SGUTranscripts - User contributions [en]

SGU Episode 245

2013-05-02T23:55:25Z

Oldcurse:

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{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 245
|episodeDate = 25th March 2010 
|episodeIcon = File:woman%20x.jpg 
|rebecca = 
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|jay = y 
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|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=245
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,27038.0.html
|qowText = My brain is the key that sets my mind free
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Houdini Harry Houdini]
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== 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 Tuesday March 25th 2010
and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey Everybody.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey Guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, good evening. How is everyone.

ALL: Great.

J: How you doing Ev.

B: Oh, you're talking to us? Oh, we're good.

E: I'm talking to the wall.

S: Rebecca is off this week but it is not her fault. What happened was the power supply decided to short circuit for some reason and I was without a computer for a couple of days we had to delay, at the last minute we had to delay the recording date and Rebecca had a previous engagement, something to do with liable reform in the UK. So unfortunately she can't make it today.

J: Steve did you see and smell smoke?

S: I did and I heard that sound that you would hear on a soundtrack: this is the sound of electronics frying. That (zzzz, zzz, zzz) you know (sound effects) (laughter). It was literally and you know the lights on my computer were sort of flashing in time with the noise

J: Oh no.

S: Yeah.

B: So two days without a computer did you get like the DT's?

S: It was rough, it was rough. Then I had to hook everything back I have such a tangle behind my computer and of course I find a power supply that's hooked up to nothing and I have no memory of.

E: A power cord hooked up to...

S: Yeah, it's like it's plugged in and there's an end that should plug into something else but I have no idea...

J: What was it, like a camera or something? How many years ago did you use that thing?

S: or an old hard drive or something I don't know.

B: Maybe it was cloaked, you just couldn't see it.

S: Right.

E: It was connected to the could obviously.

J: You're lucky, your house could have caught on fire.

S: Yeah, It's a good thing I was at my computer when it happened so that I could unplug it right away

E: so we're back up and running.

S: back up and running. Tell us what's special about today Evan.

== This Day in Skepticism () ==
E: Well it was 1903 and the Times newspaper, it doesn't say what country though, maybe there's a Times newspaper in France because it was reported that French physicists Pierre Curie assisted by Madame Curie communicated to the academy of sciences that recently discovered radium, and I'm quoting now: "possesses the extraordinary property of continuously emitting heat without combustion, without chemical change of any kind and without any change to it's molecular structure which remains spectroscopicaly identical after many months of continuous emission of heat such that the pure radium salt would melt more that it's own weight of ice every hour. A small tube containing Radium if kept in contact with the skin for some hours produces an open sore by destroying the epidermis and the true skin beneath and the cause of death of living things who's nerve centres do not lie deep enough to be shielded from their influence.

J: Oh man that, that's scary.

E: Radiation baby.

S: Radiation.

B: Wow.

J: It's just weird to hear someone describe radiation that way.

S: Right, like they had no idea what it is.

E: Right, just kinda describing kinda what it does and, could cause death...

J: So do you guys think if you were exposed to enough radiation in order for it to do that to your skin could that give you cancer and kill you as well?

S: Oh yeah.

B: I think it depends on the radiation but yeah, my guess would be yeah.

S: It would certainly be a risk factor for cancer.

J: Oh man.

E: Radium, I mean, I'm no chemist but I understand that's pretty radioactive.

J: And sadly she died of radiation poisoning.

B: Yeah.

S: Yes, took one for the team.

E: Or how about those women who used to paint the phosphorous numbers on, what was it, watches or some sort of devices and they would lick the tips of their brushes as they dip it in the phosphorous, they paint it on and they got poisoned.

J: Oh yeah. How about that guy, Steve, was it the guy who was selling radioactive water when they thought radiation was nifty and you know like sci fi.

S: Well there was like a mussel man who was a shill for radioactive tonic which he drank and eventually his jaw was eaten away by radioactivity and he suffered horribly from it.

J: And didn't they remove his bottom jaw?

S: Yeah.

J: Or it fell off.

B: Ouch.

J: can you imagine.

B: how does one acquire radioactive liquid?

S: what they would do is they would literally have like a vase made out of radium

B: Oh

S: and the instructions were to put water in it over night and then drink water from the basin or vase or whatever that's how they would do it.

E: Come a long way in a hundred and ten years

S: Yeah (laughter). One quick announcement before we get on to the news items. April 17th Saturday 10AM New York City the NECSS con The North East Conference of Science and Skepticism you can go to the necsscon.org and register for the event get tickets while some are left. The speakers this year include James Randi, DJ Grothe, Jamy Ian Swiss, George Hrab, Steve Mirsky, David Gorski, Val Jones, John Snyder, Kimball Atwood, Julia Galef and the entire cast of the SGU. It's going to be a lot of fun you can also register for a speakers dinner where you get to sit down and have dinner with all of the speakers. So please check it out and register it's coming up pretty quickly.

== News Items ==
=== Rise of the Dinosaurs (5:36)===

S: So Bob tell us about the rise of the dinosaurs.

E: Oh no where! Oh you mean Oh, OK.

B: Yeah this was a pretty cool story um news item. Any fifth grader can probably tell you how the reign of the dinosaurs ended: the aliens came down, they seeded the earth with human DNA then ate all the dinosaurs. Wait, wait that's not the consensus yet. But you know what it is well if you ask the same kid how began their dominance you'd probably get a puzzled look more than anything else. So it's a bit ironic that just last month scientists made their most definitive statement yet about the fate of dinosaurs, that they almost certainly died from an asteroid and not from volcanism. Now an international team led by Brown university palaeobiologist Jessica Witeside They concluded that the other end of the dinosaur reign namely when they took over was caused almost certainly from volcanism and not an asteroid. The opposite.
S: Right.

J: Bob so when you say volcanism what do you mean specifically.

B: you know Vulcans come. No Volcanoes, Volcanoes Jay just volcanoes and.

S: I'm just asking...

B: just volcanoes and vents in the earth that release lava, you know.

S: and gases.

B: Yeah gases.

J: gases.

B: 200 million years ago the earth was a bit different than it is today right. Most of the land masses...

S: That's what I hear.

B: Yeah, most of the land masses were smushed together into a super continent called...

J: Pangea.

B: Pangea, thank you which was actually, very good Jay, which was just actually starting to break up actually about 200 million years ago. It had been together for quite some time.

J: Well all relationships end at some point Bob.

B: But also at that time 200 million years ago crurotarsans ruled the planet crurotarsans were a branch of reptiles distinct from dinosaurs. You don't really hear too much about these guys they actually co-existed with dinosaurs and early proto dinosaurs for 30 million years but the early dinos were probably second class reptiles back then crurotarsans were the biggest most dominant animals during the Triassic period even in terms of sheer diversity they were ahead of their reptile cousins. The something happened, one of the great mass extinctions of all time occurred which ended the Triassic and ushered in the Jurassic and the scientists now believe that as the north American plate separated from the Africa plate, imagine these two plates have been together for quite some time and they start separating because the tectonic plates are, you know, slowly moving. So their slowly separating and it creates a basin, there's a basin that is created between them and which would later become the Atlantic ocean. In this basin there were fissures which released greenhouse gasses that wiped out half the plant species on the planet and many animals including most of the crurotarsans. So that pretty much what they think happened. But like any mass die off this opened up tons of ecological niches ripe for the dinosaurs to spread into and eventually led to their world domination for about, what, 200 million years. It was an amazing run that they had. So all of this started then not necessarily because they were inherently superior as many people believe but essentially they were really just lucky.

S: Yeah.

B: I'll give you a quote from Jessica Witeside she's the assistant professor of geological sciences. She says "They had the blind luck of being unwittingly adapted to get through that climate catastrophe. How they did it is quite difficult to explain." So that little bit of luck paved the way for world dominance for millions of years but we all know eventually right they all met a similar fate to the crurotarsans. They were wiped out 65 million years ago leaving only modern day birds in their wake. the crurotarsans left a legacy as well. Can you guys guess what their legacy is?

E: Um

J: twenty- nine

B: Close. You're very close Jay. No, actually you're not, you're so far away I don't know what to say. Their legacy is the twenty-three species of crocodiles, alligators and gharials that exist today. And even the number twenty-three surprised me there is actually 23. You think crocodile, Alligator there's actually 23 species of those guys so there's a lot and buy they were much more diverse 200 million years ago. Imagine if they weren't wiped out the species that they would have evolved into. Perhaps in tens of millions of years from now only a small residue of mammals will be left around. My sinical side guesses that that residue will probably consist of robotic terminators looking for that last bit of biology to wipe out.

S: Right. Now Bob this a consensus that's been building for a while because we, I think we talked about this like a year ago. The fact that the dinosaurs were just lucky,

B: Right.

S:In terms of beating the crurotarsans out. Right.

=== WOMAN X (10:25)===

S: Well lets move onto another bit of paleontological news. This one is really interesting. Do you guys know how many different species of humans there have been on the earth?

B: four foot one.

J: How many species of humans?

E: Homo Sapiens, Homo Erectus,

B: Erectus, Sapiens.

E: Homo... Is Neanderthal one?

B: Habilis.

E: Oh right Homo Habilis.

B: There's a few of them but I know there's one more. (laughs)

S: So the genus has had Homo Habilus, Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens but if you're talking about close relative to Homo Sapiens, now weather or not you call them like Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis or Homo Neanderthalensis is I guess still... I'm not sure if that's actually been finally settled. I thought that there were two: Modern humans and Neanderthals. There's a third that's been controversial over the last few years but the evidence...

B: The Hobbit.

S: ... seems to be heading towards the fact that the hobbit, Homo Floresiensis nicknamed the hobbit may be a third human species. And a fourth...

J: What?

S: ...was possibly just discovered.

J: That's incredible.

B: This is really cool

J: Where was it he or she?

S: Yeah well this is. The specimen is called "Woman X"

B: Really?

S: Yes.

(Laughter)

S: It has not been named as a species yet. The specemen comes from Siberia, about 40,000 years ago and they managed to isolate some DNA, specifically mitocondrial DNA from the...

B: Hence the Woman X. Right.

S: No. We both have mitochondria

B: but it's passed on, mitochondrial DNA is passed on through the mothers

S: yeah, It's only inherited mostly 99% or so, whatever, from the maternal line

B: that's my point.

S: Yeah but the specimen, that's not why we know the specimen's a woman though. But anyway they're working on the nuclear DNA they haven't nailed that yet but they, after analysing the micondrial DNA they basically were trying to figure out: was this specimen a Neanderthal or a modern human? And there's different genetic markers that we have that, we've sequenced enough of the Neanderthal genome. And it actually was neither. It's clearly human but not either Neanderthal or Homo Sapiens.

B: How awesome is that.

S: It's a fourth species. And they estimate, now this kind's of genetic estimation is rough there's a lot of assumptions that go into the analysis but based on the genetic analysis they estimate that this lineage broke off from the human lineage, from our ancestors, about one million years ago whereas Neanderthals split off about 500,000 years ago , half a million years ago. Ah, that's a long time ago yet it persisted till about 40,000 years ago. So 40,000 years ago there were four living human species.

B: Damn, we missed out.

S: Yeah.

B: It would have been so cool if there were more humans.

S: Within about 5,000 years three of them went extinct and we were the only ones left.

J: So Steve if they existed that short amount of time ago how come we haven't found more fossils?

S: Yeah that's a good question so, they think that this probably represents a completely separate migration of early human ancestors out of Africa and then for a million years they lived in isolation becoming there own species but then died out 40,000 years ago. So it seems as if each one of these human species may have been genetically isolated and formed there own species because they were separate migrations out of Africa. It probably just is that there range was not very far, they may have settled in, around Siberia but not spread out to Asia, Europe and whatever to the point that we would find a lot of their sites. The fossil sites that we have are so sporadic it makes you wonder, you know, maybe there are some of their sites out there that are waiting to be discovered.

B: I hope so.

J: Well you'd figure that there'd be more around the location where they found the original right?

S: That, obviously, would be a good place to look.

B: I'm sure you can bet you're but that they're going to start looking.

J: Steve did they find it by accident or did they predict that they would find something like this near there?

S: I don't think anyone predicted this. This is totally put of the blue that there's a new species

B: It was a pinky bone right just a pinky bone.

S: it was a pinky bone, yeah,

J: You know what? It's a good thing that I don't stumble on these bones.
(laughter)

S: Most people would not recognise what they are.

J: I probably wouldn't even be able to recognise it as a bone if I saw it. You know I just wouldn't even.

B: Well we have micondrial DNA from Neanderthals right?

S: Yes.

B: So did anyone mention how different they were, you know, in comparison? You know was it vastly different from either of the
other two or is it closer to Neanderthal than us or closer to us? Did any hint of that kind of relationship?
S: Ah, it's different from both. You would imagine since it split off half a million years before Nennderthals and humans split off...

B: Right.

S: it would be equidistant from the two, from the two right.
B: Right, hmmm.

S: And it looks like there were a lot of other homenid bones in the cave that they're investigating not just a pinky bone. Ah, and there were human settlements in the area as well

B: Interesting. Contemporary? I mean were they contemporaries?

S: Probably because it says there was occupation in that area for about 125,000 years so there was probably overlap

B: Yeah, I hope we find something more.

S: Yeah.

B: I want to see what they...

S: Yeah. I mean it makes sense, evolution's a bush not a ladder right so you expect these kind of speciation events to happen and humans were in the process of migrating around the world so I would expect you're going to get isolated, you know, populations here and there froming enough difference to be a different sub species or species so it kind of makes sense that we're going to find these

E: And maybe a fifth one some day.

S: Yeah I wouldn't be surprised, you know, some island somewhere or just in one region, you know if they were isolated long enough you could expect that. It would not be surprising at all.

=== Starchild update (17:05)===

S: Well let's move on to the next item. This is also a palaentological item, it's sort of a theme this week, but this one's a fake item

E: (laughter)

S: Right Evan.

E: Can you spot the fake. That's right we have an update on the Starchild project. I have some theme music to go...

J: It's actually a project?

S: It's like the Alan Parsons Project.

(laughter)

(theme music plays - Starman by David Bowie)

E: There you go.

(laughter)

E: Some of our listeners may remember that tune from the 70's called Starman. So we've adopted that as the official theme music for the Starchild project update. Now who knew there was a Starchild project update? I thought this thing was put to bed so many years ago

S: Oh no, Lloyd Pi's not giving up on this one, no way.

E: Lloyd Pi is the man responsible for this. So here's what he has: he has in his possession a skull, a skull of a child and it shows some pretty, you know, interesting malformations uh, it's like a swollen head the facial caveties are kind of all crushed in towards the middle. Lloyd Pi believes that this is evidence of a, ah, of an alien race or an alien race that visited Earth and comingled with humans shall we say. So a hybrid of some kind.

J: A hybrid.

E: Half human.

J: Yeah, I would imagine that ah, if it looks so similar to a normal human skull a normal child's human skull yeah, it has to be some kind of mix right? Like what else, what else would the explanation be?

E: What else could the explanation be?

S: Interestingly so yeah this is um. Taken at face value, right, there are those who have accused this of actually being like a hoax or a fraud or, if we say alright the skull itself is genuine and I think it dates to about 600 years, ago?

E: 900 year.

S: 900 year.

E: plus or minus 40 years.

S: 900 years ago. It has all of the anatomical features of a human skull but distorted or deformed. They're all there, there's the pariatal bone, the temporal bone, the frontal bone, they're all there just deformed. Okams razor I think would dictate that this is therefore a deformed human skull. There's no pieces that are not supposed to be there, there's no significant pieces missing, You know if you were able to take a picture of a human skull and Photoshop it and move everything around this is, you could get to something like this.

B: plus it's made of bone too. It's not made out of some funky material.

S: They claim that there are these red fibres in there but again we don't have any analysis of them to tell us what they are.

E: although we do have the claim from Lloyd Pi that he has shared it with 50 experts, and he won't tell us who these experts are but that's OK. He's consulted 50 experts on it and none of them can adequately explain the Starchild's appearance on the basis of any kind of natural deformity.

S: Right

J: Aha

E: Can you spot the logical fallacy?

J: Yes.

S: Pi's entire approach to this project is a massive argument from ignorance. and he makes that fallacy over and over again. Initially they tried to extract nuclear DNA from the bone and they were able to extract...

E: Mitochondrial DNA

S: Well they were able to get, they were able to get Mitochondrial DNA that was from a human and it seems that that was the kid's mother. They were unable to extract nuclear DNA, this was a few years ago, and Lloyd Pi's conclusion was: the reason they couldn't extract nuclear DNA proves that it's not human.

B: Oh nice.

E: (laughter) um.

S: So the lack of evidence is evidence that this is not human.

J: So right out of the gate, you make a discovery like this you bring it to "experts" right. You let scientists look at it that do this for a living and have been doing it for a long time which he's failed to do. You know he's not...

B: I disagree, I disagree. You find something like this you put it on eBay.
(laughter)

B: That's what I'd do.

E: This does pre-date eBay.

J: No Bob the Smithsonian would pay more for this than most people would imagine paying on eBay. But the .

S: Yeah

B: Well they could bid on it, they could...

J: The point is though, the point being that right out of the gate he's made poor decisions on top of poor decisions and that's if he's actually even being honest at all which I doubt.

E: Well Jay I think it's a good point and I think there may be a larger point to all this is that Lloyd pi has some pre conceived notions, right, and he is emphasizing certain points that, you know, help try to make his case and he downplays any evidence that contradicts what his personal values is. You know invested in this whole Star child project. So he's biased he's horribly biased

S: Oh yeah.

E: And that taints everything.

S: Remember this is the guy who wrote the book "Everything you know is wrong".
(laughter)

S: Right this guy thinks everything scientists say is completely wrong. He wants to rewrite history and rewrite science

B: Oh one of those.

S: He's a total crank this guy, bottom line.

E: But just last week, and I'll read it in his own words, He says: "We finally have a recovery of nuclear DNA from the Starchild".

J: So what scientist confirmed it? Where's the information?

E: OK, well he met with the geneticist working on the Starchild's DNA and he notes and I quote again: "I should add that I can't reveal the name of the geneticist or where he works until we are ready to formally present the results."

J: Of course because that would ruin everything

E: Ehhhh yeah

J: This guy, this guy is full of shit. There we go. He is totally, he is totally marketing himself. This is all hype and no substance.

S: Probably yeah.

E: Al right so he admits that back in 2003 he had a DNA analysis that used human only primers to recover the mitochondrial DNA which is the DNA outside the nucleus but at the time they could not recover it because the technology at the time was limited

B: Lame.

E: Right. But now in 2010 there have been many improvements in the recovery process, those improvements have been applied to the starchilds skull with the stunning result. And he throws up some charts and he talks about sequencing and base pairs. Steve this is where you're probably going to have to jump in and explain a little bit but essentially what he's saying is that there's a strand of 342 base pairs to which they are not able to match it up to any animal in the NIH database which contains, I guess, all this information on all kinds of animals,

S: Yeah

E: And their genetic codes.

S: Right, Pi says every animal in the world and that's wrong I mean

(laughter)

S: He's trying to say that this database basically contains the genetic information of all living things on Earth and since this thing can't be matched to anything in the database that proves this is DNA not from the Earth.

J: Oh. This guy's a genius.

S: Yeah, again we don't know what this is therefore it's an alien. No, we don't know that this is therefore, what, we don't know what it is. And...

B: Plus 342 base pairs is nothing that's tiny. That could just be junk DNA that's not coding for anything that we know.

E: Lloyd Pi believes that to be a stunning and apparently incredibly rare occurrence.

S: Right. Now the thing is, I mean that is long enough to match up to known, you know we should b able to see if it were a human we should be able to find out where that's supposed to match up along the human genome. But certainly there could be things mixed up in there that are not from people and wouldn't necessarily be in that database. Who knows, it could got... They describe the process that's supposed to get rid of any contamination but if any bacterial DNA got in there that would throw it off. Also this analysis has not been pier reviewed. We don't even know who the geneticist is.

E: (laughter)

S: There's no transparency here whatsoever

E: He could be making this up wholesale, we'd have no idea.

S: or it could just be incompetence, problems with the process, you know, who knows. This is a negative result this is just nothing. Now here's the other thing: he consults all these experts, but if you read

E: probably

S: for those experts that have actually like you can say this is a quote of doctor so and so most of them are saying things which are, don't have anything to do with weather this is a human or an alien hybrid just like, this is 900 years old from the carbon 14 dating, that's what expert A is saying. That's one expert another one is saying, you know, that this looks like it come's from a child based on the teeth maybe 5 to 6 years old. That's another expert. But they're not saying anything at all that bears at all on whether on not this is a deformed human versus a human alien hybrid but he's counting them among the experts. There's only one so called expert, a cranial facial surgeon, who is actually, who has allegedly examined the skull directly and ruled out all the known medical deformities that could explain this skull. It's just this one guy, you know, and we don't, who seems to be invested in this.

E: Right.
S: And we don't really know what his expertise is.

E: Hardly a scientific consensus.

S: Yeah.

J: I mean if you think about the hoopla this guy's making over a deformed skull, it's just a deformed skull. Obviously, if this is a real skull it was a child that had some type of genetic disease

S: Yeah, I mean, it could be in fact a very interest skull from a medical, you know, historical point of view. Maybe there were two things going on. Ah, you know what I mean like maybe hydrocephalus and they bound his head, maybe they thought that was a treatment for the hydrocephalus. Or he had some genetic disorder that had megalencephaly, you know an enlarged head. Whatever, some unique mutation that we don't see any more for some reason.

E: And Steve they discovered a y chromosome in the mix so they knew it was a boy

S: Aha

E: hence the y chromosome and nothing Lloyd Pi offers goes to explain how the y chromosome got in there.

S: Right so the y chromosome had to come from a human male and he also had a human mother and somehow Pi argues in his head that that means the father was alien.

J: What's so sad is that if they just brought this skull to one of the thousands of experts on the planet, give them an hour with it and they'll give you an arms length list of why everything he says is bullshit. Right, I mean it's that easy.

E: (laughs)

S: If this were serious

...

== Who's That Noisy? ()==

== Questions and Emails () ==
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== Interview with "..." () ==

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SGU Episode 245

2013-05-02T23:29:27Z

Oldcurse: Added Woman X and Starchild Project

{{Transcribing all
|transcriber = Oldcurse
}}
{{Editing required
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|time-stamps = y
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{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 245
|episodeDate = 25th March 2010 
|episodeIcon = File:woman%20x.jpg 
|rebecca = 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|guest1 = 
|guest2 = 
|guest3 = 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2010-03-25.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=245
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,27038.0.html
|qowText = My brain is the key that sets my mind free
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Houdini Harry Houdini]
|}}

== 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 Tuesday March 25th 2010
and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey Everybody.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey Guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, good evening. How is everyone.

ALL: Great.

J: How you doing Ev.

B: Oh, you're talking to us? Oh, we're good.

E: I'm talking to the wall.

S: Rebecca is off this week but it is not her fault. What happened was the power supply decided to short circuit for some reason and I was without a computer for a couple of days we had to delay, at the last minute we had to delay the recording date and Rebecca had a previous engagement, something to do with liable reform in the UK. So unfortunately she can't make it today.

J: Steve did you see and smell smoke?

S: I did and I heard that sound that you would hear on a soundtrack: this is the sound of electronics frying. That (zzzz, zzz, zzz) you know (sound effects) (laughter). It was literally and you know the lights on my computer were sort of flashing in time with the noise

J: Oh no.

S: Yeah.

B: So two days without a computer did you get like the DT's?

S: It was rough, it was rough. Then I had to hook everything back I have such a tangle behind my computer and of course I find a power supply that's hooked up to nothing and I have no memory of.

E: A power cord hooked up to...

S: Yeah, it's like it's plugged in and there's an end that should plug into something else but I have no idea...

J: What was it, like a camera or something? How many years ago did you use that thing?

S: or an old hard drive or something I don't know.

B: Maybe it was cloaked, you just couldn't see it.

S: Right.

E: It was connected to the could obviously.

J: You're lucky, your house could have caught on fire.

S: Yeah, It's a good thing I was at my computer when it happened so that I could unplug it right away

E: so we're back up and running.

S: back up and running. Tell us what's special about today Evan.

== This Day in Skepticism () ==
E: Well it was 1903 and the Times newspaper, it doesn't say what country though, maybe there's a Times newspaper in France because it was reported that French physicists Pierre Curie assisted by Madame Curie communicated to the academy of sciences that recently discovered radium, and I'm quoting now: "possesses the extraordinary property of continuously emitting heat without combustion, without chemical change of any kind and without any change to it's molecular structure which remains spectroscopicaly identical after many months of continuous emission of heat such that the pure radium salt would melt more that it's own weight of ice every hour. A small tube containing Radium if kept in contact with the skin for some hours produces an open sore by destroying the epidermis and the true skin beneath and the cause of death of living things who's nerve centres do not lie deep enough to be shielded from their influence.

J: Oh man that, that's scary.

E: Radiation baby.

S: Radiation.

B: Wow.

J: It's just weird to hear someone describe radiation that way.

S: Right, like they had no idea what it is.

E: Right, just kinda describing kinda what it does and, could cause death...

J: So do you guys think if you were exposed to enough radiation in order for it to do that to your skin could that give you cancer and kill you as well?

S: Oh yeah.

B: I think it depends on the radiation but yeah, my guess would be yeah.

S: It would certainly be a risk factor for cancer.

J: Oh man.

E: Radium, I mean, I'm no chemist but I understand that's pretty radioactive.

J: And sadly she died of radiation poisoning.

B: Yeah.

S: Yes, took one for the team.

E: Or how about those women who used to paint the phosphorous numbers on, what was it, watches or some sort of devices and they would lick the tips of their brushes as they dip it in the phosphorous, they paint it on and they got poisoned.

J: Oh yeah. How about that guy, Steve, was it the guy who was selling radioactive water when they thought radiation was nifty and you know like sci fi.

S: Well there was like a mussel man who was a shill for radioactive tonic which he drank and eventually his jaw was eaten away by radioactivity and he suffered horribly from it.

J: And didn't they remove his bottom jaw?

S: Yeah.

J: Or it fell off.

B: Ouch.

J: can you imagine.

B: how does one acquire radioactive liquid?

S: what they would do is they would literally have like a vase made out of radium

B: Oh

S: and the instructions were to put water in it over night and then drink water from the basin or vase or whatever that's how they would do it.

E: Come a long way in a hundred and ten years

S: Yeah (laughter). One quick announcement before we get on to the news items. April 17th Saturday 10AM New York City the NECSS con The North East Conference of Science and Skepticism you can go to the necsscon.org and register for the event get tickets while some are left. The speakers this year include James Randi, DJ Grothe, Jamy Ian Swiss, George Hrab, Steve Mirsky, David Gorski, Val Jones, John Snyder, Kimball Atwood, Julia Galef and the entire cast of the SGU. It's going to be a lot of fun you can also register for a speakers dinner where you get to sit down and have dinner with all of the speakers. So please check it out and register it's coming up pretty quickly.

== News Items ==
=== Rise of the Dinosaurs (5:36)===

S: So Bob tell us about the rise of the dinosaurs.

E: Oh no where! Oh you mean Oh, OK.

B: Yeah this was a pretty cool story um news item. Any fifth grader can probably tell you how the reign of the dinosaurs ended: the aliens came down, they seeded the earth with human DNA then ate all the dinosaurs. Wait, wait that's not the consensus yet. But you know what it is well if you ask the same kid how began their dominance you'd probably get a puzzled look more than anything else. So it's a bit ironic that just last month scientists made their most definitive statement yet about the fate of dinosaurs, that they almost certainly died from an asteroid and not from volcanism. Now an international team led by Brown university palaeobiologist Jessica Witeside They concluded that the other end of the dinosaur reign namely when they took over was caused almost certainly from volcanism and not an asteroid. The opposite.
S: Right.

J: Bob so when you say volcanism what do you mean specifically.

B: you know Vulcans come. No Volcanoes, Volcanoes Jay just volcanoes and.

S: I'm just asking...

B: just volcanoes and vents in the earth that release lava, you know.

S: and gases.

B: Yeah gases.

J: gases.

B: 200 million years ago the earth was a bit different than it is today right. Most of the land masses...

S: That's what I hear.

B: Yeah, most of the land masses were smushed together into a super continent called...

J: Pangea.

B: Pangea, thank you which was actually, very good Jay, which was just actually starting to break up actually about 200 million years ago. It had been together for quite some time.

J: Well all relationships end at some point Bob.

B: But also at that time 200 million years ago crurotarsans ruled the planet crurotarsans were a branch of reptiles distinct from dinosaurs. You don't really hear too much about these guys they actually co-existed with dinosaurs and early proto dinosaurs for 30 million years but the early dinos were probably second class reptiles back then crurotarsans were the biggest most dominant animals during the Triassic period even in terms of sheer diversity they were ahead of their reptile cousins. The something happened, one of the great mass extinctions of all time occurred which ended the Triassic and ushered in the Jurassic and the scientists now believe that as the north American plate separated from the Africa plate, imagine these two plates have been together for quite some time and they start separating because the tectonic plates are, you know, slowly moving. So their slowly separating and it creates a basin, there's a basin that is created between them and which would later become the Atlantic ocean. In this basin there were fissures which released greenhouse gasses that wiped out half the plant species on the planet and many animals including most of the crurotarsans. So that pretty much what they think happened. But like any mass die off this opened up tons of ecological niches ripe for the dinosaurs to spread into and eventually led to their world domination for about, what, 200 million years. It was an amazing run that they had. So all of this started then not necessarily because they were inherently superior as many people believe but essentially they were really just lucky.

S: Yeah.

B: I'll give you a quote from Jessica Witeside she's the assistant professor of geological sciences. She says "They had the blind luck of being unwittingly adapted to get through that climate catastrophe. How they did it is quite difficult to explain." So that little bit of luck paved the way for world dominance for millions of years but we all know eventually right they all met a similar fate to the crurotarsans. They were wiped out 65 million years ago leaving only modern day birds in their wake. the crurotarsans left a legacy as well. Can you guys guess what their legacy is?

E: Um

J: twenty- nine

B: Close. You're very close Jay. No, actually you're not, you're so far away I don't know what to say. Their legacy is the twenty-three species of crocodiles, alligators and gharials that exist today. And even the number twenty-three surprised me there is actually 23. You think crocodile, Alligator there's actually 23 species of those guys so there's a lot and buy they were much more diverse 200 million years ago. Imagine if they weren't wiped out the species that they would have evolved into. Perhaps in tens of millions of years from now only a small residue of mammals will be left around. My sinical side guesses that that residue will probably consist of robotic terminators looking for that last bit of biology to wipe out.

S: Right. Now Bob this a consensus that's been building for a while because we, I think we talked about this like a year ago. The fact that the dinosaurs were just lucky,

B: Right.

S:In terms of beating the crurotarsans out. Right.

=== WOMAN X (10:25)===

S: Well lets move onto another bit of paleontological news. This one is really interesting. Do you guys know how many different species of humans there have been on the earth?

B: four foot one.

J: How many species of humans?

E: Homo Sapiens, Homo Erectus,

B: Erectus, Sapiens.

E: Homo... Is Neanderthal one?

B: Habilis.

E: Oh right Homo Habilis.

B: There's a few of them but I know there's one more. (laughs)

S: So the genus has had Homo Habilus, Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens but if you're talking about close relative to Homo Sapiens, now weather or not you call them like Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis or Homo Neanderthalensis is I guess still... I'm not sure if that's actually been finally settled. I thought that there were two: Modern humans and Neanderthals. There's a third that's been controversial over the last few years but the evidence...

B: The Hobbit.

S: ... seems to be heading towards the fact that the hobbit, Homo Floresiensis nicknamed the hobbit may be a third human species. And a fourth...

J: What?

S: ...was possibly just discovered.

J: That's incredible.

B: This is really cool

J: Where was it he or she?

S: Yeah well this is. The specimen is called "Woman X"

B: Really?

S: Yes.

(Laughter)

S: It has not been named as a species yet. The specemen comes from Siberia, about 40,000 years ago and they managed to isolate some DNA, specifically mitocondrial DNA from the...

B: Hence the Woman X. Right.

S: No. We both have mitochondria

B: but it's passed on, mitochondrial DNA is passed on through the mothers

S: yeah, It's only inherited mostly 99% or so, whatever, from the maternal line

B: that's my point.

S: Yeah but the specimen, that's not why we know the specimen's a woman though. But anyway they're working on the nuclear DNA they haven't nailed that yet but they, after analysing the micondrial DNA they basically were trying to figure out: was this specimen a Neanderthal or a modern human? And there's different genetic markers that we have that, we've sequenced enough of the Neanderthal genome. And it actually was neither. It's clearly human but not either Neanderthal or Homo Sapiens.

B: How awesome is that.

S: It's a fourth species. And they estimate, now this kind's of genetic estimation is rough there's a lot of assumptions that go into the analysis but based on the genetic analysis they estimate that this lineage broke off from the human lineage, from our ancestors, about one million years ago whereas Neanderthals split off about 500,000 years ago , half a million years ago. Ah, that's a long time ago yet it persisted till about 40,000 years ago. So 40,000 years ago there were four living human species.

B: Damn, we missed out.

S: Yeah.

B: It would have been so cool if there were more humans.

S: Within about 5,000 years three of them went extinct and we were the only ones left.

J: So Steve if they existed that short amount of time ago how come we haven't found more fossils?

S: Yeah that's a good question so, they think that this probably represents a completely separate migration of early human ancestors out of Africa and then for a million years they lived in isolation becoming there own species but then died out 40,000 years ago. So it seems as if each one of these human species may have been genetically isolated and formed there own species because they were separate migrations out of Africa. It probably just is that there range was not very far, they may have settled in, around Siberia but not spread out to Asia, Europe and whatever to the point that we would find a lot of their sites. The fossil sites that we have are so sporadic it makes you wonder, you know, maybe there are some of their sites out there that are waiting to be discovered.

B: I hope so.

J: Well you'd figure that there'd be more around the location where they found the original right?

S: That, obviously, would be a good place to look.

B: I'm sure you can bet you're but that they're going to start looking.

J: Steve did they find it by accident or did they predict that they would find something like this near there?

S: I don't think anyone predicted this. This is totally put of the blue that there's a new species

B: It was a pinky bone right just a pinky bone.

S: it was a pinky bone, yeah,

J: You know what? It's a good thing that I don't stumble on these bones.
(laughter)

S: Most people would not recognise what they are.

J: I probably wouldn't even be able to recognise it as a bone if I saw it. You know I just wouldn't even.

B: Well we have micondrial DNA from Neanderthals right?

S: Yes.

B: So did anyone mention how different they were, you know, in comparison? You know was it vastly different from either of the
other two or is it closer to Neanderthal than us or closer to us? Did any hint of that kind of relationship?
S: Ah, it's different from both. You would imagine since it split off half a million years before Nennderthals and humans split off...

B: Right.

S: it would be equidistant from the two, from the two right.
B: Right, hmmm.

S: And it looks like there were a lot of other homenid bones in the cave that they're investigating not just a pinky bone. Ah, and there were human settlements in the area as well

B: Interesting. Contemporary? I mean were they contemporaries?

S: Probably because it says there was occupation in that area for about 125,000 years so there was probably overlap

B: Yeah, I hope we find something more.

S: Yeah.

B: I want to see what they...

S: Yeah. I mean it makes sense, evolution's a bush not a ladder right so you expect these kind of speciation events to happen and humans were in the process of migrating around the world so I would expect you're going to get isolated, you know, populations here and there froming enough difference to be a different sub species or species so it kind of makes sense that we're going to find these

E: And maybe a fifth one some day.

S: Yeah I wouldn't be surprised, you know, some island somewhere or just in one region, you know if they were isolated long enough you could expect that. It would not be surprising at all.

=== Starchild update (17:05)===

S: Well let's move on to the next item. This is also a palaentological item, it's sort of a theme this week, but this one's a fake item

E: (laughter)

S: Right Evan.

E: Can you spot the fake. That's right we have an update on the Starchild project. I have some theme music to go...

J: It's actually a project?

S: It's like the Alan Parsons Project.

(laughter)

(theme music plays - Starman by David Bowie)

E: There you go.

(laughter)

E: Some of our listeners may remember that tune from the 70's called Starman. So we've adopted that as the official theme music for the Starchild project update. Now who knew there was a Starchild project update? I thought this thing was put to bed so many years ago

S: Oh no, Lloyd Pi's not giving up on this one, no way.

E: Lloyd Pi is the man responsible for this. So here's what he has: he has in his possession a skull, a skull of a child and it shows some pretty, you know, interesting malformations uh, it's like a swollen head the facial caveties are kind of all crushed in towards the middle. Lloyd Pi believes that this is evidence of a, ah, of an alien race or an alien race that visited Earth and comingled with humans shall we say. So a hybrid of some kind.

J: A hybrid.

E: Half human.

J: Yeah, I would imagine that ah, if it looks so similar to a normal human skull a normal child's human skull yeah, it has to be some kind of mix right? Like what else, what else would the explanation be?

E: What else could the explanation be?

S: Interestingly so yeah this is um. Taken at face value, right, there are those who have accused this of actually being like a hoax or a fraud or, if we say alright the skull itself is genuine and I think it dates to about 600 years, ago?

E: 900 year.

S: 900 year.

E: plus or minus 40 years.

S: 900 years ago. It has all of the anatomical features of a human skull but distorted or deformed. They're all there, there's the pariatal bone, the temporal bone, the frontal bone, they're all there just deformed. Okams razor I think would dictate that this is therefore a deformed human skull. There's no pieces that are not supposed to be there, there's no pieces missing, You know if you were able to take a picture of a human skull and photoshop it and move everything around this is, you could get to something like this.

B: plus it's made of bone too. It's not made out of some funky material.

S: They claim that there are these red fibers in there but abain we don't have any analysis of them to tell us what they are.

E: although we do have the claim from Lloyd Pi that he has shared it with 50 experts, and he won't tell us who these experts are but that's OK. He's consulted 50 on it and none of them can adequately explain the Starchilds appearance on the basis of any kind of natural deformity.

S: Right

J: Aha

E: Can you spot the logical fallacy?

J: Yes.

S: Pi's entire approach to this project is a massive arguement from ignorance. and he makes that fallacy over and over again. Initially they tried to extract nuclear DNA from the bone and they were able to extract...

E: Mitochondrial DNA

S: Well they were able to get, they were able to get Mitochondrial DNA that was from a human and it seems that that was the kid's mother. They were unable to extract nuclear DNA, this was a few years ago, and Lloyd Pi's conclusion was: the reason they couldn't extract nuclear DNA proves that it's not human.

B: Oh nice.

E: (laughter) um.

S: So the lack of evidence is evidence that this is not human.

J: So right out of the gate, you make a discovery like this you bring it to "experts" right. You let scientists look at it that do this for a living and have been doing it for a long time which he's failed to do. You know he's not...

B: I disagree, I disagree. You find something like this you put it on ebay.
(laughter)

B: That's what I'd do.

E: This does predate ebay.

J: No Bob the Smithsonian would pay more for this than most people would imagine paying on ebay. But the .

S: Yeah

B: Well they could bid on it, they could...

J: The point is though, the point being that right out of the gate he's made poor descisions on top of poor descisions and that's if he's actually even being honest at all which I doubt.

E: Well Jay I think it's a good point and I think there may be a larger point to all this is that Lloyd pi has some pre conceived notions, right, and he is emphasizing certain points that, you know, help try to make his case and he downplays any evidence that contradicts what his personal values is. You know invested in this whole Star child project. So he's biased he's horribly biased

S: Oh yeah.

E: And that taints everything.

S: Remember this is the guy who wrote the book "Everything you know is wrong".
(laughter)

S: Right this guy thinks everything scientists say is completely wrong. He wants to rewrite history and rewrite science

B: Oh one of those.

S: He's a total crank this guy, bottom line.

E: But just last week, and I'll read it in his own words, He says: "We finally have a recovery of nuclear DNA from the Starchild".

J: So what scientist confirmed it? Where's the information?

E: OK, well he met with the geneticist working on the Storchild's DNA and he notes and I quote again: "I should add that I can't reveal the name of the geneticist or where he works until we are ready to formally present the resutls."

J: Of course because that would ruin everything

E: Ehhhh yeah

J: This guy, this guy is full of shit. There we go. He is totally, he is totally marketing himself. This is all hype and no substance.

S: Probably yeah.

E: Alright so he admits that back in 2003 he had a DNA analysis that used human only primers to recover the mitochondrial DNA which is the DNA outside the nucleus but at the time they could not recover it because the technology at the time was limited

B: Lame.

E: Right. But now in 2010 there have been many improvemnets in the recovery process, those improvements have been applied to the starchilds skull with the stunning result. And he throws up some charts and he talks about sequencing and base pairs. Steve this is where you're probably going to have to jump in and explain a little bit but essentially what he's saying is that there's a strand of 342 base pairs to which they ar not able to match it up to any animal in the NIH database which contains, I guess, all this information on all kinds of animals,

S: Yeah

E: and their genetic codes.

S: Right, Pi says every animal in the world and that's wrong I mean

(laughter)

S: He's trying to say that this database basically contains the genetic information of alll living things on Earth and since this thing can't be matched to anything in the database that proves this is DNA not from the Earth.

J: Oh. This guy's a genius.

S: Yeah, again we don't know what this is therefore it's an alien. No, we don't know that this is therefore we don't know what
it is. And...

B: Plus 342 base pairs is nothing that's tiny. That could just be junk DNA that's not coding for anything that we know.

E: Lloyd Pi believes that to be a stunning and apparently incredibly rare occurrence.

S: Right. Now the thing is, I mean that is long enough to match up to known, you know we should b able to see if it were a human we should be able to find out where that's supposed to match up along the human genome. But certainly there could be things mixed up in there that are not from people and wouldn't necessarily be in that database. Who knows, it could got... They describe the process that's supposed to get rid of any contamination but if any bacterial DNA got in there that would throw it off. Also this analysis has not been pier reviewed. We don't even know who the geneticist is.

E: (laughter)

S: there's no transparency here whatsoever

E: He could be making this up wholesale, we'd have no idea.
S: or it could just be incompetence, problems with the process, you know, who knows. This is a negative result this is just nothing. Now here's the other thing: he consults all these experts, but if you read

E: probably

S: for those experts that have actually like you can say this is a quote of doctor so and so most of them are saying things which are, don't have anything to do with weather this is a human or an alien hybrid just like, this is 900 years old from the carbon 14 dating, that's what expert A is saying. That's one expert another one is saying, you know, that this looks like it come's from a child based on the teeth maybe 5 to 6 years old. That's another expert. But they're not saying anything at all that bears at all on whether on not this is a deformed human versus a human alien hybrid but he's counting them among the experts. There's only one so called expert, a cranial facial surgeon, who is actually, who has aledgedly examined the skull directly and ruled out all the known medical deformities that could explain this skull. It's just this one guy, you know, and we don't, who seems to be invested in this

E: Right.
and we don't really know what his expertise is.

E: Hardly a scientific consensus.

S: Yeah.

J: I mean if you think about the hoopla this guy's making over a deformed skull, it's just a deformed skull. Obviously, if this is a real skull it was a child that had some type of genetic disease

S: Yeah, I mean, it could be in fact a very interest skull

== Who's That Noisy? ()==

== Questions and Emails () ==
=== Question 1 ()===
=== Question 2 ()===

== Interview with "..." () ==

== Science or Fiction () ==

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>
</blockquote>

== Announcements () ==

{{Outro1}} 

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 245

2013-04-30T20:59:45Z

Oldcurse:

SGU Episode 245

2013-04-30T20:55:22Z

Oldcurse:

SGU Episode 245

2012-10-26T11:46:17Z

Oldcurse: Started transcription

''This is a draft of the episode page skeleton, you can use it to structure your transcription page''
{{Transcribing all
|transcriber = Oldcurse
}}
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|transcription = y

|time-stamps = y
|formatting = y
|links = y
|Today I Learned list = y
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|}}
{{InfoBox
|episodeTitle = SGU Episode 245
|episodeDate = 25th March 2010 
|episodeIcon = File:LogoSGU.png 
|previous = 244 
|next = 246 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|perry = 
|guest1 = G: George Hrab 
|guest2 = 
|guest3 = 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2010-25-03.mp3
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=00000.0
|qowText = Death is an engineering problem. 
|qowAuthor = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_Kosko Bart Kosko] 
|}}

== 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 Tuesday March 25th 2010

== This Day in Skepticism () ==

== News Items ==
=== Item 1 ()===

== Who's That Noisy? ()==

== Questions and Emails () ==
=== Question 1 ()===
=== Question 2 ()===

== Interview with "..." () ==

== Science or Fiction () ==

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>
</blockquote>

== Announcements () ==

{{Outro1}} 

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

Template:SGU episode list

2012-10-22T12:35:24Z

Oldcurse: Added episode 245

<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>'''2012'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 379]], Oct 20 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 378]], Oct 13 2012
* [[SGU Episode 377]], Oct 6 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 376]], Sep 29 2012 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 375]], Sep 22 2012 {{Open}}
* [[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 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 348]], Mar 17 2012
* [[SGU Episode 347]], Mar 10 2012
* [[SGU Episode 346]], Mar 3 2012
* [[SGU Episode 339]], Jan 14 2012
* [[SGU Episode 338]], Jan 7 2012 {{tick}}

<big>'''2011'''</big>
----
* [[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 {{i}}
|valign="top" style=white-space:nowrap|<big>'''2010'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 271]], Sep 22 2010
* [[SGU Episode 260]], Jun 30 2010 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 252]], May 12 2010
* [[SGU Episode 245]], Mar 25 2010 {{i}}

<big>'''2009'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 220]], Oct 7 2009 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 216]], Sep 9 2009 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 185]], Feb 4 2009 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 184]], Jan 28 2009

<big>'''2008'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 165]], Sep 17 2008
* [[SGU Episode 156]], Jul 16 2008 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 146]], May 7 2008
* [[SGU Episode 144]], Apr 23 2008 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 140]], Mar 26 2008 {{i}}

<big>'''2007'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 123]], Nov 28, 2007 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 109]], Aug 24, 2007
* [[SGU Episode 105]], Jul 25, 2007 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 98]], June 6, 2007 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 97]], May 30 2007 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 89]], Apr 4, 2007 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 79]], Jan 24, 2007

<big>'''2006'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 62]], Sep 27 2006
* [[SGU Episode 47]], Jun 14 2006 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 46]], Jun 7 2006 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 38]], Apr 12 2006 {{Open}}
* [[SGU Episode 31]], Feb 22 2006 {{Open}}

<big>'''2005'''</big>
----
* [[SGU Episode 8]], Aug 2 2005 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 7]], Jul 20 2005
* [[SGU Episode 6]], Jul 7 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 5]], Jun 29 2005
* [[SGU Episode 4]], Jun 15 2005 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 3]], Jun 7 2005 {{i}}
* [[SGU Episode 2]], Jun 1 2005 {{tick}}
* [[SGU Episode 1]], May 4 2005 {{tick}}
|}

5X5 Episode 75

2012-10-22T10:04:13Z

Oldcurse: typo fixes

{{5X5 editing required 
|proof-reading = y 
|links = y
|categories = y
|redirect = y 
|}}
{{Template:5X5 infobox 
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 75 
|Contents = The Coriolis Effect 
|episodeDate = 12th August 2009 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52009-08-12.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=75 
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,22133.0.html 
|}}
== The Coriolis Effect == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and tonight we are talking about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect The Coriolis Effect]. The Coriolis Effect or the Coriolis force is actually a pseudo force or an illusionary force that appears to cause things to curve as they travel a long distance across a rotating or spinning frame of reference.

E: It's called the Coriolis Effect because it was first discovered by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspard-Gustave_Coriolis Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis] a French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist. He's best known for work on motion of moving parts in machines relative to their fixed parts. He had a talent for interpreting and adapting these theories to applied mathematics and mechanics and while he was an assistant professor and a director of studies at the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique École Polytechnique] in Paris from 1816 to 1838 he gave the terms [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics) work] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy kinetic energy] their scientific and practical meanings and they're still used today. But in 1835 he published a paper called "On the equations of relative motion of a system bodies" which he described this force which in the 20th century became known as the Coriolis Effect.

R: The funny thing is I think most people think of the Coriolis Effect as something that it is not. A lot of people have heard of it when they're talking about the way that, say, water swirls down the drain or the way your toilet flushes. There's a really common thing that's done on tours around the equator where they show you a bowl of water with a hole at the bottom and they show water swirling down it one way on one side of the equator and then they step over to the other side and show it swirling the other way. This effect has even been, ah, if you've been fooled by it don't feel bad because I read a book by Douglas Adams where he talks about it believing that it's totally true and at the time he wrote the book he still thought it was true. So you're not the only one and it's a very good illusion and good kind of trick. But the trick is really just in the bowls, the drains that you use, the way that they are pock marked or the subtle variation in the bowl can have a lot more to do with the way water drains than, for instance, what side of the equator you're on. You could also influence it by spinning the bowl a certain way and tipping it a certain way. So unfortunately that's not actually the Coriolis Effect that you see.

S: That's right because the Coriolis Effect is proportional to distance over which something is moving like, say, a cannonball shooting a mile or two or lets say the size of a weather system lake a tropical storm or a hurricane. However the size of a bathtub or a sink it's far, far, far too small for the Coriolis Effect to be significant. This is something called the Rosby number which describes the magnitude of the Coriolis Effect and for things the size of a tub it is literally negligible. Even the slightest momentum in the water in the tub will overwhelm any Coriolis force and that will determine the direction that the water spins when it goes down the drain.

B: In fact the Coriolis Effect is two or three orders of magnitude smaller than any of the random influences that are a much greater influence on the way that the water drains. But it can, you can pull it off, you can show the Coriolis force in a small body of water, something maybe tub sized or maybe smaller but it's an extreme effort to make it work. First off you need an incredibly smooth and uniform bowl. You will need small drain hole not a big one because you're going to need time for this force to build up. And you're also going to need about a week and a lot of patience for the water to become completely still so that all motion that may have been induced by you, by the water going in, will be completely washed away and then only then would you be able to potentially see the Coriolis effect in action but it's a very difficult experiment to pull off on something that small scale.

J: You know I had to admit I had a hard time really understanding what this meant until I had a discussion with Steve about it then I actually went to Wikipedia and looked at the graphic that they had on there so I highly recommend that you do this. Now I did come up with a way to help explain the idea of what this is visually. So lets say that an ant is travelling around a hulahoop and the hula hoop is rotating and then a cannonball is shot from the centre of that circle. It would appear to the ant that the cannonballs path is curving when it actually isn't. Because the ant is actually moving on the outside of a sphere, just like we are on the Earth and that's the basic explanation of why it looks like the path of that cannonball is actuallly curving when it isn't. And the other thing is in regards to ballistics, let's say someone is shooting something above a half a mile. They may have to take into account the Coriolis effect because the Earth is actually spinning underneath that missile after it's shot and the position isn't going to be accurate as if it was being shot on something that isn't spinning. A ballistics expert has to take into account the spin of the earth in order to calculate where that shot is actually going to hit.

B: And the faster you're moving the more pronounced the Coriolis effect will be and the further north or further south you are below the equator will also make it more and more pronounced. Another great way to visualise this is to picture four kids on a playground carousel that's spinning around and with each kid at the 12, 3, 6 and 9 positions. If the carousel is spinning and the kid at the 12 o'clock position shot the ball straight out, just pushed it straight out, the ball will curve to the left, depending on rotation of course, it will curve to the left to the person at the 3 o'clock position and then if he did it the same thing would happen it would go straight out briefly and then gently curve to the person ant the 6 o'clock position so if you were outside of that carousel and you looked at the ball would seem to be moving in a straight line but if you're on that rotating frame of reference only then will it appear to have a curved aspect to it.

E: It's a good point Bob, it's a good lesson for the kids so if there are four kids on that carousel and you're ninety degrees off centre to the left then that other kid vomits then, you know, be careful. It's not going to go straight ahead to the other kid it's going to go the left

B: (laughter)

S: That's right. So, to summarise the Coriolis force is an artefact of making observations within a rotating or spinning frame of reference. But if you are within that frame of reference you can actually treat it as if it is a real force and everything will work out as if that were true in all the calculations and observations that you make but really it's just an artefact of making observations from within a, what we call, non inertial frame of reference.

B: There are those that will argue that although it appears the force seems to just appear within the rotating frame of reference even though it's not a fundamental force of nature it is a bona fide force and should be treated as such.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}

5X5 Episode 75

2012-10-21T06:51:05Z

Oldcurse: Added (laughter), links

{{5X5 editing required 
|proof-reading = y 
|links = y
|categories = y
|redirect = y 
|}}
{{Template:5X5 infobox 
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 75 
|Contents = The Coriolis Effect 
|episodeDate = 12th August 2009 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52009-08-12.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=75 
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,22133.0.html 
|}}
== The Coriolis Effect == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and tonight we are talking about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect The Coriolis Effect]. The Coriolis Effect or the Coriolis force is actually a pseudo force or an illusionary force that appears to cause things to curve as they travel a long distance across a rotating or spinning frame of reference.

E: It's called the Coriolis Effect because it was first discovered by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspard-Gustave_Coriolis Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis] a French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist. He's best known for work on motion of moving parts in machines relative to their fixed parts. He had a talent for interpreting and adapting these theories to applied mathematics and mechanics and while he was an assistant professor and a director of studies at the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique École Polytechnique] in Paris from 1816 to 1838 he gave the terms [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics) work] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy kenetic energy] their scientific and practical meanings and they're still used today. But in 1835 he published a paper called "On the equations of relative motion of a system bodies" which he described this force which, in the 20th century became known as the Coriolis Effect.

R: The funny thing is I think most people think of the Coriolis Effect as something it is not. A lot of people have heard of it when they're talking about the way that, say, water swirls down the drain or the way your toilet flushes. There's a really common thing that's done on tours around the equator where they show you a bowl of water with a hole at the bottom and they show water swirling down one way on one side of the equator and then they step over to the other side and show it swirling the other way. This effect has even been, ah, if you've been fooled by it don't feel bad because I read a book by Douglas Adams where he talks about it believing that it's totally true and at the time he wrote the book he still thought it was true. So you're not the only one and it's a very good illusion and good kind of trick. But the trick is really just in the bowls, the drains that you use, the way that they are pock marked or the subtle variation in the bowl can have a lot more to do with the way water drains than, for instance, what side of the equator you're on. You could also influence it by spinning the bowl a certain way and tipping it a certain way. So unfortunately that's not actually the Coriolis Effect that you see.

S: That's right because the Coriolis Effect is proportional to distance over which something is moving like, say , a cannonball shooting a mile or two or lets say the size of a weather system lake a tropical storm or a hurricane. However the size of a bathtub or a sink it's far, far, far too small for the Coriolis Effect to be significant. This is something called the Rosby number which describes the magnitude of the Coriolis Effect and for things the size of a tub it is literally negligible. Even the slightest momentum in the water in the tub will overwhelm any Coriolis force and that will determine the direction that the water spins when it goes down the drain.

B: In fact the Coriolis Effect is two or three orders of magnitude smaller than any of the random influences that are a much greater influence on the way that the water drains. But it can, you can pull it off, you can show the Coriolis force in a small body of water, something maybe tub sized or maybe smaller but it's an extreme effort to make it work. First off you need an incredibly smooth and uniform bowl. You will need small drain hole not a big one because you're going to need time for this force to build up. And you're also going to need about a week and a lot of patience for the water to become completely still so that all motion that may have been induced by you, by the water going in, will be completely washed away and then only then would you be able to potentially see the Coriolis effect in action but it's a very difficult experiment to pull off on something that small scale.

J: You know I had to admit I had a hard time really understanding what this meant until I had a discussion with Steve about it then I actually went to Wikipedia and looked at the graphic that they had on there so I highly recommend that you do this. Now I did come up with a way to help explain the idea of what this is visually. So lets say that an ant is travelling around a hulahoop and the hula hoop is rotating and then a cannonball is shot from the centre of that circle. It would appear to the ant that the cannonballs path is curving when it actually isn't. because the ant is actually moving on the outside of a sphere, just like we are on the Earth and that's the basic explanation of why the path of that cannonball looks like it is curving when it isn't. And the other thing is in regards to ballistics, let's say someone is shooting something above a half a mile. They may have to take into account the Coriolis effect because the Earth is actually spinning underneath that missile after it's shot and the position isn't going to be accurate as if it was being shot on something that isn't spinning. A ballistics expert has to take into account the spin of the earth in order to calculate where that shot is actually going to hit.

B: And the faster you're moving the more pronounced the Coriolis effect is will be and the further north or further south you are below the equator will also make it more and more pronounced. Another great way to visualise this is to picture four kids on a playground carousel that's spinning around and with each kid at the 12, 3, 6 and 9 positions. If the carousel is spinning and the kid at the 12 o'clock position shot the ball straight out, just pushed it straight out, the ball will curve to the left, depending on rotation of course, it will curve to the left to the person at the 3 o'clock position and then if he did it the same thing would happen it would go straight out briefly and then gently curve to the person ant the 6 o'clock position so if you were outside of that carousel and you looked at the ball would seem to be moving in a straight line but if you're on that rotating frame of reference only then will it appear to have a curved aspect to it.

E: It's a good point Bob, it's a good lesson for the kids so if there are four kids on that carousel and you're ninety degrees off centre to the left then that other kid vomits then, you know, be careful. It's not going to go straight ahead to the other kid it's going to go the left

B: (laughter)

S: That's right. So, to summarise the Coriolis force is an artefact of making observations within a rotating or spinning frame of reference. But if you are within that frame of reference you can actually treat it as if it is a real force and everything will work out as if that were true in all the calculations and observations that you make but really it's just an artefact of making observations from within a, what we call, non inertial frame of reference.

B: There are those that will argue that although it appears the force seems to just appear within the rotating frame of reference even though it's not a fundamental force of nature it is a bona fide force and should be treated as such.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}

5X5 Episode 75

2012-10-21T06:39:30Z

Oldcurse: updated header

{{5X5 editing required 
|proof-reading = y 
|links = y
|categories = y
|redirect = y 
|}}
{{Template:5X5 infobox 
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 75 
|Contents = The Coriolis Effect 
|episodeDate = 12th August 2009 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52009-08-12.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=75 
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,22133.0.html 
|}}
== The Coriolis Effect == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and tonight we are talking about The Coriolis Effect. The Coriolis Effect or the Coriolis force is actually a pseudo force or an illusionary force that appears to cause things to curve as they travel a long distance across a rotating or spinning frame of reference.

E: It's called the Coriolis Effect because it was first discovered by Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis a French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist. He's best known for work on motion of moving parts in machines relative to their fixed parts. He had a talent for interpreting and adapting these theories to applied mathematics and mechanics and while he was an assistant professor and a director of studies at the École Polytechnique in Paris from 1816 to 1838 he gave the terms work and kenetic energy their scientific and practical meanings and they're still used today. But in 1835 he published a paper called "On the equations of relative motion of system bodies" which he described this force which, in the 20th century became known as the Coriolis Effect.

R: The funny thing is I think most people think of the Coriolis Effect as something it is not. A lot of people have heard of it when they're talking about the way that, say, water swirls down the drain or the way your toilet flushes. There's a really common thing that's done on tours around the equator where they show you a bowl of water with a hole at the bottom and they show water swirling down one way on one side of the equator and then they step over to the other side and show it swirling the other way. This effect has even been, ah, if you've been fooled by it don't feel bad because I read a book by Douglas Adams where he talks about it believing that it's totally true and at the time he wrote the book he still thought it was true. So you're not the only one and it's a very good illusion and good kind of trick. But the trick is really just in the bowls, the drains that you use, the way that they are pock marked or the subtle variation in the bowl can have a lot more to do with the way water drains than, for instance, what side of the equator you're on. You could also influence it by spinning the bowl a certain way and tipping it a certain way. So unfortunately that's not actually the Coriolis Effect that you see.

S: That's right because the Coriolis Effect is proportional to distance over which something is moving like, say , a cannonball shooting a mile or two or lets say the size of a weather system lake a tropical storm or a hurricane. However the size of a bathtub or a sink it's far, far, far too small for the Coriolis Effect to be significant. This is something called the Rosby number which describes the magnitude of the Coriolis Effect and for things the size of a tub it is literally negligible. Even the slightest momentum in the water in the tub will overwhelm any Coriolis force and that will determine the direction that the water spins when it goes down the drain.

B: In fact the Coriolis Effect is two or three orders of magnitude smaller than any of the random influences that are a much greater influence on the way that the water drains. But it can, you can pull it off, you can show the Coriolis force in a small body of water, something maybe tub sized or maybe smaller but it's an extreme effort to make it work. First off you need an incredibly smooth and uniform bowl. You will need small drain hole not a big one because you're going to need time for this force to build up. And you're also going to need about a week and a lot of patience for the water to become completely still so that all motion that may have been induced by you, by the water going in, will be completely washed away and then only then would you be able to potentially see the Coriolis effect in action but it's a very difficult experiment to pull off on something that small scale.

J: You know I had to admit I had a hard time really understanding what this meant until I had a discussion with Steve about it then I actually went to Wikipedia and looked at the graphic that they had on there so I highly recommend that you do this. Now I did come up with a way to help explain the idea of what this is visually. So lets say that an ant is travelling around a hulahoop and the hula hoop is rotating and then a cannonball is shot from the centre of that circle. It would appear to the ant that the cannonballs path is curving when it actually isn't. because the ant is actually moving on the outside of a sphere, just like we are on the Earth and that's the basic explanation of why the path of that cannonball looks like it is curving when it isn't. And the other thing is in regards to ballistics, let's say someone is shooting something above a half a mile. They may have to take into account the Coriolis effect because the Earth is actually spinning underneath that missile after it's shot and the position isn't going to be accurate as if it was being shot on something that isn't spinning. A ballistics expert has to take into account the spin of the earth in order to calculate where that shot is actually going to hit.

B: And the faster you're moving the more pronounced the Coriolis effect is will be and the further north or further south you are below the equator will also make it more and more pronounced. Another great way to visualise this is to picture four kids on a playground carousel that's spinning around and with each kid at the 12, 3, 6 and 9 positions. If the carousel is spinning and the kid at the 12 o'clock position shot the ball straight out, just pushed it straight out, the ball will curve to the left, depending on rotation of course, it will curve to the left to the person at the 3 o'clock position and then if he did it the same thing would happen it would go straight out briefly and then gently curve to the person ant the 6 o'clock position so if you were outside of that carousel and you looked at the ball would seem to be moving in a straight line but if you're on that rotating frame of reference only then will it appear to have a curved aspect to it.

E: It's a good point Bob, it's a good lesson for the kids so if there are four kids on that carousel and you're ninety degrees off centre to the left then that other kid vomits then, you know, be careful. It's not going to go straight ahead to the other kid it's going to go the left

B: (laughs)

S: That's right. So, to summarise the Coriolis force is an artefact of making observations within a rotating or spinning frame of reference. But if you are within that frame of reference you can actually treat it as if it is a real force and everything will work out as if that were true in all the calculations and observations that you make but really it's just an artefact of making observations from within a, what we call, non inertial frame of reference.

B: There are those that will argue that although it appears the force seems to just appear within the rotating frame of reference even though it's not a fundamental force of nature it is a bona fide force and should be treated as such.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}

5X5 Episode 75

2012-10-21T06:35:51Z

Oldcurse: Added main text of page

{{5X5 editing required 
|transcription = y 
|proof-reading = y 
|formatting = y
|links = y
|categories = y
|redirect = y 
|}}
{{Template:5X5 infobox 
|episodeID = 5X5 Episode 75 
|Contents = The Coriolis Effect 
|episodeDate = 12th August 2009 
|rebecca = y 
|bob = y 
|jay = y 
|evan = y 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/sgu5x5/SGU5x52009-08-12.mp3 
|notesLink = http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=2&pid=75 
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,22133.0.html 
|}}
== The Coriolis Effect == 
{{5x5intro}}

S: This is the SGU 5x5 and tonight we are talking about The Coriolis Effect. The Coriolis Effect or the Coriolis force is actually a pseudo force or an illusionary force that appears to cause things to curve as they travel a long distance across a rotating or spinning frame of reference.

E: It's called the Coriolis Effect because it was first discovered by Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis a French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist. He's best known for work on motion of moving parts in machines relative to their fixed parts. He had a talent for interpreting and adapting these theories to applied mathematics and mechanics and while he was an assistant professor and a director of studies at the École Polytechnique in Paris from 1816 to 1838 he gave the terms work and kenetic energy their scientific and practical meanings and they're still used today. But in 1835 he published a paper called "On the equations of relative motion of system bodies" which he described this force which, in the 20th century became known as the Coriolis Effect.

R: The funny thing is I think most people think of the Coriolis Effect as something it is not. A lot of people have heard of it when they're talking about the way that, say, water swirls down the drain or the way your toilet flushes. There's a really common thing that's done on tours around the equator where they show you a bowl of water with a hole at the bottom and they show water swirling down one way on one side of the equator and then they step over to the other side and show it swirling the other way. This effect has even been, ah, if you've been fooled by it don't feel bad because I read a book by Douglas Adams where he talks about it believing that it's totally true and at the time he wrote the book he still thought it was true. So you're not the only one and it's a very good illusion and good kind of trick. But the trick is really just in the bowls, the drains that you use, the way that they are pock marked or the subtle variation in the bowl can have a lot more to do with the way water drains than, for instance, what side of the equator you're on. You could also influence it by spinning the bowl a certain way and tipping it a certain way. So unfortunately that's not actually the Coriolis Effect that you see.

S: That's right because the Coriolis Effect is proportional to distance over which something is moving like, say , a cannonball shooting a mile or two or lets say the size of a weather system lake a tropical storm or a hurricane. However the size of a bathtub or a sink it's far, far, far too small for the Coriolis Effect to be significant. This is something called the Rosby number which describes the magnitude of the Coriolis Effect and for things the size of a tub it is literally negligible. Even the slightest momentum in the water in the tub will overwhelm any Coriolis force and that will determine the direction that the water spins when it goes down the drain.

B: In fact the Coriolis Effect is two or three orders of magnitude smaller than any of the random influences that are a much greater influence on the way that the water drains. But it can, you can pull it off, you can show the Coriolis force in a small body of water, something maybe tub sized or maybe smaller but it's an extreme effort to make it work. First off you need an incredibly smooth and uniform bowl. You will need small drain hole not a big one because you're going to need time for this force to build up. And you're also going to need about a week and a lot of patience for the water to become completely still so that all motion that may have been induced by you, by the water going in, will be completely washed away and then only then would you be able to potentially see the Coriolis effect in action but it's a very difficult experiment to pull off on something that small scale.

J: You know I had to admit I had a hard time really understanding what this meant until I had a discussion with Steve about it then I actually went to Wikipedia and looked at the graphic that they had on there so I highly recommend that you do this. Now I did come up with a way to help explain the idea of what this is visually. So lets say that an ant is travelling around a hulahoop and the hula hoop is rotating and then a cannonball is shot from the centre of that circle. It would appear to the ant that the cannonballs path is curving when it actually isn't. because the ant is actually moving on the outside of a sphere, just like we are on the Earth and that's the basic explanation of why the path of that cannonball looks like it is curving when it isn't. And the other thing is in regards to ballistics, let's say someone is shooting something above a half a mile. They may have to take into account the Coriolis effect because the Earth is actually spinning underneath that missile after it's shot and the position isn't going to be accurate as if it was being shot on something that isn't spinning. A ballistics expert has to take into account the spin of the earth in order to calculate where that shot is actually going to hit.

B: And the faster you're moving the more pronounced the Coriolis effect is will be and the further north or further south you are below the equator will also make it more and more pronounced. Another great way to visualise this is to picture four kids on a playground carousel that's spinning around and with each kid at the 12, 3, 6 and 9 positions. If the carousel is spinning and the kid at the 12 o'clock position shot the ball straight out, just pushed it straight out, the ball will curve to the left, depending on rotation of course, it will curve to the left to the person at the 3 o'clock position and then if he did it the same thing would happen it would go straight out briefly and then gently curve to the person ant the 6 o'clock position so if you were outside of that carousel and you looked at the ball would seem to be moving in a straight line but if you're on that rotating frame of reference only then will it appear to have a curved aspect to it.

E: It's a good point Bob, it's a good lesson for the kids so if there are four kids on that carousel and you're ninety degrees off centre to the left then that other kid vomits then, you know, be careful. It's not going to go straight ahead to the other kid it's going to go the left

B: (laughs)

S: That's right. So, to summarise the Coriolis force is an artefact of making observations within a rotating or spinning frame of reference. But if you are within that frame of reference you can actually treat it as if it is a real force and everything will work out as if that were true in all the calculations and observations that you make but really it's just an artefact of making observations from within a, what we call, non inertial frame of reference.

B: There are those that will argue that although it appears the force seems to just appear within the rotating frame of reference even though it's not a fundamental force of nature it is a bona fide force and should be treated as such.

{{5x5outro}}

{{5X5 Navigation}}

Template:5X5 episode list

2012-10-20T22:48:29Z

Oldcurse:

<noinclude>This template is used to display the list of 5X5 episodes on the [[Main Page]] and the [[5X5 Episodes]] page. Additions and amendments to this template will be reflected on those pages.

For help on how to add a new row, see [[Template:5X5 list entry]].
</noinclude>

{|class="wikitable sortable" style="margin: 1em 3em;"
!No.!!class="unsortable"|Date!!Contents!!Categories
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 113
|date = May 9 2012
|contents = What's the Harm?
|category1 = Myths & Misconceptions
|category2 = Logic & Philosophy
|category3 = Religion & Faith
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = incomplete
|episode = 112
|date = May 2 2012
|contents = Anecdotal Evidence
|category1 =
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 111
|date = Apr 25 2012
|contents = Facilitated Communication
|category1 = Pseudoscience
|category2 = Myths & Misconceptions
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 110
|date = Apr 11 2012
|contents = Naturalistic Fallacy
|category1 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 109
|date = Apr 4 2012
|contents = Celebrity Pseudoscience
|category1 = Pseudoscience
|category2 = Entertainment
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 108
|date = Mar 28 2012
|contents = Cancer Cure
|category1 = Science & Medicine
|category2 = Conspiracy Theories
|category3 = Pseudoscience
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 107
|date = Mar 21 2012
|contents = Chilean UFO
|category1 = UFOs & Aliens
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 106
|date = Mar 19 2012
|contents = Availability Heuristic
|category1 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 105
|date = Mar 7 2012
|contents = Representativeness Heuristic
|category1 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 104
|date = Feb 22 2012
|contents = WiFi
|category1 = Myths & Misconceptions
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 103
|date = Feb 15 2012
|contents = Creationism
|category1 = Creationism & ID
|category2 = Science & Education
|category3 = Legal Issues & Regulations}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 101
|date = Jan 26 2011
|contents = Skepticism 101 - Slippery Slope/Post Hoc
|category1 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 100
|date = Jan 13 2011
|contents = Testable
|category1 = General Science
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 99
|date = Jan 5 2011
|contents = Graphology
|category1 = History
|category2 = Pseudoscience
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 98
|date = Dec 30 2010
|contents = Harry Houdini
|category1 = History
|category2 = Paranormal
|category3 = Ghosts & Demons
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 97
|date = Dec 20 2010
|contents = Repressed Memories
|category1 = Neuroscience & Psychology
|category2 = Science & Medicine
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 96
|date = Nov 9 2010
|contents = Magnets
|category1 = General Science
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 95
|date = Sep 21 2010
|contents = Chelation
|category1 = Science & Medicine
|category2 = Alternative Medicine
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 94
|date = Sep 12 2010
|contents = Nostradamus
|category1 = Prophecy
|category2 = History
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 93
|date = Aug 13 2010
|contents = Chiropractic - Part 3
|category1 = Science & Medicine
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 92
|date = Jul 28 2010
|contents = Chiropractic - Part 2
|category1 = Science & Medicine
|category2 = History
|category3 = Legal Issues & Regulations
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 91
|date = Jul 13 2010
|contents = Chiropractic - Part 1
|category1 = Science & Medicine
|category2 = History
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 90
|date = Jun 29 2010
|contents = The Unification Church
|category1 = Religion & Faith
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 83
|date = Dec 20 2009
|contents = Irreducible Complexity
|category1 = Creationism & ID
|category2 = Nature & Evolution
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 81
|date = Nov 18 2009
|contents = Naturopathy
|category1 = Alternative Medicine
|category2 = Science & Medicine
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 80
|date = Oct 28 2009
|contents = Polygraphs
|category1 = Technology
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = incomplete
|episode = 75
|date = Aug 12 2009
|contents = The Coriolis Effect
|category1 = General Science
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 72
|date = Jul 16 2009
|contents = Randi Million Dollar Psychic Challenge and Connie Sonne
|category1 = Pseudoscience
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 68
|date = May 22 2009
|contents = Near Death Experiences
|category1 = Myths & Misconceptions
|category2 = Science & Medicine
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 67
|date = Apr 30 2009
|contents = Skepticism 101 - Special Pleading
|category1 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 65
|date = Apr 16 2009
|contents = Skepticism 101 - Scientific Theory
|category1 = General Science
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 62
|date = Mar 19 2009
|contents = Skepticism 101 - How to Argue
|category1 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 56
|date = Feb 4 2009
|contents = Probability
|category1 = General Science
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 55
|date = Jan 28 2009
|contents = Skepticism 101 - Poisoning the Well
|category1 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 54
|date = Jan 21 2009
|contents = Skepticism 101 - False Dichotomy
|category1 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 53
|status = verified
|date = Jan 13 2009
|contents = Anecdotal Evidence
|category1 = Myths & Misconceptions
|category2 = Logic & Philosophy
|category3 = General Science
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 52
|date = Jan 6 2009
|contents = Atlantis
|category1 = Myths & Misconceptions
|category2 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 50
|date = Dec 15 2008
|contents = Skepticism 101 - The Argument from Ignorance
|category1 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 49
|date = Dec 8 2008
|contents = Skepticism 101 - Argument from Authority
|category1 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 48
|date = Dec 1 2008
|contents = The 10% Brain Myth
|category1 = Myths & Misconceptions
|category2 = General Science
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 46
|date = Nov 18 2008
|contents = Skepticism 101 - Correlation and Causation
|category1 = General Science
|category2 = Logic & Philosophy
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 45
|date = Nov 11 2008
|contents = Chi and other forms of vitalism
|category1 = Energy Healing
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 43
|date = Oct 29 2008
|contents = Holocaust Denial
|category1 = Myths & Misconceptions
|category2 = History

}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 38
|date = Sep 24 2008
|contents = Skepticism 101 - Pareidolia
|category1 = Nature & Evolution
|category2 = Neuroscience & Psychology
|category3 = Paranormal
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = incomplete
|episode = 31
|date = Aug 4 2008
|contents = Digital Homeopathy 20 years after Benveniste
|category1 = Alternative Medicine
|category2 = Science & Medicine
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 30
|date = Jul 29 2008
|contents = Evaluation of a UCONN study of therapeutic touch on bone cells in culture
|category1 = Alternative Medicine
|category2 = New Age
|category3 = Science & Medicine
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = incomplete
|episode = 26
|date = June 29 2008
|contents = New study sheds light on genetic vs environmental contributions to sexuality.
|category1 = Science & Medicine
|category2 = Nature & Evolution
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 25
|date = June 22 2008
|contents = NASA Plans Probe to the Sun.
|category1 = Astronomy & Space Science
|category2 = Technology
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 24
|date = June 15 2008
|contents = New strategy for SETI - The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.
|category1 = Astronomy & Space Science
|category2 = Technology
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 23
|date = June 08 2008
|contents = Lame car design analogy to intelligent design from the Discovery Institute.
|category1 = Creationism & ID
|category2 = Logic & Philosophy
|category3 = Nature & Evolution
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 22
|date = June 01 2008
|contents = Researchers allow monkey to control robotic arm with its mind.
|category1 = Technology
|category2 = Neuroscience & Psychology
|category3 = Science & Medicine
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 21
|date = May 25 2008
|contents = Family claims women miraculously brought back to life after rigor mortis
|category1 = Science & Medicine
|category2 = Science & the Media
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 20
|date = May 18 2008
|contents = SPAM Chainletter e-mails do not spread as virally as thought
|category1 = Technology
|category2 = Cons, Scams & Hoaxes
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 19
|date = May 11 2008
|contents = The Science of Science Fiction Movies
|category1 = Entertainment
|category2 = General Science
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 18
|date = May 4 2008
|contents = Man Regenerates Finger - Bad Science News Reporting
|category1 = Science & the Media
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 17
|date = Apr 27 2008
|contents = T-Rex proteins closely related to chickens
|category1 = Nature & Evolution
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 16
|date = Apr 20 2008
|contents = Surgery under hypnosis.
|category1 = Science & Medicine
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = incomplete
|episode = 15
|date = Apr 13 2008
|contents = Examining a fossilized snake - with legs.
|category1 = Nature & Evolution
|category2 = Creationism & ID
|category3 = General Science
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 14
|date = Apr 6 2008
|contents = Nomophobia - the fear of being out of cell phone range.
|category1 = Science & Medicine
|category2 = Technology
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 13
|date = Mar 30 2008
|contents = Man convicted of molestation claims he was raped by Bigfoot
|category1 = Cryptozoology
|category2 = Legal Issues & Regulations
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 12
|date = Mar 23 2008
|contents = Faith-healing cult leads to child death from medical neglect
|category1 = Alternative Medicine
|category2 = Energy Healing
|category3 = Religion & Faith
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 11
|date = Mar 16 2008
|contents = Art project to give the city of Portland, Oregon acupuncture
|category1 = Alternative Medicine
|category2 = Energy Healing
|category3 = Entertainment
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 10
|status = verified
|date = Mar 9 2008
|contents = Steven Spielberg to create new paranormal online community
|category1 = Paranormal
|category2 = Entertainment
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 9
|status = verified
|date = Mar 2 2008
|contents = An Emmy award winning actress and her 911 conspiracy theory
|category1 = Conspiracy Theories
|category2 = Entertainment
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 8
|status = verified
|date = Feb 23 2008
|contents = Cryptozoology - Hunting for the Thunderbird
|category1 = Cryptozoology
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 7
|status = verified
|date = Feb 17 2008
|contents = Proposed center for exorcism in Poland
|category1 = Ghosts & Demons
|category2 = Religion & Faith
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|episode = 6
|status = verified
|date = Feb 11 2008
|contents = Dr. Harris's Pain Relief Snake Oil Infomercial
|category1 = Cons, Scams & Hoaxes
|category2 = Alternative Medicine
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 5
|date = Feb 3 2008
|contents = Pope Benedict XVI takes on science
|category1 = Religion & Faith
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 4
|date = Jan 28 2008
|contents = Do celebrity deaths come in threes? The rogues take on numerology
|category1 = Myths & Misconceptions
|category2 = Paranormal
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 3
|date = Jan 21 2008
|contents = Multilevel Marketing and Pyramid Schemes
|category1 = Cons, Scams & Hoaxes
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 2
|date = Jan 13 2008
|contents = Ghost Photographs
|category1 = Paranormal
|category2 = Ghosts & Demons
}}
|-
{{5X5 list entry
|status = verified
|episode = 1
|date = Jan 6 2008
|contents = The National Health Service of the UK plans to regulate alternative medicine
|category1 = Alternative Medicine
|category2 = Pseudoscience
}}
|}