't put too much credit to a single event or even a series of events. We just have to keep, you know, averaging up what's going on and see what's gonna happen. The peak of this cycle should happen in mid- to late-2013 and then into 2014 and it's actually after the peak that we usually see the strongest flares. And we'll just have to see what happens in, you know, 2014/2015 when the sun really starts to pop these guys off.

R: It seems a lot like climate science where we can't really look at it on a day-to-day scale. We have to look at it at... it's such a complex system. You know you have to look at it at a much larger scale. But, you know, I think scientists can understand that but from the perspective of someone who doesn't necessarily know how these things work I think it's easy for the media to, sort of, blow things like this out of proportion. Have you seen anything... any terrible reporting on this in that respect, Phil?

PP: Duh. Actually, this particular event... I poked around a few websites and it was being reported fairly well, but I can't remember which one it was, you know, I wanna say it was the Daily Mail but that's sort of my go-to garbage tabloid, that basically said we're all gonna die. I can't remember if that's the one I saw or not so I don't wanna cast aspersions on them when it's not deserved because usually it is the Daily Mail. But people... you're right in a lot of the things you said, people don't necessarily understand what's going on when they see this they panic. I got some emails from some people who were concerned about this and I had to say, no, you know, this was not that big of a deal. And you're right that we have to look at the long time scale. Just because a bunch of tornadoes broke out across the Mid West or in New England over the past few weeks doesn't mean they were swarming even if we get stronger hurricanes or more hurricanes this season, or a longer hurricane season doesn't mean that global warming is affecting you. You can't look at it that way, you've just got to take a step back, use longer time scale bins and hope that these trends are enough to see what's going on.

S: Yeah, and how many 11 year cycles have we been able to observe? How long have we had good observation of the sun?

PP: Well the first observations of the solar magnetic activity were actually in 1859 and it's pretty interesting actually, the guy, Carrington, looked at the sun with a visible light telescope and saw a flare – which is extremely rare for a flare to actually be seen with visible light. It's still to this day the strongest solar flare that's ever been seen. It caused all kinds of havoc on the earth at the time the telegraph... and stuff. And so we've been measuring the sun's activity now for about 150 years and when you look at the cycles they're all over the place, some are really strong some last longer some are weaker, it's just difficult to know what any given cycle's gonna do. We can only say that it's roughly 11 years it's not exactly 11 years. The activity tends to be strongest after the peak, that sort of stuff, but for any given event you can't really predict it. You can see, 'Hey look, there's a big old sun spot cluster there, and magnetic fields that are really strong, we ought to be keeping our eyes on it'. But that's no different from your tropical depression appearing in the Atlantic and the conditions look good to form a hurricane.

S: Yeah.

PP: You never now what's gonna happen. You've just gotta keep your eyes open for the precursors and hope for the best.

S: Well there's a couple of the news items we'd like you to hang around for if that's okay.

=== How Common is the Moon? (34:25)===
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13609153 BBC news: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought]

S: Bob, give us the summary on the new computer models about the formation of the moon.

B: Define summary.

S: (laughs)

E: The opposite of wintry.

(all laugh)

S: All right, not Bob length.

B: Researchers are redefining the rarity of Earth-moon system. They're saying that a whopping one in ten rocky planets may have satellites that's as big as our moon when compared to the Earth. Using these new sophisticated computer simulations it seems that the massive impacts that resulted in our relatively huge moon may be common, actually, throughout the universe. This research is coming from the Scientists from the Zurich Institute of Theoretical Physics in Switzerland and the Morishma at the University of Colorado in the US. They simulated planet formation from gas and chunks of planetesimal and they took these results and they factored them into another simulation, an N-body simulation, to see what the chances were that large satellites could form for that. And they were quite surprised to find that there was about a one in twelve chance of forming a planet and the satellite moon with both having more than half the mass of the Earth and the moon respectively. Now I liked how the BBC news article I read went into a little bit more statistical information about this. They were saying that the one in twelve or one in ten figure that you read everywhere else, they were saying that for the full range of possibilities it was between one in 45 and one in four. So that's kind of what the statistics were telling them, and they kinda distilled that down to about one in twelve. So now this is all tied, of course, to the once controversial and now pretty much generally accepted theory about how our moon formed. The common wisdom now is that it was a collision between the Earth Mark I, which some people refer to as Earth Mark I, colliding with this Mars-sized object and creating a huge debris ring which kind of coalesced in about a hundred years to form the moon as we know it. Of course it was a lot closer, about 15 times larger – the parent size is about 15 times larger than the way we see it now. The cool thing is that this could actually help with planet hunting – I wasn't aware of this. Large moons can distort the measurements that are made to find planets. This new knowledge could actually make finding them easier. Now Phil wasn't sure, I mean, just because you know this fact, how could this make it easier? I mean what is it about the distortion, how could the moon distort the measurements of finding a planet? A planet and a moon are pretty much like one system from a distance anyway. You know, I was having a hard time trying to figure out how a big moon could distort planet hunter measurements.

PP: Actually I'm with you, I don't now. I read the press release and it's pretty vague on that. I've not read the actual paper or talked to anybody about this. The way you find planets are actually a bunch of ways, but the two big ones are either the way the planet is pulling on the star and as it orbits the star the star is making a little circle and it creates a dopplar shift and you can see that sort of red and blue shift in the spectrum. But that should not be affected very much by a big moon. It's hard enough to see that with a low mass planet like the Earth around a star it's a very very tiny effect.

B: Right

PP: The bigger the planet the closer in it is the more that effect is and the easier it is to see. And it's hard to see how the moon would affect this – I don't know, I'm not that familiar with it. The other way is through transits where the planet literally gets between us and the star and it blocks a little bit of the starlight. Now for a Jupiter-sized planet and a star like the sun - it'll block about one percent of the star's light which is actually fairly easy to measure, you can use equipment you can buy off the shelf, which is really cool. For an Earth-like planet the effect is actually, I think, a ten thousandth the brightness of the star which is a lot harder to measure. If there's a moon that's orbiting that planet and the moon is, like, like, our moon, a significant fraction of the planet's size, then you might see more or less light dropping. If the planet and the moon transit the star you get a slightly bigger dip than if the moon is lined up with the planet from our point of view, if that makes any sense.

B: Yeah.

PP: That's the only way I can see off the top of my head there may be other things. You need to talk to an exoplanet hunter to get the deal on this.

B: Exoplanet hunter – what a cool job.

R: It's a great name.

B: The other thing that this highlights is the importance of the moon itself. Without the moon the Earth would be a very different place and I think it's a pretty safe bet that homosapiens would not be here without the moon. One of the big things that it does is that it stabilises the tilt of the Earth's axis, what's referred to as its obliquity. Without this the tilt would over greatly extended time-spans would mess with the overall heating of the Earth in ways that could make it fairly inimical to life, although I'm sure it would find ways around it.

R: Umm, would that be needed though, if nothing had smashed into the Earth in the first place to create the moon? In other words, is the moon just balancing out the wobble that was created by its own creation?

B: No. No, without the moon and without any impact they think they found some good examples that ummm... Yeah, the tilt would vary over great periods of time.

R: Because there are lot of planets without moons. What is it about the Earth that makes it require a moon?

PP: Well think of it this way. If you have a spinning top and it's perfectly balanced it'll spin really well. But if you put a lump of clay on one side of it and let it spin it'll start to wobble and that wobble can become chaotic. And so that's kinda what's happening with the Earth. You've got continents that are moving around and they cause it to be off-balance. As the Earth spins and as the moon pulls on the Earth you get a bulge around the middle of the Earth and it's the torque of the moon on that bulge, I think, that stabilises it. I'm not an expert on this but that's how I understand it. And that prevents the Earth's wobble from becoming chaotic. Venus spins much more slowly than the Earth, so I don't think it's as big of a deal. Mars, on the other hand, has roughly the same rate of spin as the Earth – it spins once a day – and there is evidence that in the past the axis of its spin has changed and some times a lot, indicating that... and I should add that it does not have a big moon it has too little dinky moons, and so it's possible that without that big moon torquing the Earth and keeping the spin from going all wobbly you get a planet that flips over and that has drastic effects on the seasons. It's not obvious, it's certainly not easy to understand how that all works, but it does seem to be the way the science is pointing right now.

S: Yeah, I remember when I was reading about the stabilising effect of the moon on the Earth, and how nice it is to have that. And at the same time, how rare the previous thinking was about how common we would see an Earth-Moon type of system. I was depressed as it would probably be very very few worlds out there that are as compatible to human life as our own system so if this is true, if these computer models are correct, and it's actually far more common, maybe, on average, one per solar system or something of that order of magnitude, that's reassuring for prospects of habitable planets out there.

B: Absolutely.

PP: You know it's reassuring, but it's not surprising at all. I've never bought into the Rare Earth idea.

S: Yeah

PP: You can say Earths must be common because we're on one – what are the odds? But that's, you know, you guys know all about that – it's like the water in the puddle saying “How remarkable it is that there's just enough water in here to fit the puddle” - you're looking at it the wrong way. So the idea that we're just the right size, just the right distance from the sun, with the moon and the magnetic field, and, and, and... it's like, you know, I'm not buying into all this. I think that there are lots of Earths out there. It's not uncommon to see stars like the sun. 10% of the stars in the galaxy are like the sun. We're starting to see that planets are common. We're starting to get an idea that planets the size of the Earth are common. If they're spinning rapidly and they have enough radioactive materials in their core they're gonna have a magnetic field. And so I think that that's something we're gonna see as common. And now, you know, if the moon is important for us to be here it seems very unlikely that we'd be the only planet in the galaxy like that, and we know that collisions are common, we know that planets are moving around in their star systems early on in the history of these things and so all of this stuff does not strike me as being all that surprising. I would have expected it. I don't know if I would have said as many as one in four Earth-like planets might have big moons, but the way objects get tossed around and the recent finding that there may be more planets wandering interstellar space than there are stars in the galaxy...

S: Yeah, how cool is that?

B: That is awesome

PP: ...Lends credence to this. The planets are moving around, they interact with each other, they change positions in the solar system, they toss each other out gravitationally, so we know that this stuff happens. So I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I would say that this finding is not surprising. It's just cool.

S: Yeah, it's just never been aesthetically pleasing to me to think that the Earth is really really rare. For all the reasons that you said. There's sort of the principle of mediocrity or whatever you call it, that chances are we're an unremarkable planet around an unremarkable star, around an unremarkable galaxy, you know. There's never any reason to think that we have a very special position in the universe. But there is a bit of the lottery fallacy that you were alluding to. If life were very rare, any life that did arise would marvel at how rare it was. Right?

PP: Unless there were two planets in that system that had life on them

S: Right

B: Right

S: But the premise is that life is rare, so that would be possible but exceedingly unlikely. But the billions of planets roaming around interstellar space is fascinating but it's also a bit scary because you think what's the possibility that, like, a Jupiter-sized planet will come ripping through the solar system.

PP: Very very rare. The universe is a very big place, the odds of that happening are extremely low. If they were high we probably wouldn't be here, right?

S: Right

PP: If over four and half billion years, the age of the Earth, some Jupiter-sized planet... if the odds were 100% that it would scream through the solar system it would have happened by now. So the odds of it happening are very very low. It makes for a great science-fiction movie.

S: Yeah

PP: Or a good novel or something like that, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it as a certainty. Certainly they're out there. That's something I've been wondering about for a long time – if there are frozen planets out there, and it's nice to see this big study. I mean this is not theoretical – these were observations that...

S: Yeah

PP: These planets gave themselves away through their gravity, effecting stars behind them and magnifying that light using basically a relativistic lens to... gravitational lens that Einstein predicted. So this is a direct observation and extrapolating to the entire sky you get this number of hundreds of billions of planets like this, which is awesome. But I don't think that hundreds of billions of planets spread out over the volume of a galaxy... it's still pretty thin stuff, so I don't think that this is that big of a problem for us.

E: What are the chances of any of those planets having life? You've gotta consider it small to none.

PP: Hard to say, you know. Jupiter is warmer than it would be... Let me rephrase that, it's actually radiating more heat than it receives from the sun. Left over heat from its formation, as well as some other sources of heat, so a giant planet could still be fairly warm, but there are other problems – there are gigantic convection currents bringing gas up and down so any life in a temperate zone would be dragged down to the hotter interior, so that's always been the problem with the theoretical models of how life might be inside a Jupiter-like planet. But you know what? I've learnt not to bet against nature. And I think that's the way to go. If they're out there, who knows? We'd have to go and take a look to be sure.

B: So this is all good but what's with the attitude?

PP: Shut up! What attitude?

E: You tell him

S: It was my attitude!

PP: My attitude of wonder and joy about the wonders of the universe? Is that what you're complaining about?

J: I'm pretty sure I've asked you this before but I live like a moment to moment life, which means that you could tell me the same joke, but, Phil because you really understand things, you know what's out there, you can write books like you did about the 59 ways you can get killed. Do you ever legitimately get frightened?

R: Like clowns, things like that?

E: Like crying in your bed at night?

J: No, I mean, you know... Is there anything that occurs that you're like, 'you know what, that is down right frightening - I don't like the idea that that might be coming at us at like a million miles an hour right now', you know what I mean?

PP: Oh, there's a ton of stuff like that. But you gotta differentiate between that stuff existing and that stuff being an actual danger – a threat to the Earth. Gamma ray bursts, supernovae and, my favourite, magnetars are these incredibly charged neutron stars that have field strengths that is quadrillions of times stronger than the Earth's magnetic fields, and they release super enormous blasts of energy and we got hit by one in 2004 actually, although it didn't really damage us. If there was one closer to us it could. But, you know what, we haven't been damaged by one of those things, there hasn't been a gamma ray burst in human history that has hurt us. There are no stars close enough to go supernova that can hurt us in this way, so this is not the kind of stuff that worries us. An asteroid impact, yeah, that could happen, a solar flare damaging our satellites and causing issues down here because of that – that's a legitimate worry, but that's also the sort of thing we can choose to protect ourselves from, we just haven't made that choice yet. So I don't lie awake at night fretting about these things. I have to worry about paying my taxes and worrying about what my kid is doing. Those are more the day-to-day things I'm worried about.

S: Yeah, Jay, it's far worse being a physician, knowing all the ways the body can fail, and knowing that one of those will happen to you soon.

J: Soon! (Laughs)

R: You make it sound like a threat

S: Soon-ish, within decades, which on astronomical scales is much quicker than anything that Phil has to worry about.

J: Steve, do you lie in bed at night going, “Nooo!!”

S: There definitely are times when I get little symptoms where I know all the horrible things it could be a symptom of, and I just have to say alright, don't worry about it, it's probably nothing and so far it has been.

J: Yeah, I find as I get older I ask myself a lot, and I mean this dead seriously, 'am I having a heart attack right now?' Is that pain right there the beginning of the end?

S: That's true, when you're in your 20's and you get a little left-sided chest pain you don't worry about it, you're like, I'm 25, you know, I'm not having a heart attack. But when you're 46 and the same exact thing happens you're like, okay, how much do I gotta worry about this?

PP: Hey wait a minute, why choose the age of 46?

S: Because that's my current age.

PP: Okay, yeah, that's my age as well.

S: Yeah. Yeah we're getting to that age where, you know, little things like that crop up and it's actually statistally plausible that it could be something serious.

PP: Everything is cancer. You know every time I look and I see a new mole on my shoulder it's like, 'Oh no!'

R: I don't even do that just with moles, with me it's just whatever random pain I have. Well it's cancer of the whatever-that-is.

B: 'Whatever-that-is'! God!(laughs)

S: ...Of the connectigizoid!

J: The claven.

B: “The clay-ven” (in mock-Jewish voice)

=== UFO Nazi Connection (50:59)===
[http://weirdnews.aol.com/2011/06/07/area-51-ufos-aliens-annie-jacobsen-nazi-soviet_n_869706.html#s285846&title=Area_51_Warning Huffington Post: Area 51 personnel feel 'betrayed' by Annie Jacobsen's Soviet-Nazi UFO connection]

S: Alright, one more news item. We have to end on a funny one for Phil. Alright Evan, tell us about UFO Nazis.

E: Well how about this one? So there's an author and her name is Annie Jacobson, and she has a new book that is out called 'Area 51 – An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base'. She spends the majority of her time in this book talking the legitimate science and projects and experimental aircraft and other things that have been taking place at this facility for the past sixty years. She got together with some people who used to work there who had declassified information and they would share it. However, it's the last chapter of the book which is making headlines. Because she is drawing the conclusion that the famous saucer crash involved with Area 51 Roswell is actually a conspiracy in which the Auchwitz doctor Joseph Mangles, the German aircraft designing brothers the Haughton brothers and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin formed a conspiracy in the late 1940's to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer which was crowded, get this, with 13-year olds which were surgically altered under the...

S: By Joseph Mengele.

E: ...By Joseph Mengele.

S: Yeah. To look alien.

E: ...To look alien. And that is actually the recovered pieces of the famous crash. And those people, the surgically altered people are the supposed aliens that were recovered from the crash.

R: Well I'll never again say that the 911 Truthers have the dumbest conspiracy theory out there.

S: Well you know there's always gotta be one dumber than whatever you're currently talking about.

R: That's true.

E: Now Annie Jacobson is a journalist. And the reviews I've read about the book say that she's done a decent, not perfect, job in the various chapters of the book that have to deal with the hard sciences. But this last chapter in which she draws this conclusion, she's basing it entirely upon an unnamed source, one person, an unnamed source.

PP: Glen Beck (coughs).

(all laugh)

PP: Sorry, something in my throat there.

E: Might as well be. ...Who apparently fed her all this information and that's what she's going by. And she says "Oh I totally trust this source, I mean he's very, very reliable."

R: I think I know who this source is; the source is her publicist.

S: (laughs) I was gonna say that.

B: That's right Rebecca.

E: Exactly.

R: Noone would be talking about this if it weren't for that last chapter.

E; Right? Because you have to have a new angle to this whole story...

S: Exactly.

E: ...if you want your book to sell well in these days.

R: Yeah, especially 'cause it was that last chapter. I's like you know she turned in the completed book and it was all sourced and nice and ready to go, and they're like "This is good, but..."

PP: "It's ''way'' too accurate."

R: "...can't you just throw in one giant lie at the end? Just tack it on. Good job."

Steve: It's like Steve Martin tells that joke - if you're making demands, you have to always throw in that one crazy one. "I want the letter M ''stricken'' from the alphabet!" That way you can always claim insanity afterwards.

(laughter)

S: It's sort of a simple thing. In the last chapter you gotta go totally off the rails and start making crazy conspiracy theories 'cause that's what's gonna sell your book.

PP: I actually have two comments on this. One is that this idea that Nazia are tied with UFOs has been around for a long time. I remember reading a novel based on this conspiracy theory back when I was in grad school in the 90s. And the book wasn't new then. I think it was called "Genesis". It was this ginormous 800 page science fiction novel. It sounded fun and it was just basically the Nazi scientists that were behind all this escaped, they moved to Antarctica, they built a base there, they perfected UFO technology, and we're gonna rise again basically, so this has been around a while.

S: This is Richard Hoagland. He wrote "Our Breakaway Nazi Civilisation". He thinks NASA's run by NAZIs and they're the shadow government that's doing all this UFO/face on Mars stuff.

PP: As soon as you say "Richard Hoagland", you can just put a period after that and we're done as far as I'm concerned.

(laughter)

S: ''Hoaglaaaand''!

B: Oh yeah.

E: (laughs)

J: Steve, when you say that, just quickly going through your mind, like okay, he really believes that there's NAZIs out there, and I have to make light of this real quick, but does he actually think they're still wearing their badass clothes with the leather and the boots, you know they still have (inaudible) and...?

R: You know there are still NAZIs out there, let's (laughs) not suggest that there's no such thing as NAZIs anymore.

S: Jay, I'm looking at a picture on his website, and it's a spacechip - a Nazi spaceship, that looks like a modified NAZI helmet with the skull and crossbones on the front.

(all laugh)

J: Right, there's my answer!

E: That would not be difficult mein Fuhrer.

J: A NAZI spaceship!

PP: There's a movie about NAZI UFOs from the Moon. It actually looks like a pretty fun movie.

E: Is is a porn, what the hell?

S: Nazi UFOs from the Moon?

PP: Does anyone know? It was announced about a year ago. I think it's an independent project. This is a great idea for a fictionalised novel or movie, but then on the other hand most of the stuff that Hoagland does is heavily fictionalised so there you go.

E: You know Phil, also there have been stories in the past drawn up by the UFO crowd that the Soviets had something to do with the crash at the famous crash that took place at Roswell as well. So what's happening is kind of blending all of these different aspects together and the alien bodies that were supposedly recovered. She's picking out these these pieces and forming her own little opinion as to what this all means to her

PP: You know it was the expanding timewaves from the Roswell crash that caused building 7 to collapse on September 11.

(sounds of agreement)

R: Yeah that makes sense actually.

B: I hate when timewaves do that!

PP: I've got the equations right here. It's quite simple. I actually... to even the most dimmest person to do a second (inaudible).

B: Most dimmest!

PP: I want to say one other thing about this too. In the article on weirdnews.aol.com where Ms Jacobson is being quoted, she says "I don't have to..." Well what happened was these guys basically came out and said "Listen, we were sources for some of her information in the book, the good stuff in the book, and we were shocked by this last chapter, and I can't believe she took our information and did this, and she didn't ask us about this." And she is ''quoted'' here as sayng, this is a quote, "For starters, journalists don't share their information with their sources prior to publication,. That's a standard rule." she said "...so I'm following journalist tradition." So what she's really saying is "I got this information. I'm not going to go check with the experts on it to find out what's going on because journalists don't do that." You know what? ''I think they do'' I think that's ''exactly'' what journalists do. They check their sources. So that quotation by her really sets off a lot of alarms in my head, and she goes on to say "What others think of my book can't matter to me in terms of being a journalist." (laughs) The word journalist is not a shield to be able to say whatever you want.

R: Maybe if she calls herself a journalist enough times, she'll actually become a journalist. That must be what she's thinking.

PP: You know, I've seen stuff like this happen before and I always want to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. I don't know what's going on, I haven't read the book, I've only read this article. The article could be sensationalising the last chapter. It could be relatively harmless and being misinterpreted, whatever. But these quotations from her ''really'' make me suspicious about the integrity of that last chapter. I think I'm safe in saying that.

S: Well Phil thank you for joining us it's always a pleasure.

PP: Thanks everybody. Thanks for having me on, it's always fun.

E: Thank you Phil.

S: We're gonna see you at TAM in about four weeks.

PP: I'll see you guys at TAM. I'm gonna see you at CSICon in New Orleans in October...

S: And DragonCon.

B: DragonConnn!

PP: ...and DragonCon yeah, I can't wait for DragonCon that's gonna be great.

S: You're gonna be sick of us.

R: Yeah.

E: Gonna be?

PP: I'm sorry, gonna be?

R: He's already sick of all of you.

E: Hello? Hello? Moreso.

J: Hello? (laughs)

S: (laughter) Alright goodnight Phil.

PP: Thanks folks...

J: Later!

PP: ...talk to you later.

B: Night buddy.

== Who's That Noisy? (59:23)==

== Science or Fiction ( ) ==

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110606171416.htm Item number one]. Astronomers find evidence that some or perhaps all of the large moons of Jupiter were proto-planets captured from the inner solar system in the early days of the solar system when Jupiter was much closer to the sun. [http://news.byu.edu/archive11-jun-redbluestates.aspx Item number two]. Research finds that citizens from so-called "blue" states are just as likely to hold liberal or conservative views on specific issues as citizens from "red" states. And [http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=24890&news_item=5619 item number three]. Scientists discover that dolphins actually project two beams of ultrasound for use in echolocation.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:17:13) ==
<blockquote>"Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are."</blockquote>
J: Eric Butterworth!

== Announcements ( ) ==

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SGU Episode 308

2013-02-22T05:43:46Z

Jessiessica: /* Who's That Noisy? ( 59:23) */

{{Editing required
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{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 308
|episodeDate = 8thJune 2011
|episodeIcon = File:Nazi_Spaceship.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = PP: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Plait Phil Plait]
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2011-06-08.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=308
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,36132.0.html
|qowText = Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are.
|qowAuthor = Eric Butterworth
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday June 8th, 2011 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: Yuan Shang Hao. Good evening to all of our listeners in China of which there are...

J: I like your intonation

S: Inflection

B: I'm not sure if it was accurate though but it sounded good

E: Does anyone listen to us in China?

R: Of course, yeah, we have some Chinese listeners

S: But if you use the wrong inflection you say, 'I wanna massage your grandmother', so you've gotta be careful

E: You know the thing about saying 'good evening' in Chinese is that I want to say it again in an hour. I don't know what it is

B: O.M.G.

R: Wow

J: That was so bad

R: He's been working on that joke all night

E: Where's my rim shot? Ah crud.
(cymbals)

R: You get a sad trombone
(sad trombone)

S: Rebecca you're joining us from London this week

J: I say

R: I am, yes, I'm back in Old Blighty, as no-one calls it

E: Rebecca Poppins

R: Yeah, so once again the listeners are being treated to Rebecca at one thirty in the morning. Awesome.

J: But you're still kind of on US time

R: No, not really

J: But you're not in a bad mood

R: No, not really

J: Well at least you're happy recording the show

R: No

== This Day in Skepticism ()==
June 11, 1854. G.F. Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved in a lecture titled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.

S: Alright. Evan tell us what is absolutely fascinating about this day in skepticism

E: Well on this day that you're listening to the show it was 1854 in which the famous mathematician Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved and he announced this in a lecture titled On the Hypothesis on which Geometry is Based, which is apparently a very famous lecture that he gave. And what he did is he described the old-fashioned, Euclidean two-dimensional plane geometry along with some other examples of old geometry and... well let me put it to you this way. There's an example in which on a piece of paper there lived a bookworm, right, and this bookworm was drawn on the piece of paper so it was drawn in two-dimensional. You take the paper and you fold it up and you crumple it up. Now the worm drawn on the paper has no sense of the cumbling and the distortion of space that's going on around him because he also exists in two dimensions. Right, follow me so far?

S: Right

R: Yeah

B: Gotcha

S: Oh yeah

E: Whereas actually that crumpled paper is in three dimensions. So extend that out, we live in a world of three dimensions, but actually everything going around us exists in, what we believe is four dimensions, the fourth dimensions being time. And this was important not only as an important discovery of his time but it also influenced scientists and physicists such as Einstein who used Riemann's work in his theory of general relativity in which he incorporated time as the fourth dimension.

S: Yeah but when Riemann was talking about higher dimension I think he was talking about higher spatial dimensions, not necessarily with time as the fourth dimension. That was something that Einstein inserted. He was saying that space itself is curved into a physical fourth dimension which we can't perceive because we're on the surface of the paper like the...

E: That's right, we're like the worm. The two-dimensional worm on the paper has no idea it's getting all crumpled and crushed up.

S: But it's interesting. Imagine being the first guy to think of space as not linear, that's it's not Euclidean, that it's curved. That's mind blowing, right?

E: Big deal

B: The way he did that was to... I guess he was the first one to actually think of introducing numbers at every point in space and that was how he came upon the idea of using that method to describe how it was bent. I guess a pretty key insight. I wonder how relativity would have been affected if he hadn't come up with that and whether it would have been delayed significantly.

R: I don't know. For some reason this reminds me a lot of, was it Plato? Plato's cave/wall idea of people who are...

E: Shadows?

R: Yeah, I guess seeing shadows on a cave/wall so they assume that that's all that life is are these two-dimensional shadows, so if you were to explain the three-dimensional world to them it would blow their minds. And of course you can't say that Plato was thinking in terms of, well maybe there was a fourth dimension, a fourth spatial dimension as such, but I mean he was thinking in those sorts of terms, don't you think?

S: Yeah well that... our perception of reality is shaped by the physical reality in which we live

J: Right

S: We may be ignorant of reality in the same way that the cave shadow people are ignorant of their ultimate reality

R: Right and that's not to suggest that Plato had any sort of evidence of a fourth spatial dimension. I just want to put that out there. For conspiracy theorists out there...

S: He was talking more in just general philosophical terms, not that specific manifestation

J: Bob, what about this thing where we have these three dimensions that we can easily perceive and understand. But why do the dimensions end there? In other words, why couldn't there have been a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth dimension that are physical dimensions?

B: There actually might be and some theories actually, string theory and things, actually consider that - have that as an integral part of that. But those dimensions are, it's kind of weird, they're actually wrapped up and compacted in such a small space that they're not visible easily, so higher dimensions can exist in our universe but we just can't really detect them yet, it's not obvious beyond the three spatial dimensions we're aware of now.

E: I've heard that membrane theory relies on 11 dimensions - they can calculate 11 dimensions based on those theories.

B: Yeah

J: How about - I've heard of other theories talking about other dimensions of time. Imagine two dimensions of time, say, four or five dimensions of say space and two of time. What would that be like?

R: Crazy. That would be...

B: Crazy. How many... two watches wherever you go

S: This kind of stuff only makes sense in the context of mathematics. We can't, you know, really think about it physically.

J: You know just because we can think of them mathematically does that mean that they actually exist?

S: No. No, but there is something to the fact that it makes the Math more elegant. It sort of solves problems to bump things up a dimension and think of the reality as a three dimensional manifestation of a four dimensional reality or however many you ultimately get up to. So what does this mean? I mean this is a big question in theoretical physics or science in general, you know, when things start to fit together and become more elegant and have more explanatory power. That's nice, but it's not the same thing as it being actually the case and that's where we get into the debate about whether or not string theory can be a real science because it's not empirical, just theoretical.

== News Items ==
=== SGU-24 (7:24)===
The first 24 hour Live SGU event. September 23, 2011, starting at 8:00pm

S: Well we have a couple of news items coming up. Phil Plait's going to be coming up in a while to talk about some astronomy news but first we have a couple of other news items. The first one is SGU related. Do you guys know... I know you guys know what's going to happen... I hope you know by now - September 23rd and 24th, this fall, 2011, a very special event will be occurring: we will be holding... we have decided for some crazy reason to do a 24 hour live streaming SGU event.

R: Extravaganza

B: Extreme is right

J: And I want everyone to know from the beginning that I'm totally against it

E: Yes, we are bringing J kicking and screaming to this event

R: Which should only make it more entertaining I think

E: Oh yeah

B: I thought of a name, I just thought of a name for it

S: What?

B: Skeptapalooza

S: Oh come on

R: That's a terrible name

B: Best one I've heard yet

S: Alright, our working title is SGU24 but we're certainly open to suggestions

J: And I get to play Jack Bower then

E: "Where's the bomb?"

S: Does that mean we get to torture you and stop your heart and then get it going again?

J: Jump my heart with a car battery and then I'll be able to do 14 hours of show?
(all laugh)

I loved every goddam season of that programme.

R: You know Jay, for some reason when I hear you mention 24 hours it doesn't really bother me that much, but when you mention 14 hours it occurs to me, like, we will have already been recording for ten hours and we'll have 14 to go and now I'm against it too.

S: Well that's like we were flying to Australia and we were on the plane for what seems like forever and we find out we still have ten more hours left on the plane. Yeah it's bad. This won't be quite that bad because it'll be in my house

E: We like doing the heavy lifting, these special events, things that other sane people would never try.

S: So more details will be unfolding over the ensuing months, but save the dates September 23rd at 8pm and for the following 24 hours you'll be able to eat, sleep and breathe the SGU. And it'll be video. And we'll be broadcasting from a very special location.

R: You already said, from your house

S: But it's a special location within my house.

E: Right...

B: And we haven't named it yet, we need a special name

J: Bob, we did name it!

S: It's the skeptilair.

R: (groans) Oh, please make it stop.

E: The skeptiman cave, with Rebecca

R: It's just gonna continue to get worse isn't it.

S: Unfortunately

J: This show will be fused... it'll be infused... with have Star Trek, with Star Wars, it'll have internet, it'll have TVs, it'll have computers, it'll have gadgets, it'll have things that pop and bubble

B: Skulls!

E: And it'll have no bathroom breaks. We'll all have to go down on one leg.

S: We'll all have catheters going to bottles strapped to our thighs

B: And one dead body

E: Oooo...

S: At least one dead body, yes

E: At least one, if not more

J: Yeah, SGU just jumped the shark

(all laugh)

R: Also we'll be introducing a young child onto the show. Our new, six-year-old love child.

(all chuckle nervously)

B: I thought you were referencing Oliver from the Brady Bunch

R: Oliver

B: The punk

R: The kid on married with children

E: You remember the Brady Bunch, Rebecca? No?

R: I've heard of the Brady Bunch

B: (gasp)

E: Heard of the Brady Bunch...

R: Anyway, the point is

J: 'Pork chops and applesauce'

(all laugh)

E: 'Oh, my nose!' (chuckles to self)

R: Are these... Are these Brady Bunch jokes? Is that what we...

J: Mum always said don't paintball in the house

E: That's why they're all zooming over your head

S: Yes

R: Yes. Alright, can we go back to Star Trek?

J: Oh woah.

E: 'He's dead Jim'

B: Never thought I'd hear her say that

S: But worse, can you imagine 24 hours of this?

R: I'm just gonna bring earplugs

(Steve laughs)

R: I'm going to bring a big pair of headphones. So I can just listen to my music.

S: Noise cancellation.

Alright, well, let's go on...

B: Geek cancellation

=== Psychic Tipster (12:06)===
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/usa-crime-bodies-idUSN0717557520110608 Reuters: UPDATE 6-Texas authorites find no bodies after psychic tip]

S: ...To another news item, Rebecca. A psychic gave a very interesting tip to the police

R: That's right, Steve. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies'. That was the headline that Reuters decided to run with. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies, including children, buried in a mass grave in a rural home East of Houston', local media reported.

(All laugh)

R: Ah, it goes on to say, 'It might not have been 30, it was 25 to 30, but preliminary reports did indicate that there were children.' So a really horrific scene there, Tuesday night, that was on June 7. And there was a lot of confusion as these reports were coming in, but it turns out that this amazing find was in fact discovered by a psychic. It came in through a psychic tip, the psychic told the police to go to this specific house in Texas and to search for bodies, the police went there, they didn't find anything so the same caller, the same anonymous psychic caller called back and again stated that there were bodies there it's just that the police were in slightly the wrong spot. So the psychic gave even more exact directions so the police went back and they found... Nothing.

S: Nothing?

Nothing. There was nothing. They found a small amount of blood on the porch of a house nearby and for some reason that turned into 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies including children', which is basically what the psychic had reported. But try as the might, the Texas authorities were actually unable to find any evidence of any bodies. The home-owners, the people who lived in the house on that property were truckers, cross-country truckers, who were out on the road when it happened. When reached for comment they said no, they were not murderers.

J: We don't know nothing about no bodies

B: Exactly

E: 'No bodies' (laughs)

R: But, apparently some slightly deranged person had cut his wrists on their porch a few weeks back.

S: Apparently it was the daughter's fiancée who was AWOL from the army

R: Yes

S: And cut himself deliberately and blood went all over the place and now is in a military psych facility, apparently.

R: Yes. And so, yeah, there was absolutely nothing. There was no sign of any bodies anywhere on the property. There was no reason to suspect that these people killed anyone. It was all thanks to one anonymous quote-unquote 'psychic'. So now after it's finally come out there were, in fact, no bodies, the police are discussing trying to charge the tipster. Although there's no real indication whether or not they'll be able to discover the identity of the caller. But hopefully they can and hopefully this person will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Because this is what we see again and again. You see, when people ask, 'What's the harm? Psychic detectives, they're just adding another, you know, another possibility of finding a body or finding a murderer', well this is the problem. You have somebody that thinks that they're a psychic offering what they think... And they might actually believe this, they may actually think that they're having psychic visions about something and think that they're helping. But what they're only doing, really, is that they're wasting the police's time. Can you imagine how many detectives and how many offices they had to be on this searching this property to find out that there's absolutely nothing? And that...

S: And the FBI get involved.

R: Yeah. Surely they had something better to do.

S: Yeah

E: There were aerial video pictures of the groups - all the cars and all the detectives and the personnel - it was throngs of people at this supposed place. It was a huge waste of resources. Huge.

R: Yeah. And, of course, to me it's still not as bad as the cases you have where there's been a disappearance of someone and there's been a quote-unquote 'psychic' contact the relatives or someone and say that they have evidence of where this person is.

J: (In character) The kid's dead.

R: Exactly, that causes an incredible amount of emotional, psychological damage to these families. In this case, at least the damage was just economic, I suppose. But that's your tax dollars at work. Tracking down the pointless tips from pychics.

S: Now Rebecca, there're a few details to this story that I found very interesting. Of course, I'm basing this... I've read multiple articles on this and they were shuffling around the same basic facts. And that one was the blood on the porch. Another one though, was that when the cops got there they described a quote-unquote 'Overwhelming smell of decomposition'.

R: Oh yeah, yeah I saw that noted as well.

S: Yeah, so... which leant... so now you have the blood and the decomp. which meant 'oh right, this is legit, there's something here', so that's how they justified the massive response. Yeah, initially it was just a couple of guys going to check it out, but these details led to the more... calling in the FBI and getting the bigger response. Plus they also noted that there were some details, some, you know, some geographic details relating to the layout of the house that the psychic got pretty accurately and that that convinced them also that this was a legitimate tip, and not just a lunatic.

R: Right. And of course maybe the psychic just had knowledge of this area, been by or something.

S: Yeah

R: There was also the fact that apparently the property owner's son is a convicted sex offender, though he hasn't lived there for over a year and that the smell, the foul stench that the police identified was found to be coming from piles of rotting garbage.

S: Yeah. They were truckers who were on the road, so they were...

R: Right

S: Yeah

R: There were a lot of little details that when combined with this quote-unquote 'psychic tip' led the police to realise they... you know, needed to do something because these were all adding to a sort-of confirmation bias

S: Yeah, exactly, it's circumstantial evidence, confirmation bias, and you think, 'What's the chance that the police checking out a tip are gonna find blood on the porch?' Well it turns out it's probably not... You know first it asks the wrong question. The question is not, 'What's the chance of finding blood?', it's 'What's the chance of finding something suspcious?'

R: Right

S: And all the different things that could be suspicious. And the fact that somebody bled sometime in the last week or so was not that remarkable. And the quote-unquote 'decomp' was just the truckers on the road left the garbage behind which was rotting and smelling.

R: Yeah

S: So those, kind of, circumstantial things, you know, it's actually pretty likely, but when you're hunting for confirmation of your suspicions it's amazing how many connections you can make even on something apparently random like this. My only other question is, as you say, was this really just a random tip from an alleged psychic or did she have reason to point the police out to this house?

R: Yeah, I mean I, not knowing anything about... anything... (laughs)

S: You know, we don't have the details

R: Yeah, it's hard to say

E: It's unfolding, you know, it's still unfolding

R: I'm hoping that maybe somebody is looking into the guy who slit his wrists on the porch - I mean, it was a woman who called in but it's obviously some bad blood, so to speak, happening around there. So it's not out of the question to imagine that there might be someone who had reason to want to disrupt the people who lived there. That could be a cause.

S: And the police said specifically that somebody was looking into the revenge angle. That this was done to make trouble for the home-owners

R: Yeah

S: Okay. Well we're going to bring in Phil Plait the Bad Astronomy to cover these next few items because they have an Astronomy-theme. So Phil, welcome to Skeptics' Guide.

21:20

PP: Hey, thanks for having me on once again

S: It's always great to have you, Phil Plat

PP: Kay, thanks

R: Oh, yeah, right, rings a bell

E: Phil Prat, what a good gag

PP: You know I don't care if people mispronounce my name so long as they can spell it and can find it online

R: Right, spoken like a true nerd

E: Can we call you Philip?

PP: No

S: Is your name Philip or is it really legally just Phil?

E: I don't know, I'd have to check my birth certificate. Which I know actually has my middle name misspelled on it but there you go

R: Phil Plait doesn't know his own name

PP: Those details are irrelevant

=== Explosion on the Sun (21:57)===
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-a-huge-explosion/ Bad Astronomy, Discover magazine: The Sun lets loose a HUGE explosion]

S: So Phil, we were going to talk about this news item about this massive explosion on the sun we just had to talk about with you so won't you tell us about it?

PP: This is a pretty good story. The sun goes through these cycles, it has a magnetic field like a... like a magnet. And the magnetic field goes through cycles and it gets stronger every few years. It's an 11 year cycle. So it gets stronger then it fades, it gets stronger then it fades and we're sort of on the ramp up to the peak solar activity and we see this manifested on the surface of the sun with sunspots and solar flares and all kinds of cool stuff like that.

S: Phil, do we know what causes that cycle?

PP: No (laughs). That's the good part.

S: Okay...

PP: Well, there's some models that indicate why the sun's solar cycle goes up and down, it has to do with the way that the gas... is actually a plasma, it's an ionised gas inside the sun, is circulating around and when you move charged particles you generate a magnetic field and so this movement is very complicated and it has to do with the way that this gas is being transported in the solar interior. And what happens is is that the magnetic field gets dragged along with the stuff inside the sun, breaks through the sun's surface and that's why we see sunspots and various things, and magnetic field effects, it's the gas itself.

S: Is it an oscillation like a Cepheid variable's an oscillation, is that the theory?

PP: No, it has more to do with the way gas is flowing through the centre of the sun... well not through the centre, not through the core itself, but at the core the gas is very hot, it radiates that heat away. The gas above that then convects. The hot stuff rises and the cool stuff sinks just like in the Earth's atmosphere or in a boiling pot of water, and the problem is that that's not a simple system – the sun is rotating so there're rivers of gas like jet streams that are moving underneath the sun's surface. It's really complicated and the models that are trying to figure out how that works... They're not bad, they're doing a decent job but it's really really hard to figure out exactly all the motions that are going on inside, you know, this star that we're living nearby.

S: Right

PP: So what happens is as the magnetic field pokes through the surface of the sun it creates sunspots and these magnetic lines, you can think of them as like field lines, get tangled up and there's energy stored in them and if they get too tangled up they can actually sort of erupt – one of them snaps and it sets up a cascade or a lot of them snap and they all release their energy. You can imagine them like a bunch of mousetraps sitting on your floor and you throw a ping pong ball in there and as everything bounces around the mousetraps release all their energy you get a lot of snapping and motion and all kinds of craziness. Well that's what happens. And this can form a solar flare. It's a gigantic explosion on the surface of the sun. And it can be billions of megatons of energy released in just a few minutes. That's what happened on the sun and it wasn't actually that big of a flare as they go, they're different classes and this was a fare-to-middling sized explosion. But what happened, it was pretty unusual, is that there was an enormous fountain of gas that erupted off the surface of the sun and that's not usually associated with these types of events and now NASA has the Solar Dynamics Observatory which is this really phenomenal satellite and it's observing the sun at a lot of different wavelengths. So we have a high resolution, really gorgeous basically video, just images taken every couple of minutes or something like that, and you can string them together to make videos so you can see this flare. The eruption, this fountain of material flowing out from the sun and falling back down. And in different wavelengths it's just unbelievable it looks like, you know, ink flowing through water in one wavelength of light and in another it looks like fiery gas blowing out, it's just spectacular.

R: So Phil, how long until we all die?

PP: Ah, for you? Well it depends on your lifestyle habits – is there something you need to tell us?

R: Well, you know now I'm just a bit concerned about crazy things flying out of the sun at me.

PP: Well in this case, this particular event wasn't energetic enough to really do much. It did blow out a cloud of particles called coronal mass ejection, and that's gonna kinda sorta nick the Earth. It's not really directed at us. There maybe some aurorae associated with this, probably not much. On the other hand, you know, big flares, something that's bigger than this, we saw bigger ones earlier this year in February, they can damage satellites, they can affect the Earth's magnetic field. They can't really cause any specific problems here on Earth directly – you're not going to get irradiated, you're not going to turn into the Incredible Hulk, you're not going to melt, you're not going to turn into chud or morlocks or anything like that. Sorry.

B: Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.

PP: I know I know, a couple of you guys would probably love to see that happen.

(All laugh)

PP: But it can have effects you know. We have satellites up in space that can be damaged by this. You're basically zapping them with excess current and that can fry their electronics and we depend on a lot of the satellites like GPS, for financial transactions and all kinds of stuff like that. So corporations take this pretty seriously, they try to make sure their satellites are safeguarded against these kinds of events. Not all of them are. So we have to be careful about this and understand these sorts of events better so that we can build better satellites and protect them. Plus, you know, there're astronauts the International Space Station and they can be in danger of radioactive... well not radioactive, it's radiation, it's different than what we might we might think of as radioactivity, but these bizarre floods of subatomic particles that can come through the metal and whatnot, and I can't believe I just said whatnot, but the metal and other materials if I want to be a little more scientific, umm, in the space station - they may have to go to a better protected section of the station so that they don't get irradiated.

S: Yeah, or otherwise they might turn into the Fantastic Four

PP: I think that's true, yeah

E: Oh god

PP: Although I hope they make a better movie with actual astronauts than they would from the comic books.

S: Phil, if this explosion were aimed right at the Earth how bad would it have been?

PP: This one wouldn't have been as bad. We get some pretty spectacular aurora you know you can never say it's completely safe, we might lose a satellite, some of them might get damaged, sometimes satellites like Hubble and a lot of other ones, when they detect that there's excess current or that there's a problem they shut down automatically, they go into what's called 'safe-mode'. Sometimes, if we have enough advance warning, if there's a big flare, an X-class flare, one of these gigantic ones like we had earlier this year, or back in 2003 when the sun was just popping them off like popcorn it was really amazing, if you have enough warning you can shut down sensitive satellites and that's something that a lot of people are looking into. There's a space weather centre actually here in Boulder, it's not far from where I live, and they monitor the sun very careful, they issue warnings all the time in the hope that even just a few minutes warning can be enough to shut down these satellites and potentially save, you know, billions or tens of billions of dollars of assets in space.

E: Hey Phil just a few years ago we were talking about the lack of activity going on in the sun and how that was very unusual that low amount of activity for a long time, no sunspots for many months in a row. Now that we're seeing... since then the sun has been active with sunspots and all these other things that the sun does. What can we expect? Does the sun make up for lost time in a sense because of that lower activity and is it, like, trying to catch up to an equilibrium now?

PP: Nobody knows. I remember a couple of years ago people were arguing about this, that this long period of solar minimum which we kind of understand why it happened, or at least how it happened, but why the circumstances were set up for it to happen or not are not terribly well understood, but we do know that it was a record length of time with basically minimal solar activity. And so people were arguing, does this mean that the solar cycle will be also, you know, lower activity? when it reaches its peak will it be a lower than usual peak? Or will this mean that sun is building up energy and it's going to explode? Not literally, but you know, do something equally serious, and nobody really knows, and the thing is you have to be careful, I know you guys talk about anomaly hunting, the sun is going to do stuff like this. In February we had a bunch of X-class flares, there was a lower energy M-class flare. It was an unusual event because of that fountain of material that had never been seen before but, you know, who knows if it's actually happened before and we missed it, we just didn't have the equipment to see it, so you can't put too much credit to a single event or even a series of events. We just have to keep, you know, averaging up what's going on and see what's gonna happen. The peak of this cycle should happen in mid- to late-2013 and then into 2014 and it's actually after the peak that we usually see the strongest flares. And we'll just have to see what happens in, you know, 2014/2015 when the sun really starts to pop these guys off.

R: It seems a lot like climate science where we can't really look at it on a day-to-day scale. We have to look at it at... it's such a complex system. You know you have to look at it at a much larger scale. But, you know, I think scientists can understand that but from the perspective of someone who doesn't necessarily know how these things work I think it's easy for the media to, sort of, blow things like this out of proportion. Have you seen anything... any terrible reporting on this in that respect, Phil?

PP: Duh. Actually, this particular event... I poked around a few websites and it was being reported fairly well, but I can't remember which one it was, you know, I wanna say it was the Daily Mail but that's sort of my go-to garbage tabloid, that basically said we're all gonna die. I can't remember if that's the one I saw or not so I don't wanna cast aspersions on them when it's not deserved because usually it is the Daily Mail. But people... you're right in a lot of the things you said, people don't necessarily understand what's going on when they see this they panic. I got some emails from some people who were concerned about this and I had to say, no, you know, this was not that big of a deal. And you're right that we have to look at the long time scale. Just because a bunch of tornadoes broke out across the Mid West or in New England over the past few weeks doesn't mean they were swarming even if we get stronger hurricanes or more hurricanes this season, or a longer hurricane season doesn't mean that global warming is affecting you. You can't look at it that way, you've just got to take a step back, use longer time scale bins and hope that these trends are enough to see what's going on.

S: Yeah, and how many 11 year cycles have we been able to observe? How long have we had good observation of the sun?

PP: Well the first observations of the solar magnetic activity were actually in 1859 and it's pretty interesting actually, the guy, Carrington, looked at the sun with a visible light telescope and saw a flare – which is extremely rare for a flare to actually be seen with visible light. It's still to this day the strongest solar flare that's ever been seen. It caused all kinds of havoc on the earth at the time the telegraph... and stuff. And so we've been measuring the sun's activity now for about 150 years and when you look at the cycles they're all over the place, some are really strong some last longer some are weaker, it's just difficult to know what any given cycle's gonna do. We can only say that it's roughly 11 years it's not exactly 11 years. The activity tends to be strongest after the peak, that sort of stuff, but for any given event you can't really predict it. You can see, 'Hey look, there's a big old sun spot cluster there, and magnetic fields that are really strong, we ought to be keeping our eyes on it'. But that's no different from your tropical depression appearing in the Atlantic and the conditions look good to form a hurricane.

S: Yeah.

PP: You never now what's gonna happen. You've just gotta keep your eyes open for the precursors and hope for the best.

S: Well there's a couple of the news items we'd like you to hang around for if that's okay.

=== How Common is the Moon? (34:25)===
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13609153 BBC news: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought]

S: Bob, give us the summary on the new computer models about the formation of the moon.

B: Define summary.

S: (laughs)

E: The opposite of wintry.

(all laugh)

S: All right, not Bob length.

B: Researchers are redefining the rarity of Earth-moon system. They're saying that a whopping one in ten rocky planets may have satellites that's as big as our moon when compared to the Earth. Using these new sophisticated computer simulations it seems that the massive impacts that resulted in our relatively huge moon may be common, actually, throughout the universe. This research is coming from the Scientists from the Zurich Institute of Theoretical Physics in Switzerland and the Morishma at the University of Colorado in the US. They simulated planet formation from gas and chunks of planetesimal and they took these results and they factored them into another simulation, an N-body simulation, to see what the chances were that large satellites could form for that. And they were quite surprised to find that there was about a one in twelve chance of forming a planet and the satellite moon with both having more than half the mass of the Earth and the moon respectively. Now I liked how the BBC news article I read went into a little bit more statistical information about this. They were saying that the one in twelve or one in ten figure that you read everywhere else, they were saying that for the full range of possibilities it was between one in 45 and one in four. So that's kind of what the statistics were telling them, and they kinda distilled that down to about one in twelve. So now this is all tied, of course, to the once controversial and now pretty much generally accepted theory about how our moon formed. The common wisdom now is that it was a collision between the Earth Mark I, which some people refer to as Earth Mark I, colliding with this Mars-sized object and creating a huge debris ring which kind of coalesced in about a hundred years to form the moon as we know it. Of course it was a lot closer, about 15 times larger – the parent size is about 15 times larger than the way we see it now. The cool thing is that this could actually help with planet hunting – I wasn't aware of this. Large moons can distort the measurements that are made to find planets. This new knowledge could actually make finding them easier. Now Phil wasn't sure, I mean, just because you know this fact, how could this make it easier? I mean what is it about the distortion, how could the moon distort the measurements of finding a planet? A planet and a moon are pretty much like one system from a distance anyway. You know, I was having a hard time trying to figure out how a big moon could distort planet hunter measurements.

PP: Actually I'm with you, I don't now. I read the press release and it's pretty vague on that. I've not read the actual paper or talked to anybody about this. The way you find planets are actually a bunch of ways, but the two big ones are either the way the planet is pulling on the star and as it orbits the star the star is making a little circle and it creates a dopplar shift and you can see that sort of red and blue shift in the spectrum. But that should not be affected very much by a big moon. It's hard enough to see that with a low mass planet like the Earth around a star it's a very very tiny effect.

B: Right

PP: The bigger the planet the closer in it is the more that effect is and the easier it is to see. And it's hard to see how the moon would affect this – I don't know, I'm not that familiar with it. The other way is through transits where the planet literally gets between us and the star and it blocks a little bit of the starlight. Now for a Jupiter-sized planet and a star like the sun - it'll block about one percent of the star's light which is actually fairly easy to measure, you can use equipment you can buy off the shelf, which is really cool. For an Earth-like planet the effect is actually, I think, a ten thousandth the brightness of the star which is a lot harder to measure. If there's a moon that's orbiting that planet and the moon is, like, like, our moon, a significant fraction of the planet's size, then you might see more or less light dropping. If the planet and the moon transit the star you get a slightly bigger dip than if the moon is lined up with the planet from our point of view, if that makes any sense.

B: Yeah.

PP: That's the only way I can see off the top of my head there may be other things. You need to talk to an exoplanet hunter to get the deal on this.

B: Exoplanet hunter – what a cool job.

R: It's a great name.

B: The other thing that this highlights is the importance of the moon itself. Without the moon the Earth would be a very different place and I think it's a pretty safe bet that homosapiens would not be here without the moon. One of the big things that it does is that it stabilises the tilt of the Earth's axis, what's referred to as its obliquity. Without this the tilt would over greatly extended time-spans would mess with the overall heating of the Earth in ways that could make it fairly inimical to life, although I'm sure it would find ways around it.

R: Umm, would that be needed though, if nothing had smashed into the Earth in the first place to create the moon? In other words, is the moon just balancing out the wobble that was created by its own creation?

B: No. No, without the moon and without any impact they think they found some good examples that ummm... Yeah, the tilt would vary over great periods of time.

R: Because there are lot of planets without moons. What is it about the Earth that makes it require a moon?

PP: Well think of it this way. If you have a spinning top and it's perfectly balanced it'll spin really well. But if you put a lump of clay on one side of it and let it spin it'll start to wobble and that wobble can become chaotic. And so that's kinda what's happening with the Earth. You've got continents that are moving around and they cause it to be off-balance. As the Earth spins and as the moon pulls on the Earth you get a bulge around the middle of the Earth and it's the torque of the moon on that bulge, I think, that stabilises it. I'm not an expert on this but that's how I understand it. And that prevents the Earth's wobble from becoming chaotic. Venus spins much more slowly than the Earth, so I don't think it's as big of a deal. Mars, on the other hand, has roughly the same rate of spin as the Earth – it spins once a day – and there is evidence that in the past the axis of its spin has changed and some times a lot, indicating that... and I should add that it does not have a big moon it has too little dinky moons, and so it's possible that without that big moon torquing the Earth and keeping the spin from going all wobbly you get a planet that flips over and that has drastic effects on the seasons. It's not obvious, it's certainly not easy to understand how that all works, but it does seem to be the way the science is pointing right now.

S: Yeah, I remember when I was reading about the stabilising effect of the moon on the Earth, and how nice it is to have that. And at the same time, how rare the previous thinking was about how common we would see an Earth-Moon type of system. I was depressed as it would probably be very very few worlds out there that are as compatible to human life as our own system so if this is true, if these computer models are correct, and it's actually far more common, maybe, on average, one per solar system or something of that order of magnitude, that's reassuring for prospects of habitable planets out there.

B: Absolutely.

PP: You know it's reassuring, but it's not surprising at all. I've never bought into the Rare Earth idea.

S: Yeah

PP: You can say Earths must be common because we're on one – what are the odds? But that's, you know, you guys know all about that – it's like the water in the puddle saying “How remarkable it is that there's just enough water in here to fit the puddle” - you're looking at it the wrong way. So the idea that we're just the right size, just the right distance from the sun, with the moon and the magnetic field, and, and, and... it's like, you know, I'm not buying into all this. I think that there are lots of Earths out there. It's not uncommon to see stars like the sun. 10% of the stars in the galaxy are like the sun. We're starting to see that planets are common. We're starting to get an idea that planets the size of the Earth are common. If they're spinning rapidly and they have enough radioactive materials in their core they're gonna have a magnetic field. And so I think that that's something we're gonna see as common. And now, you know, if the moon is important for us to be here it seems very unlikely that we'd be the only planet in the galaxy like that, and we know that collisions are common, we know that planets are moving around in their star systems early on in the history of these things and so all of this stuff does not strike me as being all that surprising. I would have expected it. I don't know if I would have said as many as one in four Earth-like planets might have big moons, but the way objects get tossed around and the recent finding that there may be more planets wandering interstellar space than there are stars in the galaxy...

S: Yeah, how cool is that?

B: That is awesome

PP: ...Lends credence to this. The planets are moving around, they interact with each other, they change positions in the solar system, they toss each other out gravitationally, so we know that this stuff happens. So I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I would say that this finding is not surprising. It's just cool.

S: Yeah, it's just never been aesthetically pleasing to me to think that the Earth is really really rare. For all the reasons that you said. There's sort of the principle of mediocrity or whatever you call it, that chances are we're an unremarkable planet around an unremarkable star, around an unremarkable galaxy, you know. There's never any reason to think that we have a very special position in the universe. But there is a bit of the lottery fallacy that you were alluding to. If life were very rare, any life that did arise would marvel at how rare it was. Right?

PP: Unless there were two planets in that system that had life on them

S: Right

B: Right

S: But the premise is that life is rare, so that would be possible but exceedingly unlikely. But the billions of planets roaming around interstellar space is fascinating but it's also a bit scary because you think what's the possibility that, like, a Jupiter-sized planet will come ripping through the solar system.

PP: Very very rare. The universe is a very big place, the odds of that happening are extremely low. If they were high we probably wouldn't be here, right?

S: Right

PP: If over four and half billion years, the age of the Earth, some Jupiter-sized planet... if the odds were 100% that it would scream through the solar system it would have happened by now. So the odds of it happening are very very low. It makes for a great science-fiction movie.

S: Yeah

PP: Or a good novel or something like that, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it as a certainty. Certainly they're out there. That's something I've been wondering about for a long time – if there are frozen planets out there, and it's nice to see this big study. I mean this is not theoretical – these were observations that...

S: Yeah

PP: These planets gave themselves away through their gravity, effecting stars behind them and magnifying that light using basically a relativistic lens to... gravitational lens that Einstein predicted. So this is a direct observation and extrapolating to the entire sky you get this number of hundreds of billions of planets like this, which is awesome. But I don't think that hundreds of billions of planets spread out over the volume of a galaxy... it's still pretty thin stuff, so I don't think that this is that big of a problem for us.

E: What are the chances of any of those planets having life? You've gotta consider it small to none.

PP: Hard to say, you know. Jupiter is warmer than it would be... Let me rephrase that, it's actually radiating more heat than it receives from the sun. Left over heat from its formation, as well as some other sources of heat, so a giant planet could still be fairly warm, but there are other problems – there are gigantic convection currents bringing gas up and down so any life in a temperate zone would be dragged down to the hotter interior, so that's always been the problem with the theoretical models of how life might be inside a Jupiter-like planet. But you know what? I've learnt not to bet against nature. And I think that's the way to go. If they're out there, who knows? We'd have to go and take a look to be sure.

B: So this is all good but what's with the attitude?

PP: Shut up! What attitude?

E: You tell him

S: It was my attitude!

PP: My attitude of wonder and joy about the wonders of the universe? Is that what you're complaining about?

J: I'm pretty sure I've asked you this before but I live like a moment to moment life, which means that you could tell me the same joke, but, Phil because you really understand things, you know what's out there, you can write books like you did about the 59 ways you can get killed. Do you ever legitimately get frightened?

R: Like clowns, things like that?

E: Like crying in your bed at night?

J: No, I mean, you know... Is there anything that occurs that you're like, 'you know what, that is down right frightening - I don't like the idea that that might be coming at us at like a million miles an hour right now', you know what I mean?

PP: Oh, there's a ton of stuff like that. But you gotta differentiate between that stuff existing and that stuff being an actual danger – a threat to the Earth. Gamma ray bursts, supernovae and, my favourite, magnetars are these incredibly charged neutron stars that have field strengths that is quadrillions of times stronger than the Earth's magnetic fields, and they release super enormous blasts of energy and we got hit by one in 2004 actually, although it didn't really damage us. If there was one closer to us it could. But, you know what, we haven't been damaged by one of those things, there hasn't been a gamma ray burst in human history that has hurt us. There are no stars close enough to go supernova that can hurt us in this way, so this is not the kind of stuff that worries us. An asteroid impact, yeah, that could happen, a solar flare damaging our satellites and causing issues down here because of that – that's a legitimate worry, but that's also the sort of thing we can choose to protect ourselves from, we just haven't made that choice yet. So I don't lie awake at night fretting about these things. I have to worry about paying my taxes and worrying about what my kid is doing. Those are more the day-to-day things I'm worried about.

S: Yeah, Jay, it's far worse being a physician, knowing all the ways the body can fail, and knowing that one of those will happen to you soon.

J: Soon! (Laughs)

R: You make it sound like a threat

S: Soon-ish, within decades, which on astronomical scales is much quicker than anything that Phil has to worry about.

J: Steve, do you lie in bed at night going, “Nooo!!”

S: There definitely are times when I get little symptoms where I know all the horrible things it could be a symptom of, and I just have to say alright, don't worry about it, it's probably nothing and so far it has been.

J: Yeah, I find as I get older I ask myself a lot, and I mean this dead seriously, 'am I having a heart attack right now?' Is that pain right there the beginning of the end?

S: That's true, when you're in your 20's and you get a little left-sided chest pain you don't worry about it, you're like, I'm 25, you know, I'm not having a heart attack. But when you're 46 and the same exact thing happens you're like, okay, how much do I gotta worry about this?

PP: Hey wait a minute, why choose the age of 46?

S: Because that's my current age.

PP: Okay, yeah, that's my age as well.

S: Yeah. Yeah we're getting to that age where, you know, little things like that crop up and it's actually statistally plausible that it could be something serious.

PP: Everything is cancer. You know every time I look and I see a new mole on my shoulder it's like, 'Oh no!'

R: I don't even do that just with moles, with me it's just whatever random pain I have. Well it's cancer of the whatever-that-is.

B: 'Whatever-that-is'! God!(laughs)

S: ...Of the connectigizoid!

J: The claven.

B: “The clay-ven” (in mock-Jewish voice)

=== UFO Nazi Connection (50:59)===
[http://weirdnews.aol.com/2011/06/07/area-51-ufos-aliens-annie-jacobsen-nazi-soviet_n_869706.html#s285846&title=Area_51_Warning Huffington Post: Area 51 personnel feel 'betrayed' by Annie Jacobsen's Soviet-Nazi UFO connection]

S: Alright, one more news item. We have to end on a funny one for Phil. Alright Evan, tell us about UFO Nazis.

E: Well how about this one? So there's an author and her name is Annie Jacobson, and she has a new book that is out called 'Area 51 – An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base'. She spends the majority of her time in this book talking the legitimate science and projects and experimental aircraft and other things that have been taking place at this facility for the past sixty years. She got together with some people who used to work there who had declassified information and they would share it. However, it's the last chapter of the book which is making headlines. Because she is drawing the conclusion that the famous saucer crash involved with Area 51 Roswell is actually a conspiracy in which the Auchwitz doctor Joseph Mangles, the German aircraft designing brothers the Haughton brothers and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin formed a conspiracy in the late 1940's to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer which was crowded, get this, with 13-year olds which were surgically altered under the...

S: By Joseph Mangola

E: ...By Joseph Mangola.

S: Yeah. To look alien.

E: ...To look alien. And that is actually the recovered pieces of the famous crash. And those people, the surgically altered people are the supposed aliens that were recovered from the crash.

R: Well I'll never again say that the 911 Truthers have the dumbest conspiracy theory out there.

S: Well you know there's always gotta be one dumber than whatever you're currently talking about.

R: That's true.

E: Now Annie Jacobson is a journalist. And the reviews I've read about the book say that she's done a decent, not perfect, job in the various chapters of the book that have to deal with the hard sciences. But this last chapter in which she draws this conclusion, she's basing it entirely upon an unnamed source, one person, an unnamed source.

PP: Glen Beck (coughs).

(all laugh)

PP: Sorry, something in my throat there.

E: Might as well be. ...Who apparently fed her all this information and that's what she's going by. And she says "Oh I totally trust this source, I mean he's very, very reliable."

R: I think I know who this source is; the source is her publicist.

S: (laughs) I was gonna say that.

B: That's right Rebecca.

E: Exactly.

R: Noone would be talking about this if it weren't for that last chapter.

E; Right? Because you have to have a new angle to this whole story...

S: Exactly.

E: ...if you want your book to sell well in these days.

R: Yeah, especially 'cause it was that last chapter. I's like you know she turned in the completed book and it was all sourced and nice and ready to go, and they're like "This is good, but..."

PP: "It's ''way'' too accurate."

R: "...can't you just throw in one giant lie at the end? Just tack it on. Good job."

Steve: It's like Steve Martin tells that joke - if you're making demands, you have to always throw in that one crazy one. "I want the letter M ''stricken'' from the alphabet!" That way you can always claim insanity afterwards.

(laughter)

S: It's sort of a simple thing. In the last chapter you gotta go totally off the rails and start making crazy conspiracy theories 'cause that's what's gonna sell your book.

PP: I actually have two comments on this. One is that this idea that Nazia are tied with UFOs has been around for a long time. I remember reading a novel based on this conspiracy theory back when I was in grad school in the 90s. And the book wasn't new then. I think it was called "Genesis". It was this ginormous 800 page science fiction novel. It sounded fun and it was just basically the Nazi scientists that were behind all this escaped, they moved to Antarctica, they built a base there, they perfected UFO technology, and we're gonna rise again basically, so this has been around a while.

S: This is Richard Hoagland. He wrote "Our Breakaway Nazi Civilisation". He thinks NASA's run by NAZIs and they're the shadow government that's doing all this UFO/face on Mars stuff.

PP: As soon as you say "Richard Hoagland", you can just put a period after that and we're done as far as I'm concerned.

(laughter)

S: ''Hoaglaaaand''!

B: Oh yeah.

E: (laughs)

J: Steve, when you say that, just quickly going through your mind, like okay, he really believes that there's NAZIs out there, and I have to make light of this real quick, but does he actually think they're still wearing their badass clothes with the leather and the boots, you know they still have (inaudible) and...?

R: You know there are still NAZIs out there, let's (laughs) not suggest that there's no such thing as NAZIs anymore.

S: Jay, I'm looking at a picture on his website, and it's a spacechip - a Nazi spaceship, that looks like a modified NAZI helmet with the skull and crossbones on the front.

(all laugh)

J: Right, there's my answer!

E: That would not be difficult mein Fuhrer.

J: A NAZI spaceship!

PP: There's a movie about NAZI UFOs from the Moon. It actually looks like a pretty fun movie.

E: Is is a porn, what the hell?

S: Nazi UFOs from the Moon?

PP: Does anyone know? It was announced about a year ago. I think it's an independent project. This is a great idea for a fictionalised novel or movie, but then on the other hand most of the stuff that Hoagland does is heavily fictionalised so there you go.

E: You know Phil, also there have been stories in the past drawn up by the UFO crowd that the Soviets had something to do with the crash at the famous crash that took place at Roswell as well. So what's happening is kind of blending all of these different aspects together and the alien bodies that were supposedly recovered. She's picking out these these pieces and forming her own little opinion as to what this all means to her

PP: You know it was the expanding timewaves from the Roswell crash that caused building 7 to collapse on September 11.

(sounds of agreement)

R: Yeah that makes sense actually.

B: I hate when timewaves do that!

PP: I've got the equations right here. It's quite simple. I actually... to even the most dimmest person to do a second (inaudible).

B: Most dimmest!

PP: I want to say one other thing about this too. In the article on weirdnews.aol.com where Ms Jacobson is being quoted, she says "I don't have to..." Well what happened was these guys basically came out and said "Listen, we were sources for some of her information in the book, the good stuff in the book, and we were shocked by this last chapter, and I can't believe she took our information and did this, and she didn't ask us about this." And she is ''quoted'' here as sayng, this is a quote, "For starters, journalists don't share their information with their sources prior to publication,. That's a standard rule." she said "...so I'm following journalist tradition." So what she's really saying is "I got this information. I'm not going to go check with the experts on it to find out what's going on because journalists don't do that." You know what? ''I think they do'' I think that's ''exactly'' what journalists do. They check their sources. So that quotation by her really sets off a lot of alarms in my head, and she goes on to say "What others think of my book can't matter to me in terms of being a journalist." (laughs) The word journalist is not a shield to be able to say whatever you want.

R: Maybe if she calls herself a journalist enough times, she'll actually become a journalist. That must be what she's thinking.

PP: You know, I've seen stuff like this happen before and I always want to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. I don't know what's going on, I haven't read the book, I've only read this article. The article could be sensationalising the last chapter. It could be relatively harmless and being misinterpreted, whatever. But these quotations from her ''really'' make me suspicious about the integrity of that last chapter. I think I'm safe in saying that.

S: Well Phil thank you for joining us it's always a pleasure.

PP: Thanks everybody. Thanks for having me on, it's always fun.

E: Thank you Phil.

S: We're gonna see you at TAM in about four weeks.

PP: I'll see you guys at TAM. I'm gonna see you at CSICon in New Orleans in October...

S: And DragonCon.

B: DragonConnn!

PP: ...and DragonCon yeah, I can't wait for DragonCon that's gonna be great.

S: You're gonna be sick of us.

R: Yeah.

E: Gonna be?

PP: I'm sorry, gonna be?

R: He's already sick of all of you.

E: Hello? Hello? Moreso.

J: Hello? (laughs)

S: (laughter) Alright goodnight Phil.

PP: Thanks folks...

J: Later!

PP: ...talk to you later.

B: Night buddy.

== Who's That Noisy? (59:23)==

== Science or Fiction ( ) ==

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110606171416.htm Item number one]. Astronomers find evidence that some or perhaps all of the large moons of Jupiter were proto-planets captured from the inner solar system in the early days of the solar system when Jupiter was much closer to the sun. [http://news.byu.edu/archive11-jun-redbluestates.aspx Item number two]. Research finds that citizens from so-called "blue" states are just as likely to hold liberal or conservative views on specific issues as citizens from "red" states. And [http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=24890&news_item=5619 item number three]. Scientists discover that dolphins actually project two beams of ultrasound for use in echolocation.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:17:13) ==
<blockquote>"Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are."</blockquote>
J: Eric Butterworth!

== Announcements ( ) ==

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SGU Episode 308

2013-02-22T05:42:35Z

Jessiessica: /* How Common is the Moon? (34:25) */

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{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 308
|episodeDate = 8thJune 2011
|episodeIcon = File:Nazi_Spaceship.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = PP: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Plait Phil Plait]
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2011-06-08.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=308
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,36132.0.html
|qowText = Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are.
|qowAuthor = Eric Butterworth
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday June 8th, 2011 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: Yuan Shang Hao. Good evening to all of our listeners in China of which there are...

J: I like your intonation

S: Inflection

B: I'm not sure if it was accurate though but it sounded good

E: Does anyone listen to us in China?

R: Of course, yeah, we have some Chinese listeners

S: But if you use the wrong inflection you say, 'I wanna massage your grandmother', so you've gotta be careful

E: You know the thing about saying 'good evening' in Chinese is that I want to say it again in an hour. I don't know what it is

B: O.M.G.

R: Wow

J: That was so bad

R: He's been working on that joke all night

E: Where's my rim shot? Ah crud.
(cymbals)

R: You get a sad trombone
(sad trombone)

S: Rebecca you're joining us from London this week

J: I say

R: I am, yes, I'm back in Old Blighty, as no-one calls it

E: Rebecca Poppins

R: Yeah, so once again the listeners are being treated to Rebecca at one thirty in the morning. Awesome.

J: But you're still kind of on US time

R: No, not really

J: But you're not in a bad mood

R: No, not really

J: Well at least you're happy recording the show

R: No

== This Day in Skepticism ()==
June 11, 1854. G.F. Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved in a lecture titled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.

S: Alright. Evan tell us what is absolutely fascinating about this day in skepticism

E: Well on this day that you're listening to the show it was 1854 in which the famous mathematician Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved and he announced this in a lecture titled On the Hypothesis on which Geometry is Based, which is apparently a very famous lecture that he gave. And what he did is he described the old-fashioned, Euclidean two-dimensional plane geometry along with some other examples of old geometry and... well let me put it to you this way. There's an example in which on a piece of paper there lived a bookworm, right, and this bookworm was drawn on the piece of paper so it was drawn in two-dimensional. You take the paper and you fold it up and you crumple it up. Now the worm drawn on the paper has no sense of the cumbling and the distortion of space that's going on around him because he also exists in two dimensions. Right, follow me so far?

S: Right

R: Yeah

B: Gotcha

S: Oh yeah

E: Whereas actually that crumpled paper is in three dimensions. So extend that out, we live in a world of three dimensions, but actually everything going around us exists in, what we believe is four dimensions, the fourth dimensions being time. And this was important not only as an important discovery of his time but it also influenced scientists and physicists such as Einstein who used Riemann's work in his theory of general relativity in which he incorporated time as the fourth dimension.

S: Yeah but when Riemann was talking about higher dimension I think he was talking about higher spatial dimensions, not necessarily with time as the fourth dimension. That was something that Einstein inserted. He was saying that space itself is curved into a physical fourth dimension which we can't perceive because we're on the surface of the paper like the...

E: That's right, we're like the worm. The two-dimensional worm on the paper has no idea it's getting all crumpled and crushed up.

S: But it's interesting. Imagine being the first guy to think of space as not linear, that's it's not Euclidean, that it's curved. That's mind blowing, right?

E: Big deal

B: The way he did that was to... I guess he was the first one to actually think of introducing numbers at every point in space and that was how he came upon the idea of using that method to describe how it was bent. I guess a pretty key insight. I wonder how relativity would have been affected if he hadn't come up with that and whether it would have been delayed significantly.

R: I don't know. For some reason this reminds me a lot of, was it Plato? Plato's cave/wall idea of people who are...

E: Shadows?

R: Yeah, I guess seeing shadows on a cave/wall so they assume that that's all that life is are these two-dimensional shadows, so if you were to explain the three-dimensional world to them it would blow their minds. And of course you can't say that Plato was thinking in terms of, well maybe there was a fourth dimension, a fourth spatial dimension as such, but I mean he was thinking in those sorts of terms, don't you think?

S: Yeah well that... our perception of reality is shaped by the physical reality in which we live

J: Right

S: We may be ignorant of reality in the same way that the cave shadow people are ignorant of their ultimate reality

R: Right and that's not to suggest that Plato had any sort of evidence of a fourth spatial dimension. I just want to put that out there. For conspiracy theorists out there...

S: He was talking more in just general philosophical terms, not that specific manifestation

J: Bob, what about this thing where we have these three dimensions that we can easily perceive and understand. But why do the dimensions end there? In other words, why couldn't there have been a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth dimension that are physical dimensions?

B: There actually might be and some theories actually, string theory and things, actually consider that - have that as an integral part of that. But those dimensions are, it's kind of weird, they're actually wrapped up and compacted in such a small space that they're not visible easily, so higher dimensions can exist in our universe but we just can't really detect them yet, it's not obvious beyond the three spatial dimensions we're aware of now.

E: I've heard that membrane theory relies on 11 dimensions - they can calculate 11 dimensions based on those theories.

B: Yeah

J: How about - I've heard of other theories talking about other dimensions of time. Imagine two dimensions of time, say, four or five dimensions of say space and two of time. What would that be like?

R: Crazy. That would be...

B: Crazy. How many... two watches wherever you go

S: This kind of stuff only makes sense in the context of mathematics. We can't, you know, really think about it physically.

J: You know just because we can think of them mathematically does that mean that they actually exist?

S: No. No, but there is something to the fact that it makes the Math more elegant. It sort of solves problems to bump things up a dimension and think of the reality as a three dimensional manifestation of a four dimensional reality or however many you ultimately get up to. So what does this mean? I mean this is a big question in theoretical physics or science in general, you know, when things start to fit together and become more elegant and have more explanatory power. That's nice, but it's not the same thing as it being actually the case and that's where we get into the debate about whether or not string theory can be a real science because it's not empirical, just theoretical.

== News Items ==
=== SGU-24 (7:24)===
The first 24 hour Live SGU event. September 23, 2011, starting at 8:00pm

S: Well we have a couple of news items coming up. Phil Plait's going to be coming up in a while to talk about some astronomy news but first we have a couple of other news items. The first one is SGU related. Do you guys know... I know you guys know what's going to happen... I hope you know by now - September 23rd and 24th, this fall, 2011, a very special event will be occurring: we will be holding... we have decided for some crazy reason to do a 24 hour live streaming SGU event.

R: Extravaganza

B: Extreme is right

J: And I want everyone to know from the beginning that I'm totally against it

E: Yes, we are bringing J kicking and screaming to this event

R: Which should only make it more entertaining I think

E: Oh yeah

B: I thought of a name, I just thought of a name for it

S: What?

B: Skeptapalooza

S: Oh come on

R: That's a terrible name

B: Best one I've heard yet

S: Alright, our working title is SGU24 but we're certainly open to suggestions

J: And I get to play Jack Bower then

E: "Where's the bomb?"

S: Does that mean we get to torture you and stop your heart and then get it going again?

J: Jump my heart with a car battery and then I'll be able to do 14 hours of show?
(all laugh)

I loved every goddam season of that programme.

R: You know Jay, for some reason when I hear you mention 24 hours it doesn't really bother me that much, but when you mention 14 hours it occurs to me, like, we will have already been recording for ten hours and we'll have 14 to go and now I'm against it too.

S: Well that's like we were flying to Australia and we were on the plane for what seems like forever and we find out we still have ten more hours left on the plane. Yeah it's bad. This won't be quite that bad because it'll be in my house

E: We like doing the heavy lifting, these special events, things that other sane people would never try.

S: So more details will be unfolding over the ensuing months, but save the dates September 23rd at 8pm and for the following 24 hours you'll be able to eat, sleep and breathe the SGU. And it'll be video. And we'll be broadcasting from a very special location.

R: You already said, from your house

S: But it's a special location within my house.

E: Right...

B: And we haven't named it yet, we need a special name

J: Bob, we did name it!

S: It's the skeptilair.

R: (groans) Oh, please make it stop.

E: The skeptiman cave, with Rebecca

R: It's just gonna continue to get worse isn't it.

S: Unfortunately

J: This show will be fused... it'll be infused... with have Star Trek, with Star Wars, it'll have internet, it'll have TVs, it'll have computers, it'll have gadgets, it'll have things that pop and bubble

B: Skulls!

E: And it'll have no bathroom breaks. We'll all have to go down on one leg.

S: We'll all have catheters going to bottles strapped to our thighs

B: And one dead body

E: Oooo...

S: At least one dead body, yes

E: At least one, if not more

J: Yeah, SGU just jumped the shark

(all laugh)

R: Also we'll be introducing a young child onto the show. Our new, six-year-old love child.

(all chuckle nervously)

B: I thought you were referencing Oliver from the Brady Bunch

R: Oliver

B: The punk

R: The kid on married with children

E: You remember the Brady Bunch, Rebecca? No?

R: I've heard of the Brady Bunch

B: (gasp)

E: Heard of the Brady Bunch...

R: Anyway, the point is

J: 'Pork chops and applesauce'

(all laugh)

E: 'Oh, my nose!' (chuckles to self)

R: Are these... Are these Brady Bunch jokes? Is that what we...

J: Mum always said don't paintball in the house

E: That's why they're all zooming over your head

S: Yes

R: Yes. Alright, can we go back to Star Trek?

J: Oh woah.

E: 'He's dead Jim'

B: Never thought I'd hear her say that

S: But worse, can you imagine 24 hours of this?

R: I'm just gonna bring earplugs

(Steve laughs)

R: I'm going to bring a big pair of headphones. So I can just listen to my music.

S: Noise cancellation.

Alright, well, let's go on...

B: Geek cancellation

=== Psychic Tipster (12:06)===
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/usa-crime-bodies-idUSN0717557520110608 Reuters: UPDATE 6-Texas authorites find no bodies after psychic tip]

S: ...To another news item, Rebecca. A psychic gave a very interesting tip to the police

R: That's right, Steve. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies'. That was the headline that Reuters decided to run with. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies, including children, buried in a mass grave in a rural home East of Houston', local media reported.

(All laugh)

R: Ah, it goes on to say, 'It might not have been 30, it was 25 to 30, but preliminary reports did indicate that there were children.' So a really horrific scene there, Tuesday night, that was on June 7. And there was a lot of confusion as these reports were coming in, but it turns out that this amazing find was in fact discovered by a psychic. It came in through a psychic tip, the psychic told the police to go to this specific house in Texas and to search for bodies, the police went there, they didn't find anything so the same caller, the same anonymous psychic caller called back and again stated that there were bodies there it's just that the police were in slightly the wrong spot. So the psychic gave even more exact directions so the police went back and they found... Nothing.

S: Nothing?

Nothing. There was nothing. They found a small amount of blood on the porch of a house nearby and for some reason that turned into 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies including children', which is basically what the psychic had reported. But try as the might, the Texas authorities were actually unable to find any evidence of any bodies. The home-owners, the people who lived in the house on that property were truckers, cross-country truckers, who were out on the road when it happened. When reached for comment they said no, they were not murderers.

J: We don't know nothing about no bodies

B: Exactly

E: 'No bodies' (laughs)

R: But, apparently some slightly deranged person had cut his wrists on their porch a few weeks back.

S: Apparently it was the daughter's fiancée who was AWOL from the army

R: Yes

S: And cut himself deliberately and blood went all over the place and now is in a military psych facility, apparently.

R: Yes. And so, yeah, there was absolutely nothing. There was no sign of any bodies anywhere on the property. There was no reason to suspect that these people killed anyone. It was all thanks to one anonymous quote-unquote 'psychic'. So now after it's finally come out there were, in fact, no bodies, the police are discussing trying to charge the tipster. Although there's no real indication whether or not they'll be able to discover the identity of the caller. But hopefully they can and hopefully this person will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Because this is what we see again and again. You see, when people ask, 'What's the harm? Psychic detectives, they're just adding another, you know, another possibility of finding a body or finding a murderer', well this is the problem. You have somebody that thinks that they're a psychic offering what they think... And they might actually believe this, they may actually think that they're having psychic visions about something and think that they're helping. But what they're only doing, really, is that they're wasting the police's time. Can you imagine how many detectives and how many offices they had to be on this searching this property to find out that there's absolutely nothing? And that...

S: And the FBI get involved.

R: Yeah. Surely they had something better to do.

S: Yeah

E: There were aerial video pictures of the groups - all the cars and all the detectives and the personnel - it was throngs of people at this supposed place. It was a huge waste of resources. Huge.

R: Yeah. And, of course, to me it's still not as bad as the cases you have where there's been a disappearance of someone and there's been a quote-unquote 'psychic' contact the relatives or someone and say that they have evidence of where this person is.

J: (In character) The kid's dead.

R: Exactly, that causes an incredible amount of emotional, psychological damage to these families. In this case, at least the damage was just economic, I suppose. But that's your tax dollars at work. Tracking down the pointless tips from pychics.

S: Now Rebecca, there're a few details to this story that I found very interesting. Of course, I'm basing this... I've read multiple articles on this and they were shuffling around the same basic facts. And that one was the blood on the porch. Another one though, was that when the cops got there they described a quote-unquote 'Overwhelming smell of decomposition'.

R: Oh yeah, yeah I saw that noted as well.

S: Yeah, so... which leant... so now you have the blood and the decomp. which meant 'oh right, this is legit, there's something here', so that's how they justified the massive response. Yeah, initially it was just a couple of guys going to check it out, but these details led to the more... calling in the FBI and getting the bigger response. Plus they also noted that there were some details, some, you know, some geographic details relating to the layout of the house that the psychic got pretty accurately and that that convinced them also that this was a legitimate tip, and not just a lunatic.

R: Right. And of course maybe the psychic just had knowledge of this area, been by or something.

S: Yeah

R: There was also the fact that apparently the property owner's son is a convicted sex offender, though he hasn't lived there for over a year and that the smell, the foul stench that the police identified was found to be coming from piles of rotting garbage.

S: Yeah. They were truckers who were on the road, so they were...

R: Right

S: Yeah

R: There were a lot of little details that when combined with this quote-unquote 'psychic tip' led the police to realise they... you know, needed to do something because these were all adding to a sort-of confirmation bias

S: Yeah, exactly, it's circumstantial evidence, confirmation bias, and you think, 'What's the chance that the police checking out a tip are gonna find blood on the porch?' Well it turns out it's probably not... You know first it asks the wrong question. The question is not, 'What's the chance of finding blood?', it's 'What's the chance of finding something suspcious?'

R: Right

S: And all the different things that could be suspicious. And the fact that somebody bled sometime in the last week or so was not that remarkable. And the quote-unquote 'decomp' was just the truckers on the road left the garbage behind which was rotting and smelling.

R: Yeah

S: So those, kind of, circumstantial things, you know, it's actually pretty likely, but when you're hunting for confirmation of your suspicions it's amazing how many connections you can make even on something apparently random like this. My only other question is, as you say, was this really just a random tip from an alleged psychic or did she have reason to point the police out to this house?

R: Yeah, I mean I, not knowing anything about... anything... (laughs)

S: You know, we don't have the details

R: Yeah, it's hard to say

E: It's unfolding, you know, it's still unfolding

R: I'm hoping that maybe somebody is looking into the guy who slit his wrists on the porch - I mean, it was a woman who called in but it's obviously some bad blood, so to speak, happening around there. So it's not out of the question to imagine that there might be someone who had reason to want to disrupt the people who lived there. That could be a cause.

S: And the police said specifically that somebody was looking into the revenge angle. That this was done to make trouble for the home-owners

R: Yeah

S: Okay. Well we're going to bring in Phil Plait the Bad Astronomy to cover these next few items because they have an Astronomy-theme. So Phil, welcome to Skeptics' Guide.

21:20

PP: Hey, thanks for having me on once again

S: It's always great to have you, Phil Plat

PP: Kay, thanks

R: Oh, yeah, right, rings a bell

E: Phil Prat, what a good gag

PP: You know I don't care if people mispronounce my name so long as they can spell it and can find it online

R: Right, spoken like a true nerd

E: Can we call you Philip?

PP: No

S: Is your name Philip or is it really legally just Phil?

E: I don't know, I'd have to check my birth certificate. Which I know actually has my middle name misspelled on it but there you go

R: Phil Plait doesn't know his own name

PP: Those details are irrelevant

=== Explosion on the Sun (21:57)===
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-a-huge-explosion/ Bad Astronomy, Discover magazine: The Sun lets loose a HUGE explosion]

S: So Phil, we were going to talk about this news item about this massive explosion on the sun we just had to talk about with you so won't you tell us about it?

PP: This is a pretty good story. The sun goes through these cycles, it has a magnetic field like a... like a magnet. And the magnetic field goes through cycles and it gets stronger every few years. It's an 11 year cycle. So it gets stronger then it fades, it gets stronger then it fades and we're sort of on the ramp up to the peak solar activity and we see this manifested on the surface of the sun with sunspots and solar flares and all kinds of cool stuff like that.

S: Phil, do we know what causes that cycle?

PP: No (laughs). That's the good part.

S: Okay...

PP: Well, there's some models that indicate why the sun's solar cycle goes up and down, it has to do with the way that the gas... is actually a plasma, it's an ionised gas inside the sun, is circulating around and when you move charged particles you generate a magnetic field and so this movement is very complicated and it has to do with the way that this gas is being transported in the solar interior. And what happens is is that the magnetic field gets dragged along with the stuff inside the sun, breaks through the sun's surface and that's why we see sunspots and various things, and magnetic field effects, it's the gas itself.

S: Is it an oscillation like a Cepheid variable's an oscillation, is that the theory?

PP: No, it has more to do with the way gas is flowing through the centre of the sun... well not through the centre, not through the core itself, but at the core the gas is very hot, it radiates that heat away. The gas above that then convects. The hot stuff rises and the cool stuff sinks just like in the Earth's atmosphere or in a boiling pot of water, and the problem is that that's not a simple system – the sun is rotating so there're rivers of gas like jet streams that are moving underneath the sun's surface. It's really complicated and the models that are trying to figure out how that works... They're not bad, they're doing a decent job but it's really really hard to figure out exactly all the motions that are going on inside, you know, this star that we're living nearby.

S: Right

PP: So what happens is as the magnetic field pokes through the surface of the sun it creates sunspots and these magnetic lines, you can think of them as like field lines, get tangled up and there's energy stored in them and if they get too tangled up they can actually sort of erupt – one of them snaps and it sets up a cascade or a lot of them snap and they all release their energy. You can imagine them like a bunch of mousetraps sitting on your floor and you throw a ping pong ball in there and as everything bounces around the mousetraps release all their energy you get a lot of snapping and motion and all kinds of craziness. Well that's what happens. And this can form a solar flare. It's a gigantic explosion on the surface of the sun. And it can be billions of megatons of energy released in just a few minutes. That's what happened on the sun and it wasn't actually that big of a flare as they go, they're different classes and this was a fare-to-middling sized explosion. But what happened, it was pretty unusual, is that there was an enormous fountain of gas that erupted off the surface of the sun and that's not usually associated with these types of events and now NASA has the Solar Dynamics Observatory which is this really phenomenal satellite and it's observing the sun at a lot of different wavelengths. So we have a high resolution, really gorgeous basically video, just images taken every couple of minutes or something like that, and you can string them together to make videos so you can see this flare. The eruption, this fountain of material flowing out from the sun and falling back down. And in different wavelengths it's just unbelievable it looks like, you know, ink flowing through water in one wavelength of light and in another it looks like fiery gas blowing out, it's just spectacular.

R: So Phil, how long until we all die?

PP: Ah, for you? Well it depends on your lifestyle habits – is there something you need to tell us?

R: Well, you know now I'm just a bit concerned about crazy things flying out of the sun at me.

PP: Well in this case, this particular event wasn't energetic enough to really do much. It did blow out a cloud of particles called coronal mass ejection, and that's gonna kinda sorta nick the Earth. It's not really directed at us. There maybe some aurorae associated with this, probably not much. On the other hand, you know, big flares, something that's bigger than this, we saw bigger ones earlier this year in February, they can damage satellites, they can affect the Earth's magnetic field. They can't really cause any specific problems here on Earth directly – you're not going to get irradiated, you're not going to turn into the Incredible Hulk, you're not going to melt, you're not going to turn into chud or morlocks or anything like that. Sorry.

B: Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.

PP: I know I know, a couple of you guys would probably love to see that happen.

(All laugh)

PP: But it can have effects you know. We have satellites up in space that can be damaged by this. You're basically zapping them with excess current and that can fry their electronics and we depend on a lot of the satellites like GPS, for financial transactions and all kinds of stuff like that. So corporations take this pretty seriously, they try to make sure their satellites are safeguarded against these kinds of events. Not all of them are. So we have to be careful about this and understand these sorts of events better so that we can build better satellites and protect them. Plus, you know, there're astronauts the International Space Station and they can be in danger of radioactive... well not radioactive, it's radiation, it's different than what we might we might think of as radioactivity, but these bizarre floods of subatomic particles that can come through the metal and whatnot, and I can't believe I just said whatnot, but the metal and other materials if I want to be a little more scientific, umm, in the space station - they may have to go to a better protected section of the station so that they don't get irradiated.

S: Yeah, or otherwise they might turn into the Fantastic Four

PP: I think that's true, yeah

E: Oh god

PP: Although I hope they make a better movie with actual astronauts than they would from the comic books.

S: Phil, if this explosion were aimed right at the Earth how bad would it have been?

PP: This one wouldn't have been as bad. We get some pretty spectacular aurora you know you can never say it's completely safe, we might lose a satellite, some of them might get damaged, sometimes satellites like Hubble and a lot of other ones, when they detect that there's excess current or that there's a problem they shut down automatically, they go into what's called 'safe-mode'. Sometimes, if we have enough advance warning, if there's a big flare, an X-class flare, one of these gigantic ones like we had earlier this year, or back in 2003 when the sun was just popping them off like popcorn it was really amazing, if you have enough warning you can shut down sensitive satellites and that's something that a lot of people are looking into. There's a space weather centre actually here in Boulder, it's not far from where I live, and they monitor the sun very careful, they issue warnings all the time in the hope that even just a few minutes warning can be enough to shut down these satellites and potentially save, you know, billions or tens of billions of dollars of assets in space.

E: Hey Phil just a few years ago we were talking about the lack of activity going on in the sun and how that was very unusual that low amount of activity for a long time, no sunspots for many months in a row. Now that we're seeing... since then the sun has been active with sunspots and all these other things that the sun does. What can we expect? Does the sun make up for lost time in a sense because of that lower activity and is it, like, trying to catch up to an equilibrium now?

PP: Nobody knows. I remember a couple of years ago people were arguing about this, that this long period of solar minimum which we kind of understand why it happened, or at least how it happened, but why the circumstances were set up for it to happen or not are not terribly well understood, but we do know that it was a record length of time with basically minimal solar activity. And so people were arguing, does this mean that the solar cycle will be also, you know, lower activity? when it reaches its peak will it be a lower than usual peak? Or will this mean that sun is building up energy and it's going to explode? Not literally, but you know, do something equally serious, and nobody really knows, and the thing is you have to be careful, I know you guys talk about anomaly hunting, the sun is going to do stuff like this. In February we had a bunch of X-class flares, there was a lower energy M-class flare. It was an unusual event because of that fountain of material that had never been seen before but, you know, who knows if it's actually happened before and we missed it, we just didn't have the equipment to see it, so you can't put too much credit to a single event or even a series of events. We just have to keep, you know, averaging up what's going on and see what's gonna happen. The peak of this cycle should happen in mid- to late-2013 and then into 2014 and it's actually after the peak that we usually see the strongest flares. And we'll just have to see what happens in, you know, 2014/2015 when the sun really starts to pop these guys off.

R: It seems a lot like climate science where we can't really look at it on a day-to-day scale. We have to look at it at... it's such a complex system. You know you have to look at it at a much larger scale. But, you know, I think scientists can understand that but from the perspective of someone who doesn't necessarily know how these things work I think it's easy for the media to, sort of, blow things like this out of proportion. Have you seen anything... any terrible reporting on this in that respect, Phil?

PP: Duh. Actually, this particular event... I poked around a few websites and it was being reported fairly well, but I can't remember which one it was, you know, I wanna say it was the Daily Mail but that's sort of my go-to garbage tabloid, that basically said we're all gonna die. I can't remember if that's the one I saw or not so I don't wanna cast aspersions on them when it's not deserved because usually it is the Daily Mail. But people... you're right in a lot of the things you said, people don't necessarily understand what's going on when they see this they panic. I got some emails from some people who were concerned about this and I had to say, no, you know, this was not that big of a deal. And you're right that we have to look at the long time scale. Just because a bunch of tornadoes broke out across the Mid West or in New England over the past few weeks doesn't mean they were swarming even if we get stronger hurricanes or more hurricanes this season, or a longer hurricane season doesn't mean that global warming is affecting you. You can't look at it that way, you've just got to take a step back, use longer time scale bins and hope that these trends are enough to see what's going on.

S: Yeah, and how many 11 year cycles have we been able to observe? How long have we had good observation of the sun?

PP: Well the first observations of the solar magnetic activity were actually in 1859 and it's pretty interesting actually, the guy, Carrington, looked at the sun with a visible light telescope and saw a flare – which is extremely rare for a flare to actually be seen with visible light. It's still to this day the strongest solar flare that's ever been seen. It caused all kinds of havoc on the earth at the time the telegraph... and stuff. And so we've been measuring the sun's activity now for about 150 years and when you look at the cycles they're all over the place, some are really strong some last longer some are weaker, it's just difficult to know what any given cycle's gonna do. We can only say that it's roughly 11 years it's not exactly 11 years. The activity tends to be strongest after the peak, that sort of stuff, but for any given event you can't really predict it. You can see, 'Hey look, there's a big old sun spot cluster there, and magnetic fields that are really strong, we ought to be keeping our eyes on it'. But that's no different from your tropical depression appearing in the Atlantic and the conditions look good to form a hurricane.

S: Yeah.

PP: You never now what's gonna happen. You've just gotta keep your eyes open for the precursors and hope for the best.

S: Well there's a couple of the news items we'd like you to hang around for if that's okay.

=== How Common is the Moon? (34:25)===
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13609153 BBC news: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought]

S: Bob, give us the summary on the new computer models about the formation of the moon.

B: Define summary.

S: (laughs)

E: The opposite of wintry.

(all laugh)

S: All right, not Bob length.

B: Researchers are redefining the rarity of Earth-moon system. They're saying that a whopping one in ten rocky planets may have satellites that's as big as our moon when compared to the Earth. Using these new sophisticated computer simulations it seems that the massive impacts that resulted in our relatively huge moon may be common, actually, throughout the universe. This research is coming from the Scientists from the Zurich Institute of Theoretical Physics in Switzerland and the Morishma at the University of Colorado in the US. They simulated planet formation from gas and chunks of planetesimal and they took these results and they factored them into another simulation, an N-body simulation, to see what the chances were that large satellites could form for that. And they were quite surprised to find that there was about a one in twelve chance of forming a planet and the satellite moon with both having more than half the mass of the Earth and the moon respectively. Now I liked how the BBC news article I read went into a little bit more statistical information about this. They were saying that the one in twelve or one in ten figure that you read everywhere else, they were saying that for the full range of possibilities it was between one in 45 and one in four. So that's kind of what the statistics were telling them, and they kinda distilled that down to about one in twelve. So now this is all tied, of course, to the once controversial and now pretty much generally accepted theory about how our moon formed. The common wisdom now is that it was a collision between the Earth Mark I, which some people refer to as Earth Mark I, colliding with this Mars-sized object and creating a huge debris ring which kind of coalesced in about a hundred years to form the moon as we know it. Of course it was a lot closer, about 15 times larger – the parent size is about 15 times larger than the way we see it now. The cool thing is that this could actually help with planet hunting – I wasn't aware of this. Large moons can distort the measurements that are made to find planets. This new knowledge could actually make finding them easier. Now Phil wasn't sure, I mean, just because you know this fact, how could this make it easier? I mean what is it about the distortion, how could the moon distort the measurements of finding a planet? A planet and a moon are pretty much like one system from a distance anyway. You know, I was having a hard time trying to figure out how a big moon could distort planet hunter measurements.

PP: Actually I'm with you, I don't now. I read the press release and it's pretty vague on that. I've not read the actual paper or talked to anybody about this. The way you find planets are actually a bunch of ways, but the two big ones are either the way the planet is pulling on the star and as it orbits the star the star is making a little circle and it creates a dopplar shift and you can see that sort of red and blue shift in the spectrum. But that should not be affected very much by a big moon. It's hard enough to see that with a low mass planet like the Earth around a star it's a very very tiny effect.

B: Right

PP: The bigger the planet the closer in it is the more that effect is and the easier it is to see. And it's hard to see how the moon would affect this – I don't know, I'm not that familiar with it. The other way is through transits where the planet literally gets between us and the star and it blocks a little bit of the starlight. Now for a Jupiter-sized planet and a star like the sun - it'll block about one percent of the star's light which is actually fairly easy to measure, you can use equipment you can buy off the shelf, which is really cool. For an Earth-like planet the effect is actually, I think, a ten thousandth the brightness of the star which is a lot harder to measure. If there's a moon that's orbiting that planet and the moon is, like, like, our moon, a significant fraction of the planet's size, then you might see more or less light dropping. If the planet and the moon transit the star you get a slightly bigger dip than if the moon is lined up with the planet from our point of view, if that makes any sense.

B: Yeah.

PP: That's the only way I can see off the top of my head there may be other things. You need to talk to an exoplanet hunter to get the deal on this.

B: Exoplanet hunter – what a cool job.

R: It's a great name.

B: The other thing that this highlights is the importance of the moon itself. Without the moon the Earth would be a very different place and I think it's a pretty safe bet that homosapiens would not be here without the moon. One of the big things that it does is that it stabilises the tilt of the Earth's axis, what's referred to as its obliquity. Without this the tilt would over greatly extended time-spans would mess with the overall heating of the Earth in ways that could make it fairly inimical to life, although I'm sure it would find ways around it.

R: Umm, would that be needed though, if nothing had smashed into the Earth in the first place to create the moon? In other words, is the moon just balancing out the wobble that was created by its own creation?

B: No. No, without the moon and without any impact they think they found some good examples that ummm... Yeah, the tilt would vary over great periods of time.

R: Because there are lot of planets without moons. What is it about the Earth that makes it require a moon?

PP: Well think of it this way. If you have a spinning top and it's perfectly balanced it'll spin really well. But if you put a lump of clay on one side of it and let it spin it'll start to wobble and that wobble can become chaotic. And so that's kinda what's happening with the Earth. You've got continents that are moving around and they cause it to be off-balance. As the Earth spins and as the moon pulls on the Earth you get a bulge around the middle of the Earth and it's the torque of the moon on that bulge, I think, that stabilises it. I'm not an expert on this but that's how I understand it. And that prevents the Earth's wobble from becoming chaotic. Venus spins much more slowly than the Earth, so I don't think it's as big of a deal. Mars, on the other hand, has roughly the same rate of spin as the Earth – it spins once a day – and there is evidence that in the past the axis of its spin has changed and some times a lot, indicating that... and I should add that it does not have a big moon it has too little dinky moons, and so it's possible that without that big moon torquing the Earth and keeping the spin from going all wobbly you get a planet that flips over and that has drastic effects on the seasons. It's not obvious, it's certainly not easy to understand how that all works, but it does seem to be the way the science is pointing right now.

S: Yeah, I remember when I was reading about the stabilising effect of the moon on the Earth, and how nice it is to have that. And at the same time, how rare the previous thinking was about how common we would see an Earth-Moon type of system. I was depressed as it would probably be very very few worlds out there that are as compatible to human life as our own system so if this is true, if these computer models are correct, and it's actually far more common, maybe, on average, one per solar system or something of that order of magnitude, that's reassuring for prospects of habitable planets out there.

B: Absolutely.

PP: You know it's reassuring, but it's not surprising at all. I've never bought into the Rare Earth idea.

S: Yeah

PP: You can say Earths must be common because we're on one – what are the odds? But that's, you know, you guys know all about that – it's like the water in the puddle saying “How remarkable it is that there's just enough water in here to fit the puddle” - you're looking at it the wrong way. So the idea that we're just the right size, just the right distance from the sun, with the moon and the magnetic field, and, and, and... it's like, you know, I'm not buying into all this. I think that there are lots of Earths out there. It's not uncommon to see stars like the sun. 10% of the stars in the galaxy are like the sun. We're starting to see that planets are common. We're starting to get an idea that planets the size of the Earth are common. If they're spinning rapidly and they have enough radioactive materials in their core they're gonna have a magnetic field. And so I think that that's something we're gonna see as common. And now, you know, if the moon is important for us to be here it seems very unlikely that we'd be the only planet in the galaxy like that, and we know that collisions are common, we know that planets are moving around in their star systems early on in the history of these things and so all of this stuff does not strike me as being all that surprising. I would have expected it. I don't know if I would have said as many as one in four Earth-like planets might have big moons, but the way objects get tossed around and the recent finding that there may be more planets wandering interstellar space than there are stars in the galaxy...

S: Yeah, how cool is that?

B: That is awesome

PP: ...Lends credence to this. The planets are moving around, they interact with each other, they change positions in the solar system, they toss each other out gravitationally, so we know that this stuff happens. So I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I would say that this finding is not surprising. It's just cool.

S: Yeah, it's just never been aesthetically pleasing to me to think that the Earth is really really rare. For all the reasons that you said. There's sort of the principle of mediocrity or whatever you call it, that chances are we're an unremarkable planet around an unremarkable star, around an unremarkable galaxy, you know. There's never any reason to think that we have a very special position in the universe. But there is a bit of the lottery fallacy that you were alluding to. If life were very rare, any life that did arise would marvel at how rare it was. Right?

PP: Unless there were two planets in that system that had life on them

S: Right

B: Right

S: But the premise is that life is rare, so that would be possible but exceedingly unlikely. But the billions of planets roaming around interstellar space is fascinating but it's also a bit scary because you think what's the possibility that, like, a Jupiter-sized planet will come ripping through the solar system.

PP: Very very rare. The universe is a very big place, the odds of that happening are extremely low. If they were high we probably wouldn't be here, right?

S: Right

PP: If over four and half billion years, the age of the Earth, some Jupiter-sized planet... if the odds were 100% that it would scream through the solar system it would have happened by now. So the odds of it happening are very very low. It makes for a great science-fiction movie.

S: Yeah

PP: Or a good novel or something like that, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it as a certainty. Certainly they're out there. That's something I've been wondering about for a long time – if there are frozen planets out there, and it's nice to see this big study. I mean this is not theoretical – these were observations that...

S: Yeah

PP: These planets gave themselves away through their gravity, effecting stars behind them and magnifying that light using basically a relativistic lens to... gravitational lens that Einstein predicted. So this is a direct observation and extrapolating to the entire sky you get this number of hundreds of billions of planets like this, which is awesome. But I don't think that hundreds of billions of planets spread out over the volume of a galaxy... it's still pretty thin stuff, so I don't think that this is that big of a problem for us.

E: What are the chances of any of those planets having life? You've gotta consider it small to none.

PP: Hard to say, you know. Jupiter is warmer than it would be... Let me rephrase that, it's actually radiating more heat than it receives from the sun. Left over heat from its formation, as well as some other sources of heat, so a giant planet could still be fairly warm, but there are other problems – there are gigantic convection currents bringing gas up and down so any life in a temperate zone would be dragged down to the hotter interior, so that's always been the problem with the theoretical models of how life might be inside a Jupiter-like planet. But you know what? I've learnt not to bet against nature. And I think that's the way to go. If they're out there, who knows? We'd have to go and take a look to be sure.

B: So this is all good but what's with the attitude?

PP: Shut up! What attitude?

E: You tell him

S: It was my attitude!

PP: My attitude of wonder and joy about the wonders of the universe? Is that what you're complaining about?

J: I'm pretty sure I've asked you this before but I live like a moment to moment life, which means that you could tell me the same joke, but, Phil because you really understand things, you know what's out there, you can write books like you did about the 59 ways you can get killed. Do you ever legitimately get frightened?

R: Like clowns, things like that?

E: Like crying in your bed at night?

J: No, I mean, you know... Is there anything that occurs that you're like, 'you know what, that is down right frightening - I don't like the idea that that might be coming at us at like a million miles an hour right now', you know what I mean?

PP: Oh, there's a ton of stuff like that. But you gotta differentiate between that stuff existing and that stuff being an actual danger – a threat to the Earth. Gamma ray bursts, supernovae and, my favourite, magnetars are these incredibly charged neutron stars that have field strengths that is quadrillions of times stronger than the Earth's magnetic fields, and they release super enormous blasts of energy and we got hit by one in 2004 actually, although it didn't really damage us. If there was one closer to us it could. But, you know what, we haven't been damaged by one of those things, there hasn't been a gamma ray burst in human history that has hurt us. There are no stars close enough to go supernova that can hurt us in this way, so this is not the kind of stuff that worries us. An asteroid impact, yeah, that could happen, a solar flare damaging our satellites and causing issues down here because of that – that's a legitimate worry, but that's also the sort of thing we can choose to protect ourselves from, we just haven't made that choice yet. So I don't lie awake at night fretting about these things. I have to worry about paying my taxes and worrying about what my kid is doing. Those are more the day-to-day things I'm worried about.

S: Yeah, Jay, it's far worse being a physician, knowing all the ways the body can fail, and knowing that one of those will happen to you soon.

J: Soon! (Laughs)

R: You make it sound like a threat

S: Soon-ish, within decades, which on astronomical scales is much quicker than anything that Phil has to worry about.

J: Steve, do you lie in bed at night going, “Nooo!!”

S: There definitely are times when I get little symptoms where I know all the horrible things it could be a symptom of, and I just have to say alright, don't worry about it, it's probably nothing and so far it has been.

J: Yeah, I find as I get older I ask myself a lot, and I mean this dead seriously, 'am I having a heart attack right now?' Is that pain right there the beginning of the end?

S: That's true, when you're in your 20's and you get a little left-sided chest pain you don't worry about it, you're like, I'm 25, you know, I'm not having a heart attack. But when you're 46 and the same exact thing happens you're like, okay, how much do I gotta worry about this?

PP: Hey wait a minute, why choose the age of 46?

S: Because that's my current age.

PP: Okay, yeah, that's my age as well.

S: Yeah. Yeah we're getting to that age where, you know, little things like that crop up and it's actually statistally plausible that it could be something serious.

PP: Everything is cancer. You know every time I look and I see a new mole on my shoulder it's like, 'Oh no!'

R: I don't even do that just with moles, with me it's just whatever random pain I have. Well it's cancer of the whatever-that-is.

B: 'Whatever-that-is'! God!(laughs)

S: ...Of the connectigizoid!

J: The claven.

B: “The clay-ven” (in mock-Jewish voice)

=== UFO Nazi Connection (50:59)===
[http://weirdnews.aol.com/2011/06/07/area-51-ufos-aliens-annie-jacobsen-nazi-soviet_n_869706.html#s285846&title=Area_51_Warning Huffington Post: Area 51 personnel feel 'betrayed' by Annie Jacobsen's Soviet-Nazi UFO connection]

S: Alright, one more news item. We have to end on a funny one for Phil. Alright Evan, tell us about UFO Nazis.

E: Well how about this one? So there's an author and her name is Annie Jacobson, and she has a new book that is out called 'Area 51 – An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base'. She spends the majority of her time in this book talking the legitimate science and projects and experimental aircraft and other things that have been taking place at this facility for the past sixty years. She got together with some people who used to work there who had declassified information and they would share it. However, it's the last chapter of the book which is making headlines. Because she is drawing the conclusion that the famous saucer crash involved with Area 51 Roswell is actually a conspiracy in which the Auchwitz doctor Joseph Mangles, the German aircraft designing brothers the Haughton brothers and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin formed a conspiracy in the late 1940's to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer which was crowded, get this, with 13-year olds which were surgically altered under the...

S: By Joseph Mangola

E: ...By Joseph Mangola.

S: Yeah. To look alien.

E: ...To look alien. And that is actually the recovered pieces of the famous crash. And those people, the surgically altered people are the supposed aliens that were recovered from the crash.

R: Well I'll never again say that the 911 Truthers have the dumbest conspiracy theory out there.

S: Well you know there's always gotta be one dumber than whatever you're currently talking about.

R: That's true.

E: Now Annie Jacobson is a journalist. And the reviews I've read about the book say that she's done a decent, not perfect, job in the various chapters of the book that have to deal with the hard sciences. But this last chapter in which she draws this conclusion, she's basing it entirely upon an unnamed source, one person, an unnamed source.

PP: Glen Beck (coughs).

(all laugh)

PP: Sorry, something in my throat there.

E: Might as well be. ...Who apparently fed her all this information and that's what she's going by. And she says "Oh I totally trust this source, I mean he's very, very reliable."

R: I think I know who this source is; the source is her publicist.

S: (laughs) I was gonna say that.

B: That's right Rebecca.

E: Exactly.

R: Noone would be talking about this if it weren't for that last chapter.

E; Right? Because you have to have a new angle to this whole story...

S: Exactly.

E: ...if you want your book to sell well in these days.

R: Yeah, especially 'cause it was that last chapter. I's like you know she turned in the completed book and it was all sourced and nice and ready to go, and they're like "This is good, but..."

PP: "It's ''way'' too accurate."

R: "...can't you just throw in one giant lie at the end? Just tack it on. Good job."

Steve: It's like Steve Martin tells that joke - if you're making demands, you have to always throw in that one crazy one. "I want the letter M ''stricken'' from the alphabet!" That way you can always claim insanity afterwards.

(laughter)

S: It's sort of a simple thing. In the last chapter you gotta go totally off the rails and start making crazy conspiracy theories 'cause that's what's gonna sell your book.

PP: I actually have two comments on this. One is that this idea that Nazia are tied with UFOs has been around for a long time. I remember reading a novel based on this conspiracy theory back when I was in grad school in the 90s. And the book wasn't new then. I think it was called "Genesis". It was this ginormous 800 page science fiction novel. It sounded fun and it was just basically the Nazi scientists that were behind all this escaped, they moved to Antarctica, they built a base there, they perfected UFO technology, and we're gonna rise again basically, so this has been around a while.

S: This is Richard Hoagland. He wrote "Our Breakaway Nazi Civilisation". He thinks NASA's run by NAZIs and they're the shadow government that's doing all this UFO/face on Mars stuff.

PP: As soon as you say "Richard Hoagland", you can just put a period after that and we're done as far as I'm concerned.

(laughter)

S: ''Hoaglaaaand''!

B: Oh yeah.

E: (laughs)

J: Steve, when you say that, just quickly going through your mind, like okay, he really believes that there's NAZIs out there, and I have to make light of this real quick, but does he actually think they're still wearing their badass clothes with the leather and the boots, you know they still have (inaudible) and...?

R: You know there are still NAZIs out there, let's (laughs) not suggest that there's no such thing as NAZIs anymore.

S: Jay, I'm looking at a picture on his website, and it's a spacechip - a Nazi spaceship, that looks like a modified NAZI helmet with the skull and crossbones on the front.

(all laugh)

J: Right, there's my answer!

E: That would not be difficult mein Fuhrer.

J: A NAZI spaceship!

PP: There's a movie about NAZI UFOs from the Moon. It actually looks like a pretty fun movie.

E: Is is a porn, what the hell?

S: Nazi UFOs from the Moon?

PP: Does anyone know? It was announced about a year ago. I think it's an independent project. This is a great idea for a fictionalised novel or movie, but then on the other hand most of the stuff that Hoagland does is heavily fictionalised so there you go.

E: You know Phil, also there have been stories in the past drawn up by the UFO crowd that the Soviets had something to do with the crash at the famous crash that took place at Roswell as well. So what's happening is kind of blending all of these different aspects together and the alien bodies that were supposedly recovered. She's picking out these these pieces and forming her own little opinion as to what this all means to her

PP: You know it was the expanding timewaves from the Roswell crash that caused building 7 to collapse on September 11.

(sounds of agreement)

R: Yeah that makes sense actually.

B: I hate when timewaves do that!

PP: I've got the equations right here. It's quite simple. I actually... to even the most dimmest person to do a second (inaudible).

B: Most dimmest!

PP: I want to say one other thing about this too. In the article on weirdnews.aol.com where Ms Jacobson is being quoted, she says "I don't have to..." Well what happened was these guys basically came out and said "Listen, we were sources for some of her information in the book, the good stuff in the book, and we were shocked by this last chapter, and I can't believe she took our information and did this, and she didn't ask us about this." And she is ''quoted'' here as sayng, this is a quote, "For starters, journalists don't share their information with their sources prior to publication,. That's a standard rule." she said "...so I'm following journalist tradition." So what she's really saying is "I got this information. I'm not going to go check with the experts on it to find out what's going on because journalists don't do that." You know what? ''I think they do'' I think that's ''exactly'' what journalists do. They check their sources. So that quotation by her really sets off a lot of alarms in my head, and she goes on to say "What others think of my book can't matter to me in terms of being a journalist." (laughs) The word journalist is not a shield to be able to say whatever you want.

R: Maybe if she calls herself a journalist enough times, she'll actually become a journalist. That must be what she's thinking.

PP: You know, I've seen stuff like this happen before and I always want to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. I don't know what's going on, I haven't read the book, I've only read this article. The article could be sensationalising the last chapter. It could be relatively harmless and being misinterpreted, whatever. But these quotations from her ''really'' make me suspicious about the integrity of that last chapter. I think I'm safe in saying that.

S: Well Phil thank you for joining us it's always a pleasure.

PP: Thanks everybody. Thanks for having me on, it's always fun.

E: Thank you Phil.

S: We're gonna see you at TAM in about four weeks.

PP: I'll see you guys at TAM. I'm gonna see you at CSICon in New Orleans in October...

S: And DragonCon.

B: DragonConnn!

PP: ...and DragonCon yeah, I can't wait for DragonCon that's gonna be great.

S: You're gonna be sick of us.

R: Yeah.

E: Gonna be?

PP: I'm sorry, gonna be?

R: He's already sick of all of you.

E: Hello? Hello? Moreso.

J: Hello? (laughs)

S: (laughter) Alright goodnight Phil.

PP: Thanks folks...

J: Later!

PP: ...talk to you later.

B: Night buddy.

== Who's That Noisy? ( )==

== Science or Fiction ( ) ==

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110606171416.htm Item number one]. Astronomers find evidence that some or perhaps all of the large moons of Jupiter were proto-planets captured from the inner solar system in the early days of the solar system when Jupiter was much closer to the sun. [http://news.byu.edu/archive11-jun-redbluestates.aspx Item number two]. Research finds that citizens from so-called "blue" states are just as likely to hold liberal or conservative views on specific issues as citizens from "red" states. And [http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=24890&news_item=5619 item number three]. Scientists discover that dolphins actually project two beams of ultrasound for use in echolocation.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:17:13) ==
<blockquote>"Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are."</blockquote>
J: Eric Butterworth!

== Announcements ( ) ==

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SGU Episode 308

2013-02-22T05:41:39Z

Jessiessica: /* UFO Nazi Connection (50:59) */

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{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 308
|episodeDate = 8thJune 2011
|episodeIcon = File:Nazi_Spaceship.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = PP: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Plait Phil Plait]
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2011-06-08.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=308
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,36132.0.html
|qowText = Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are.
|qowAuthor = Eric Butterworth
|}}

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

S: Hello and welcome to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday June 8th, 2011 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: Yuan Shang Hao. Good evening to all of our listeners in China of which there are...

J: I like your intonation

S: Inflection

B: I'm not sure if it was accurate though but it sounded good

E: Does anyone listen to us in China?

R: Of course, yeah, we have some Chinese listeners

S: But if you use the wrong inflection you say, 'I wanna massage your grandmother', so you've gotta be careful

E: You know the thing about saying 'good evening' in Chinese is that I want to say it again in an hour. I don't know what it is

B: O.M.G.

R: Wow

J: That was so bad

R: He's been working on that joke all night

E: Where's my rim shot? Ah crud.
(cymbals)

R: You get a sad trombone
(sad trombone)

S: Rebecca you're joining us from London this week

J: I say

R: I am, yes, I'm back in Old Blighty, as no-one calls it

E: Rebecca Poppins

R: Yeah, so once again the listeners are being treated to Rebecca at one thirty in the morning. Awesome.

J: But you're still kind of on US time

R: No, not really

J: But you're not in a bad mood

R: No, not really

J: Well at least you're happy recording the show

R: No

== This Day in Skepticism ()==
June 11, 1854. G.F. Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved in a lecture titled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.

S: Alright. Evan tell us what is absolutely fascinating about this day in skepticism

E: Well on this day that you're listening to the show it was 1854 in which the famous mathematician Bernhard Riemann proposed that space is curved and he announced this in a lecture titled On the Hypothesis on which Geometry is Based, which is apparently a very famous lecture that he gave. And what he did is he described the old-fashioned, Euclidean two-dimensional plane geometry along with some other examples of old geometry and... well let me put it to you this way. There's an example in which on a piece of paper there lived a bookworm, right, and this bookworm was drawn on the piece of paper so it was drawn in two-dimensional. You take the paper and you fold it up and you crumple it up. Now the worm drawn on the paper has no sense of the cumbling and the distortion of space that's going on around him because he also exists in two dimensions. Right, follow me so far?

S: Right

R: Yeah

B: Gotcha

S: Oh yeah

E: Whereas actually that crumpled paper is in three dimensions. So extend that out, we live in a world of three dimensions, but actually everything going around us exists in, what we believe is four dimensions, the fourth dimensions being time. And this was important not only as an important discovery of his time but it also influenced scientists and physicists such as Einstein who used Riemann's work in his theory of general relativity in which he incorporated time as the fourth dimension.

S: Yeah but when Riemann was talking about higher dimension I think he was talking about higher spatial dimensions, not necessarily with time as the fourth dimension. That was something that Einstein inserted. He was saying that space itself is curved into a physical fourth dimension which we can't perceive because we're on the surface of the paper like the...

E: That's right, we're like the worm. The two-dimensional worm on the paper has no idea it's getting all crumpled and crushed up.

S: But it's interesting. Imagine being the first guy to think of space as not linear, that's it's not Euclidean, that it's curved. That's mind blowing, right?

E: Big deal

B: The way he did that was to... I guess he was the first one to actually think of introducing numbers at every point in space and that was how he came upon the idea of using that method to describe how it was bent. I guess a pretty key insight. I wonder how relativity would have been affected if he hadn't come up with that and whether it would have been delayed significantly.

R: I don't know. For some reason this reminds me a lot of, was it Plato? Plato's cave/wall idea of people who are...

E: Shadows?

R: Yeah, I guess seeing shadows on a cave/wall so they assume that that's all that life is are these two-dimensional shadows, so if you were to explain the three-dimensional world to them it would blow their minds. And of course you can't say that Plato was thinking in terms of, well maybe there was a fourth dimension, a fourth spatial dimension as such, but I mean he was thinking in those sorts of terms, don't you think?

S: Yeah well that... our perception of reality is shaped by the physical reality in which we live

J: Right

S: We may be ignorant of reality in the same way that the cave shadow people are ignorant of their ultimate reality

R: Right and that's not to suggest that Plato had any sort of evidence of a fourth spatial dimension. I just want to put that out there. For conspiracy theorists out there...

S: He was talking more in just general philosophical terms, not that specific manifestation

J: Bob, what about this thing where we have these three dimensions that we can easily perceive and understand. But why do the dimensions end there? In other words, why couldn't there have been a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth dimension that are physical dimensions?

B: There actually might be and some theories actually, string theory and things, actually consider that - have that as an integral part of that. But those dimensions are, it's kind of weird, they're actually wrapped up and compacted in such a small space that they're not visible easily, so higher dimensions can exist in our universe but we just can't really detect them yet, it's not obvious beyond the three spatial dimensions we're aware of now.

E: I've heard that membrane theory relies on 11 dimensions - they can calculate 11 dimensions based on those theories.

B: Yeah

J: How about - I've heard of other theories talking about other dimensions of time. Imagine two dimensions of time, say, four or five dimensions of say space and two of time. What would that be like?

R: Crazy. That would be...

B: Crazy. How many... two watches wherever you go

S: This kind of stuff only makes sense in the context of mathematics. We can't, you know, really think about it physically.

J: You know just because we can think of them mathematically does that mean that they actually exist?

S: No. No, but there is something to the fact that it makes the Math more elegant. It sort of solves problems to bump things up a dimension and think of the reality as a three dimensional manifestation of a four dimensional reality or however many you ultimately get up to. So what does this mean? I mean this is a big question in theoretical physics or science in general, you know, when things start to fit together and become more elegant and have more explanatory power. That's nice, but it's not the same thing as it being actually the case and that's where we get into the debate about whether or not string theory can be a real science because it's not empirical, just theoretical.

== News Items ==
=== SGU-24 (7:24)===
The first 24 hour Live SGU event. September 23, 2011, starting at 8:00pm

S: Well we have a couple of news items coming up. Phil Plait's going to be coming up in a while to talk about some astronomy news but first we have a couple of other news items. The first one is SGU related. Do you guys know... I know you guys know what's going to happen... I hope you know by now - September 23rd and 24th, this fall, 2011, a very special event will be occurring: we will be holding... we have decided for some crazy reason to do a 24 hour live streaming SGU event.

R: Extravaganza

B: Extreme is right

J: And I want everyone to know from the beginning that I'm totally against it

E: Yes, we are bringing J kicking and screaming to this event

R: Which should only make it more entertaining I think

E: Oh yeah

B: I thought of a name, I just thought of a name for it

S: What?

B: Skeptapalooza

S: Oh come on

R: That's a terrible name

B: Best one I've heard yet

S: Alright, our working title is SGU24 but we're certainly open to suggestions

J: And I get to play Jack Bower then

E: "Where's the bomb?"

S: Does that mean we get to torture you and stop your heart and then get it going again?

J: Jump my heart with a car battery and then I'll be able to do 14 hours of show?
(all laugh)

I loved every goddam season of that programme.

R: You know Jay, for some reason when I hear you mention 24 hours it doesn't really bother me that much, but when you mention 14 hours it occurs to me, like, we will have already been recording for ten hours and we'll have 14 to go and now I'm against it too.

S: Well that's like we were flying to Australia and we were on the plane for what seems like forever and we find out we still have ten more hours left on the plane. Yeah it's bad. This won't be quite that bad because it'll be in my house

E: We like doing the heavy lifting, these special events, things that other sane people would never try.

S: So more details will be unfolding over the ensuing months, but save the dates September 23rd at 8pm and for the following 24 hours you'll be able to eat, sleep and breathe the SGU. And it'll be video. And we'll be broadcasting from a very special location.

R: You already said, from your house

S: But it's a special location within my house.

E: Right...

B: And we haven't named it yet, we need a special name

J: Bob, we did name it!

S: It's the skeptilair.

R: (groans) Oh, please make it stop.

E: The skeptiman cave, with Rebecca

R: It's just gonna continue to get worse isn't it.

S: Unfortunately

J: This show will be fused... it'll be infused... with have Star Trek, with Star Wars, it'll have internet, it'll have TVs, it'll have computers, it'll have gadgets, it'll have things that pop and bubble

B: Skulls!

E: And it'll have no bathroom breaks. We'll all have to go down on one leg.

S: We'll all have catheters going to bottles strapped to our thighs

B: And one dead body

E: Oooo...

S: At least one dead body, yes

E: At least one, if not more

J: Yeah, SGU just jumped the shark

(all laugh)

R: Also we'll be introducing a young child onto the show. Our new, six-year-old love child.

(all chuckle nervously)

B: I thought you were referencing Oliver from the Brady Bunch

R: Oliver

B: The punk

R: The kid on married with children

E: You remember the Brady Bunch, Rebecca? No?

R: I've heard of the Brady Bunch

B: (gasp)

E: Heard of the Brady Bunch...

R: Anyway, the point is

J: 'Pork chops and applesauce'

(all laugh)

E: 'Oh, my nose!' (chuckles to self)

R: Are these... Are these Brady Bunch jokes? Is that what we...

J: Mum always said don't paintball in the house

E: That's why they're all zooming over your head

S: Yes

R: Yes. Alright, can we go back to Star Trek?

J: Oh woah.

E: 'He's dead Jim'

B: Never thought I'd hear her say that

S: But worse, can you imagine 24 hours of this?

R: I'm just gonna bring earplugs

(Steve laughs)

R: I'm going to bring a big pair of headphones. So I can just listen to my music.

S: Noise cancellation.

Alright, well, let's go on...

B: Geek cancellation

=== Psychic Tipster (12:06)===
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/usa-crime-bodies-idUSN0717557520110608 Reuters: UPDATE 6-Texas authorites find no bodies after psychic tip]

S: ...To another news item, Rebecca. A psychic gave a very interesting tip to the police

R: That's right, Steve. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies'. That was the headline that Reuters decided to run with. 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies, including children, buried in a mass grave in a rural home East of Houston', local media reported.

(All laugh)

R: Ah, it goes on to say, 'It might not have been 30, it was 25 to 30, but preliminary reports did indicate that there were children.' So a really horrific scene there, Tuesday night, that was on June 7. And there was a lot of confusion as these reports were coming in, but it turns out that this amazing find was in fact discovered by a psychic. It came in through a psychic tip, the psychic told the police to go to this specific house in Texas and to search for bodies, the police went there, they didn't find anything so the same caller, the same anonymous psychic caller called back and again stated that there were bodies there it's just that the police were in slightly the wrong spot. So the psychic gave even more exact directions so the police went back and they found... Nothing.

S: Nothing?

Nothing. There was nothing. They found a small amount of blood on the porch of a house nearby and for some reason that turned into 'Texas authorities find up to 30 bodies including children', which is basically what the psychic had reported. But try as the might, the Texas authorities were actually unable to find any evidence of any bodies. The home-owners, the people who lived in the house on that property were truckers, cross-country truckers, who were out on the road when it happened. When reached for comment they said no, they were not murderers.

J: We don't know nothing about no bodies

B: Exactly

E: 'No bodies' (laughs)

R: But, apparently some slightly deranged person had cut his wrists on their porch a few weeks back.

S: Apparently it was the daughter's fiancée who was AWOL from the army

R: Yes

S: And cut himself deliberately and blood went all over the place and now is in a military psych facility, apparently.

R: Yes. And so, yeah, there was absolutely nothing. There was no sign of any bodies anywhere on the property. There was no reason to suspect that these people killed anyone. It was all thanks to one anonymous quote-unquote 'psychic'. So now after it's finally come out there were, in fact, no bodies, the police are discussing trying to charge the tipster. Although there's no real indication whether or not they'll be able to discover the identity of the caller. But hopefully they can and hopefully this person will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Because this is what we see again and again. You see, when people ask, 'What's the harm? Psychic detectives, they're just adding another, you know, another possibility of finding a body or finding a murderer', well this is the problem. You have somebody that thinks that they're a psychic offering what they think... And they might actually believe this, they may actually think that they're having psychic visions about something and think that they're helping. But what they're only doing, really, is that they're wasting the police's time. Can you imagine how many detectives and how many offices they had to be on this searching this property to find out that there's absolutely nothing? And that...

S: And the FBI get involved.

R: Yeah. Surely they had something better to do.

S: Yeah

E: There were aerial video pictures of the groups - all the cars and all the detectives and the personnel - it was throngs of people at this supposed place. It was a huge waste of resources. Huge.

R: Yeah. And, of course, to me it's still not as bad as the cases you have where there's been a disappearance of someone and there's been a quote-unquote 'psychic' contact the relatives or someone and say that they have evidence of where this person is.

J: (In character) The kid's dead.

R: Exactly, that causes an incredible amount of emotional, psychological damage to these families. In this case, at least the damage was just economic, I suppose. But that's your tax dollars at work. Tracking down the pointless tips from pychics.

S: Now Rebecca, there're a few details to this story that I found very interesting. Of course, I'm basing this... I've read multiple articles on this and they were shuffling around the same basic facts. And that one was the blood on the porch. Another one though, was that when the cops got there they described a quote-unquote 'Overwhelming smell of decomposition'.

R: Oh yeah, yeah I saw that noted as well.

S: Yeah, so... which leant... so now you have the blood and the decomp. which meant 'oh right, this is legit, there's something here', so that's how they justified the massive response. Yeah, initially it was just a couple of guys going to check it out, but these details led to the more... calling in the FBI and getting the bigger response. Plus they also noted that there were some details, some, you know, some geographic details relating to the layout of the house that the psychic got pretty accurately and that that convinced them also that this was a legitimate tip, and not just a lunatic.

R: Right. And of course maybe the psychic just had knowledge of this area, been by or something.

S: Yeah

R: There was also the fact that apparently the property owner's son is a convicted sex offender, though he hasn't lived there for over a year and that the smell, the foul stench that the police identified was found to be coming from piles of rotting garbage.

S: Yeah. They were truckers who were on the road, so they were...

R: Right

S: Yeah

R: There were a lot of little details that when combined with this quote-unquote 'psychic tip' led the police to realise they... you know, needed to do something because these were all adding to a sort-of confirmation bias

S: Yeah, exactly, it's circumstantial evidence, confirmation bias, and you think, 'What's the chance that the police checking out a tip are gonna find blood on the porch?' Well it turns out it's probably not... You know first it asks the wrong question. The question is not, 'What's the chance of finding blood?', it's 'What's the chance of finding something suspcious?'

R: Right

S: And all the different things that could be suspicious. And the fact that somebody bled sometime in the last week or so was not that remarkable. And the quote-unquote 'decomp' was just the truckers on the road left the garbage behind which was rotting and smelling.

R: Yeah

S: So those, kind of, circumstantial things, you know, it's actually pretty likely, but when you're hunting for confirmation of your suspicions it's amazing how many connections you can make even on something apparently random like this. My only other question is, as you say, was this really just a random tip from an alleged psychic or did she have reason to point the police out to this house?

R: Yeah, I mean I, not knowing anything about... anything... (laughs)

S: You know, we don't have the details

R: Yeah, it's hard to say

E: It's unfolding, you know, it's still unfolding

R: I'm hoping that maybe somebody is looking into the guy who slit his wrists on the porch - I mean, it was a woman who called in but it's obviously some bad blood, so to speak, happening around there. So it's not out of the question to imagine that there might be someone who had reason to want to disrupt the people who lived there. That could be a cause.

S: And the police said specifically that somebody was looking into the revenge angle. That this was done to make trouble for the home-owners

R: Yeah

S: Okay. Well we're going to bring in Phil Plait the Bad Astronomy to cover these next few items because they have an Astronomy-theme. So Phil, welcome to Skeptics' Guide.

21:20

PP: Hey, thanks for having me on once again

S: It's always great to have you, Phil Plat

PP: Kay, thanks

R: Oh, yeah, right, rings a bell

E: Phil Prat, what a good gag

PP: You know I don't care if people mispronounce my name so long as they can spell it and can find it online

R: Right, spoken like a true nerd

E: Can we call you Philip?

PP: No

S: Is your name Philip or is it really legally just Phil?

E: I don't know, I'd have to check my birth certificate. Which I know actually has my middle name misspelled on it but there you go

R: Phil Plait doesn't know his own name

PP: Those details are irrelevant

=== Explosion on the Sun (21:57)===
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-a-huge-explosion/ Bad Astronomy, Discover magazine: The Sun lets loose a HUGE explosion]

S: So Phil, we were going to talk about this news item about this massive explosion on the sun we just had to talk about with you so won't you tell us about it?

PP: This is a pretty good story. The sun goes through these cycles, it has a magnetic field like a... like a magnet. And the magnetic field goes through cycles and it gets stronger every few years. It's an 11 year cycle. So it gets stronger then it fades, it gets stronger then it fades and we're sort of on the ramp up to the peak solar activity and we see this manifested on the surface of the sun with sunspots and solar flares and all kinds of cool stuff like that.

S: Phil, do we know what causes that cycle?

PP: No (laughs). That's the good part.

S: Okay...

PP: Well, there's some models that indicate why the sun's solar cycle goes up and down, it has to do with the way that the gas... is actually a plasma, it's an ionised gas inside the sun, is circulating around and when you move charged particles you generate a magnetic field and so this movement is very complicated and it has to do with the way that this gas is being transported in the solar interior. And what happens is is that the magnetic field gets dragged along with the stuff inside the sun, breaks through the sun's surface and that's why we see sunspots and various things, and magnetic field effects, it's the gas itself.

S: Is it an oscillation like a Cepheid variable's an oscillation, is that the theory?

PP: No, it has more to do with the way gas is flowing through the centre of the sun... well not through the centre, not through the core itself, but at the core the gas is very hot, it radiates that heat away. The gas above that then convects. The hot stuff rises and the cool stuff sinks just like in the Earth's atmosphere or in a boiling pot of water, and the problem is that that's not a simple system – the sun is rotating so there're rivers of gas like jet streams that are moving underneath the sun's surface. It's really complicated and the models that are trying to figure out how that works... They're not bad, they're doing a decent job but it's really really hard to figure out exactly all the motions that are going on inside, you know, this star that we're living nearby.

S: Right

PP: So what happens is as the magnetic field pokes through the surface of the sun it creates sunspots and these magnetic lines, you can think of them as like field lines, get tangled up and there's energy stored in them and if they get too tangled up they can actually sort of erupt – one of them snaps and it sets up a cascade or a lot of them snap and they all release their energy. You can imagine them like a bunch of mousetraps sitting on your floor and you throw a ping pong ball in there and as everything bounces around the mousetraps release all their energy you get a lot of snapping and motion and all kinds of craziness. Well that's what happens. And this can form a solar flare. It's a gigantic explosion on the surface of the sun. And it can be billions of megatons of energy released in just a few minutes. That's what happened on the sun and it wasn't actually that big of a flare as they go, they're different classes and this was a fare-to-middling sized explosion. But what happened, it was pretty unusual, is that there was an enormous fountain of gas that erupted off the surface of the sun and that's not usually associated with these types of events and now NASA has the Solar Dynamics Observatory which is this really phenomenal satellite and it's observing the sun at a lot of different wavelengths. So we have a high resolution, really gorgeous basically video, just images taken every couple of minutes or something like that, and you can string them together to make videos so you can see this flare. The eruption, this fountain of material flowing out from the sun and falling back down. And in different wavelengths it's just unbelievable it looks like, you know, ink flowing through water in one wavelength of light and in another it looks like fiery gas blowing out, it's just spectacular.

R: So Phil, how long until we all die?

PP: Ah, for you? Well it depends on your lifestyle habits – is there something you need to tell us?

R: Well, you know now I'm just a bit concerned about crazy things flying out of the sun at me.

PP: Well in this case, this particular event wasn't energetic enough to really do much. It did blow out a cloud of particles called coronal mass ejection, and that's gonna kinda sorta nick the Earth. It's not really directed at us. There maybe some aurorae associated with this, probably not much. On the other hand, you know, big flares, something that's bigger than this, we saw bigger ones earlier this year in February, they can damage satellites, they can affect the Earth's magnetic field. They can't really cause any specific problems here on Earth directly – you're not going to get irradiated, you're not going to turn into the Incredible Hulk, you're not going to melt, you're not going to turn into chud or morlocks or anything like that. Sorry.

B: Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.

PP: I know I know, a couple of you guys would probably love to see that happen.

(All laugh)

PP: But it can have effects you know. We have satellites up in space that can be damaged by this. You're basically zapping them with excess current and that can fry their electronics and we depend on a lot of the satellites like GPS, for financial transactions and all kinds of stuff like that. So corporations take this pretty seriously, they try to make sure their satellites are safeguarded against these kinds of events. Not all of them are. So we have to be careful about this and understand these sorts of events better so that we can build better satellites and protect them. Plus, you know, there're astronauts the International Space Station and they can be in danger of radioactive... well not radioactive, it's radiation, it's different than what we might we might think of as radioactivity, but these bizarre floods of subatomic particles that can come through the metal and whatnot, and I can't believe I just said whatnot, but the metal and other materials if I want to be a little more scientific, umm, in the space station - they may have to go to a better protected section of the station so that they don't get irradiated.

S: Yeah, or otherwise they might turn into the Fantastic Four

PP: I think that's true, yeah

E: Oh god

PP: Although I hope they make a better movie with actual astronauts than they would from the comic books.

S: Phil, if this explosion were aimed right at the Earth how bad would it have been?

PP: This one wouldn't have been as bad. We get some pretty spectacular aurora you know you can never say it's completely safe, we might lose a satellite, some of them might get damaged, sometimes satellites like Hubble and a lot of other ones, when they detect that there's excess current or that there's a problem they shut down automatically, they go into what's called 'safe-mode'. Sometimes, if we have enough advance warning, if there's a big flare, an X-class flare, one of these gigantic ones like we had earlier this year, or back in 2003 when the sun was just popping them off like popcorn it was really amazing, if you have enough warning you can shut down sensitive satellites and that's something that a lot of people are looking into. There's a space weather centre actually here in Boulder, it's not far from where I live, and they monitor the sun very careful, they issue warnings all the time in the hope that even just a few minutes warning can be enough to shut down these satellites and potentially save, you know, billions or tens of billions of dollars of assets in space.

E: Hey Phil just a few years ago we were talking about the lack of activity going on in the sun and how that was very unusual that low amount of activity for a long time, no sunspots for many months in a row. Now that we're seeing... since then the sun has been active with sunspots and all these other things that the sun does. What can we expect? Does the sun make up for lost time in a sense because of that lower activity and is it, like, trying to catch up to an equilibrium now?

PP: Nobody knows. I remember a couple of years ago people were arguing about this, that this long period of solar minimum which we kind of understand why it happened, or at least how it happened, but why the circumstances were set up for it to happen or not are not terribly well understood, but we do know that it was a record length of time with basically minimal solar activity. And so people were arguing, does this mean that the solar cycle will be also, you know, lower activity? when it reaches its peak will it be a lower than usual peak? Or will this mean that sun is building up energy and it's going to explode? Not literally, but you know, do something equally serious, and nobody really knows, and the thing is you have to be careful, I know you guys talk about anomaly hunting, the sun is going to do stuff like this. In February we had a bunch of X-class flares, there was a lower energy M-class flare. It was an unusual event because of that fountain of material that had never been seen before but, you know, who knows if it's actually happened before and we missed it, we just didn't have the equipment to see it, so you can't put too much credit to a single event or even a series of events. We just have to keep, you know, averaging up what's going on and see what's gonna happen. The peak of this cycle should happen in mid- to late-2013 and then into 2014 and it's actually after the peak that we usually see the strongest flares. And we'll just have to see what happens in, you know, 2014/2015 when the sun really starts to pop these guys off.

R: It seems a lot like climate science where we can't really look at it on a day-to-day scale. We have to look at it at... it's such a complex system. You know you have to look at it at a much larger scale. But, you know, I think scientists can understand that but from the perspective of someone who doesn't necessarily know how these things work I think it's easy for the media to, sort of, blow things like this out of proportion. Have you seen anything... any terrible reporting on this in that respect, Phil?

PP: Duh. Actually, this particular event... I poked around a few websites and it was being reported fairly well, but I can't remember which one it was, you know, I wanna say it was the Daily Mail but that's sort of my go-to garbage tabloid, that basically said we're all gonna die. I can't remember if that's the one I saw or not so I don't wanna cast aspersions on them when it's not deserved because usually it is the Daily Mail. But people... you're right in a lot of the things you said, people don't necessarily understand what's going on when they see this they panic. I got some emails from some people who were concerned about this and I had to say, no, you know, this was not that big of a deal. And you're right that we have to look at the long time scale. Just because a bunch of tornadoes broke out across the Mid West or in New England over the past few weeks doesn't mean they were swarming even if we get stronger hurricanes or more hurricanes this season, or a longer hurricane season doesn't mean that global warming is affecting you. You can't look at it that way, you've just got to take a step back, use longer time scale bins and hope that these trends are enough to see what's going on.

S: Yeah, and how many 11 year cycles have we been able to observe? How long have we had good observation of the sun?

PP: Well the first observations of the solar magnetic activity were actually in 1859 and it's pretty interesting actually, the guy, Carrington, looked at the sun with a visible light telescope and saw a flare – which is extremely rare for a flare to actually be seen with visible light. It's still to this day the strongest solar flare that's ever been seen. It caused all kinds of havoc on the earth at the time the telegraph... and stuff. And so we've been measuring the sun's activity now for about 150 years and when you look at the cycles they're all over the place, some are really strong some last longer some are weaker, it's just difficult to know what any given cycle's gonna do. We can only say that it's roughly 11 years it's not exactly 11 years. The activity tends to be strongest after the peak, that sort of stuff, but for any given event you can't really predict it. You can see, 'Hey look, there's a big old sun spot cluster there, and magnetic fields that are really strong, we ought to be keeping our eyes on it'. But that's no different from your tropical depression appearing in the Atlantic and the conditions look good to form a hurricane.

S: Yeah.

PP: You never now what's gonna happen. You've just gotta keep your eyes open for the precursors and hope for the best.

S: Well there's a couple of the news items we'd like you to hang around for if that's okay.

=== How Common is the Moon? (34:25)===
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13609153 BBC news: Moons like Earth's could be more common than we thought]

S: Bob, give us the summary on the new computer models about the formation of the moon.

B: Define summary.

S: (laughs)

E: The opposite of wintry.

(all laugh)

S: All right, not Bob length.

B: Researchers are redefining the rarity of Earth-moon system. They're saying that a whopping one in ten rocky planets may have satellites that's as big as our moon when compared to the Earth. Using these new sophisticated computer simulations it seems that the massive impacts that resulted in our relatively huge moon may be common, actually, throughout the universe. This research is coming from the Scientists from the Zurich Institute of Theoretical Physics in Switzerland and the Morishma at the University of Colorado in the US. They simulated planet formation from gas and chunks of planetesimal and they took these results and they factored them into another simulation, an N-body simulation, to see what the chances were that large satellites could form for that. And they were quite surprised to find that there was about a one in twelve chance of forming a planet and the satellite moon with both having more than half the mass of the Earth and the moon respectively. Now I liked how the BBC news article I read went into a little bit more statistical information about this. They were saying that the one in twelve or one in ten figure that you read everywhere else, they were saying that for the full range of possibilities it was between one in 45 and one in four. So that's kind of what the statistics were telling them, and they kinda distilled that down to about one in twelve. So now this is all tied, of course, to the once controversial and now pretty much generally accepted theory about how our moon formed. The common wisdom now is that it was a collision between the Earth Mark I, which some people refer to as Earth Mark I, colliding with this Mars-sized object and creating a huge debris ring which kind of coalesced in about a hundred years to form the moon as we know it. Of course it was a lot closer, about 15 times larger – the parent size is about 15 times larger than the way we see it now. The cool thing is that this could actually help with planet hunting – I wasn't aware of this. Large moons can distort the measurements that are made to find planets. This new knowledge could actually make finding them easier. Now Phil wasn't sure, I mean, just because you know this fact, how could this make it easier? I mean what is it about the distortion, how could the moon distort the measurements of finding a planet? A planet and a moon are pretty much like one system from a distance anyway. You know, I was having a hard time trying to figure out how a big moon could distort planet hunter measurements.

PP: Actually I'm with you, I don't now. I read the press release and it's pretty vague on that. I've not read the actual paper or talked to anybody about this. The way you find planets are actually a bunch of ways, but the two big ones are either the way the planet is pulling on the star and as it orbits the star the star is making a little circle and it creates a dopplar shift and you can see that sort of red and blue shift in the spectrum. But that should not be affected very much by a big moon. It's hard enough to see that with a low mass planet like the Earth around a star it's a very very tiny effect.

B: Right

PP: The bigger the planet the closer in it is the more that effect is and the easier it is to see. And it's hard to see how the moon would affect this – I don't know, I'm not that familiar with it. The other way is through transits where the planet literally gets between us and the star and it blocks a little bit of the starlight. Now for a Jupiter-sized planet and a star like the sun - it'll block about one percent of the star's light which is actually fairly easy to measure, you can use equipment you can buy off the shelf, which is really cool. For an Earth-like planet the effect is actually, I think, a ten thousandth the brightness of the star which is a lot harder to measure. If there's a moon that's orbiting that planet and the moon is, like, like, our moon, a significant fraction of the planet's size, then you might see more or less light dropping. If the planet and the moon transit the star you get a slightly bigger dip than if the moon is lined up with the planet from our point of view, if that makes any sense.

B: Yeah.

PP: That's the only way I can see off the top of my head there may be other things. You need to talk to an exoplanet hunter to get the deal on this.

B: Exoplanet hunter – what a cool job.

R: It's a great name.

B: The other thing that this highlights is the importance of the moon itself. Without the moon the Earth would be a very different place and I think it's a pretty safe bet that homosapiens would not be here without the moon. One of the big things that it does is that it stabilises the tilt of the Earth's axis, what's referred to as its obliquity. Without this the tilt would over greatly extended time-spans would mess with the overall heating of the Earth in ways that could make it fairly inimical to life, although I'm sure it would find ways around it.

R: Umm, would that be needed though, if nothing had smashed into the Earth in the first place to create the moon? In other words, is the moon just balancing out the wobble that was created by its own creation?

B: No. No, without the moon and without any impact they think they found some good examples that ummm... Yeah, the tilt would vary over great periods of time.

R: Because there are lot of planets without moons. What is it about the Earth that makes it require a moon?

PP: Well think of it this way. If you have a spinning top and it's perfectly balanced it'll spin really well. But if you put a lump of clay on one side of it and let it spin it'll start to wobble and that wobble can become chaotic. And so that's kinda what's happening with the Earth. You've got continents that are moving around and they cause it to be off-balance. As the Earth spins and as the moon pulls on the Earth you get a bulge around the middle of the Earth and it's the torque of the moon on that bulge, I think, that stabilises it. I'm not an expert on this but that's how I understand it. And that prevents the Earth's wobble from becoming chaotic. Venus spins much more slowly than the Earth, so I don't think it's as big of a deal. Mars, on the other hand, has roughly the same rate of spin as the Earth – it spins once a day – and there is evidence that in the past the axis of its spin has changed and some times a lot, indicating that... and I should add that it does not have a big moon it has too little dinky moons, and so it's possible that without that big moon torquing the Earth and keeping the spin from going all wobbly you get a planet that flips over and that has drastic effects on the seasons. It's not obvious, it's certainly not easy to understand how that all works, but it does seem to be the way the science is pointing right now.

S: Yeah, I remember when I was reading about the stabilising effect of the moon on the Earth, and how nice it is to have that. And at the same time, how rare the previous thinking was about how common we would see an Earth-Moon type of system. I was depressed as it would probably be very very few worlds out there that are as compatible to human life as our own system so if this is true, if these computer models are correct, and it's actually far more common, maybe, on average, one per solar system or something of that order of magnitude, that's reassuring for prospects of habitable planets out there.

B: Absolutely.

PP: You know it's reassuring, but it's not surprising at all. I've never bought into the Rare Earth idea.

S: Yeah

PP: You can say Earths must be common because we're on one – what are the odds? But that's, you know, you guys know all about that – it's like the water in the puddle saying “How remarkable it is that there's just enough water in here to fit the puddle” - you're looking at it the wrong way. So the idea that we're just the right size, just the right distance from the sun, with the moon and the magnetic field, and, and, and... it's like, you know, I'm not buying into all this. I think that there are lots of Earths out there. It's not uncommon to see stars like the sun. 10% of the stars in the galaxy are like the sun. We're starting to see that planets are common. We're starting to get an idea that planets the size of the Earth are common. If they're spinning rapidly and they have enough radioactive materials in their core they're gonna have a magnetic field. And so I think that that's something we're gonna see as common. And now, you know, if the moon is important for us to be here it seems very unlikely that we'd be the only planet in the galaxy like that, and we know that collisions are common, we know that planets are moving around in their star systems early on in the history of these things and so all of this stuff does not strike me as being all that surprising. I would have expected it. I don't know if I would have said as many as one in four Earth-like planets might have big moons, but the way objects get tossed around and the recent finding that there may be more planets wandering interstellar space than there are stars in the galaxy...

S: Yeah, how cool is that?

B: That is awesome

PP: ...Lends credence to this. The planets are moving around, they interact with each other, they change positions in the solar system, they toss each other out gravitationally, so we know that this stuff happens. So I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I would say that this finding is not surprising. It's just cool.

S: Yeah, it's just never been aesthetically pleasing to me to think that the Earth is really really rare. For all the reasons that you said. There's sort of the principle of mediocrity or whatever you call it, that chances are we're an unremarkable planet around an unremarkable star, around an unremarkable galaxy, you know. There's never any reason to think that we have a very special position in the universe. But there is a bit of the lottery fallacy that you were alluding to. If life were very rare, any life that did arise would marvel at how rare it was. Right?

PP: Unless there were two planets in that system that had life on them

S: Right

B: Right

S: But the premise is that life is rare, so that would be possible but exceedingly unlikely. But the billions of planets roaming around interstellar space is fascinating but it's also a bit scary because you think what's the possibility that, like, a Jupiter-sized planet will come ripping through the solar system.

PP: Very very rare. The universe is a very big place, the odds of that happening are extremely low. If they were high we probably wouldn't be here, right?

S: Right

PP: If over four and half billion years, the age of the Earth, some Jupiter-sized planet... if the odds were 100% that it would scream through the solar system it would have happened by now. So the odds of it happening are very very low. It makes for a great science-fiction movie.

S: Yeah

PP: Or a good novel or something like that, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it as a certainty. Certainly they're out there. That's something I've been wondering about for a long time – if there are frozen planets out there, and it's nice to see this big study. I mean this is not theoretical – these were observations that...

S: Yeah

PP: These planets gave themselves away through their gravity, effecting stars behind them and magnifying that light using basically a relativistic lens to... gravitational lens that Einstein predicted. So this is a direct observation and extrapolating to the entire sky you get this number of hundreds of billions of planets like this, which is awesome. But I don't think that hundreds of billions of planets spread out over the volume of a galaxy... it's still pretty thin stuff, so I don't think that this is that big of a problem for us.

E: What are the chances of any of those planets having life? You've gotta consider it small to none.

PP: Hard to say, you know. Jupiter is warmer than it would be... Let me rephrase that, it's actually radiating more heat than it receives from the sun. Left over heat from its formation, as well as some other sources of heat, so a giant planet could still be fairly warm, but there are other problems – there are gigantic convection currents bringing gas up and down so any life in a temperate zone would be dragged down to the hotter interior, so that's always been the problem with the theoretical models of how life might be inside a Jupiter-like planet. But you know what? I've learnt not to bet against nature. And I think that's the way to go. If they're out there, who knows? We'd have to go and take a look to be sure.

B: So this is all good but what's with the attitude?

PP: Shut up! What attitude?

E: You tell him

S: It was my attitude!

PP: My attitude of wonder and joy about the wonders of the universe? Is that what you're complaining about?

J: I'm pretty sure I've asked you this before but I live like a moment to moment life, which means that you could tell me the same joke, but, Phil because you really understand things, you know what's out there, you can write books like you did about the 59 ways you can get killed. Do you ever legitimately get frightened?

R: Like clowns, things like that?

E: Like crying in your bed at night?

J: No, I mean, you know... Is there anything that occurs that you're like, 'you know what, that is down right frightening - I don't like the idea that that might be coming at us at like a million miles an hour right now', you know what I mean?

PP: Oh, there's a ton of stuff like that. But you gotta differentiate between that stuff existing and that stuff being an actual danger – a threat to the Earth. Gamma ray bursts, supernovae and, my favourite, magnetars are these incredibly charged neutron stars that have field strengths that is quadrillions of times stronger than the Earth's magnetic fields, and they release super enormous blasts of energy and we got hit by one in 2004 actually, although it didn't really damage us. If there was one closer to us it could. But, you know what, we haven't been damaged by one of those things, there hasn't been a gamma ray burst in human history that has hurt us. There are no stars close enough to go supernova that can hurt us in this way, so this is not the kind of stuff that worries us. An asteroid impact, yeah, that could happen, a solar flare damaging our satellites and causing issues down here because of that – that's a legitimate worry, but that's also the sort of thing we can choose to protect ourselves from, we just haven't made that choice yet. So I don't lie awake at night fretting about these things. I have to worry about paying my taxes and worrying about what my kid is doing. Those are more the day-to-day things I'm worried about.

S: Yeah, Jay, it's far worse being a physician, knowing all the ways the body can fail, and knowing that one of those will happen to you soon.

J: Soon! (Laughs)

R: You make it sound like a threat

S: Soon-ish, within decades, which on astronomical scales is much quicker than anything that Phil has to worry about.

J: Steve, do you lie in bed at night going, “Nooo!!”

S: There definitely are times when I get little symptoms where I know all the horrible things it could be a symptom of, and I just have to say alright, don't worry about it, it's probably nothing and so far it has been.

J: Yeah, I find as I get older I ask myself a lot, and I mean this dead seriously, 'am I having a heart attack right now?' Is that pain right there the beginning of the end?

S: That's true, when you're in your 20's and you get a little left-sided chest pain you don't worry about it, you're like, I'm 25, you know, I'm not having a heart attack. But when you're 46 and the same exact thing happens you're like, okay, how much do I gotta worry about this?

PP: Hey wait a minute, why choose the age of 46?

S: Because that's my current age.

PP: Okay, yeah, that's my age as well.

S: Yeah. Yeah we're getting to that age where, you know, little things like that crop up and it's actually statistally plausible that it could be something serious.

PP: Everything is cancer. You know every time I look and I see a new mole on my shoulder it's like, 'Oh no!'

R: I don't even do that just with moles, with me it's just whatever random pain I have. Well it's cancer of the whatever-that-is.

B: 'Whatever-that-is'! God!(laughs)

S: ...Of the connectigizoid!

J: The claven.

B: “The clay-ven” (in mock-Jewish voice)

S: Alright, one more news item. We have to end on a funny one for Phil. Alright Evan, tell us about UFO Nazis.

E: Well how about this one? So there's an author and her name is Annie Jacobson, and she has a new book that is out and it's called, 'Area 51 – An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base'. She spends the majority of her time in this book talking the legitimate science and projects and experimental aircraft and other things that have been taking place at this facility for the past sixty years. She got together with some people who used to work there who had declassified information and they would share it. However, it's the last chapter of the book which is making headlines. Because she is drawing the conclusion that the famous saucer crash involved with Area 51 Roswell is actually a conspiracy in which the Auchwitz doctor Joseph Mangles, the German aircraft designing brothers the Haughton brothers and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin formed a conspiracy in the late 1940's to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer which was crowded, get this, with 13-year olds which were surgically altered under the...

S: By Joseph Mangola

E: ...By Joseph Mangola.

S: Yeah. And Togalian

E: ...And Togalian. And that is actually the recovered pieces of the famous crash. And those people, the surgically altered people are the supposed aliens that were recovered from the crash.

R: Well I'll never again say that the 911 Truthers have the dumbest conspiracy theory out there.

S: Well you know there's always gotta be one dumber than whatever you're talking about

R: That's true.

E: Now Annie Jacobson is a journalist. And the reviews I've read about the book say that she's done a decent, not perfect, job in the various chapters of the book that have to do with the hard science. But this last chapter in which she draws this conclusion, she's basing it entirely upon an unnamed source, one person, an unnamed source.

PP: Glen Beck (coughs). Something in my throat.

E: Might as well be. ...Who fed her all this information

...

Transcription paused around 54:00

=== UFO Nazi Connection (50:59)===
[http://weirdnews.aol.com/2011/06/07/area-51-ufos-aliens-annie-jacobsen-nazi-soviet_n_869706.html#s285846&title=Area_51_Warning Huffington Post: Area 51 personnel feel 'betrayed' by Annie Jacobsen's Soviet-Nazi UFO connection]

S: Alright, one more news item. We have to end on a funny one for Phil. Alright Evan, tell us about UFO Nazis.

E: Well how about this one? So there's an author and her name is Annie Jacobson, and she has a new book that is out called 'Area 51 – An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base'. She spends the majority of her time in this book talking the legitimate science and projects and experimental aircraft and other things that have been taking place at this facility for the past sixty years. She got together with some people who used to work there who had declassified information and they would share it. However, it's the last chapter of the book which is making headlines. Because she is drawing the conclusion that the famous saucer crash involved with Area 51 Roswell is actually a conspiracy in which the Auchwitz doctor Joseph Mangles, the German aircraft designing brothers the Haughton brothers and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin formed a conspiracy in the late 1940's to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer which was crowded, get this, with 13-year olds which were surgically altered under the...

S: By Joseph Mangola

E: ...By Joseph Mangola.

S: Yeah. To look alien.

E: ...To look alien. And that is actually the recovered pieces of the famous crash. And those people, the surgically altered people are the supposed aliens that were recovered from the crash.

R: Well I'll never again say that the 911 Truthers have the dumbest conspiracy theory out there.

S: Well you know there's always gotta be one dumber than whatever you're currently talking about.

R: That's true.

E: Now Annie Jacobson is a journalist. And the reviews I've read about the book say that she's done a decent, not perfect, job in the various chapters of the book that have to deal with the hard sciences. But this last chapter in which she draws this conclusion, she's basing it entirely upon an unnamed source, one person, an unnamed source.

PP: Glen Beck (coughs).

(all laugh)

PP: Sorry, something in my throat there.

E: Might as well be. ...Who apparently fed her all this information and that's what she's going by. And she says "Oh I totally trust this source, I mean he's very, very reliable."

R: I think I know who this source is; the source is her publicist.

S: (laughs) I was gonna say that.

B: That's right Rebecca.

E: Exactly.

R: Noone would be talking about this if it weren't for that last chapter.

E; Right? Because you have to have a new angle to this whole story...

S: Exactly.

E: ...if you want your book to sell well in these days.

R: Yeah, especially 'cause it was that last chapter. I's like you know she turned in the completed book and it was all sourced and nice and ready to go, and they're like "This is good, but..."

PP: "It's ''way'' too accurate."

R: "...can't you just throw in one giant lie at the end? Just tack it on. Good job."

Steve: It's like Steve Martin tells that joke - if you're making demands, you have to always throw in that one crazy one. "I want the letter M ''stricken'' from the alphabet!" That way you can always claim insanity afterwards.

(laughter)

S: It's sort of a simple thing. In the last chapter you gotta go totally off the rails and start making crazy conspiracy theories 'cause that's what's gonna sell your book.

PP: I actually have two comments on this. One is that this idea that Nazia are tied with UFOs has been around for a long time. I remember reading a novel based on this conspiracy theory back when I was in grad school in the 90s. And the book wasn't new then. I think it was called "Genesis". It was this ginormous 800 page science fiction novel. It sounded fun and it was just basically the Nazi scientists that were behind all this escaped, they moved to Antarctica, they built a base there, they perfected UFO technology, and we're gonna rise again basically, so this has been around a while.

S: This is Richard Hoagland. He wrote "Our Breakaway Nazi Civilisation". He thinks NASA's run by NAZIs and they're the shadow government that's doing all this UFO/face on Mars stuff.

PP: As soon as you say "Richard Hoagland", you can just put a period after that and we're done as far as I'm concerned.

(laughter)

S: ''Hoaglaaaand''!

B: Oh yeah.

E: (laughs)

J: Steve, when you say that, just quickly going through your mind, like okay, he really believes that there's NAZIs out there, and I have to make light of this real quick, but does he actually think they're still wearing their badass clothes with the leather and the boots, you know they still have (inaudible) and...?

R: You know there are still NAZIs out there, let's (laughs) not suggest that there's no such thing as NAZIs anymore.

S: Jay, I'm looking at a picture on his website, and it's a spacechip - a Nazi spaceship, that looks like a modified NAZI helmet with the skull and crossbones on the front.

(all laugh)

J: Right, there's my answer!

E: That would not be difficult mein Fuhrer.

J: A NAZI spaceship!

PP: There's a movie about NAZI UFOs from the Moon. It actually looks like a pretty fun movie.

E: Is is a porn, what the hell?

S: Nazi UFOs from the Moon?

PP: Does anyone know? It was announced about a year ago. I think it's an independent project. This is a great idea for a fictionalised novel or movie, but then on the other hand most of the stuff that Hoagland does is heavily fictionalised so there you go.

E: You know Phil, also there have been stories in the past drawn up by the UFO crowd that the Soviets had something to do with the crash at the famous crash that took place at Roswell as well. So what's happening is kind of blending all of these different aspects together and the alien bodies that were supposedly recovered. She's picking out these these pieces and forming her own little opinion as to what this all means to her

PP: You know it was the expanding timewaves from the Roswell crash that caused building 7 to collapse on September 11.

(sounds of agreement)

R: Yeah that makes sense actually.

B: I hate when timewaves do that!

PP: I've got the equations right here. It's quite simple. I actually... to even the most dimmest person to do a second (inaudible).

B: Most dimmest!

PP: I want to say one other thing about this too. In the article on weirdnews.aol.com where Ms Jacobson is being quoted, she says "I don't have to..." Well what happened was these guys basically came out and said "Listen, we were sources for some of her information in the book, the good stuff in the book, and we were shocked by this last chapter, and I can't believe she took our information and did this, and she didn't ask us about this." And she is ''quoted'' here as sayng, this is a quote, "For starters, journalists don't share their information with their sources prior to publication,. That's a standard rule." she said "...so I'm following journalist tradition." So what she's really saying is "I got this information. I'm not going to go check with the experts on it to find out what's going on because journalists don't do that." You know what? ''I think they do'' I think that's ''exactly'' what journalists do. They check their sources. So that quotation by her really sets off a lot of alarms in my head, and she goes on to say "What others think of my book can't matter to me in terms of being a journalist." (laughs) The word journalist is not a shield to be able to say whatever you want.

R: Maybe if she calls herself a journalist enough times, she'll actually become a journalist. That must be what she's thinking.

PP: You know, I've seen stuff like this happen before and I always want to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. I don't know what's going on, I haven't read the book, I've only read this article. The article could be sensationalising the last chapter. It could be relatively harmless and being misinterpreted, whatever. But these quotations from her ''really'' make me suspicious about the integrity of that last chapter. I think I'm safe in saying that.

S: Well Phil thank you for joining us it's always a pleasure.

PP: Thanks everybody. Thanks for having me on, it's always fun.

E: Thank you Phil.

S: We're gonna see you at TAM in about four weeks.

PP: I'll see you guys at TAM. I'm gonna see you at CSICon in New Orleans in October...

S: And DragonCon.

B: DragonConnn!

PP: ...and DragonCon yeah, I can't wait for DragonCon that's gonna be great.

S: You're gonna be sick of us.

R: Yeah.

E: Gonna be?

PP: I'm sorry, gonna be?

R: He's already sick of all of you.

E: Hello? Hello? Moreso.

J: Hello? (laughs)

S: (laughter) Alright goodnight Phil.

PP: Thanks folks...

J: Later!

PP: ...talk to you later.

B: Night buddy.

== Who's That Noisy? ( )==

== Science or Fiction ( ) ==

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110606171416.htm Item number one]. Astronomers find evidence that some or perhaps all of the large moons of Jupiter were proto-planets captured from the inner solar system in the early days of the solar system when Jupiter was much closer to the sun. [http://news.byu.edu/archive11-jun-redbluestates.aspx Item number two]. Research finds that citizens from so-called "blue" states are just as likely to hold liberal or conservative views on specific issues as citizens from "red" states. And [http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=24890&news_item=5619 item number three]. Scientists discover that dolphins actually project two beams of ultrasound for use in echolocation.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:17:13) ==
<blockquote>"Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are."</blockquote>
J: Eric Butterworth!

== Announcements ( ) ==

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