SGUTranscripts - User contributions [en]

SGU Episode 978

2024-05-11T12:54:04Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

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|episodeIcon = File:978 RobotaxisNewYork.jpg

|caption = "New York City could soon have scores of autonomous vehicles (AVs) jockeying their way through bustling streets." <ref name=robotaxis>[https://www.popsci.com/technology/nyc-robotaxis-driverless/ Popular Science: NYC takes first step towards unleashing robotaxis on city roads]</ref>
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|guest1 = AJR: [http://www.jonesrooy.com Andrea Jones-Rooy,] political, social, and data scientist

|qowText = As always in life, people want a simple answer . . . and it's always wrong.
|qowAuthor = {{w| Susan Greenfield, Baroness Greenfield|Susan Greenfield}}, English scientist
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== Introduction, knives, Hawaii, Alaska, snow, treats stories ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024, 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 Andrea Jones-Rooy. Andrea, welcome back to the SGU. Hello.

'''AJR:''' Thank you. It's always lovely to be here. Hi to all the novellas and novella fans.

'''S:''' You and the Novella boys.

'''AJR:''' I'm just invading a family reunion at this point.

'''S:''' Yeah, basically. We had to record on Tuesday because we're going to Dallas later in the week for the Eclipse weekend thing. Cara's working tonight. She's literally working impatient. Evan is tax season. Tax season madness. Work until midnight every night. Yeah. He's got to do extra work because he still had to carve out time for the eclipse, even though it was like worst possible time of the year. So you just have us tonight, Andrea.

'''AJR:''' I'll be playing the role of Evan and Cara at various points. I've been practicing my impressions.

'''J:''' Remember back in like the 80s and 90s? It's a very special episode of Blossom. Remember they used to say shit like that?

'''AJR:''' Blossom is a deep cut. Well done.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah.

'''J:''' It's a deep cut. All right. Andrea, tell me something. Okay. How is my butcher knife in your kitchen doing?

'''AJR:''' It's doing just fine. It's it's missing its glory days of being on stage at not a con. And it is. it is resigned currently to its sad fate of resting in a drawer, which is very depressing for everybody. I haven't.

'''J:''' I don't like that at all. If it's not on the wall on.

'''AJR:''' No, I keep making the excuse, oh, we moved recently, so I haven't mounted it on the wall. We moved in May, which is nearly a year ago, but I just haven't found the time somehow to mount them to the wall. So the butcher knife and all its friends are sadly nestled away. I like to think of them as hibernating until their next time to shine.

'''J:''' Well, you don't eat a lot of meat, so I guess you don't really need it.

'''AJR:''' I really – the Nauticon cooking show is probably the most use it ever got in its life. And I've had it for like seven years. We opened a coconut with it once and otherwise I think I might put googly eyes on it for fun at some point.

'''J:''' Speaking of coconuts, I don't know if I ever told you guys this. Did I tell you that when I went to Hawaii that one of the places that we – we rented Airbnbs, right? One of the houses had a coconut tree and I ate two coconuts off the tree that I pulled down myself. Did I tell you this?

'''S:''' No.

'''J:''' Yeah, like I had to get the outer, what would you call that? The husk. The outer husk, yeah. That was not freaking easy at all.

'''B:''' Yeah, right?

'''J:''' I'm thinking like, did I burn more calories ripping this thing apart than I would get from eating the coconut?

'''B:''' Yeah, if you saw Survivor, you'd know that.

'''J:''' But what I did was I roasted it. I made roasted coconut and it was freaking amazing.

'''AJR:''' Like you roasted the meat that was on the inside?

'''J:''' Yeah, yeah. I took it out. I broke it into very, very small pieces and then I roasted it in a pan and it was like really, really flavorful, like awesome.

'''B:''' Wow. Speaking of coconut, I went to Alaska last week. That's why I wasn't on the show. I was visiting my daughter, Ashley, and her boyfriend, Cormac, in Girdwood, Alaska. Alaska is amazing. It is so beautiful. Ashley works at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, and she is amazing. She takes care of bears, foxes, bison, eagles, and of course, as we all know in the family, Twix the porcupine. Such an adorable animal. But it's an amazing place. And Alaska is even more beautiful than I anticipated because when you're driving around in this time of year, there's snow-capped mountains everywhere you look. And it's mind-boggling how beautiful it was. I came back home to Connecticut and I'm driving around and I'm like, something is missing. This place looks horrible because you look at the horizon. It's like I don't see anything, maybe tiny hills. But it was such – oh, man. I can't even imagine living there.

'''AJR:''' Where in Alaska is Gerwick, you said?

'''B:''' Yeah. Girdwood. Girdwood.

'''AJR:''' I wasn't even close. Where in Alaska is that?

'''B:''' It's about 45 minutes from Anchorage. Okay. The other striking thing, of course, when you go there, and this will be no surprise, is that there's so much snow everywhere. Oh, it's crazy. It's like snow used to be when, you know, 30 years ago before climate change really kicked in in Connecticut anyway. It's just like so much snow. They would get like, oh, yeah, we got three feet of snow two weeks ago. Like what?

'''S:''' Three feet?

'''AJR:''' And it's not even like news probably for them. No.

'''B:''' Oh, it's nothing. They're just like, whatever, you know, nothing for them. But just a huge accumulation of snow that I haven't seen in so long because it's just like doesn't really snow much anymore in the Northeast.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. No, because I'm in New York, New York City, and I've forgotten what it's like to have more than a dusting of snow. And that's now I'm depressed. You're right. Yeah.

'''B:''' I forgot about that. So thank you, Ashley and Cormac, for an amazing time in Alaska. I don't miss this now.

'''J:''' Oh, I do.

'''AJR:''' Steve is pro-climate change.

'''S:''' I do jokingly say that all the time. Thank God for climate change. We have a nice weather. It has been literally years since we've had a harsh winter. I remember 10, 12 years ago, the last really bad winter where snow was piled up 10 feet on the side of the road. They had to come in with backhoes because they couldn't even plow it anymore. I was snowed in my house for three days. Yeah.

'''AJR:''' A friend of mine is from Buffalo, and he was there when they got snowed in. last year or the year before and that was the first time i recalled that we would have like snow days where you truly couldn't leave the house because i've just gotten so used to being like oh it's snowing it's like slightly more complicated than rain and that's sort of all i think about at this point. All right, Alaska it is. I'll see you there.

'''J:''' Yeah, I've been wanting – my wife and I were going to go, but the thing that Bob didn't say, it's really expensive to go there.

'''B:''' Is it? Well, depending where you're coming from, but yeah, it's across the country.

'''J:''' It is, yeah.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. I once flew there – this is embarrassing. I'm causing all the climate change that Steve is enjoying because I flew there on a miles run at the end of a few years ago. I needed to hit a certain number of miles, and I happened to find really cheap tickets to Alaska there.

'''B:''' A miles run.

'''AJR:''' A flu delta. I needed to hit a certain number of miles traveled to hit the medallion status for the following year. So between Christmas and New Year's, I flew from New York to Seattle to Alaska, back to Seattle in like 24 hours.

'''S:''' Oof.

'''AJR:''' Just for the miles.

'''B:''' That's so funny.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, it was probably not worth it in the end. And again, for climate change, but but I did get diamond medallion status for any of my fellow Delta obsessives. And it was very big for my ego. So this is awesome. Yeah, this is what happens when you don't have any hobbies. is you end up in situations like this.

'''B:''' yeah did you like sightsee a little bit or did you just go from gate to gate i literally i landed.

'''AJR:''' i guess i landed in anchorage and i had four hours and i slept in a little kind of landing area uh on the floor and i got back on a flight return and returned like i had to hit it before the end of the year and i thought i was gonna make it and then i didn't. oh it was like kind of fun to fly to nowhere In a way, because everyone's like, we're going on a trip. We're coming home. And I was like, I'm not doing anything. I'm literally just sitting here and watching a TV show. Yeah, I don't know that it's the best use of my time ever, but I have technically been to Alaska.

'''B:''' Jay, I had six of those Delta biscotti cookies.

'''J:''' Oh, yeah, man.

'''AJR:''' Those are good.

'''B:''' Oh, my God. I always say, can I have two, please? They're my favorite.

'''J:''' I found those at Costco, by the way. I had a whole sleeve of them. Yep.

'''B:''' I got a whole sleeve once and it was gone in three days.

'''S:''' But are they as special when you're not getting it only on plane flights?

'''B:''' Yeah. After like you have like a dozen, it's like, all right, these are still awesome, but it's not quite as special as being on a plane and getting just a few of them.

'''AJR:''' That's right. Like, I don't really drink soda very much, but I'll get a Diet Coke on the plane, and I always really like it. And I think apparently it's very annoying for flight attendants if you order soda because the carbonation is much higher, and so it's more of a pain to pour. But I once had a Diet Coke recently on the ground, and it wasn't as good. And I think, A, it's less carbonated, but, B, there is a special kind of ritual to it when you're flying.

'''S:''' I remember when we were kids, I don't know if you guys remember this, there was this one restaurant where we could get root beer. And that was the only time we ever had root beer. And I think we all just assumed, because we're kids and we don't know what's going on, we don't know how the world works, that that was it. That was the only place you could ever get root beer. Until eventually, you could just buy it at the store. And you probably always could buy it at the store. We just didn't know it. Right. And then once we had like a bottle of root beer in our refrigerator, it was no longer quite as special because it wasn't like the kind of thing that happens once or twice a year, only when you go to this one restaurant. You know what I mean?

'''AJR:''' One of the best college lectures I ever attended was in a – I believe it was an intro microeconomics course where we were learning about diminishing returns and – the professor did this exercise where he had a student volunteer. he said who's the student who's like willing to eat a lot right now? and it's you're not allergic to popcorn or whatever. and so he had the student sit in the front of the classroom and had a little thing of popcorn like a little movie container and said have a few bites of popcorn and describe how you're feeling. and he was like oh it's really good oh i'm really enjoying it oh it's great. Then have a little more. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's really good. And then over the course of, you know, almost child, I don't even know if you could get away with this. This was the early 2000s. You could do whatever you wanted in the classroom at the time. 9-11 hadn't happened. You know, we could do whatever we wanted. And so he would eat all this popcorn and reported, you know, we watched in real time. He was like, I've kind of had enough. Like, it's not that interesting anymore. Like, I'd really rather stop. And so we all witnessed it in real time, which I thought was a very creative way to describe what's otherwise kind of a dry concept.

'''B:''' Yeah, then you get Homer in the front of the class and he's eating those donuts in hell and it just like doesn't work as torture because he depletes the entire supply in hell. Yeah. That was the room of ironic punishment. I'll never forget that one.

'''S:''' All right, Bob, why don't you start by telling us about silicon spikes?

'''B:''' Silicon spikes.

'''AJR:''' Yes.

{{anchor|quickie}} 
== Quickie with Bob: Silicon Spikes (9:58) ==
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'''B:''' Thank you, Steve. This is your Quickie with Bob. Do you like silicon? How about silicon spikes? How about silicon spikes that kill 96% of the viruses that get on it? Would you like those? That's exactly what an international research team led by RMIT University has designed and manufactured. This is really cool. The inspiration for this material came from that one place that has already done millions of years of R&D, and that, of course, is nature. In this case, the inspiration were the wings of insects like dragonflies and cicadas, which have tiny spikes to kill bacteria and fungi on them. Fungi on them. Fungi, fungi, fungi. The process to create a similar surface, though, to kill viruses had to create spikes that were far smaller because viruses are, in fact, far smaller, generally speaking, than bacteria. The researchers started with a smooth silicon wafer, which they then slammed with ions specifically and selectively to remove material, leaving the spikes on the surface, which were pretty tiny, as you might imagine, only about two nanometers thick. which is 30,000 times thinner than your hair and only 290 nanometers high. They tested it on HPIV-3 virus, which causes bronchitis, pneumonia, and croup. And they showed that within six hours, 96% of the viruses were either totally ripped apart or damaged beyond function. They say that this material can be incorporated into commonly touched devices and surfaces to prevent viral spread and reduce the use of disinfectants. By doing so, we aim to create safer environments for researchers, healthcare professionals, and patients alike. Very cool. Hope to see that in a hospital near you soon. This has been your Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

'''S:''' That was quick.

'''B:''' Yeah.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

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=== Havana Syndrome (11:55) ===
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'''S:''' That's a quickie. All right. Thanks, Bob. Let me ask you guys a question. Have any of you heard of Havana syndrome? Yes.

'''J:''' Yeah, I have heard of that.

'''S:''' Yeah. What do you know about it?

'''B:''' Well, they thought it was – The Russians poisoned people, right?

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' They thought it was a device that was being used by the Russians to mess with people like diplomats and people. Right. But then recently, there's a new bit of information that I guess you're going to discuss about it. Yes. Yes.

'''AJR:''' But it was a big mystery for many years, right? Oh, yeah. All these diplomats or foreign, you know, mostly U.S. government officials, I believe. And they were having, like, headaches. And, you know, we thought it was, like, this weird sound. And it was quite mysterious for quite a long time. And there was nothing else like it anywhere. And no one really knew what to do about it.

'''S:''' Yeah, you guys sort of know the news item, so you've got a lot of the details right there. It started in 2016. There was a cluster in the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, hence Havana Syndrome, of people feeling that they were dizzy, they felt lightheaded, they were getting migraines and headaches. They were confused, like they couldn't think. They had ringing in their ear. Sometimes they described like a buzzing or a pulsating noise, like a bizarre noise in their room. in their ear it was very disruptive. some of them claimed that all they only had those sensations when they were like in a certain room and if they left the room they would feel better if they went back to that room they would get the symptoms back. that and that's kind of like the most interesting feature of havana syndrome although not everybody displays that feature right. So the question has been basically one of two major hypotheses here. Either this is due to, as you say, some foreign power, some foreign adversary, let's say, not necessarily Russians, could be Chinese, could be North Korea, could be somebody else. We don't know. Some foreign adversary using some kind of cutting edge or experimental device to induce these symptoms at a distance in people. And the two thoughts were that either it's a pulsed sonic device or a pulsed electromagnetic device. Those are sort of the two ideas. The people who were experiencing this were American and Canadian diplomats and military personnel. So that's the cohort, American and Canadian diplomats and military personnel. There has been some investigation. We do have some new data. But I'll say, we'll cut to the chase a little bit, is that the answer is not yet definitive. There is still some debate and disagreement about what the ultimate answer to this is. There are two main hypotheses. One hypothesis is that this is an actual attack by a foreign adversary using some kind of device, as I mentioned, some kind of ranged device that induces these neurological symptoms. The other hypothesis is that this is a mass delusion. These were preexisting conditions or people with whatever, new onset migraines or benign positional vertigo, like known neurological phenomena that maybe there was a coincidental cluster. And that led to the belief that maybe something is going on, which then takes on a life of its own.

'''AJR:''' Right, and it's like power of suggestion. Oh, I am feeling funny now that you mention it.

'''S:''' Yeah, and we've spoken on the show before about so-called sick building syndrome where like somebody in a building has an asthma attack and somebody else has an asthma attack and then pretty soon like there's black mold in the building and whatever. There's believed to be something environmental in the building that is making people sick. And then you have all these other cases, which may be partly due to suggestion or just confirmation bias or just you're looking for it more, where people are more alert to their own symptoms. You know, it's like, I'm having a little bit of a scratchy throat. You know what I mean? Like, it's very easy. It's not necessarily like you're delusional or you're psychosomatic, although some people probably are, right? Enough people could potentially be involved. You're going to run into that. Yeah. It could just be a little bit of confirmation bias and people don't realize how much background symptoms there are in any building of people. You might underestimate how many people are actually working in a building and you don't realize that it's not that unusual for 10 or 20 people to all be having these symptoms.

'''AJR:''' I mean, we all experienced a version of that, not in a building, but in COVID when, you know, of course, people were getting very, very sick. But every single day when they would list out all the symptoms, I would sit and I'd be like, my throat is itchy. I can't draw a full breath. Like what, you know, we would all kind of convince ourselves that what was in a sniffle that I wouldn't have thought twice about, you know, because I stirred up some dust was now something to be worried about.

'''S:''' Yeah, we call that being hypervigilant, right? You become hypervigilant about symptoms. And then just the background noise of day-to-day symptoms of life, if you focus on it, you can convince yourself that, is my throat a little scratchy today? Am I feeling a little hot?

'''J:''' Steve, did they not find anything?

'''S:''' All right. Let's break it down. Here we have this question. Honestly, we haven't spoken about this on the show and I haven't written about this until now because I wasn't quite sure what take would be the best or the most appropriate one on this because the information is just so ambiguous. Let's break it down and work our way through it and I'll tell you the bits of information that we have as we go along. So when we are confronted with a claim like this, Havana syndrome, is it real? Is it not real? How do we decide what is the likely to be the –? what's the better answer? What's the more likely answer? Maybe we just don't know. We have to just say it's currently unknown. Yeah. So one thing we could do is we could analyze it based upon plausibility. How plausible is the alleged phenomenon? So here there's a few elements that we could pull apart. One is the plausibility of the technology itself, like our pulsed sonar guns or pulsed EM projectors. Is that technology plausible? And it is. Yeah, absolutely. There's nothing implausible about that notion. Is it plausible that such a device could cause the symptoms people are reporting, right? The government's calling them anomalous health incidents, AHIs. Reminds me of the unidentified anomalous phenomena. They always have their diplomat speak, their government speak. And there I think now I'm sort of putting on my neurologist hat. It could have pulsed sonic weapon, you know, cause people to have like migraines and tinnitus and feel dizzy. And the answer is absolutely yes. Those are all things that could be triggered. You know, people who have migraines or maybe have a predisposition to migraine-like phenomena can be triggered by varying pressure in the air. Absolutely. Absolutely. The closest I came to that, one of the cars that I have, if you open the windows to a certain amount and you're driving at a certain speed, you get this pulsating pressure in the car from the wind.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, it makes me want to throw up.

'''S:''' Yeah, right. It makes you want to throw up. I can't stand it.

'''B:''' Oh, my God. It's torture. It's torture.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah. My wife is not bothered by it at all. Oh, my God.

'''J:''' She's weird.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''AJR:''' No, I'm pretty sensitive. My boyfriend is even more sensitive. And if you even pass through that level on the way to a better level of the window, he'll be unwell.

'''S:''' Yeah, so there you go, right? A lot of us have experienced a similar kind of thing. Imagine if you have a device that was designed to maximize that and was aimed right at your head. Wow. So anyway, totally plausible that it could cause the symptoms being reported.

'''AJR:''' It feels very sci-fi in a fun way. Yeah, a little bit.

'''S:''' Yeah, it does. But not like breaking the laws of physics, right? Right, right. Yeah. So we could take a technology plausibility, a medical plausibility, and then we have to go to a intelligence agency. plausibility, right? So what do we know from an intelligence perspective, a military perspective about? does anybody have this technology? Have they ever used it? And was there any investigation? And did they find anything? Yeah. So the American intelligence agencies have investigated Havana syndrome, right, from a spy perspective, not like a medical or technological perspective. And they could find no evidence that such a device exists or was in use or that there was any identifiable perpetrators. So the intelligence investigation came up negative. So now we could, I think we could ask some further plausibility questions given the negative investigation. Is it likely that such a device could be used and we missed it? Our intelligence agencies were not able to detect it. I don't honestly know the answer to the question of how plausible that is. Are they saying like, listen, they always just say there was no evidence of anything, blah, blah, blah. But I haven't heard an interview with somebody saying either, look, if this were happening, we would know. Or who knows? We didn't find anything, but we probably wouldn't. Like if this was spies doing this and then with a portable device that then scrolled away, how would we know? I don't know. I don't know where along that spectrum it is.

'''AJR:''' Or if they were using it previously on an individual, the individual might just say, well, I wasn't feeling well and I went home or whatever.

'''S:''' Yeah, right. Yeah. The other thing is you could think that they're lying to the public. I think that's very implausible for a couple of reasons. One, why would they? Yeah. Again, the motivation is not there. Why wouldn't they say, yeah, we caught the Chinese doing this to us and aren't they bad? and they're breaking diplomatic protocol and blah, blah, blah? Right? I mean, they would just leverage that for political purposes.

'''AJR:''' I mean, we heard about the balloons. We'd hear about this.

'''S:''' Right. Right. Exactly. And also, they're not supposed to lie to the American public, whatever you believe that they adhere to that or not. But I just don't know why they would lie about that. It seems like it would be more advantageous to tell us the truth. Right. Yeah. So I don't know how that affects overall plausibility. But I think it has to move it down at least a notch that they weren't able to discover who was doing this and any evidence that this was actually an external attack. And they concluded that you could explain all of the cases on the basis of pre-existing conditions and environmental factors. That was their conclusion. All right, now we come to the new bit, and that is taking a look at this from a medical perspective. So if we examine the people who have these AHIs, the anomalous health incidents, can we detect anything objective that might indicate that they were subjected to this external disease? Right. Yep.

'''J:''' That makes sense.

'''S:''' Right. So that makes sense. So there was a study a few years ago where they looked at MRI scans and they looked at people who had Havana syndrome and people who didn't have Havana syndrome and they found some differences in their brains. Hmm. So they found, for example, that the people who had the symptoms had a little bit more atrophy, like shrinkage of the brain tissue, than the people who didn't have it, for example. That was a 2019 study. Now, it was a small study, and I read through it. The thing that gets me is that it was kind of an exploratory study. They were just saying, hey, let's see if we could find anything, right? They didn't really have any very specific hypothesis. And the things that they found seemed kind of random to me. It's not the things that I would expect. And in fact, it would be perfectly reasonable to find nothing given the symptoms. Like if people are having like migraine-like symptoms, they wouldn't necessarily have to have any objective findings.

'''AJR:''' Did they know who had been experiencing Havana syndrome when they were looking at it? Or was it randomized or blind study?

'''S:''' Actually, I don't know. So I would imagine it was a blinded evaluation. Of course, it wasn't randomized. It was retrospective. You've had Havana syndrome. Okay, let's take a look at your brain. Yeah.

'''AJR:''' But they didn't know like, okay, this is a Havana syndrome brain. Let's see what we can see. So they at least protected against that.

'''S:''' I hope so. Yeah. All right. But now there were two follow-up studies published this year where they did a larger sample size and they did a more detailed analysis.

'''B:''' Well, how many people are we talking about?

'''S:''' In the new one, I think I had 60 people. The old ones were like 20.

'''J:''' Oh my God. I was thinking of a handful of people.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''AJR:''' How many people were affected by it do we think?

'''S:''' But in this study, they had 81 participants who experienced it and 48 matched controlled participants was the recent study. So that's a good number of people. They found no difference in the brains, none whatsoever. So those findings did not replicate. And not only did the specific findings not replicate, they found no differences in. Now, these more current studies have come under some criticism. So specifically, when the studies were published, they were published with an accompanying editorial by Dr. Relman, who was one of the neurologists who was part of the original government investigation of AHI, of Havana syndrome. And he has a lot to say about, you know, he thinks it's real, right? He thinks it's a real neurological external attack by foreign adversaries. I think the most salient thing he had to say was that the recent studies did not specify whether the individuals with Havana syndrome had the location-specific feature. And he thinks that's the most specific feature. And so that means they might be including a lot of people who don't have Havana syndrome, who just have migraines or vertigo or whatever. And that would dilute out any findings. So it's like, okay, yes, technically that's true. I'm not sure that that really invalidates the results or that we wouldn't see that. You could go back and do a subgroup analysis. I think that would be an easy way to deal with that. But nevertheless, I think that the fact that these studies didn't replicate the findings, again, it doesn't put it to rest. But it's another blow against the norm. Steve, is there any data that you got to see that would give you an opinion on what's going on personally? No, no, not really, no. I have been sort of paying attention to this and I've been reading into it. I wrote about it recently, so I did a fairly decent deep dive. I don't have any good firsthand information. It's all just these conclusions based on analyses and data, et cetera. I would like to get a little bit more details and I could be persuaded one way or the other. Right now, I think we just don't know. Because it's plausible, but we haven't found any smoking gun, right? Either biologically or through intelligence investigation. So what does that mean? So I think if let's say this is a real phenomenon, the other thing is it's been eight years, right? I would think by now, wouldn't they have caught the guy? You know what I mean? That was my question.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' You know, after eight years, I could see if we were two years in, you could say, hey, we have to, you know, they're doing their investigation. Who knows? I think the more time that goes by without us figuring out like who did. it makes it less likely. I think eight years is kind of a long time.

'''AJR:''' It's like, oh, there is that guy holding the funny looking gun, but he's probably fine. Yeah.

'''S:''' Like, could you put like an EM detector in the embassies around the world, the American embassies and or or pressure sensitive detectors like we can detect these things, you know? Yeah. If your head can detect them, we have instruments that can detect them.

'''AJR:''' I mean, are there still ongoing attacks? or is it like, yeah, there was this period that was weird and, you know, the big thing that got it started and that's it. Or are people still experiencing this when they're in Havana? Yeah.

'''S:''' So I don't think it's – it's not specific to Havana. These have been reported now all around the world.

'''AJR:''' Oh, I thought it was just Havana. No. I see. Wow.

'''S:''' Okay. So that's another thing. And here's the other possibility. So even – it's possible that this was a real external attack or they were testing this new weapon to see how disruptive it would be or whatever. But it was very limited. But that that sparked the mass delusion, right? Yeah. And then everything else. Right. And in fact, if this is real, I'm sure there is also a penumbra of delusional cases or just, you know, confirmation bias, whatever. There are cases that are not real that are just being attached to it.

'''AJR:''' I would be the first to claim such a thing. Power of suggestion is something fierce for me. I'm like, I have it. Yeah. I watched The Diplomat. I'm experiencing it.

'''S:''' I think if it's not real, we'll never know. We'll never be able to put it to bed.

'''J:''' Steve, why outrule a poison of some kind?

'''S:''' Because that's not the claim, right? Because that wouldn't explain why it's –. again, the most specific feature is the location specificity, which implies some kind of directed weapon, directed effect, space-related effect.

'''AJR:''' And maybe this is naive, is to what end, if this were a plot, you know, some spy, some something, is it they're disrupting meetings or they're making people who are government officials uncomfortable? And what are they doing?

'''S:''' That's a good question. And I don't think that really cuts either way, in my opinion. Yeah. Because do governments do stupid things sometimes? Sure. Yeah. You know, could you, I could imagine them saying, oh, we could, you know, disrupt the military intelligence meetings or whatever by doing this. And, you know, they thought that this would somehow be worthwhile and it turned out to be a bust. Yeah. So they gave up, so they gave it up, you know. Yeah. It turned out to be a mild annoyance or whatever, you know.

'''B:''' Yeah. And they're really giggling now. Like, look what we caused.

'''S:''' Yeah. I don't think it was a big geopolitical success, you know, in terms of whatever device that they were using. But they probably were trying to see what potential does it have if this is real. Yeah. So at this point, I think it's probably more likely than not that it isn't real, but I'm not firm on that. I think there might be a real phenomenon at the core of this and then surrounded by, again, just cases that sort of attach to it. And I think the lack of any biological smoking gun is, I think it's irrelevant, honestly. I wouldn't expect there to be, to be honest with you, given the symptoms that people are reporting and the mechanism. Like, we don't see anything in people with migraines. Right. Can't see that on your MRI scan, you know.

'''AJR:''' I was going to ask because I get migraines and I was like, is my brain tissue smaller than everyone else? It may be, but it's not.

'''S:''' No, I mean you have a little bit more white matter changes with age, right? Like it's the same thing if you have a little bit of high blood pressure or diabetes or if you smoke or whatever. All these things could increase like the amount of – White matter lesions and migraines are one of those things. But it's very nonspecific. You can't really diagnose migraine based upon that. And you don't always have that. It's just like if you're 50 or 60 and we see a little bit more than we would expect for age and you have migraines, like, ah, it's all right. I agree. There's no smoking gun, but there wouldn't necessarily be one. So I think at the end of the day, we just don't know. It wouldn't really surprise me either way.

'''J:''' It fits right in that zone. Yeah. Like blurry UFO images. You know what I mean?

'''S:''' Although I think that I'm much more confident that we're not being visited by aliens, right? I mean, I think that their plausibility is really, really low. And then the evidence, like we would expect there to be evidence that there isn't, et cetera. Well, Steve.

'''AJR:''' I think the only evidence you need is that these aliens are causing people to experience Havana syndrome.

'''S:''' There you go. The aliens are doing it. But it's interesting, too, because we think about our biases as a skeptic. So certainly, as a skeptic, the mass delusion explanation would be far more satisfying, right? Because it fits the skeptical narrative. We understand mass delusions. We know a lot of historical cases. This would be a great one to add to our list. As I wrote, every skeptic talking about this topic would have a slide about Havana syndrome. We're like, see, it's a cautionary tale, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't think we're quite there. I think that the door is still open for, yeah, this may have been some hostile entity experimenting with a pulsed. I think the sonic weapon is actually more plausible than the EM one. But I totally believe that some kind of post-sonic thing could have made people feel bad and have migraines and feel nauseated, etc. And then didn't really do enough to make it worthwhile. Then people started talking about it. So they stopped doing it and they covered their tracks. And, you know, that is compatible with all the information that we have.

'''AJR:''' And even the part where it's happening all over the world, not just in, you know, the initial location.

'''S:''' Again, if it's a real phenomenon, there's also not real parts of it.

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''S:''' Definitely. Because that would almost have to be. That's just the nature of the beast.

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''S:''' Yeah. So it doesn't have to be 100%. Like every case of Havana syndrome is real.

'''AJR:''' Right. Which is true for every case of, you know, any disease.

'''S:''' Of everything.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. Of everything is the real one. And then the rest of us who feel like we also have it.

'''S:''' Yeah. Right, right, right.

'''AJR:''' You're right. No, it is a nice story from a skeptical perspective. And I need to check my own lack of skepticism because I like how nice it would be to be like, yep, we're all delusional.

'''S:''' Yeah, right. It'd be nice. But it's good to break it down. And so this is how you analyze it and this is how you think about it.

'''J:''' So, Andrea, you're basically calling them all liars. Is that what I'm saying?

'''AJR:''' That's right.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''AJR:''' I'm experiencing it right now. I don't know what you all are talking about.

'''J:''' I'm feeling it, man. I'm disoriented.

'''S:''' Yeah. I feel pretty good.

'''AJR:''' They're not interested in you, Bob. Okay. They want the state secrets from Jay and me.

=== Robo Taxis in NY (34:10) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.popsci.com/technology/nyc-robotaxis-driverless/
|article_title = NYC takes first step towards unleashing robotaxis on city roads
|publication = Popular Science
|refname=robotaxis
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''B:''' {{guidelines|g}}

'''S:''' Clearly. All right, Jay, tell us about robo-taxis in New York.

'''J:''' Let's start here. Let's start with this. We're all in New York City together, right? We hail a taxi, and this is happening tonight. Everything that you know of right now, right? And a driverless car pulls up. Would you guys want to get in or not? Sure.

'''S:''' We're in the middle of the city?

'''J:''' Right now, in New York City.

'''S:''' Yeah, I'd do it.

'''AJR:''' I think my bias is if the Novella brothers will do it, I'll come. I don't know if I would do it on my own.

'''B:''' Bob, would we know about it? If it came as a surprise, like, wait, what's happening? Then I'd be a little skeptical. But if we're like, oh, yeah, let's try this new service, I'd want to read up on it.

'''J:''' Steve's a yes. Andrea is I'll do what we do.

'''AJR:''' Bandwagon effect.

'''J:''' Bob, you're being skeptical. Personally, my answer would be I absolutely would not get in.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Yep. Not yet. We're not there yet. This is what's in my head, right? We all have a little bit different information going on. The reason why I ask is because this is going to be a choice that some people are going to be faced with at some point soon in New York City. Maybe not like in the next few months, but it could probably – maybe within a year or so, this could be happening. So what New York City did, they made public this new safety requirements that they came up with. You can think of them as requirements and guidelines. This will be for testing autonomous vehicles in the city. So outside companies that want to test AVs are required to have – of course, there's a whole bunch of stipulations. They have to have something called the safety driver behind the wheel. This isn't some rando person that they just hire. It's not like somebody working for Instacart.

'''AJR:''' This is actually – Shots fired at Instacart, but okay, yeah.

'''J:''' But this is a real deal. This is going to be someone that's really trained. So this training and having a safety driver in the car has not been required in other cities. Like Phoenix didn't do that. They just let the driverless cars do their testing and didn't require a safety person in there. But New York is really pushing it, saying, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to have humans behind a wheel and watching the whole time. So the guidelines also stipulate that only companies with prior testing experience in other cities will be considered for the permits and that the permits will last a year. Now, they could be renewed, of course, but they have to renew every year and there's hoops to be jumped through every time you renew them. The safety drivers have to have, of course, a current driver's license. They have to pass background checks. And when they're testing, they're required to take breaks so they can keep their focus up. You know what I mean? Like you don't want someone being a safety driver having to concentrate for hours at a time. Like I think they would be giving them breaks, you know, quite frequently. Also, to comply with New York City's safety protocols for autonomous vehicle testing, the applicants need to outline the selection and training process for their test operators. This essentially means that the companies have to very openly show exactly what they're going to be doing to train their drivers. It has to pass whatever the people working for New York City say. They're basically going to give them stipulations that they're going to have to meet. They have to make sure the testers follow the Society of Automotive Engineers best practices, and they'll have to do background checks, like I said, and give the drivers tons of specific training on how to be a test driver. Now, this is, you know, again, this is happening in New York City and this isn't the case in other places where they've had driverless cars. And I think it's the right thing to do. I think we're not at that stage yet where we could just be testing driverless cars without having a backup, particularly in New York City. Right.

'''S:''' Jay, is this going to be the kind of service where they scan the city and these cars are going to be working off of an internal map of the city?

'''J:''' I didn't find anything specific on that, Steve, but I was taking my own notes, like asking questions just like you did. So I would assume that they're going to have to do that because, you know, it's not just going to be using global positioning. Like they're going to have to know very specific details like things like this at four o'clock. The grid is going to get really tight. They're going to have to pick different routes. They're going to have to change the car's behavior because there's going to be way more people in the street at four than there would be at two because of rush hour. Like all that city-specific, corner-specific data that needs to be collected. And the scary part, good but scary, is that there's cameras everywhere in New York City. They could easily be already collecting this information if they already don't have a good dossier on it already. I don't know, but I would imagine that they're going to get as detailed as possible on this.

'''AJR:''' I mean, one of the things that actually is sort of heartening about it being in New York City, and I guess it depends on where in the city, like I would hope it would stay off of the highways, sort of the FDR and the West Side Highway, because most of the time, especially in high traffic periods, cars are going very slowly. The concern, obviously, is that they would hit pedestrians. But if anything, I would hope that they would engineer them in such a way that they'd be too cautious around pedestrians and then just never go. And that would be the main reason traffic progresses during rush hour is because some dude decides that he's going to run a red light even though he really shouldn't because the pedestrian's about to take over. And so if the cars are more cautious, we're actually probably going to get more traffic, which is a good problem to have compared to cars recklessly sprinting up and down these streets. If anything, I think that the high density might be safer for testing or you'd have more bumps but fewer fatalities. i i don't know but it's hard to predict right?

'''J:''' you know because like people who know or you know new york city i know new york city and new york city traffic very well and i know you do too andrea. There is some type of ballet in the chaos, though, right? Yeah. As a human, I understand. if you're getting into the left lane and you're going to be making a left-hand turn, don't do it too early because you're going to piss people off. Yeah. If you're four blocks before that turn, cabs are going to be trying to get around you. There's all of these heuristics that we come up with as drivers that frequent the city that you have to understand. And those cars have to understand that human level thinking in order to kind of get with the flow. Because they didn't say how many vehicles they're going to allow in the city at one time. And I hear what you're saying about it having an effect on traffic and it absolutely will. I mean, especially in the beginning when they haven't really tweaked it up. But, you know, if you were to replace 50 percent of the cars in New York City with this, right, then their behavior would kind of take over in a sense. You know what I mean? Oh, sure. Which I think in the long run will be way better because you won't have those crazy cab drivers that are going 60 miles an hour anymore.

'''S:''' Right.

'''AJR:''' I don't drive very often. I don't have a car, but I am definitely part of the problem in that I will do the last minute get to the left lane so I can turn without having to wait or slow anyone down. And, you know, oh, it's yellow, but I'm going to go through because otherwise I'll sit there forever. It's no good. And if everyone drives like me, you're going to be in a place. I used to say that when I was living in China, I was like, everyone in China drives like me and that's bad. And so there's chaos all the time. And so you're right. I think there would be a threshold effect after which we would all be really following the rules and it could actually be more orderly.

'''J:''' I was envisioning – I don't know what country this is from or it's definitely happening in multiple countries. But you ever see like those just fantastically complex, crazy traffic systems where like – it's almost like a bunch of insects moving from one place to another because when there's enough people that are kind of pushing in to cross the street, then the cars will kind of stop and then they'll sneak around. That chaos is like the extreme version of what we're – like New York City is not that chaotic but – Those cars are going to have to be able to handle like really complicated, quick and life-threatening decisions because of just – the stakes are pretty damn high in New York City when it comes to driving.

'''AJR:''' Well, I'm almost thinking of those stories you would hear about when we're training algorithms that play – computers to play chess and they do really well against really good chess players. But you put them up against a novice who does all kinds of random crap. Yeah. They actually don't perform as well. I feel like the robots have to deal with that because in New York, it's just all manner. I mean, I ride bikes a lot in New York and then there's the e-bikes that people are on and their scooters and people are weaving in and out. And it's just. I'm going to keep an eye out now more like. I don't think a robot like the algorithm would have to be pretty nuanced. You know, it's like, oh, at First Avenue, you can kind of do that right, even though you're not supposed to, because otherwise you'll never get anywhere or whatever, you know.

'''J:''' Yeah. So let me tell you some more things that I think are pretty interesting. So the applicant companies are also going to have to give comprehensive overviews of their AV technology, the automation level, the safety performance. This will include previous testing outcomes and crash records. So New York City is not messing around here. They're like, you're going to have to have completely open books with us. We want to be on the inside and see everything so we can assure residents that this is going to be safe, which I think is the absolute right way to do it. New York City DOT, Department of Transportation, wants to make sure that the A.V. testing doesn't interfere. Like we were talking about with the usual traffic flow and overall safety, which is good to hear. But I really don't know how they're going to do that. Like they are definitely making lists of wants here that I would love to see how they become real. Like how are you going to get it from like a piece of paper to like actually built into the software on these autonomous vehicles? The other thing too is as the – an interesting stat here. The safety of driverless vehicles goes down as the number of pedestrians goes up, right? Yikes. Right? It's a one-to-one. As one goes down, the other one goes up. So I'd say like I said before, like I consider New York driving and pedestrian density as pretty damn hostile. Yeah. What I'm worried about is they might be trying to start something in an atmosphere that is just too aggressive to learn there. You know what I mean? You would think that they would want to – Maybe steps? Yeah. Do something like maybe only let them do it in a certain region at a certain time. Start out like that and kind of branch out from there. You know, I know that the testing, like I said, has been done in other cities. And, you know, progress is being made, guys. Like, you know, driverless cars are functioning better today than they were five years ago. They are. Like we said many times on the show, though, it's a slow, steady creep here. We didn't get to the finish line as quick as we thought. We were making just like battery enhancements. It's not dramatic changes, but worthwhile changes and updates are happening all the time. And efforts like this, I think, can really help. But, man, New York City, you know, I can't get over that.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. I mean, I'm also now thinking through, you know, there are a lot of cultural differences in terms of how people drive here. And it's if you grew up here versus if you grew up driving somewhere else, or if you're a taxi driver versus if you're a courier versus if you're just rented a car and just trying to make your way. Like, I just feel like, yes, there are other places, at least in the U.S., where there are drivers that are like, some are commuters and some are local and whatever. But I feel like New York is just such a mix of You can't even learn like overall driving styles because it's just such absolute madness.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' So now that we've talked about this, guys, Steve, would you change your mind?

'''S:''' Well, one of the main reasons why I said yes is because I think of New York traffic as being really slow and like you're constantly in a traffic jam. Yeah. So it's not that risky.

'''J:''' Well, I don't know about that. I mean, you know, there are very frequently when I'm in the city, like there's the crazy cab drivers going on your left and on your right. Yeah. There are streets where you would think I should be able to take a left here because the streets are one way, most of them. And then when you want to take that left, like this particular corner, you can't take a left.

'''S:''' Right.

'''J:''' You know what I mean? Like there's all of that stuff. Like I would think right now I would just not do it. I would want to see the safety records and all that stuff.

'''AJR:''' One of the things I found myself thinking about as you described this, Jay, is like one of the hardest parts about driving in New York is the parking signs are very confusing in some places. And the number of times that either I or I have— Oh, my God, yes. Right? You watch people and you're like, okay, no standing between 4 to 6. Taxis only from seven to nine. I mean, I can stay here from six to seven. Do I pay? Do I not pay? And then you get a ticket anyway. And so if these cars can figure that out, you know, my my brother has a car. And when he comes to park near me, we just have to go out and study every single time. Like, well, there's this one area that says you can park here except on a school day. And I found myself in my rental car looking up the academic calendar and being like, is there summer? It was like an early May Sunday night. And I was like, is Monday morning a school day? I don't know. And it's madness. So if they can figure that out.

'''J:''' Andrew, you know what? I've thought about this. I mean, I've been towed in New York when I was younger. I've been towed.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Let me tell you something. I don't think that that is an accident. I think that is deliberate.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Because they make a shitload of money. When they tow your car. Yeah. You're in it for hundreds of dollars.

'''AJR:''' It's very expensive. That's true.

'''J:''' If they tow a couple of thousand people a day, that adds up quick.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' I totally buy that. There was even people who would go street to street and they would investigate every sign and then they would create another sign that said it – That had the same effect but in plain language. So it was obvious what the stupid sign meant. Right. And I don't think they still – I don't know if they even do that anymore. But I love those people, whoever they were, because those signs pissed me off.

'''AJR:''' Literally, I've lived in the same neighborhood forever, and people will visit and say, oh, can we park near you? And I actually don't know. I think if it's before 6 a.m. on a Sunday, yes. But other than that, I really couldn't tell you. Yeah, I think it is on purpose. That's a good point.

'''S:''' All right, Andrea, you sent us a really interesting article about rebellions and cultural memory.

=== Rebellions and Cultural Memory (48:01) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29182/w29182.pdf
|article_title = Eclipses and the Memory of Revolutions: Evidence from China
|publication = National Bureau of Economic Research
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''AJR:''' Yes. So I was so excited to find this article and so thrilled that our timing for this episode is such that it's relevant. So I was looking up the other day what kind of social science goes on during solar eclipses, particularly total solar eclipses like the one coming up, because there's so much excitement around the solar eclipse for many reasons. And one of the things that I'm reading a lot about, and I'm sure you all are reading it and talking about it, is, you know, there's all this opportunity for citizen science, and NASA can take all these great pictures of the sun, and da-da-da-da. So I was digging around to see if I could find anything interesting related to solar eclipses and social science, and I was so thrilled to find this paper. Now, I want to say it's not peer-reviewed. It's a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, so you can find it online. There's a couple different versions of the PDF. The one I'm working from is from 2022. But it's it's called Eclipses and the Memory of Revolutions Evidence from China. And now I want to start actually by asking you three, what would you say are the top reasons why? what causes protests in a society? Think of like BLM or if you want to call January 6th a protest. Like what are the big drivers of protests that come to mind?

'''S:''' Yeah, I would say it's economic.

'''B:''' Yeah, that's pretty big right there.

'''J:''' Also, if you're a minority, just not being treated well, just not being equal from your perception.

'''AJR:''' So some inequity or inequality, right? So I have no resources. Someone over there, usually the government, usually someone rich has all of them, so I'm upset. Or I'm experiencing some other kind of inequality, inequity, lack of justice that often is tied financially but is some sort of thing. And so why would you say that one country, so this kind of level of inequality exists in different forms all over the world. What do you think might make one country more likely to deal with that problem via protests as opposed to deal with that problem via some other route, maybe waiting out elections, maybe some other kind of disagreement with the government that isn't a protest form. Maybe you go on a boycott or something like that or a sit-in. What do you think would make a country more prone to protests?

'''S:''' I think probably how desperate the people are.

'''B:''' Well, like less fear of like a government overreaction.

'''AJR:''' Like less likelihood that you're going to get thrown into jail or more of a belief that it's going to actually do something. probably, right?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. The general set of research on protests is around, look, there's two reasons, you know, kind of two big levers. If you're like, is this society going to lead in a protest? Like, yes, there's some grievance. that's particularly bad. It turns out that it can be equally bad in different places. You know, the level of inequality or the lack of justice in one country versus another or one county versus another is roughly the same. And we do see protests in one area and we don't in another. And the big drivers there are, yeah, do you think the protest is going to make a difference? And then the two levers that social scientists have focused on are, one, individually, am I upset enough that I'm going to protest? Sort of like, what's my individual rational choice calculation on whether or not I should protest, whether it's going to do something, whether I really care enough about this issue? And then the other one is this social aspect, which is protests happen. It's a collective action. And so protests tend to happen when I believe other people are going to protest, too. And this gets to the point I think, Bob, you just made, which is, you know, how how likely am I to get what I'm protesting for? And am I likely to get thrown into jail? And the more of us that hit the streets, the fewer of us, you know, the higher the chances are that I can protest without. they can't put all of us in jail. Right. And so social scientists have been studying protests. Why do we see protests? Why do we not see protests? In all kinds of different areas and mostly focused on those particular things. Like, why would an individual participate in a protest? Like, if I'm sitting at home, I see the BLM protests after, you know, George Floyd, or I see these other protests, what makes me individually join it? It turns out. one of the biggest predictors there is whether I've been in a protest in the past. So it's your... Whatever your gateway protest was, it makes you more likely to participate in future protests. And then the collective action problem is, is there some big thing that's happening that signals to everyone that this is the moment and we can get over the coordination problem of not running the risk of hitting – I hit Union Square and I'm the only person in there and the police cart me away, right? And so the George Floyd summer – is a classic example of this, where this big event took place. Everyone in the United States observed this event, and then it was very clear, like, okay, we're going to take action, and that moment is now, which is why we saw it at that particular moment. This paper, so I'm getting to eclipses, because this paper says, what about a third... possibility or all three could take place. But what about a third possibility? And this is a possibility that tends to live more in kind of like cultural and humanities research, which says that some cultures or countries or places have a history or a culture of protest. And I'm not an expert on this, but just anecdotally, France comes to mind for me. I feel like that's one, you know, if there's something going on in the country that people disagree with, protests seem like a first reaction as opposed to, oh, letters to the editor or petitions or elections or whatever. And I lived in Bolivia for a little while, and I felt like every other day there was a protest about something. So some countries, some cultures have a stronger inclination to use protests as a tool than other countries, even if you hold constant their level of grievance or inequality or probability of getting thrown into jail. Or whatever else. So that's kind of the idea. But there's never been a meaningful way to study that. And so you're kind of left with these just so stories that are like, well, there were always protests. And so you're more likely to keep having protests. And if a culture had a protest in the past, it had a protest in the future. But you couldn't ever tease out what was causing it. And like maybe there was just a lot of injustice during that time. So this paper, I just am stunned, and I hope it comes out and is peer-reviewed, and it looks plausible to me insofar as I've been able to parse through the data. But they took advantage of a cultural belief in China that it's a Confucian belief that that solar eclipses are a sign from the heavens. This is scientific, I promise. Solar eclipses are a sign from the heavens that the emperor is not doing a good job. So during the Qing Dynasty, which is the period that they studied, and this was between 1644 and 1912, which is 268 years, so almost three decades, During the Qing Dynasty, Confucianism was kind of the way of life, and they show a bunch of evidence to say that a lot of people believed this. This was kind of the main way of thinking. It was what everyone agreed on. And in the Confucian tradition, any natural disaster or celestial phenomena that happens is interpreted as the heavens weighing in on how well the emperor is doing. So some of these things could be a sign that, oh, the emperor is really great. Some of them could be a sign that the emperor is really bad. And we almost see this in the U.S. where they say, oh, we had Hurricane Katrina because God hates conservatives or whatever. We kind of drum that stuff up. But in this case, it really was taken very seriously. And total solar eclipses were seen as the most serious condemnation of the leaders. And total solar eclipses are something that are widely observable by everybody in a particular area. So just like the murder of George Floyd was something that everyone in the U.S. could observe, a total solar eclipse, you know, we have one coming up in the U.S., everyone can see it. And so their argument, and it's like slightly complicated, but it works out in the data in, I think, a pretty compelling way, Their argument is that total solar eclipses happened in China over these 300 years of the Qing Dynasty. And during the times that we had these total solar eclipses, that was a coordinating moment for people who were going to have uprisings. And they were largely, Steve, as you said, they were peasant uprisings against inequality of wealth. They were much more likely during these total solar eclipses because it was a shared signal that, aha, see, the emperor is weak. The emperor is no good. We're going to actually get what we're asking for if we go to a protest. And so they have a three-tiered study. Step one is, are peasant uprisings in the Qing dynasty more likely during total solar eclipses in China? And they map— protest data against NASA data on total solar eclipses and find, lo and behold, yes, you are more likely to see protests during the periods when there is a total solar eclipse. Then they compare it to protests today, and I believe it's from 2001 to 2013 is what they do. So it's not super, super recent, but recent enough to be interesting. So they compare protests in China between 2001 and 2013, against the history of protests in these places, and they find that places in China that were in the path of the total solar eclipse way back in the Qing Dynasty, this is 1600s, 1700s, and so on, are today more likely to see protests anti-government protests about wealth inequality than those that were not in the path of totality hundreds of years ago. And I just found it to be stunning. Some caveats. So the magnitude is not massive. The coefficient here is very, very small. So one additional rebellion between 1644 and 1912 predicts 0.2% more episodes of social unrest from 2001 to 2013. But it's, you know, insofar as we care, it's statistically robust and they do a number of different estimates. Is it overall protests? Is it protests per capita? Is it protest participants? Is it how serious is the unrest? So it's robust to all of those things. And what's so cool about this to me is they've also made sure that these solar eclipses are orthogonal to anything that might be causing social unrest. So you could be thinking, well, maybe the total solar eclipses in China happened along the coast more often or in an area where there were more farmers, and so therefore it was agriculture. And they were able to... Hold constant those various things and also show that total solar eclipses, you know, they have some maps of the paths, you know, like the one we're seeing in the U.S. It's really stretching across a big stretch of the country. And over 300 years, there were quite a lot crisscrossing. And so they, I think, pretty compellingly hold hold constant any other effects of like, yeah, something else could have been going on in that area that made it both more likely to have. and more likely to have total solar eclipses. So I'm a fan of a natural experiment. They're very hard to pull off, but this is a very cool one where they took advantage of this fact that, hey, we interpret total solar eclipses to mean something. Therefore, we're going to behave in a certain way. And now, hundreds of years later, we're seeing that there are actually slightly more protests in these areas. The last piece I'll say on this, and it's a fascinating paper. It's free online. Again, not perfect. The weakest argument, but one that I do want to mention because I'm curious what you guys think, is their third one, which is what is it? What's the mechanism by which this memory, this shared history of protest is passed on from a place hundreds of years ago to now? And it could be storytelling. It could be the people who were involved. It could be the families. They zoom in on whether or not after these protests took place, this peasant uprising took place, whether or not there were statues or other public monuments put up to commemorate that uprising. So a lot of revolutions in China have been the result of uprisings. And so they play a very, very big role, kind of like how we put civil war leaders in statues and other things, which obviously is... is controversial. They argue that the places that have these monuments to that social unrest are the ones where you're even more likely to see social unrest today. I find that to be kind of less compelling. A, is that really the mechanism? And B, it also kind of muddies the causal story that they're telling about a culture of it. Like maybe it was just something that was so significant, therefore I put up a monument, therefore I'm going to continue to protest. And so I actually think it kind of weakens their argument. But overall, I think the stark difference of if you experience the total solar eclipse when Confucianism was the rule of the day, you're more likely to see protests now, I find to be very exciting. And you think about parts of the US, you think about other parts of the world where we follow protests, the Hong Kong protests. And it's interesting to think about the impact of a culture that we're building today for protests. I think about it in light of January 6th and what sort of culture. A single event isn't going to do it, but... But just being able to trace this historical effect is interesting. But mostly, I think it's just a brilliant research design. And so rarely do we get to see this kind of stuff in the social sciences. So I was just thrilled that they're doing it.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, on its face, the idea that that cultural memory can last for centuries, I think, is plausible. You know, a lot of people, you know, historians think that there's a lot of a lot in the American character today that derives from the friggin pilgrims. You know what I mean? Like we're more puritanical than Europe is. still after hundreds of years. You look at the different regions of the United States and why are Minnesotans like Minnesotans? Well, because it was settled by people from Nordic countries. You know what I mean? Like the character of the people who settled different regions of the U.S. 200, 300 years ago is still observable in these regional cultures today. So I think that to me, it seems totally plausible that there would be some cultural influence that goes back centuries. I mean, culture has a lot of momentum. And from what you're saying, if I understood it correctly, that cultural inertia is just this sense that we're more likely to protest if we think other people are going to protest with us. And an eclipse is when people protest. So that will make it more likely for me to protest.

'''AJR:''' Right. It helps us overcome the collective action problem or the coordination problem, which is, you know, you know, and that's why you see, you know, after George Floyd is such a. it's a. it's a sad example, but a very strong example of this where there's been injustice against black Americans for a very long time. But then this thing happens and everyone says, oh. I know that if I take to the streets today, a lot of other people are likely to join me because we all just observed this same thing. And then, of course, there's network effects, and we can get each other – encourage one another and communicate. But generally speaking, a challenge of protest is – collective action problem. And so it's helpful to see a big thing. You know, you think about the Arab Spring, you know, it was the incident in Tunisia that sparked, literally, I shouldn't have used that word, everyone to take to the streets. So usually something big has to happen. And so their argument is this total solar eclipse is a rare enough yet totally shared experience that helps us overcome this collective action problem because we know that it's a sign that government's not doing their job and what better signal of weakness and what better moment to take to the streets than this

'''S:''' right interesting. that's really fascinating Yeah.

'''AJR:''' I mean, I don't know if any of you are planning on protesting during the solar eclipse coming up, but I think it could be a good moment to do it.

'''J:''' I think I might just spontaneously do it.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Yeah. If there's cloud cover, I will certainly be protesting.

'''AJR:''' Yes, there you go. There you go. Well, the other piece of this that I guess I was just excited about is that, and maybe you all are reading this in the news too, is that most of the social science research I find on this, and it's valuable and it's fine, but most of the research that I'm seeing is, oh, total solar eclipse are a wonderful time for humanity to come together. And the Washington Post had an article this week that said, you know, despite our differences and it's a polarized country and blah, blah, blah, we can all experience the same eclipse. and won't that bring harmony to our country? And there's a study a couple of years ago that even evaluated tweets and people who were in the path of totality in 2017 were more likely to tweet things related to awe and shared experiences and humanity. And those just sort of seem like, I guess, I guess that's fine. And I guess that's good. And of course, I love that. it's like an awesome event and people describe it as life-changing and that's wonderful. But But as far as social science goes, I find it more kind of descriptive and slightly obvious, maybe. Maybe I'm being jaded. But this, to me, just the fact that they were able to leverage this into a natural experiment felt very exciting. And I wonder what else we could do, you know, take advantage of events, natural events that are largely, if not exclusively, orthogonal to human experiences and see what we can learn about humans and society's.

'''S:''' All right, Bob, tell us how gravitational waves are responsible for human life.

=== Gravitational Waves and Human Life (1:05:30) ===
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'''B:''' Yeah, this was kind of an interesting little talk. It reminded me of Connections, the show Connections, Steve, showing the linkages between various technologies. So this was a new study that links gravitational waves created by neutron star collisions to the existence of life on Earth as we know it, including, of course, humanity. This paper was submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has not been peer-reviewed yet. You can see it on the online archive server. The name of the study is Do We Owe Our Existence to Gravitational Waves? Now, you may think that colliding neutron stars and the gravitational waves they produce are quaint and mildly interesting astronomical phenomenon. First of all, shame on you. They are far more than that. I know. Of course, I'm kidding. I know everyone is desperately in love with gravitational waves. Even evolution deniers like them. Yeah, they're just endlessly fascinating to me. So life as we know it absolutely requires many of the fundamental elements of the universe, obviously, right? Hydrogen, for example, is forged in the Big Bang, and it's critical for us for obvious reasons. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, they're high on the critically important element list as well. They come from helium fusion within many, many different types of stars. In total, there's over 20 elements that are generally considered to be of vital importance to our existence. But it depends what website you're looking at, right? Because some websites say there's 20 of them. Some say there's 25. Some say there's 28. So that's why I'm just going to say there's over 20 elements. Right. Whichever elements they are though, if the atomic number is less than 35, as most of them are among these most important ones, then they were synthesized in giant stars and dispersed in supernovae explosions. But two elements though that are generally considered to be incredibly important, they're distinctive though in this context. They're iodine and bromine. Iodine is an element found in thyroid hormones, which critically impacts our growth and development, our heart rate, even our body temperatures. Bromine is also very, very important. It's critical for collagen scaffolding in our bodies, tissue development from the most primitive sea creature to the most primitive human. This is very important stuff, elements that are – life on earth would not be as it is if it weren't for just iodine and bromine. For iodine and bromine, for those elements to exist. as we see it, supernovae don't really cut it like the other elements. The process is incredibly complicated in supernovae and we're not sure exactly what's going on and how iodine and bromine are created. primary source is thought to be neutron star collisions because that's where a wonderful thing happens called the R process. The R process refers to what's called the rapid neutron capture process. This is what's creating these elements and many of the heavier stable elements. So this happens when a heavy atomic nucleus Hold on to and grabs a series of very, very free neutrons one after the other really, really fast. And it has to be fast because if you have a lot of neutrons jumping into a nucleus, it's generally just going to radioactively decay, right? Specifically beta decay. So if it happens really, really fast, though, these neutrons get together really fast. You get two critical things happening. You get a very high density, which is thought to be 10 to the 24, which is about a septillion neutrons per cubic centimeter. And with that, you also get, as you might expect, a very, very high temperature. For this, it's around a billion Kelvin temperature. which is pretty damn hot. So if you have both of those, that incredible density and temperature, then the neutrons are absorbed and heavier isotopes are synthesized. And so that is a rapid neutron capture process, the R process that can create many elements, many of the heavier elements, but especially iodine and bromine. Now, like I said before, the R process in supernovae has a lot of theoretical uncertainty with it and for that reason, the authors don't focus on that. The one place though where we are very confident that the R process happens in abundance is a kilonova explosion, which happens when neutron stars collide. So now the authors then take this step back and they ask, well, what caused this collision that created those critical elements? And they say in their paper, neutron star collisions occur because binary systems lose energy by emitting gravitational waves. So these fundamental physics phenomena may have made human life possible, which is kind of like the big bottom line of their study. So in the future, the researchers would like to more solidly link this gravitational waves to human evolution. With the core collapse supernovas, we're not really sure theoretically and mathematically exactly what's happening with the R process. We're not really sure how much supernovae are contributing to bromine and iodine. But the other thing that they suggest is that we could potentially more definitively prove that iodine is created in neutron star collisions. to really augment their argument in their paper. They suggest that we might detect iodine in lunar regolith that could then be tied to a specific historic kilonova explosion. And in that way, we could say, yes, see, there is this link between gravitational waves and life on Earth. So perhaps we'll see in the future if they do those studies. It's fun though – and that was my approach to this. It's just fun to imagine yet another roll of the dice, another contingency of life as we know it on Earth due this time to ultimately an incredibly rare collision in the universe, colliding neutron stars. They happen and we're detecting them. But imagine in the immensity of the universe, it's very, very rare and yet it could be a critical – they could create a critical component to life as we know it caused ultimately by their release of gravitational waves. So that was their study.

'''AJR:''' As you were describing it, Bob, I kept finding myself thinking about all those salt containers that I've seen over the years that say, this salt contains iodine, a necessary nutrient. I was like, you don't even know how necessary.

'''B:''' Thank you, Killanova.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, yeah. I was like, now I understand why I need it. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, but again, life evolved to use what was there, right? Exactly. So if it wasn't there, there would be life that wasn't dependent on its existence. The fact that there's some stuff in the universe that's unlikely to exist or that is the product of a rare process makes sense. The universe is big.

'''B:''' It's been around for a long time.

'''S:''' So a lot of rare stuff happens all the time. Yeah.

'''B:''' To me, it was just fun to have this connection between this esoteric astronomical subject like gravitational waves, which a lot of people – if you don't – if you listen to this podcast, you have heard me blather on about them many times. But for a lot of people, they are just like whatever. They've never even heard of it. And to think that there could be some tight link between something like gravitational waves, which are these utterly ethereal vibrations in spacetime itself, could potentially – auger the existence of life forms on Earth that need these critical elements. And of course, absolutely, if they didn't exist, then life would exist without them. But it's just funny to see these connections.

'''AJR:''' Do you think very dense gravitational waves could be causing Havana syndrome?

'''B:''' Ah, interesting. No, because then everybody on the Earth would be constantly like... Nauseous. Yes.

'''S:''' Yeah, unless somebody has a gravitational wave producer, like a gravitational wave gun. Oh, God.

'''B:''' Good luck with that. And it weighs a nonillion tons.

'''S:''' I didn't say it was practical.

'''AJR:''' That's the problem with science fiction is it breaks all the rules. I'm learning.

'''B:''' Tell me a good story. You could break it a little. Yeah. Don't go crazy with the breaking. You know, give me a couple of gimme's and then tell me a good story with it and I'll be very happy.

'''AJR:''' But you're right. And to Steve's point, we could all be sitting here as different forms of life who don't need iodine and bromine to live and be talking about. Imagine if we needed those things, how silly we'd be.

'''B:''' Yeah, for that, I think it would be – it strikes me that it would be a little bit trivial to get around them. But if you said, yeah, do away with carbon, then that's a problem. That's a huge problem. Then you're talking about a life form that's just like, oh boy, so different, ridiculously different and probably not as adaptable, not as variable because as we all know, carbon is just an amazing element to base life around because it just – it could – It's easily changeable and adaptable. It could hook up to so many different things that it's really – there's nothing like it. There could be life forms based on other elements out there. Silicon. There probably are. But I think they would be very diminished in terms of the types of life you could have.

'''AJR:''' I'm hearing that Bob is quite the carbon superiority. It is.

'''S:''' Carbon supremacy advocate over here. Carbon makes a lot of bonds, and they're very flexible, right? Yeah. So you can go to silicon, which is right below it on the periodic table, and it does make a similar number of bonds, but they're not as flexible as carbon is. Yeah. So it just won't have the same chemistry. Carbon chemistry is unique, which is why there's carbon-based life, right? There is a whole branch of chemistry dedicated to carbon. Yeah.

'''B:''' It's a pretty easy bet to say that. I bet most life in the universe is based on carbon. It seems like a solid bet. But yet again, we have one data point. Who knows?

'''AJR:''' Would silicon be the next most likely or is that even that question too muddied by my own – There's actually a bunch that are reasonable to expect.

'''B:''' Silicon is kind of up there, I think. And there's even more that can plausibly create some type of life. But as we've been saying, though, nothing is like carbon. Carbon is king in that regard.

'''AJR:''' Carbon is king.

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== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:15:28) ==
=== Email #1: Evolution of gullibility ===
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'''S:''' All right, well, we have at least one email this week. This one comes from Malcolm, and he writes, Great show, as everyone says. Nevertheless, it is. My question, what's the evolutionary benefit of gullibility? My premise is, one, there appears to be a long history of received wisdom about how the world works. e.g., it is what it is. That goes back to in written text at least as far as Gilgamesh and therefore probably further. This trait, despite on the face of it inclining towards not very useful because, well, reality, dude, has survived and flourishes. Traits can survive without being useful if they're not harmful, but given the small percentage of skeptics, it suggests an advantage. Given this, is there an evolutionary benefit to gullibility, and if so, what? Asking for a friend, he says with a winky eye emoji. Keep it up, guys. Seriously, lots of us out here admire what you do. Thank you, Malcolm. So basically he's saying that given that gullibility is pretty much a universal human condition throughout history, that it's not useful because it doesn't allow you to track your beliefs with reality. And yet it seems to be the dominant form of humanity. Why is that? Is that because there's an evolutionary advantage or benefit to gullibility? What do you guys think?

'''B:''' Well, I mean I think gullibility is a byproduct of being a social species, having an open mind, being social. But I think that culture has amplified and exposed our gullibility. It's weaponized it in ways that you wouldn't have – I don't think you would have seen centuries ago or millennia ago.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, I'm inclined towards where Bob began, which is that, yeah, it seems to be kind of like an outcropping of cooperation, being in a society, listening to one another. But maybe on a collective evolutionary perspective, you know, it's individuals, traits that are advantageous for individuals matter, of course, but traits that matter for groups probably matter even more. And so groups that have higher gullibility, meaning they listen to their leader and will march into war with them, might actually outperform those that think for themselves and separate. And so it actually might cause, you might want cultures from an evolutionary perspective, cultures that are more gullible because then you listen to whoever's in charge and you kind of work, all the coordination problems we were talking about earlier. But I agree with Bob that there is a level at which information either travels too fast or the wrong information travels and gullibility becomes a problem and maybe we're running into that. But I could certainly see it being an advantage. If you're trying to defeat another country, you want everyone to be as gullible as possible because then they'll listen to you.

'''S:''' Yeah, I think the best way to think about evolutionary forces like that, selective pressures, is that everything's a trade-off. You know, like we tend to think of like better or worse, you know, superior and inferior out competing. But in reality, most evolutionary pressures are a lateral move and most of them involve a lot of tradeoffs. Right. And like, for example, birds can fly and flying is a massive advantage in terms of evading bugs. predators and hunting for prey and whatever. but right comes at a massive calorie cost energy cost and therefore you know it it persists in species that their behavior makes it a good trade-off but it may tip over to being just not a good trade-off and then they lose their ability to fly and

'''B:''' fight this bird.

'''S:''' it's not yeah it's not a an always a net positive it's Even having eyes, like if you live in a cave, the eyes are a detriment because you can poke them and get infected and whatever. So there's an advantage to not having them. So especially when you talk about behavior, which is so complicated, I think you guys hit upon the big one. So oftentimes, not only are traits trade-offs, but there are competing traits. And often evolution is a balance among multiple factors. And that balance is in some kind of sweet spot, but there's probably a range of different balances that can occur depending on different strategies, even within a population, within a species. You know what I mean? Like you could adopt an alpha male strategy or a beta male strategy in the same species, and they're both viable. They're just different choices that individuals make, which create different selective pressures, et cetera. So I wonder if the same kind of thing is at play here. So I think the other pressure that you guys are talking about is the cohesiveness of your population, your tribe, your village, your people, right? For war is one thing, but not only that, just – hey, we're all going to go over there now. We're all going to migrate to do whatever. We know that humans have hard wiring to listen to our leaders. There's MRI studies now that show if you listen to a charismatic leader within your in-group, it literally turns off your Reality testing. You get more gullible. You literally get more gullible when you're listening to somebody speak who is charismatic and you identify with as part of your group.

'''B:''' We've seen that writ large in American politics.

'''AJR:''' I can't think of who you'd be referring to, Bob, but okay. Yeah.

'''S:''' Well, you know, you wonder, like, how could somebody like Adolf Hitler capture a country? Yeah. And that's how that happens.

'''AJR:''' I wonder less these days, unfortunately. Yeah.

'''S:''' And we've talked before also about another tradeoff. And this is the false positive versus false negative tradeoff. So let's say that your friend says, hey, don't go over there. I was over there and I heard a tiger growling. Right. Now, are you going to just believe your friend and stay away from there? Or are you going to say, I don't know. That could have been anything. How do I know it was a tiger? How do I know this guy isn't lying to me? I'm going to check it out for myself. I think we are descended from the people who just believe their friend and didn't go over there and that the people who went over there were eaten and we are not their descendants. Right?

'''J:''' So fear is really powerful.

'''S:''' And so there may be an evolution. The evolutionary balance of like false positive to false negative may favor false positives, meaning that you're better off believing potential threats and being gullible actually will probably make you really cautious. Whereas being a curious skeptic may not be the most advantageous in terms of your survival. But ultimately, it's very context-dependent. But you can certainly see how those balances, those trade-offs would exist, right? And they would be different in different contexts at different times, different places, different cultures, etc., And also, again, and you hit upon this, Andrea, although, you know, the whole idea of group selections are controversial, I think, still within evolutionary biologists, as is many aspects of evolutionary psychology. But the idea that are there group level selective pressures, you know, like is the balance of traits within a tribe be selected for? Are some tribes more likely to survive than other tribes, you know, or other groups of people, other subpopulations? Yeah. Because they have some percentage of their population who's able to do something like lead into war. While they contain other subsets of people who are more thoughtful and able to problem solve. And other groups of people who are more nurturing or whatever. And so it's not like this trait is always in every context important. superior or more advantageous or selected for versus these other traits. It depends on what role you're fitting in society. And also, you know, there's so much variability. There's so much neurological variability. I have to wonder if variability itself is selected for. You know what I mean?

'''AJR:''' Right. I mean, you want a mix of and this is an oversimplification, but you want a mix of people who are going to look for the tiger and a mix of people who are definitely not going to look for the tiger.

'''S:''' If we think about modern society, you know, we need soldiers and doctors and politicians and whatever. We need all these different and scientists, you know, and teachers. We need all these different kinds of people to make society work. And engineers, and thank goodness there are engineers, you know, who have maybe a different statistical profile neurologically than, say, somebody who's a rock star. Although, I don't know, do we really need rock stars? I don't know. Well, entertainers, you know what I mean?

'''AJR:''' Yeah, Brian went. But there's also a bunch of research in information and communication, which is basically, like you said, like you're listening to a trusted, charismatic speaker. It's an information shortcut. And so at an individual level, it's just easier for me to listen to the person rather than have to work through every single problem myself. Should I take the vaccine? Is this happening? Is this real? Is the earth flat? I just turn to the person who I think is the authority and listen to whatever they say. And so on a local short-term level, it can be very advantageous for me to get these conversations. In political science, we call them information shortcuts. I'm sure that's...

'''S:''' Heuristic.

'''AJR:''' Heuristic, yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, so it's a mental shortcut. And listening to experts is not an unreasonable shortcut. They're not always correct, though. So if it's absolute, you will be led astray at some point in time. And also, there's the emotional desire for simplicity. If you feel overwhelmed, say, well, I'm just going to do whatever this guy says. He's smarter than me. He's more knowledgeable.

'''AJR:''' Well, I said that earlier about the driverless taxis. So, yeah. Yeah.

'''S:''' All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

{{anchor|wtn}}{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? (1:24:58) ==
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|episodeNum = 977
|answer = [https://www.instagram.com/p/C6C404ctoT7/ Modified sousaphone] – The {{w|sousaphone}} playing triggers MIDI notes on synthesizer; video game controller lowers & oscillates frequency into {{w|dubstep}} sub-bass noises.
|}}


'''J:''' All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy. This Noisy What do you guys think that is?

'''S:''' I mean, it definitely sounds musical, which makes me think that it's some kind of instrument.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, my guess was an AI-generated song of some kind.

'''S:''' What do you think, Bob?

'''B:''' I think frog.

'''S:''' A frog?

'''J:''' You think it's a digital frog?

'''AJR:''' I hope Bob's right.

'''J:''' All right, well, a listener named Darren P. Cusick, he gave me the phonetics for his name. Yeah, okay, I can see that now. I don't know why I can't pronounce last names. Anyway, he said he's from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada, right? Now, have any of you guys ever been to Saskatchewan?

'''AJR:''' No, I'd love to go.

'''J:''' Well, it is like – talk about wide open space. Like, oh, my God. It's a huge area of land north of the U.S. And it's very – from what I've read about it, there is not a lot of people that live there. So Darren is one of the few who live in Saskatchewan.

'''AJR:''' Holding down the fort. Good, Darren.

'''J:''' So he says he's a longtime listener. This is his first time guessing. And he said, I believe this is an electronic wind instrument. Although they can be used to replicate the sound of traditional wind instruments, they are more often used to create synthetic sounds. I'm going to say that is a very good guess. Very, very good guess. Not completely there, but nonetheless a very good guess. Killy Hill wrote in, said, hi, Jay. I'll guess it's a contemporary song played through an early recording technology like a cylinder record. I know exactly what you're talking about, but you're not correct. Visto Tutti wrote in. He said, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. Wow, man. Acid flashback to the 90s. Sounds like analog worms attacking. So then he goes, this is a Korg MS-20 bass synth kicking in the E's.

'''S:''' Wow.

'''J:''' Man, I think he was drunk when he wrote that.

'''AJR:''' I love it.

'''J:''' You are incorrect, but I love your answer. And I have another listener here. This listener's name is Osha Johnson. Hi, Jay. Greetings from India. This week's noisy reminds me of horror movies from the 70s and 80s like Kubrick and Carpenter. So I think it's a synthesizer, probably a Moog. Okay, so all of these guesses are provocative and in their own way good. Some more close than others. But let me tell you what the answer is. So the winner for this week is a listener named Jordan, Jordan Smith. And he says, this week's noisy was definitely a modified sousaphone, right? You guys know what a sousaphone is? No. Well, a sousaphone is very similar to a tuba. So basically a sousaphone is considered a type of tuba. So for the purposes of this game that we're playing right now, just think of it as a – I think it's a smaller looking tuba, right? So this is a modified sousaphone used to play dubstep sub-bass noises. The Salsa Steps on Instagram uses his Salsa phone playing to trigger a MIDI note on his synthesizer and has repurposed an Xbox controller to basically lower the frequency and oscillate the frequency. Very, very cool. So let me play this for you again, knowing now that you're basically hearing a modified tuba.

'''AJR:''' Salsa Steps If you played this for me and I had to guess what it is, some of the breathing in that instrument sounds like a didgeridoo.

'''B:''' Yeah, you're right.

'''J:''' I would have guessed probably something digitally changing a didgeridoo because it is really cool. I didn't realize that the breath in a tuba had a similar, somehow similar, you know, affectation as a didgeridoo does, but very cool. I thought that was a really, really fun one.

'''B:''' It reminds me of Logan's Run, some of the sound effects in Logan's Run. Totally, Bob.

'''J:''' Yeah, I totally hear that as well. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. It was sent in by a listener named Jared Zimmerman, and here it is. Oh, my God. Bye. Bye. You know, I keep saying this. One of the things I love about who's that noisy is that I can hear so many different things that could possibly make that noise. When I hear that, I'm like, I don't even want to say it because I'm sure people are going to guess. But I just think that's so cool. Like without context, your brain can just assign it to so many different things. Yeah.

'''AJR:''' No, I can't wait to hear the range of answers that people send in. And yeah, I'm sure what I'm thinking is very different from what you're thinking.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (1:29:22) ===
[Animal? honking/squeaking noises]

'''J:'''... {{wtnAnswer|979|things that could possibly make that noise}}

== Announcements (1:30:06) ==

'''J:''' So, Andrea, do you know that we're all going to Dallas this weekend?

'''AJR:''' I did know that. I am very excited for you.

'''J:''' Yeah, I know. We're really looking forward to it. By the time people are hearing this, if you hear this show on the Saturday that it comes out, which will be the 6th, we will be doing an extravaganza that night. And then the day after, on Sunday the 7th, we will be doing two SGU live shows. Almost back to back. It's very unlikely that anybody that hears this will have time to buy tickets and go. But if you happen to be in Dallas, you can go to the Skeptic's Guide homepage where we still have some tickets available for the – we almost sold out of the extravaganza, which is amazing because we just – COVID just killed everybody's desire or willingness to go out. But now it seems like things are going back to normal. And, Andrew, we have two live shows because we basically sold out of one of them, so I split it in half. Awesome. Which is really cool. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. So anyway, after this weekend, we have the two Chicago shows coming up in August. So I'll give you more details about that. You can buy tickets for both of those events, though, on the Skeptic's Guide homepage. So yeah, on August 17th, we'll have the extravaganza. And on August 18th, we will be recording our 1,000th episode.

'''S:''' Whoa.

'''AJR:''' Right? Oh, that's awesome.

'''J:''' That's just, you know.

'''B:''' And then we're done. Unreal. Finally.

'''J:''' Then we got to do it all over again.

'''AJR:''' Oh, congrats. I've been thinking about how your 1,000th episode is coming up and wondering how you were going to commemorate it. And that's amazing.

'''J:''' Yeah, by the way, I'm going to do this live on air. You ready, Andrea?

'''AJR:''' I'm ready.

'''J:''' How would you like to be a virtual guest on that show?

'''AJR:''' Sure. Me? Yes, I would love to. You are invited. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I'd be honored.

'''J:''' We'll call you in, you know, as we usually do, like a live stream.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' And then we'll chit chat with you. You could you could talk about like whatever your favorite moments like, you know, we'll just kind of reminisce about the stuff we've done together and, you know, your appearances on the show and other things that we've done as the SGU.

'''AJR:''' Oh, well, I'm going to cry. That's lovely. Yes.

'''S:''' Basically, you have to talk about how awesome we are.

'''AJR:''' Yes, yes, I'll be there. I'll mostly talk about the time that Bob insulted Steve as a podcaster during... Yes!

'''B:''' That was awesome when we did that. You were with me on that one. That wasn't just me.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, no, it was amazing. I just insulted him as a doctor, so we both have a cross to bear.

'''B:''' You tag-teamed him.

'''AJR:''' No, I would be honored, absolutely. I'm thrilled.

'''J:''' I got you both beat. Whenever I talk, I insult Steve's intelligence. So a couple more things. If you appreciate the work that we do on this show, you could do a few things. One, you could join our mailing list. We send out an email every week that lets people know about everything that we have created the previous week, which is nice because you could see all of Steve's blog posts in various places and you'll see the podcast. You'll see the stuff that we do on TikTok and the stuff we do on YouTube. We're pretty busy over here. Another thing that you could do is you can become a patron of the show. You can go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide. If you appreciate the work that we do, that would be a wonderful way to show your support. And also you can give our show a rating on whatever podcast player you're using. I do know that iTunes is still a good place to do that because people use that to find new podcasts. Back to you, brother.

'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Jay. All right, guys. Let's go on with science or fiction.

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:33:31) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
}}
{{SOFinfo
|theme = Eggs

|item1 = By weight the egg white is >90% protein, while the egg yolk is >90% fat.
|link1web = https://www.egginfo.co.uk/egg-nutrition-and-health/egg-nutrition-information/white-and-yolk/compare
|link1title = Egg white vs egg yolk
|link1pub = Egg Info

|item2 = Easter egger chickens are a breed that can lay eggs which are yellow, blue, green, cream, or even pink.
|link2web = https://www.farmersalmanac.com/what-are-easter-egg-chickens
|link2title = What Are Easter Egger Chickens?
|link2pub = Farmers' Almanac

|item3 = In the US eggs must be refrigerated once harvested and cleaned, while in Europe eggs are stored at room temperature.
|link3web = https://www.businessinsider.com/why-europeans-dont-refrigerate-eggs-2014-12
|link3title = Why Europeans Don't Refrigerate Eggs But Americans Do
|link3pub = Business Insider

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = Egg white vs. egg yolk
|science1 = Easter Egger chickens [[File:978 eastereggers.jpg|200px]]
|science2 = refrigerated vs. room temp

|rogue1 = jay
|answer1 = Easter Egger chickens

|rogue2 =bob
|answer2 =Easter Egger chickens

|rogue3 =Andrea
|answer3 =Egg white vs. egg yolk

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win =y 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. What is it? Do you guys want to guess what it is? I want to know.

'''AJR:''' Eclipse.

'''J:''' It's got to be Eclipse.

'''B:''' Oh. Nematodes.

'''J:''' What airplanes not to fly on? Yes.

'''S:''' It is based on a recent holiday, Easter, which we just celebrated. Halloween. Nope. It is all about eggs. Eggs. Okay. See how much you know about eggs.

'''J:''' I know a lot about eggs.

'''AJR:''' I know almost nothing, so let's go. Yeah.

'''S:''' Okay. Here we go. Item number one. By weight, the egg white is greater than 90% protein, while the egg yolk is greater than 90% fat. Okay. All right, number two, Easter Egger chickens are a breed that can lay eggs which are yellow, blue, green, cream, or even pink. And eye number three, in the U.S., eggs must be refrigerated once harvested and cleaned, while in Europe, eggs are stored at room temperature. Okay. All right, Jay, you seem pretty confident about your egg knowledge.

'''J:''' I actually am, Steve.

'''S:''' Why don't you go first?

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' I think I got this one.

'''S:''' All right.

'''J:''' All right, Steve, the first one, by weight, the egg white is 90% or greater than 90% protein, while the egg yolk is 90% fat. Okay. Yeah. I mean egg whites are the very low or zero fat way to eat eggs without getting all that fat, right? Because that's where all the protein is or so they've been telling me. I mean I just think that one is science. I mean I don't know – when you're saying that 90% by weight – Greater than 90%. Greater is protein. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, I think so. I think I agree with that. I mean, everything I know about eggs, that is 100% on. Number two, Easter egg chickens are a breed that can lay eggs, which are yellow, blue, green, and cream. I highly doubt that one. But let me jump to number three real quick. In the U.S., eggs must be refrigerated once harvested and cleaned. While in Europe, eggs are stored at room temperature. That is – I absolutely think that is fact. Very confident that that one is science. Okay. I do not think that we could have selectively bred or even genetically modified chickens. I don't think that we have. I think we could, but I don't think that people have done this to make them lay colored eggs for freaking Easter. No, that did not take place. That was a fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' All right. The egg white is protein. I mean, yeah, pretty common knowledge. I don't know if it's greater than 90%. Maybe it's only 75%. But I don't think you're going to do that. So that makes perfect sense to me. We'll go to number three, refrigerated and not refrigerated. Yeah, this makes sense, although to me, having an egg not be in the refrigerator is weird and I would probably avoid it. But I think it doesn't matter that much because you're cooking the egg anyway. Any bacteria that may have arose, you're going to cook it anyway. So I think it probably wouldn't last as long unrefrigerated, but I think it's fine and that makes sense that they would do that. Yeah, it's a middle one. that's just killing me. I mean, colored eggs, never heard that before. I mean, what kind of effort would it even take to make that happen? Yeah. And it's just so easy to color them anyway. And just for one silly holiday, you're going to do some genetic engineering and breeding to get those eggs. It would be cool, but I doubt that's worth the effort or even how possible that is. So two is fiction, the colored eggs.

'''S:''' Okay, Andrea.

<big>'''Andrea's Response'''</big>

'''AJR:''' All right. So I'm going to go – after all that talk of coordination and sense of belonging today, I'm going to go against Jay and Bob on this. Ah! So I'm going to start with number two, this Easter egg or chickens laying eggs that are multiple different colors. That feels to me, and I think, Steve, I always try to over-psychoanalyze you and you always beat me, so I'm probably treading in the wrong here. I'm going to say that's science because it seems like something that's so obviously preposterous and unheard of that you wouldn't have just put it in. You were trying to trick us because it seems so silly, and we're doing all kinds of wild things, and so why not? I'm sure there's some corner of the market where someone's making a pretty penny by selling eggs that are multiple different colors. I feel like in China they've figured out how to do all kinds of wild things when I was living there, so I could totally see that happening. And that makes me think about number three, about eggs needing to be refrigerated once harvested. in the U.S. I don't know about eggs, but generally I find when I travel that we refrigerate things a ton more than other countries. And so I'm inclined to think that that is science. And the only other one that's giving me some pause is this, the egg white being more than 90% protein, while the egg yolk is more than 90% fat. The protein sounds right, but the egg yolk as fat is giving me pause. So if I were to say that that were, you know, I need a fiction at this point because I've decided to believe the colorful egger chicken. So I'm going to say... As I'm stretching, and so I'm going to say that the egg white being not more than 90% protein and the yolk being more than 90% fat, I'm going to say those are fiction. I think the yolk is not that much fat, even though I know it's horrible for you and I know there's cholesterol and I don't really know how those go together. I'm going to say that one's the fiction.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Okay. Okay. So you all agree on number three. So we'll start there. In the U.S., eggs must be refrigerated once harvested and cleaned. While in Europe, eggs are stored at room temperature. You guys all think that one is science.

'''J:''' Steve, can I, before you do it, can I tell you more info now?

'''S:''' Yeah, go ahead.

'''J:''' That's because they wash the eggs in the United States and they don't have the protective coating that the ones in Europe do.

'''S:''' Okay, that's an interesting idea. Well, this one is, Jay, you might be surprised to find out that this one is, this is science. And you are correct, Jay, but it's a way more complicated story than that. As usual. So why do we wash the eggs? That's one question. But let me just say, you have to choose a strategy to minimize the introduction of salmonella into the egg, right? Yeah. So the eggshell is there to protect the egg. So you need to protect the integrity of that eggshell. Right. In the U.S., we tend to factory farm our eggs more, so they're less free range, which means there's more crap on them. So we decided we're going to clean the eggs because there's more feces on them. But then when you do that, you have to keep it refrigerated and at a constant temperature. Because you don't want the egg shell to essentially allow, you know, you don't want it to get porous. You don't want it to get wet necessarily. You want to keep it cool so that the bacteria doesn't proliferate and doesn't get inside the shell. Whereas in Europe, they, rather than cleaning the eggs, they tried to have clean farming processes so you could harvest the egg without having to clean it. And there you can keep it at a constant room temperature, which also keeps the shell from opening up at any point and allowing the bacteria in. Also, when you do refrigerate it, you can't then let it warm up to room temperature. You're committed to refrigerating it.

'''AJR:''' Like beer.

'''S:''' Yeah, because then the shell does like expand and then lets the bacteria in. So you got to pick your lane. You're either going to keep it refrigerated until you use it or you could keep it at room temperature and it will last for a while. Because again, the shell works. It protects the egg.

'''B:''' So what does cleaning do to it, though, that necessitates refrigerating it?

'''S:''' It weakens the shell a little bit.

'''B:''' Oh, that's what I was missing.

'''S:''' Yeah, it weakens the shell a little bit.

'''B:''' It weakens.

'''S:''' Yeah. So in Europe, they keep the integrity of the shell by not cleaning it, but then they have to have cleaner farming practices. so there's less feces on the shells. I see. Yeah, something to be said for that.

'''AJR:''' So I can't do the thing where I was like, oh, I got back from Europe and now I'm cultured. I'm not going to refrigerate my eggs anymore. It doesn't work that way.

'''S:''' No.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

Noted. You got to follow the rules wherever you are. Yeah.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Let's go back to number two. Easter egg or chickens are a breed that can lay eggs which are yellow, blue, green, cream, or even pink. Jay and Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Andrew, you think it sounds too much like the fiction. So it must be me trying to... trick you. so you think this one is science and this one is science. here we go. this one is science. what the hell. so it's actually not that big a deal to lay eggs which are different colored. lots of birds lay colored different colored eggs. it says zero about the contents of the egg. it's just about the compounds that get incorporated into the shell and And so it's about the genetics of the breed. There are a lot of chicken breeds which lay blue eggs. And they are increasing in popularity among small farms or people who keep chickens. Apparently, the breeds themselves are very nice. They lay lots of eggs. They're very easy to take care of. And they happen to lay blue-shelled eggs, which are very pretty. So I wouldn't be surprised if they start showing up. at some point or at farmer's markets or whatever you find blue eggs. So I was researching that when I was researching the chicken egg segment. And then I came across this Easter Egger chicken, which is a hybrid, right? It's a hybrid. It's a hybrid. Of a blue egg laying chicken with other breeds, then they got it so that they could lay all these different colors. And it's amazing. It is like Easter eggs. I mean, that's why it's called the Easter egg chicken. They're beautiful, all the different colors. But here's the thing. Each individual chicken lays only one color egg, right? But the breed, within that breed, there are yellow laying chickens and blue egg laying chickens and green egg laying chickens, cream and pink.

'''AJR:''' Right. It's a diverse group. you'd have to get the Easter colors.

'''S:''' And they lay a lot of eggs. They're nice big eggs. The chickens are easy to manage. So there's no reason why our eggs have to be white or cream or whatever that tan color. They could be any of these colors.

'''AJR:''' I like this. Yeah.

'''S:''' All right. All this means that.

'''B:''' How come I haven't seen any of these damn eggs?

'''S:''' I know. They're pretty. Look them up online. The Easter Egger chickens.

'''B:''' I'm looking at them now.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' By weight, the egg white is greater than 90% protein, while the egg yolk is greater than 90% fat. Is the fiction, Andrea? You are correct. While the egg white is pretty much mostly protein, right, in terms of the macronutrients, the egg yolk actually has more protein per gram than the egg white does. But there's more egg white than yolk. So you get more protein from the whites only because there's more of it, right? But the egg yolk has actually more protein per gram than the egg white does. But it also has more fat. So it has almost all the fat that's in the egg is in the yolk. Right. Yeah. It's a little bit less than two-thirds fat and one-third protein, but it's still more densely packed with protein.

'''B:''' Wow. I don't like that. That's the whole damn thing. It's not a lot.

'''S:''' It's not a lot. Eggs are like 70 calories. There's a lot of nutrients in them.

'''B:''' Eggs are awesome.

'''J:''' I have eggs every day. Yeah, but one egg has 30% of the cholesterol that a person should eat, so be careful with eggs.

'''S:''' Yeah, but eating cholesterol is not that big a problem.

'''B:''' Right. Exactly. Exactly.

'''S:''' Because it doesn't necessarily mean that you make more cholesterol in your body. So this is like a 1980s kind of myth about eating the eggs and cholesterol.

'''J:''' So now I'm learning about like I don't have to worry about how much cholesterol I eat?

'''S:''' Yeah, it's not as much of a problem as we thought 30, 40 years ago.

'''B:''' Yeah, a high-fat diet is worse for your cholesterol, I think, than eating a lot of cholesterol on your diet.

'''S:''' Actual cholesterol. I know that's one of those simplistic heuristics that a lot of people fall into, like how much you eat of something, you have that something in your body. It's so rife with the whole clean-eating health food guru nonsense. It's like, oh, chlorophyll's good, so eat chlorophyll. It's like, yeah, you know what happens when you eat stuff like that? You digest it. You don't have it in its undigested, unbroken-up form. Or like, oh, you need more melatonin in your brain. You'll take melatonin. It's like, well, it doesn't translate necessarily because you're making it in a specific part of your brain at a specific time.

'''AJR:''' What if I put it in my ears? Yeah, right. Is that closer?

'''S:''' And it's the same thing, good and bad. Like, so, you know, just because you're, like, you're having, and also remember, there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. It's more about the ratio. It is about the total number two, but the ratio is also important. And this is complicated, and it's a moving target, and the answer is always changing. But every time you read a study, actually, it's whatever. So they're constantly tweaking the recommendations and the evidence about this. Generally speaking, yes, you want to have your cholesterol less than 200. You want a good HDL to LDL ratio. And the way to do that is just keep lean, exercise, don't eat a lot of animal fat. But eating cholesterol itself doesn't appear to be one of the risk factors.

'''J:''' All right. Well, this is why I make this show because I always learn something.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah.

'''AJR:''' Well, and this is kind of like the 90s movement for like fat-free products where it's like any fat you would eat must be bad for you. Yeah. So we're all going to eat zero fat and we eat all this sugar instead. Right. Obviously, the type of fat and how much you have, but it's not to say that all – any bit – I mean I avoided nuts until I was 30 because of this stuff.

'''S:''' That's kind of productive. Yeah. Because nuts have good fat. They're good for you. Yeah. Yeah.

'''AJR:''' All right. Egg and nut omelets coming right up.

'''S:''' Exactly. I'm going to make an egg and nut omelet tonight. Andrea, nice solo win this week.

'''B:''' Yeah, what the hell, man? It's not supposed to happen.

'''AJR:''' Thank you. It's all because I decided not to trust Steve.

'''J:''' Or Bob or Jay.

'''S:''' You distrusted all of us.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, that's true.

'''J:''' I was so unbelievably sure that I got it all right tonight.

'''AJR:''' You were very confident, Jay. You did sound confident.

'''S:''' Well, I got to tell you, when I saw the Eiger one, the Easter Eiger, I'm like, that's my fiction. That's my fiction. It was so good. I knew that was – It seems so fake. I had the same reaction. Yeah, it seems so fake and it's like how did I – now have I never heard of this before? Yeah. Why aren't store shelves full of these eggs? I think it's just. there's not many of them around. They're not industrialized. But apparently they're growing in popularity for local farms. Okay. Check it out. Evan's not here, so I came up with a quote for this week.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:48:25) ==

{{qow
|text = As always in life, people want a simple answer . . . and it's always wrong,
|author = {{w|Susan Greenfield, Baroness Greenfield|Susan Greenfield}}
|lived = 1950-present
|desc = English scientist, writer, broadcaster and member of the {{w|House of Lords}}
}}


'''S:''' Here's the quote. As always in life, people want a simple answer, and it's always wrong. That is from Susan Greenfield, who's a neurochemist who researches Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Susan Greenfield. Yeah, very nice. And I was just referring to this previously. People like simple answers. It's one of our core biases. Okay. But the world is complicated. So simple, compelling, satisfying answers, they're usually wrong. Yep. Yeah.

'''J:''' We like stories that we can understand.

'''S:''' Yeah, and wrap our head around. Yeah, absolutely.

'''AJR:''' And tweet and share.

'''S:''' And tweet. I mean, think about Twitter. Twitter is all about short, simple blurbs. Yep. Think about it. All right, well, hey, Andrea, thanks for joining us this week.

'''J:''' Thank you, Andrea.

'''AJR:''' Thanks for having me. Always fun to hang out with you guys. And safe travels. Enjoy the eclipse, everyone. Thank you.

'''S:''' Yep, we're off to Dallas. The next episode will be one of the two shows that we record in Dallas. Should be fun.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

{{Outro664}}{{top}} 
== Today I Learned ==
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SGU Episode 656

2024-05-05T08:19:45Z

Ralsettem: /* Portable DNA Sequencing (16:15) */ Adding ai transcription

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|qowText = No idea should be suppressed. And it applies to ideas that look like nonsense. We must not forget that some of the best ideas seemed like nonsense at first. The truth will prevail in the end. Nonsense will fall of its own weight, by an intellectual law of gravitation. If we bat it about, we shall only keep an error in the air a little longer. And a new truth will go into orbit.
|qowAuthor = {{w|Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin}}, British-American astronomer and astrophysicist

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== Introduction, Hawaii trip: wedding, bananas, and woo ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, January 31st, 2018, 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 folks!

'''S:''' Cara is still traveling today. She did not get back in time to do the show, but she will be back next week. And I just got back a few days ago from Hawaii.

'''B:''' What the hell were you doing there?

'''E:''' How great was that?

'''S:''' It's paradise. It's awesome. What can you say?

'''E:''' How about that earthquake that happened in the tsunami warning?

'''S:''' Yeah, we got a tsunami warning while we were there. But they took it away pretty quickly and said, never mind. It's nothing serious. It was an earthquake near Alaska. And so basically anything surrounding that had a tsunami warning.

'''J:''' So what was the coolest thing that happened to you, Steve? What did you do?

'''B:''' Any ballistic missiles coming in or anything?

'''S:''' No, no middles.

'''E:''' That's a different kind.

'''S:''' So I was there for a wedding. This was a wedding of a friend of mine from medical school and it was also my first gay wedding. It was actually – it was nice. It was a really, really sweet ceremony. Everything was very nice. But just to give you an idea of what it was like, there were two ring bearers and they were both stuffed animal Pua pigs from Moana. What?

'''J:''' Stuffed animal, Pua pigs. Moana.

'''S:''' What was that? Remember the pig from Moana?

'''B:''' I saw that movie. It was awesome. What?

'''S:''' Really? The pig?

'''B:''' That's awesome.

'''S:''' Yeah. They were the ring bearers.

'''J:''' Neat. Oh, that pig that she's friends with temporarily. Okay. Yes. All right.

'''S:''' Whose name is Pua, which is Hawaiian for pig.

'''B:''' That's awesome. I would have picked the dog from Coco, but that was still good.

'''S:''' Now, they're both huge Disney fans. They're both huge Hawaii fans. And then, of course, they're both huge Moana fans. And so that was the theme of the wedding, basically.

'''E:''' Why was it there, Steve? Do they live there or just wanted an exotic location?

'''S:''' Yeah, as I said, they just – that was like – they wanted that place. That's like their favorite place together. So that's why they wanted it there. Luckily, he told us a year ago. It's like, oh, I'm getting married in Hawaii. So we had time to prepare. But we obviously made a vacation out of it. But it was – that was the reason why we went. But Hawaii is awesome. Jay, I think the best thing that we did while we were there other than the wedding was – We were in Oahu. We went to the botanical gardens. We got a tour from one of the people who works there. Now, you know when you do tours of places like this, it's a crapshoot. I've been on a lot of tours where the person had no idea what they were talking about. They had a script that they barely understood and there was a lot of misinformation in there. This was not like that at all. This guy knew his stuff and it was really fascinating. You know, talking about like what plants are native to Hawaii and how they get there and then what the changes over time. You had access to it. So he could like pull flowers off of trees and do stuff that you couldn't do if you're just walking around, you know, and cut open some of the fruit and everything. It was great. It was really, really fascinating. I did some birding while I was there, of course.

'''J:''' Yeah, of course.

'''S:''' Of course you did. Lots of beautiful birds in Hawaii. Although I did not see a honeycreeper. Oh, crap. What's a honeycreeper? I mean, it's a beautiful bird, but if you live there, you might see one once a year or something. You're not going to see them just walking around.

'''E:''' Are they endangered?

'''S:''' Every bird in the island that's native is endangered pretty much.

'''B:''' Oh, why? That's horrible.

'''E:''' Humans.

'''S:''' Humans. Yeah, I mean so it's overrun with invasive species. I mean there are house sparrows there. House sparrows are like the invasive bird everywhere. Oh, boy. Everything that you would expect, loss of habitat, but mostly just wave after wave of people bringing animals and plants and everything there. So they're trying to preserve the native species as much as possible, but it's kind of a losing battle.

'''E:''' Yeah, we're very good at contamination. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''J:''' Well, it's remarkable when you think about with all the boating and air travel that we haven't utterly totaled the planet yet. Right. Through contamination.

'''S:''' Well, it's happening slowly.

'''E:''' And we're changing. Things are changing.

'''S:''' One thing I noticed when I was there is the culture, you know, in terms of how much woo there is there. And it was bad. It was pretty bad. I mean compared to what we're used to on the East Coast. I wanted to talk to Cara about it because it's probably a lot closer to what she's used to in California. But it might even be worse because the appeal to nature fallacy was off the hook. It was totally rampant. You know what I mean?

'''B:''' Oh, wow. Yeah. It kind of makes sense.

'''S:''' It does. It does. And I get it. You're a native population and the technological civilization comes in there and muscles you aside and everything. And they're trying to preserve their culture. But it's just unfortunate that that gets exploited and it gets turned into sort of an anti-science stance. Yeah, it feeds the beast. Yeah. Yeah, every store was like – everything was gluten-free and natural cane sugar, sweetened soda, that kind of crap. Everything natural was awesome and it was – yeah, like. there was a Cyberry superfood crap everywhere and that was terrible. Yeah.

'''E:''' Did you go surfing and hit your head on a surfboard while wearing a tiki around your neck?

'''S:''' That was on my list, but I didn't get to it.

'''E:''' Confuse that with that old TV show, The Brady Bunch. Sorry. My mind wanders.

'''S:''' But it's gorgeous. You're driving on the highway and you turn a corner and there's this amazing vista with these giant cliffs on one side and the ocean spreading out to the other side. It was just gorgeous.

'''E:''' Now, were you tempted to stop every mile and take new photographs basically?

'''S:''' Oh, I wasn't just tempted. I did it. Yeah.

'''B:''' How many pictures did you take, Steve?

'''S:''' Probably 1,000.

'''B:''' Give me a number. 1,000, not bad.

'''S:''' Yeah, a lot. With digital cameras, just click, click, click. Why not?

'''J:''' So Steve, what do you do? Do you literally go home and just sift through all of that content?

'''S:''' Yeah, I usually organize it and then sometimes like if I want to do a picture book or something, I'll pick out the best ones. I posted some of it to our Twitter feed. Part of the reason why I take so many pictures, like if I am seeing a pretty bird I want to take a picture of, I'll click 20 pictures of that one bird. Hoping to get one with like the best whatever, focus and movement and angle and whatnot. Framing. That's like the one picture of that bird that I keep. So while I was there, I was on a quest to find local banana varieties. Oh, of course.

'''J:''' Wait, stop, stop. If you did not eat – Gros Michel? What's it called? Gros Michel. Yeah, if you didn't eat it, don't tell this story.

'''S:''' Well, I'm going to tell the story anyway. So actually I looked up like what are the bananas grown on the Hawaiian Islands or on Oahu? and Gros Michel was not among them. What? It's not among them.

'''J:''' What did you eat then? Tell me what you did. All right.

'''S:''' So obviously there's lots of Cavendish everywhere because that's the most commercial banana. Then there were two other bananas that are like local Hawaiian bananas. One is called an – they call it an apple banana. It's really a Brazilian banana. And it does have like this little tart undertone. First of all, they're smaller but they're really dense. They're very creamy and they're a little bit tart. So they're nice. They're very, very, very, very delicious banana. And then they have a local variety of a cooking banana like a plantain. Yeah. They're supposed to also have some other local varieties including ice cream bananas, but I could not find them anywhere.

'''B:''' Yeah, I heard about those.

'''E:''' Ice cream bananas.

'''S:''' Couldn't find them anywhere.

'''B:''' They're supposed to be amazing.

'''E:''' You must have asked people.

'''S:''' I did. I asked a couple of people that never heard of them.

'''E:''' Never heard of them.

'''S:''' Yeah, you probably have to go to a farmer's market and I only went to one. I didn't really – I wasn't there for that long. I think you just have to go to the right – know which farmer's market to go to or whatever. Oh, boy. And it may have been only on the other islands, maybe not on Oahu. So I don't know. So unfortunately, I didn't get to taste the ice cream banana. But the apple bananas were different. It was good.

'''J:''' So was it basically more of an artifact of the island that you were on and not that they're just not anywhere in the Hawaiian islands?

'''S:''' Maybe. Yeah, maybe. It's just not on Oahu. But I think that there's definitely an untapped market there because why the hell would you sell Cavendish bananas in a place where you could grow Michelle or ice cream bananas or pineapple bananas or whatever? You know what I mean? Why are you wasting your time with Cavendish? It's crazy. Just sell them to the Rubes in North America.

'''E:''' It's not right there.

'''S:''' You don't have a choice.

'''J:''' The Rubes. I'm getting really frustrated with this. Do we have to actually go to South America or something to eat this banana?

'''E:''' Well, there's an eclipse happening next year. Maybe, you know, coincide.

'''S:''' We'll call it the banana eclipse.

'''E:''' I like it.

'''S:''' I don't understand why there isn't an industry of this in Florida, right? You could grow them there.

'''J:''' Well, I think partly because you probably care more about bananas than most people do.

'''E:''' Well, yeah, it sounds like bad marketing on the people.

'''S:''' Yes, I think there's a marketing opportunity. there is what I'm saying because if you tasted one of the – from what I understand, if you tasted one of these other bananas, I think you'd pay a premium for it. Again, the only reason why these aren't commercial is because they can't – they don't stay ripe long enough to ship them around the world. But if you're just selling them locally, then that's not an issue.

'''J:''' Yeah, sure. Yeah, I agree with that. Right? Okay. All right. You've reinvigorated my desire to eat either one of those two other bananas. I want to do it.

'''S:''' The ice cream bananas are blue. The bananas themselves are blue.

'''E:''' The peels or the insides? Yeah, the peel.

'''S:''' The peel on the outside. Cool. I like that. They're all kind of like beige on the inside. Yeah.

'''J:''' Soft and creamy beige.

'''S:''' So the quest continues. I did add one more banana notch to my belt though with the apple banana, but that was it.

'''J:''' Good for you, Steve. Well done.

'''S:''' Thank you.

'''E:''' Glad you had a nice trip.

'''S:''' Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It's great in the middle of the winter, right? You get a week of sunshine. It'll get me through February.

'''J:''' So I got to tell you guys, I went over to Steve's house on Sunday night to record the latest episode of our science fiction review show, Alpha Quadrant 6. And Steve and Joss had just got back from the vacation. And Steve was in full Hawaiian mode. He was wearing khaki cargo pants with no shoes and a Hawaiian shirt. And he had these beads around his neck. He caught the fever. Steve went native, man. Totally. Him not wearing shoes, to me, was so odd. Like Steve is not a walk around the house without shoes on type of guy to me. And he was the whole night. He was recording the show with no shoes on. It was pretty cool. It was horrible.

'''S:''' Okay. Here's the other thing. We stayed at a Disney resort in Oahu. Oh, really? Cool. Yeah. And we did this – they have these like little games, these tours that you do. Like they give you an iPad and then you walk around the resort or around the lobby or whatever. They had different ones. And you're interacting with the video on the thing and it's communicating through Wi-Fi with props, right? So you might walk up to a rock and the person on the video is saying like, you know, say the magic word and lights appear on the rock or whatever. You know what I mean? But the whole thing that we – so I did one with my daughter and it was horrific, guys. It was so – Horrific? Yeah, it was bad in the worst way that Disney whitewashes these issues. So what they did – the framing was terrible. So it was like a woman who was a native Hawaiian and was like the main person on the video and she was like a video, live action. And then in the corner, there was a still picture of a professor from a university, right? Yeah. So the whole thing was framed as a sort of conflict between the native person who was nice and friendly and who believed in magic and all of the traditional Hawaiian beliefs and this stuffy skeptical professor who was mean and dismissive and – you know what I mean? That sucks. It was insulting on both ends. The whole thing was designed to convince kids that magic is real. And of course you could say, yeah, it's Disney. It's tongue-in-cheek. Of course they know it's not real. But still, it's like it assumed the framing of the professor. First of all, he had all the knowledge. He did download the actual facts. So I found it was simultaneously insulting to the academic end and also the native end because the native – It was infantilizing, right? Like she was giving the Disney version of Hawaiian mysticism and was like poo-pooing the academic knowledge and the scientific approach and was doing that, oh, come on. You don't believe in magic, like being really insulting to the professor for daring to be skeptical. Yeah. The whole thing was – it was disgusting. It was just from beginning to end.

'''J:''' It's almost as if they were – that she was saying to the professor, not that you don't believe in magic, but you don't believe in dreams. You don't believe in – Yes.

'''S:''' It's like really?

'''J:''' Like you can't make – magic be equivalent to like having a positive outlook on the future? That's ridiculous.

'''S:''' They totally blurred the lines between magic, the supernatural, and religion. That's the other thing. It wasn't just like fairy magic like Peter Pan. It was blending seamlessly into supernatural beliefs and also traditional mystical beliefs or religion. That's why it was especially bad.

'''E:''' The worst of all worlds.

'''S:''' It was. I was like just offended the entire time.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''S:''' Just horrible.

'''J:''' So in a weird perspective, if you look through a different scope to people – to non-skeptics, people whose radar wouldn't have been tweaked or set off with that, right? Steve – I could see like a funny video of like Steve being like, I can't believe I'm just so offended and people are like, what's wrong with that guy? We just watched this really cute video and like you're all pissed off, right?

'''S:''' As I said, I would think that a native Hawaiian would have been offended at the – how infantilized that character was. I could think about how there was an opportunity there to show how compatible – just respecting the history of traditional beliefs of Hawaiians. and scientific knowledge. These things are not mutually exclusive. They are not in conflict. You can be a scientist and respect the traditions at the same time. And again, that's on the background of me being annoyed the whole trip at this forced conflict between science and rationalism and respect for nature, you know, on the other end. That is a false dichotomy. that is very destructive and it drives me nuts. And you just had the Disney version of that on steroids, you know?

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' That's unfortunate. Yeah, and they unfortunately have a history of doing things like that.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 
=== Portable DNA Sequencing (16:15) ===
* [https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/gattaca/ Gattaca]<ref>[https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/gattaca/ Neurologica: Gattaca]</ref>

'''S:''' All right. Let's get started with some news items. Jay, you're going to tell us about this new portable DNA sequencer.

'''J:''' Yeah. So in recent news, a company called Oxford Nanopore has developed a handheld device that that can sequence the human genome. I just said that a company has developed a handheld device that can sequence the human genome. If you're not blown away by that, then you need to pay attention because I'm going to give you a little history about why that's utterly remarkable. So the details about this are in the journal Nature Biotechnology, and the cool thing about this device is that it allows genetics to be a part of a more routine medical examination or just a practice of medicines. The Human Genome Project started in 1990. It lasted 13 years. It included the National Institutes of Health, it's also called the NIH, and the Department of Energy, along with many global partners. And they set out to sequence all three billion letters or base pairs in the human genome. When they were done, they successfully quantified this complete set of DNA in the human body. And the project was such a success that they even completed it two years early, And they came in, of course, saving that much time. They also saved millions of dollars in the budget. But that's more of a testament to just how hard these people worked on the project.

'''S:''' Well, it's also a testament to the fact that the technology was advancing during the project. Exactly. So their budget was based upon the technology in 1990. But by 2003, they were already blowing it away.

'''J:''' It cost hundreds of millions of dollars, right? It was a global thing. It was a very long process. Today, the handheld device costs $1,000 to sequence an entire genome.

'''S:''' Wow.

'''B:''' And it does it how fast?

'''J:''' I think about nine days, two weeks time frame. I did the calculation. They could do – in 48 hours, they could do 10 to 20 billion bits of information. I calculated about nine days.

'''B:''' Gigabase pairs?

'''J:''' Yeah. But still, Bob, compare a week and a half or a week. Compare that to 13 years.

'''B:''' Oh, I know.

'''S:''' Bob, that's with the handheld device. They have slightly bigger ones that could do it faster. How fast? Like twice as fast, four times as fast. Also, the handheld device that we're talking about isn't the smallest one. They have one that you basically plug into a smartphone.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' This advance is so – I mean portability and price and speed. I mean we're at a point now where we're going to see an explosion of genomes being produced. It's fantastic.

'''J:''' So the project though, the Human Genome Project back in the day, especially – As more and more people became aware of it and the press started to pick it up, this promise of being able to revolutionize medicine and human health was there. I remember thinking like, oh, when they're done with it, they're going to start – things are going to be happening super fast and curing all cancers and stuff like that. I mean it just seemed like the hype was too good to be true. It was too good to be true at the time but it took a while for the technology to catch up. Now we're starting to actually see a lot of that. early investment is beginning to pay off. As a quick example, we could use fast and inexpensive DNA sequencing to direct us on how best to treat a particular kind of cancer or detect a specific bacteria and maybe what antibacterials it would be resistant to as an idea of what benefits we can get. And that's where we're kind of at today. But in the next couple of decades – It really is going to blow out and I think that's when we're going to see some remarkable effects. with the initial sequencing that started in the 90s.

'''B:''' Yeah, we got to flesh out the other ohms, right? It will be really helpful once we flesh out the proteome, the bacteriome. That will complement the genome and it will work together.

'''J:''' But I mean, Bob, today with precision, we're able to read DNA and And we're able to edit RNA and DNA today with CRISPR. Like, we're already editing DNA. And again, we're still on the super, super beginnings of that curve of what we're going to be able to do with it. And, you know, we have to legitimize the fact that there is a danger here as well. I mean, You know, it's almost like creating a nuke at that point. You know, it's like, you know, this is too powerful, guys. In some instances, it could be very dangerous, especially in the wrong hands. And I advocate heavily for us to expand our knowledge in these areas, but I also advocate for us to be very careful and make very well thought out, very good decisions about how to use these technologies because, you know, it's scary. what, you know... I think a lot about like someone creating a biohazard, some type of bioattack using CRISPR. Have it be a virus that is just so powerful that it kills people really fast and it spreads itself very efficiently. That is real. That's real. That's scary.

'''B:''' Yeah, true.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a powerful technology. All powerful technologies are two double-edged swords, atomic energy. You could use it to produce energy or you can use it to blow up the world.

'''E:''' Destroy the world.

'''S:''' Yeah. I think I'm more concerned than worried if that makes sense. I think what I mean is we need to think about how to regulate this technology and think about the potential uses and abuses. But I think we should do it because I think we – the benefits – as long as we're even the slightest bit careful, the benefits are likely to outweigh any detriments. We'd have to be careless I think. Of course.

'''J:''' I mean you could say that we have to be careful with every technology, right? Yeah. Space travel as an example. Like we're – We have to be careful with what we do there because a couple of things like space junk, that's dangerous. How about cars?

'''B:''' How many people do cars kill every year around the world? Huge numbers. But should we get rid of cars? No.

=== Alternative Treatment for Bears (22:13) ===
* [https://www.kqed.org/science/1919050/bears-burned-in-california-wildfires-go-holistic-for-pain Bears burned in California wildfires go holistic for pain]<ref>[https://www.kqed.org/science/1919050/bears-burned-in-california-wildfires-go-holistic-for-pain KQED: Bears burned in California wildfires go holistic for pain]</ref>

'''S:''' All right, Evan, tell us about these bears that were treated for burns.

'''J:''' Is this the bear sting burns? Doubles. Doubles.

'''E:''' Oh, nice, Jay. Yeah, good one.

'''S:''' Jay, it's the burn ward bears.

'''J:''' Thanks for making it better, Steve.

'''E:''' Point for Steve. Go ahead. The bears who are victims, like many other animals, were of the wildfires recently in California. But the Associated Press did a article just recently in which they, well, I'll read you the very first sentence of the article and you decide kind of what they're going after here. Veterinarians successfully used alternative medical treatments, such as acupuncture, on three wild animals burned in the Southern California wildfires. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Successfully used alternative medical treatments. Okay.

'''S:''' Yeah, total bullshit.

'''E:''' Yeah, total crap. How the heck? Hell, do they even know what was successful or what wasn't. But in any case, here's the story. Two adult bears and a young mountain lion were brought to veterinarians. First, they went to the State Department of Fish and Wildlife and later the University of California in Davis. And again, lots of animals were hurt in these fires. But the paws on these animals were burned very badly. The pictures are just awful. I mean, deep third-degree burns these bears are suffering from. One of which couldn't even – could not even stand up even while they were having – after they got the treatment. the pain was just too excruciating. They said that standard pain treatment is a problem for the animals because you can only anesthetize them so many times. And they are wild animals we're talking about, you know, teeth and claws, and certainly they'll, you know, attack you as fast as they would probably attack anyone else if they feel threatened. So you've got to keep them sedated, but keeping them sedated for too long causes problems. And you can't just throw pain pills at and pain medicines at them. They say that there's no guarantee the animals will eat them. Now, why they can't inject them with painkillers, I don't quite understand, but at least that's what they're reporting. They said that some of the alternative methods that they employ on these animals and others include acupuncture, chiropractic treatment, and cold laser therapy. So crap, crap, and more crap.

'''S:''' Yeah, but here's the key line. Vets carried out the alternative treatments only on days when the bears and mountain lion were already anesthetized for bandage changes or other standard care. Right. So they got acupuncture and anesthesia. Of course. Right. But the acupuncture worked? How do you come to that conclusion? Total nonsense.

'''E:''' And that's what gets the top billing, essentially, what the thrust of this article is really about. Basically saying, hey, the alternative methods work. Yeah, sure, they got the other stuff, but it was the acupuncture. It was the chiropractic that actually did it.

'''S:''' I get high with heroin and homeopathy. It works really well.

'''E:''' Right. You decide which one is the actual effect occurring.

'''S:''' Right, right.

'''E:''' The vets have to stitch fish skins to the animals' burned paws. That's the treatment that they give them. And then they wrap their feet with – bandages of rice paper and corn husks. They have to use these kinds of materials because the animals will eat away at them. And if you gave them standard bandages, it would cause other health problems for them. They can't digest those things. Yeah, I suppose they did what they they essentially could for them. I don't know if the animals necessarily suffered further unnecessarily as a result of this because they were actually getting some real treatment for things. But, you know, again, here we go with the clouding of pseudoscience and real science and another article that just goes ahead and continues to make it worse.

'''S:''' Yeah, the only story here is how absolutely credulous the reporting was. I mean, just shameful. And this is like CBS News. This is like major news outlets, not like the National Enquirer or some crap like that. That's right.

'''E:''' AP initially reported it and ABC ran with it and other major news organizations ran with it too because it sounds great even though it's crap.

'''S:''' Total crap. OK, Bob, but you're going to tell us about not crap, but the acoustic tractor beam.

=== Acoustic Tractor Beam (26:23) ===
* [https://phys.org/news/2018-01-world-powerful-acoustic-tractor-pave.html The world's most powerful acoustic tractor beam could pave the way for levitating humans]<ref>[https://phys.org/news/2018-01-world-powerful-acoustic-tractor-pave.html University of Bristol: The world's most powerful acoustic tractor beam could pave the way for levitating humans]</ref>

'''B:''' Yeah, it looks like tractor beams or acoustic levitation has had a bit of a breakthrough recently that could legitimately result in the levitation of large objects, perhaps as big as a human. Hello. That would be awesome. So we've all seen tractor beams, right? We've seen tractor beams in science fiction. Usually it's like an invisible force that lifts something and lifts it up, pulls it in or pushes it away, whatever. But it's never precisely clear how they work. But we all really want technology like that to be real, right? So now you could use a magnetic field or electromagnetism to push or pull or levitate objects.

'''E:''' Like the frog? Yeah.

'''B:''' But it's already a fairly mature technology at this point. And who doesn't love high-speed maglev trains? They're awesome. I can't wait until they're everywhere. But such technology, it's really not seen as a sci-fi tractor beam. And it can only be used on specific types of materials like conductors. So, yeah, it just kind of doesn't qualify. This, though, this is acoustic levitation or acoustophoresis. I did not know that word before. I learned a new word today. It basically uses the pressure of ultrasound alone to move objects, and it was actually theorized as far back as 1930, early 30s. So that's interesting. I didn't know the theory was that old. But for decades, we've been using that idea. We've been levitating small objects like insects or even fish using purely sound. But in 2013, though, real tractor beam-like abilities were realized for the first time right around then when objects were not only levitated but moved as well. So now a common way to do this is to use many speakers or transducers to create vortices of high frequency sound that wrap around an object like a tornado while the object itself sits in the eye of the storm or the cone of silence, you could call it. So that worked great. You could levitate it. You could move it. But there was a huge limitation though. The object itself could never be larger than the wavelength of sound. If they were larger, the objects were actually larger, the rotating vortex could transfer some of its energy to the levitated object and then just kind of like eject it and it would just fail or you'd fly away really fast or just fall. So they couldn't get past that and it seemed to be a fundamental limitation. That was kind of annoying because you don't want to be stuck lifting just really tiny things. So engineers from the University of Bristol found a way around the problem. They realized that rapidly changing the direction of the vortices stabilized the tractor beam. Imagine the tornado, these little tornadoes wrapping around the object and then going in one direction and then rapidly switching to the other direction and then the other direction again, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and that really stabilized it. For example, so using a 40 kilohertz ultrasonic waves that no human could hear but some bats could I think could hear that. They levitated and moved two centimeter long objects. That's more than two acoustic wavelengths in size. So that's – it seems like a small breakthrough but it's big. The object itself was bigger than the wavelength of the sound and that was a limitation that they weren't sure that – how they were going to get past. So it seems now that the only size limit is not related to the wavelength of sound itself but the amount of power that they could pump into the acoustic waves. So that's an amazing change because it's not a limit to how big it is but how much power can you throw into those acoustic waves? and you just know that as transducers get more powerful, smaller, cheaper, better design, that they're going to be able to throw more and more power at it and they're going to be able to lift bigger and bigger things. So right now they're working with about 192 transducers to lift about 1.5 centimeters according to one report I read. They theorize that with 40,000 transducers, they could levitate an object a meter across. But the near future though will probably not focus on levitating people or bigger things but little things really well. For example, Bruce Drinkwater, professor of ultrasonics from the Department of Mechanical Engineering said – Acoustic tractor beams have huge potential in many applications. I'm particularly excited by the ideas of contactless production lines where delicate objects are assembled without touching them. So this could be invaluable to industries like pharmaceuticals, electronics. For example, it could be used for manipulating say volatile chemicals. that you didn't want to put in any container. or you could use it for moving devices within a body like a probe. or how about a kidney stone? You could use the sound from the outside of the body to move the kidney stone along the path you want to move it in and get rid of it because I hear they're pretty painful. So moving a person though around using this type of device, clearly when and if that happens, that's certainly going to get front page news and you know that they're going to use the words tractor beam in the headline. So we'll be seeing that again over and over I think over the years. But so all we have to figure out now is how to use a tractor beam in airless space like all good spaceships should be able to do. Yeah, right. Because it's not going to work in space, kids. So yeah, so that's just another – another offshoot of tractor beam technology that they're going to have to get around.

'''E:''' So is tractor beam the right descriptor here?

'''J:''' It's really not a tractor beam, Bob.

'''E:''' Because a tractor beam implies kind of pulling it in towards sort of this much larger scale movement.

'''B:''' Sure. Dude, look at the videos. You could – suspending these good-sized beads, then they can move then left, right, up, down. They even turned it upside down and it still stayed in a static position above the transducers. I mean this is like invisibly moving apparent – invisible to us. Right. moving an object that you can imagine you can move it down a production line. I mean it's. it's. you know it's a tractor beam of sorts. it's. you know it's not. yeah it's not a spaceship tractor beam in space. no but I mean what the hell I mean. you know I mean sure it's close enough to a tractor beam and don't take that away from me.

'''E:''' all right bob you get your tractor beam tag there.

'''S:''' So, guys, do you know what a super blue blood moon is? Yeah.

=== Super Blue Blood Moon (32:50) ===
* [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42817785 Skywatchers see 'super blue blood Moon']<ref>[https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42817785 BBC News: Skywatchers see 'super blue blood Moon']</ref>

'''E:''' Oh, gosh. Yes. Of course. I missed it. Rare. Blah, blah, blah.

'''S:''' Yeah. I think it's been like 30 years since we've had one.

'''B:''' I think the next one is like many decades away, right?

'''S:''' Yeah. I'm going to cry. Supermoon, blue moon, blood moon all at the same time. So let's break that down. So a supermoon just means when the moon is at perigee, at its closest approach to the earth. It's actually no big deal. You can't really tell visually that it's closer. It's like 7% bigger, which is nice. But you would never notice it unless somebody pointed it out to you.

'''B:''' Right, and if you saw a picture of side by side of the difference, it's like, oh, that's cool. But yeah, when you're out there, you're like, well, yeah, it's a little different. It's not like in your face, like bam, big.

'''S:''' It's basically negligible to just ordinary viewing. So the supermoon, a lot of people think it's kind of a misnomer. I think the term was actually coined by an astrologer. It's not really even an astronomical term. No big deal, but that was going on. And a blood moon, so blue moon has two definitions. Twice a month. Yeah, the more popular one, the one that most people go to is it's the second full moon in a month. But actually, the more technical definition is the third full moon in a season that has four full moons. Right? Which is why nobody remembers that. It was always the second full moon in the month.

'''E:''' You think about it in more like quarter years rather than one-twelfth of a year. Think about it in those terms. Right.

'''S:''' So that's the real technical definition. But the more popular one that people think about is the second full moon. So this was the second full moon in January. So by that definition, it's a blue moon even though not by the more technical definition. And then a blood moon. This is interesting. So I've seen this many times. You guys have seen this many times as well. Basically, when the moon turns red as it passes through the Earth's shadow or umbra, like the inner shadow. So the question is, why does it turn red and why can we see it at all if it's completely in shadow? That's a good question, Evan. Glad you asked that. Yeah.

'''E:''' Yes. Steve, explain, please.

'''S:''' Yeah. So this is why. It's actually pretty interesting. So when the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie, when the moon is in the Earth's shadow, the only light that's getting to it is light that is basically bending through the Earth's atmosphere, right? So if you imagine that being – Hugging the Earth. Yeah. So it's hugging the Earth, being bent inward and then reflecting off the moon. Now, the reason why it's red is because only the long red wavelengths of light will do that. The blue light scatters before it can get through the atmosphere. And so it's basically filtered out by that scattering. So if you remove the blue light from sunlight, you're left with the red light. So only the red light that's bending around the earth through lensing in the atmosphere is what's being reflected back off the moon when it's in the umbra or in the dense part of the shadow. And so we see this blood red moon.

'''B:''' Now, I want to know what does the earth look like at that time if you were on the moon? Come on. Nobody has ever, ever seen that. Basically, it looks like a sunset around the entire moon. ring of the moon, of the Earth. I mean, that must be amazing. I want to see it.

'''E:''' It's a solar eclipse from the moon's perspective. Yeah.

'''S:''' Have we ever had a probe? take that image? That would be interesting. But yeah, so it's the same reason that sunsets are red, right? Sunsets are red because the sunlight is going through more atmosphere and the blue light is being scattered out.

'''B:''' It actually goes through, compared to overhead light, it's going through 12 times as much atmosphere when it's on the horizon. 12 times. So it scatters a lot of blue light out.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's significant. All right, Jay, who's that noisy time?

{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? (38:13) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 654
|answer = slowed-down audio of a {{w|kookaburra}}
|}}



'''J:''' Yep, so guys, last week I played this noisy. What is it?

'''S:''' It's an animal.

'''E:''' Or a demon.

'''J:''' I got so many people wrote in. So a lot of people guessed an ape. A lot of people guessed some type of seal.

'''E:''' I would have gone with seal.

'''J:''' The worst guess was. somebody said it was a male camel. Michael M. said it's a dromedary, but bactrians probably do it and do it too. And other camelids and llamas. Whatever.

'''E:''' Camel is, okay.

'''S:''' Even the Dalai Lama?

'''J:''' Yeah, he was saying they have the big, fat, gross tongue and all this stuff. Yeah, that's not it. Somebody said it's an animal. Originally, I thought it was a bird, but I think it's an elephant seal barking. That was Cameron Fraser. I got a ton of answers. Go and figure. A lot of people that answered were from Australia. A lot.

'''S:''' Of the correct answers.

'''J:''' No, the aggregate answers.

'''S:''' Did anyone get it right?

'''J:''' Yes, a lot of people did get it right and every single person that got it right that I saw was from Australia. and they said that is in fact a slowed down audio.

'''S:''' Play the fast up version first.

'''J:''' Okay. That is a kookaburra.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah.

'''J:''' Is it a kookaburra or a kookaburra?

'''S:''' Kookaburra. Very recognizable sound, normal speed when you slow it down.

'''J:''' I thought it sounded like an ape. I think the trick there was that it sounded like an ape. So the winner from last week was Adam Bailey. Adam guessed it so fast it was ridiculous, like right after Steve put the show up. So very good job, Adam. To this day, a noisy gets sent to me. It's a freaking bird and it's interesting enough to play it. I'm surprised. You figured we'd be done with bird noises.

'''S:''' Oh, we haven't even scratched the surface of bird noises, Jay.

'''J:''' I'm agreeing with you, Steve. So this, you know, just to remind everyone, Kirk Mona sent in the original noisy and, you know, again, saying that it's a quintessential sound of the jungle, right? That bird has definitely got the jungle noise. So, guys, this week's Noisy was sent in by a listener named Katie F. And this one is pretty interesting.

'''S:''' Aloha! Aloha! It's a singing frog.

'''J:''' You know what it actually reminded me of? Did you ever see The Three Amigos?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' The singing bush. That's what that reminded me of. The singing bush. A little obscure, but yeah. It's not the singing bush from The Three Amigos. Only Katie and I know what that is.

'''E:''' They spoke Spanish, not French in that movie.

'''J:''' If you think you know what the noisy is for this week, or if you heard something really cool and you need to just send it to me, do it at WTN at theskepticsguide.org.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (40:25) ===
[old-sounding recording hinting at {{w|Alouette (song)|"Alouette"}} song]

... {{wtnAnswer|657|what the Noisy is}} for this week ...

{{anchor|followup}}
{{anchor|correction}} 
== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (41:12) ==

=== Email #1: Driverless Cars () ===

<blockquote> _consider_using_block_quotes_for_emails_read_aloud_in_this_segment_ with_reduced_spacing_for_long_chunks –</blockquote>

'''S:''' Do it. All right. Thanks, Jay. One email this week. This email comes from Nick C. And they write, I'm a longtime listener and very much enjoy your show. Thank you for all that you do for promoting skeptical thinking and science literacy. However – Thank you for having me. More battery waste, environmental harm, increased urban sprawl due to longer, more productive commutes, et cetera. Car companies at the CES would love for people to ignore the downsides and buy, buy, buy. But as skeptics, we can do better and present both sides of the story. Then she goes on to talk about a study where – she later clarified that they actually did a study, although it was a small study, like I think only 13 participants – where they paid for a chauffeur for people and – so that's to simulate a driverless car, right? So they basically had a free chauffeur and then they tracked their use of the chauffeured car compared to their baseline use and I think unsurprisingly, people drove more, right? They made – were in the car more when they had access to a chauffeur than when they didn't. Parents would send the chauffeur to go pick up their kids, and people who were older and maybe not as confident driving drove more at night and drove longer distance, and overall car driving increased significantly. They said on average they logged 76% more miles than normal. First of all, let's talk about the overall comment. Did we ignore the potential downsides to driverless cars? And two, what do you think about this notion that when driverless cars are widely available, that they will dramatically increase our road time? What do you guys think about that?

'''B:''' Well, first off, the topic I was discussing was the CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. And I was basically showcasing what was there and what was being claimed. I mean it wasn't an overview of the future of driverless cars where going over the downsides would have been more appropriate. So there's that. I mean that wasn't really the thrust of the talk at that time. Yeah. And granted, we did riff a little as we sometimes do. We just chatted about it because it's fascinating and that went a little bit beyond maybe the strict CES floor show and stuff like that. But still, it wasn't meant as a nice overview. And I think talking about potential downsides of a driverless society is certainly worthy of discussion. Sure. Although I think such a small – Such a small study is not really ready to base a discussion on that. I don't think – I mean first off, a chauffeur-driven car is one thing. But a driverless car that could be a TV room, a bedroom, an office are two different things. I mean – So that might make the driving even more dramatic, the increase in driving, because it's an environment. It's a driverless environment that's not just a car, but it's a moving environment. So maybe that makes it worse. I just think we're not ready to seriously address potential downsides yet until we get some more big studies, more realistic studies going on. But it is interesting to consider how things are going to change. And yeah, this is a disruptive technology. For sure, this is incredibly disruptive. This is going to change a lot of shit. We don't know how much it's going to change or exactly what's going to change, but get ready because this is coming and there's no stopping it.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean I agree. This study is way too small to generalize from this. Plus there's potentially a lot of artifacts in here. People may have been using the chauffeur just because of the novelty. We really don't know that in a month or a year that that's what their driving behavior would be like. It's way too short term to really I think make any conclusions from it. But – The possibilities that it raises are certainly reasonable and we just don't know how it's going to shake out. I think it's very likely that people who are for whatever reason not as confident or even able to drive by themselves will make use of driverless cars. Absolutely.

'''B:''' Our mom is 80 years old and she is afraid to drive at night. She will not drive at night. It's just hard for her to see the road and just glare and she basically doesn't do it anymore. So this would be wonderful for her. Even just for – during the day, she's good. But at night, not good. This would be fantastic for her.

'''S:''' Right. I'd love it. I think the issue of like. there were times when there was no passenger in the car because they sent the car.

'''B:''' That's concerning. Yeah.

'''S:''' Actually, that's not concerning. I was going to make the opposite point. Because what's the difference? If a parent goes to pick up their child or if they send the car to pick up their child while they're at home doing something else, there's no difference.

'''E:''' That's true. That's a good point.

'''S:''' The only difference is that the parent could do something else rather than just be driving to go pick up somebody else.

'''J:''' It's more efficient. The more driverless cars there are, the more efficient the roads will be overall, right? So think of it this way. It's the difference between cars working in coordination with each other. Yeah. Not just from a safety perspective, but cars are going to be able to... First, they'll be detecting each other. Then they'll actually be talking to each other. Right. And when we get to that point, it'll be like stepping into a fast-moving lane, you know... Versus like a human being trying to do it wouldn't be able to do it with the same precision and lack of effect on all the other vehicles.

'''E:''' I think minority report gives me the image of how the cars were driving around in a world like that.

'''B:''' That's a good point. That's a good point and that addresses the whole idea that it's going to increase traffic. First off, you got to consider that. Imagine cars on the highway all doing say 70 miles an hour like a foot behind each other or whatever.

'''E:''' You can't do that now.

'''B:''' You can't do that. now so the the road carrying capacity increases. and if say you know say there still is more traffic and more time spent on the road that sucks. but if you're if you're in a car which is basically your living room ah you don't really care as much. you're still being productive you're still. so you don't really care that it takes. maybe you know if it takes 20 longer to get somewhere that you're still being productive and doing fun stuff and not a slave to that damn steering wheel.

'''E:''' Is the underlying assumption here also that this is a safer overall technology than what we currently have? So the saving in lives, I suppose you could – I don't know how you put a cost on that and sort of bring that into the formula of all this. But hey, if you're going to – 50,000 people a year perish on the US roads if I'm not mistaken. You can cut that down. If you can cut that down significantly, I don't know. That seems worth it. Right.

'''B:''' No one is saying that's a bad thing. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about two different scenarios. The scenarios we're comparing are everybody owning a driverless car and everybody renting a driverless car. So those are the two different scenarios. And it's this whole idea of on-demand driving that is being addressed here. So yeah, so that's kind of the choice. And yeah, I'm still – I'd love to see some great studies on this, but I'm not terribly concerned. I mean I love disruptive technologies anyway. Bring it.

'''E:''' I happen to think this will be a long way down the road, pun intended.

'''J:''' Hey, it could be 10 years. Dude, dude, no.

'''E:''' In 10 years, we're not going to have – not everybody is going to be abandoning their cars and going for these rent-a-pods or whatever the heck you want to call it.

'''S:''' Well, we don't know exactly how it's going to be used. But I think driverless cars are going to be pretty common in 10 years just given where the technology is.

'''E:''' But that doesn't get rid of the old cars.

'''S:''' Oh, you're right. I agree. You're still going to have those.

'''E:''' There's going to be this integration between the two for, I think, quite a long time. And I'm not sure how they're going to exactly get all that worked out. That seems very foggy to me.

'''S:''' I think in terms of the traffic issue as an isolated issue, I think there's way too many variables to predict what the net effect is going to be. I buy the fact that people will be using more cars because it's going to be more convenient and safer and people who can't drive now will be able to drive and people will – if it's available as an easy and convenient option, people will use it. Absolutely. Absolutely. But then we have to say at the same time, the driverless cars will be more efficient. So they may reduce traffic in that way. For example, it's quite possible that people who are using driverless cars as a service, they may also be optimized to carpool. You know what I mean? Like it may be cheaper if you're saying, yeah, you could pick up somebody else on the way. You know what I mean? Right, right. So it's possible that there may be more people per car on average if you're using driverless cars.

'''E:''' A little ride sharing.

'''S:''' Who knows? We'll have to wait and see. The other thing is. the other factor that's really hard to account for is the thing none of us are thinking of. It's the thing that someone – some company is going to innovate some service or some way to do something that no one is thinking of right now. that's going to change everything. Because we haven't fully explored all of the new possibilities that driverless cars brings. Right. We're going to put millions of lithium ion batteries on the road. We absolutely have to think about where does all that lithium come from? Where are they going to? What's the net cost of economically and environmentally, et cetera? And I do think that we really need to prioritize research into batteries made of common, cheap, non-toxic materials.

'''B:''' Sure.

'''S:''' I agree with you, Bob. None of this is a deal breaker. None of this means that we shouldn't be moving forward with driverless or electric cars. It means we just need to think about the impact all of these things are going to have and think about potential solutions and way to leverage the benefits of absolutely that's with any disruptive technology artificial intelligence gmo nanotech all that stuff.

'''B:''' um you we got to talk about. we got to talk about it before it's so in your face and it's already here. talk about it prepare for it anticipate deal with it because some things you're just not you're just not going to stop as much as you might hate it.

{{anchor|interview}} 
== Interview with Brian Dunning and Emery Emery (52:15) ==
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* [https://sciencefriction.tv ''Science Friction'': a documentary about scientists who get misrepresented by the media]
=== Brian's conviction ===

=== Brian's redemption ===


'''S:''' all right guys. so we have a very interesting interview coming up with Brian Dunning and Emery Emery so stay tuned for that. Well, joining us now, we have two guests, Brian Dunning and Emery Emery. Guys, welcome back to the SGU.

'''BD:''' Thank you. Thanks for having us.

'''S:''' Brian, it's been a while since we've had you on. Emery, I know we've been on your show once. Did we ever have you on our show? I don't remember.

'''EE:''' I believe this is my first appearance.

'''S:''' This is your first. You're an SGU virgin.

'''EE:''' I am.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''BD:''' That's a rite of passage. You need to all whip him or something now.

'''S:''' So we're having the two of you on together because you are both involved in a project. You're trying to fund a skeptical movie. We're going to talk about that in a few minutes. But Brian, since we haven't had you on since your life-changing events occurred – And this is kind of the elephant in the room. We figured we better get this out of the way and talk about this and answer the questions that come up since this has happened. So why don't you give us your summary of what happened and then we'll sort of ask you the questions that people ask us when it comes up.

'''BD:''' Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's no secret. It's been on my Wikipedia page for just about 10 years now. And I actually enjoy talking about it, but nobody ever asks me. So I was convicted of wire fraud. I pleaded guilty. And I spent basically a year at Club Fed. And that happened from 2014 to 2015. And what was the conviction based upon? So it was from a business I had back in the early 2000s, from about 2002 to 2006, 2007. I had a partner and I and a number of employees had a small company doing affiliate marketing for eBay. One day, out of the blue, we were raided by the FBI, which was a shock to nobody more than it was to me. And seven and a half years of civil cases followed. I believe we were in the right, and I believe we would have won those civil cases. But the fact is, I'm an individual, and I'm fighting one of the world's largest and wealthiest companies with arguably the world's most expensive law firm with a carte blanche. And seven and a half years, there's no way you can maintain fighting that. And after about four years, they went thermonuclear and filed a criminal complaint, making the exact same charges that were in their civil complaint. They simply weren't true, which is why we were fighting them for so long. But there comes to be a point, and we can talk about this, there comes to be a point where it's a numbers game and you just have to play the best odds. And the cheapest and fastest way to get out of it is to simply plead guilty. And we worked with the prosecutor to... write something that had a word of truth in it that I could honestly plead guilty to. And so I went away for a few months. That's the short version. I've talked about this on a number of podcasts, Emery, including yours. I've been on a couple of times. And there's a complete detailed summary of it on my personal website, which is briandunning.com slash message. And you can read the entire case there. But that's basically it.

'''S:''' So what did eBay say that you did?

'''BD:''' It's technical and it's confusing and it's hard to follow. There's no simple way to describe it. But what we were doing was placing ads for eBay on websites. And if somebody sees one of those ads, they become, quote unquote, our customer because eBay writes a cookie to their computer through our ad. And if they go to eBay within the next 30 days and become a new customer and buy something that generates a profitable commission for eBay, they would pay us a percentage of that for this person having been our customer that we introduced them through our ad.

'''J:''' It's basically how affiliate programs work.

'''BD:''' Yeah, it's how they have always worked and how they continue to work today. What they were alleging was that their pixel that was in our ad was not in the original contract. And these original contracts were written late 90s, early 2000s, long before the industry was in any way mature. As they knew every detail of what we were doing, they saw our ads. Of course, they scrutinized them. We worked closely with them on a daily basis. It was a complete surprise and still just absolutely bizarre that they charged that they had no idea that their pixel was in our ads. It makes no sense at all.

'''S:''' What do you mean by their pixel?

'''BD:''' In our ad, we just have a little bit of HTML that would be on people's websites in the form of a widget that provided some useful gadget that they wanted on their website. And in the text of that ad, it would say, buy and sell stuff on eBay, and there would be a little picture or whatever it was. And in there is a little invisible pixel, just a one-by-one invisible GIF image that comes from eBay's server. So in our HTML, which we write, which is part of our ad, we had a call to eBay's website as the address for this pixel. That allows the web visitor's browser to make a direct connection to eBay. The reason eBay had that pixel in the ads was to track user behavior because they want to know what websites people visit so that they can better market products to them. Amazon does this. Every large internet company in the world does this. They track user behavior via some technology similar to this. That's exactly what eBay was doing.

'''S:''' But they said that they were not aware that you had a pixel in your ad that linked back to their website?

'''BD:''' That is the whole of it right there. It is completely bizarre. Why does that bother them? It's inexcusable. We don't know. That's the one thing that we were never able to find out, why they decided to – there was a number of companies that they charged with this behavior. It wasn't just us. And I was not the only person who went to jail. It was a number of people for all exactly the same behavior. And the thing that's sad is that it continued even during our lawsuit, during all those years I was fighting it. All of their top affiliates were still doing exactly the same thing. I have a video of that on the URL that I just gave you, briandunning.com slash message. You can see that. a video of me viewing a website and seeing the exact same behavior. And it's still how they do it today. So we can't know what their internal mechanism was. Somebody decided they were paying out too much money. I have no idea. We've never been able to just do anything more than speculate.

'''S:''' Was there any deception on your part?

'''BD:''' No, I spoke with them every day, and they can see the ad. They can look right at it. I was always concerned because this was a lucrative business. Our whole contract was, over those several years, was about $5.3 million. We had 15 or 20 people employed at the most, but I was personally one of the highest paid guys. I personally made about $1.1 million over all those years.

'''S:''' I'm still trying to wrap my head around it and ask you the kind of questions that people ask us.

'''BD:''' So am I, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah, I know. It's complicated. So was there any – were the people whose websites you were placing the ad on through the widgets that you were providing them? Do I have that right? You were like, hey, here's a useful widget that does something. And in that was an ad which was basically paying for the free widget. And that ad led back to eBay. Was anyone in this chain being deceived by anything?

'''BD:''' I don't see how that argument can be made. There was two basic widgets that we used. One was a WordPress plug-in, which would show a – it was called Who Linked, and it would show a list of backlinks, other websites that linked to your WordPress blog. That's a useful widget. People would install it on their website, and it would have sponsored by eBay, and their little graphic would be in the ad. And the other one we used, which was more successful, actually, was on MySpace because this was the early 2000s, and MySpace was actually a thing. Whoa, MySpace.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''BD:''' It was just basically a little Google map showing a map of all the visitors to your MySpace profile. And at the bottom of that was the ad. It said, buy and sell your stuff on eBay. And a little picture. So, I mean, it's very apparent to everyone who installed it that it was supported by this eBay advertising. eBay certainly knew that. In fact, eBay gave us several revisions over the years. Hey, change the wording to this. Change it to that. Change the graphic from this old eBay one to the new eBay one. I mean the argument that they didn't know anything about it is just completely untenable.

'''B:''' But I mean did you – could you have supplied like an email with having this communication with them and showing that here? Look, they're just – they're talking about it. They wanted us to do this. Did that carry no weight in court?

'''BD:''' Well, it never went to trial, so we never got to make that argument. But the first thing we wanted to do, of course, was to depose our person, the person that I had daily contact with. As soon as the FBI raided us, eBay's employee in their affiliate marketing department, their program manager that we worked with, she disappeared and was completely off the map and nobody knew where she was, quote unquote, for six whole months. And at the end of that six whole months, because we actually had an investigator trying to find her so that we could depose her, she resurfaced and eBay had transferred her overseas to London, where she remained through the duration of the whole case. So we were unable to depose her.

'''EE:''' To the best of my ability to figure this out, I have an opinion, and I suspect Brian can't even say what I'm about to say from a legalistic standpoint. That's my guess, but I haven't asked him. I've never asked him before. But my opinion is that eBay was doing something that was ethically questionable and using affiliates like Brian and others to do it. And then when some heat came on them, I think they threw these affiliates under the bus.

'''BD:''' I agree with most of what you say. I don't see anything that they were doing. that was unethical, though. My best analysis was really this was just a case of their left hand didn't know what their right hand was doing. And somebody internally had some problem that we don't know what it was. And they said, well, hey, rather than saying our guys are doing something wrong, let's just say we were being cheated or fooled or something by the affiliates.

'''S:''' I get that, but I still don't – maybe there's no answer to this. It sounds like you don't have an answer to this. But what is the offense that is being alleged? that they were trying to cover up or blame on somebody else? So here's my reading of this over the years. Again, I never really understood what happened. But one thing that some people seem to get the impression happened is is that you were taking credit for referrals to eBay that you weren't really responsible for. In other words, that pixel that was on their website on the widget would capture affiliate credit even if they went to eBay by themselves. that had nothing to do with the ad that you had placed there. Is that accurate or is that a misunderstanding of how this worked?

'''BD:''' Okay, so we have to introduce a new level of complexity to address that.

'''S:''' I'm sorry, I know.

'''BD:''' You're correct. So there was a middleman company, which was called Commission Junction, which eBay employed as the middleman contractor that actually ran this program and did everything. Now, they had their own contract. that said we couldn't put eBay's Pixel actually in the ad, that the users would have to actually click the ad and go to the website, and that's when the direct connection would be established between the user's computer and eBay, allowing eBay to write cookies on their computer. Now, very, very early in our involvement with eBay, when everyone is trying to figure out, gee, how can we make this better? How can we get more traffic? How can we generate more clicks? eBay made it known to me in kind of a sideways sort of way. Well, hey, if the pixel, if our pixel was actually in the ad, then they would get we would be able to write to their computer before and whether or not they ever actually visited the Web site. So that, I think, addresses exactly what you're talking about. I see. And the problem that that caused was that now we had the choice of, well, do we want to violate Commission Junction's terms of service or do we want to not do what eBay is telling us to do?

'''S:''' Okay.

'''BD:''' We're between a rock and a hard place from day one. I see. And eBay was the 800-pound gorilla. They were by far Commission Junction's largest customer. And eBay always told us. I remember the phone calls specifically. They said, we support what you're doing, whether or not they do. If they ever give you any guff, you call me. I will have it cleared up within 10 minutes. And that's what always happened. We actually had printouts of the email conversation. I would email my contact at eBay and said, Commission Junction just called me. They said they've got a problem with the... the pixel appearing in the ad because it generates this connection to the server while someone is only viewing the ad and not clicking on it. And, and, and she would reply back to me, no problem. I'll take care of it. You stand by. And then five minutes later, she'd email me. Okay. It's handled. You're, you're clear. Keep, keep on keeping on.

'''S:''' I see. Now I think I understand it a little bit better. So you think that is the focus of the – I'll say misunderstanding, whatever. All of the hubbub was that pixel. Do you think maybe that eBay was violating their agreement with the middleman and then they tried to throw you under the bus to cover that fact?

'''BD:''' That's a possibility. That is absolutely a possibility. In the middle of this, in fact, I even called Commission Junction and said, hey, look, eBay is screwing you here. If you'd like my evidence that these conversations they're having with me to violate our agreement, I'm in.

'''S:''' Was Commission Junction being screwed out of commission because of the way it was working this way? Were they being bypassed in some way?

'''BD:''' I not not in any way that I know of. I actually feel that Commission Junction was probably. I mean, they were. they had their terms of service the way they felt affiliate programs should run. And I think that they were true to that and they were willing to stand up to their biggest customer. Yeah. You know, in a sense, I admire them for doing that. In another sense, it's like, well, hey, this is how your customers this is what eBay is hiring you to do. You should do it the way they want you to do it. Yeah.

'''S:''' So again, I'm trying to find out who the victim is in all of this. So eBay wasn't losing anything out, right? They were paying a commission but that's because people were coming to them through your ads, right?

'''BD:''' Yeah. I mean, if somebody never saw an ad on the Internet and then they went to eBay all on their own with a fresh, clean browser and eBay would get to keep the full commission.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''BD:''' So their argument was, hey, we lost money. It's like, well, no, you didn't lose any money because all of these were profitable commissions on sales from people who saw our ads.

'''B:''' The cookie was written, though, if I'm reading this right, from just displaying the ad, just by having it display on the screen. That's correct. So that seems sketchy to me. I mean, I see a lot of ads, but I'd almost never click them. And I would expect that if I clicked it, then, yeah, whatever happens, happens. But if it just appears and I don't do anything, I really wouldn't expect anything to happen. But it did happen. So to me, that seems the crux of the sketchiness is that.

'''BD:''' I agree with you. Right there. And the thing is, that's up to eBay. The connection was to eBay's computer. It was their scripting on their end that decided what to do with this connection. Do we read to see if they already have a cookie?

'''EE:''' See, that's the thing that made it really clear to me was when I understood that Brian wasn't creating this system. He was just putting it in place per eBay's instructions.

'''BD:''' Yeah. Is that accurate, Brian?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''BD:''' They asked me to give them a racetrack. They're free to drive on the racetrack or not to.

'''EE:''' And so it's really clear to me that Brian wasn't guilty of creating some insidious thing that does a thing in the background. He was guilty of building a way that these things that eBay was creating could be delivered. And that is why he got into trouble because he was simply involved in this process and they threw him under the bus. That's the way I read it.

'''S:''' Brian, at the end of all this, do you think that you made any mistakes that you regret?

'''BD:''' So actually, the day that the FBI raided my house, the first thing on my calendar that morning was to call up eBay and say, we need to have the contract amended because we keep getting these complaints from Commission Junction and you keep overriding them. I want to have this in writing that you want us to be doing the ads this way, that this is not something I can potentially get in trouble for. And it seems unlikely that anyone's going to believe me when I say that that was honestly the first thing I was going to do that day. Yeah. Yeah. I regret. I definitely regret allowing myself to be in a position where two people were telling me two different things. Yeah. And. I mean, you've got to be on top of that kind of thing. You've got to say, no, I'm not going to be in this ambiguous position where either one of you might suddenly decide you've got some claim against me because the contract I have with the other party you don't like.

'''S:''' Yeah. So I want to move on to the other part of the interview. So that is –. obviously this whole situation is very complicated. We're trying to get to the bottom of this as best we can. So what I'll just say, if there are any listeners out there who have questions we didn't ask or you think were left unanswered, email us. Email Brian, right? Brian, you're happy to answer anything that was left unanswered. Absolutely.

'''BD:''' Absolutely.

'''S:''' We're just trying to be as transparent as we can in a very complicated situation. Well, you can email info at – Brian, if you want to give your email, you can do that. Sure.

'''BD:''' Brian at Skeptoid.com.

'''S:''' So the other part of what we wanted to talk about tonight was that you and Emery are trying to fund a movie. Part of the reason why we thought we had to clear the air about your history was because when we posted a link to this on our Facebook page – There was a discussion about, oh, why should we give money to a fraudster? You're asking us to support something done by somebody who's a convicted felon and I thought, well, OK, fair enough. If we're going to ask for this, we should at least give you enough information to make an informed decision about what this is. Let me further say that I think regardless of what you think about all of this and what your guilt is in all of this, you paid your debt to society for whatever it's worth. It's done and going forward, you want to be – you want to do – as you said to me many times, you want to do good skeptical work. That's your redemption, right? And I totally believe in redemption. I totally believe, hey, if you want to do good skeptical work going forward, you know, I'm happy to support you. So that's what this project is about. So tell us about this movie that you and Emery are looking to produce.

'''BD:''' So the title is called Science Friction. And it's a documentary film about scientists who have been misrepresented by science documentaries on TV, movies, the media.

'''S:''' Does that happen?

'''BD:''' It happens all the time.

'''E:''' Which channel is that on?

'''BD:''' In fact, Steve, as you know, you were one of the people that we interviewed. We talked about your experience on the Dr. Oz show. And that was a drop in the bucket from all the stories that we've been collecting.

'''S:''' It wasn't even my worst experience.

'''BD:''' Oh, it wasn't? Well, we've got to come back and do a second round of interviews with you then.

'''S:''' Yeah, absolutely. No, that was – Yeah.

'''BD:''' So what we want to do is we want to give them a chance to say, OK, what did you actually tell the TV producers? And then we're going to show what actually made it onto the air. And you can see that it was edited horribly out of context or misrepresented. They twisted their words to make it sound like the scientist was promoting the Wu perspective, basically. And the further we've gone down this rabbit hole, everyone we talked to says, oh, well, you need to talk to this person, this person and this person, because it was way worse with this. Now, we've got a lot of big names on here, but but really the people that this has happened to the most and the most dramatic stories that we've got are from people whose names aren't necessarily household names. Regular working scientists who were really excited to get a call from Discovery Channel, History Channel, Science Channel, you name it. And were really excited to have a chance to be on a TV show and had every reason to believe they were going to be presented as a scientist and they were going to get to share their awesome science with us. with them. They got screwed. They were really upset about it. And they found that they had no recourse.

'''S:''' Yeah. You sign your life away. Absolutely. It's boilerplate. But they say, yeah, sign this release. Basically, we can do whatever the hell we want with this footage and you have no recourse. And what are you going to do? I mean, you have to sign those things if you're going to do that. Most like workaday scientists who aren't media savvy have no idea, you know, how all this works. And they think they'll just tell their story and what could go wrong, you know? And even, you know, I try to be savvy and I still get screwed, you know?

'''BD:''' My favorite person that we talked to was Richard Wiseman. I was able to buttonhole him at a conference last year and say, I told him about the film and his response really surprised me. This is my favorite thing that's happened to me so far in this whole experience. He literally backed me against the wall and got right in my face and said, the reason that doesn't happen to me is because I am so paranoid about it. Every time one of these producers comes to my university and wants to feature one of us or wants to feature me on their TV show, you would not believe the grinder that we put them through. We make them sign this giant contract that says we get creative control over the final product. We get final edit. This is a partnership between our university and you. And nobody agrees to that contract.

'''E:''' No.

'''S:''' I can't see it. They would never agree to that.

'''EE:''' But Brian, did he make you sign that too? No.

'''BD:''' Okay, so he said, and it's going to be the same thing if I talk to you guys. Now, the difference is, of course, I'm excited to sign that. I'm thrilled to sign that. I say, yes, that's exactly what we want to communicate. These are the links that you have to go to as a science communicator if you don't want to be misrepresented by the media. And that's what was so dramatic.

'''EE:''' Was there a repeat offending party here that when you guys were going through this process, you were like, oh my god, this movie that all of these people were in was a horrible scam? Which one was the big offender?

'''BD:''' Oh, well, okay. I mean, we talked to both Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins about their experience with Expelled. Yeah, that was Expelled. It was like the poster child for this. Yeah, that was a good one. We are hoping to, we haven't gotten to it yet, but we're hoping to talk to Lawrence Krauss, Kate Mulgrew, and Michio Kaku about The Principle, which was a 2014 movie promoting geocentrism. A whole alternate view of the universe and all of these people were lied to about what the movie was going to be about. There was also other scientists who weren't even interviewed for the movie. They took like existing footage of them and edited it badly to fit it into there to make it sound like they were promoting geocentrism.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, Brian, as you and I both know, the editing room is powerful. It is amazingly powerful. You could make audio or video sound like pretty much whatever you want.

'''EE:''' I'm jumping in. I was really excited about this project. First of all, I understand the responsibility of directing and editing this sort of project, or any project, I should say, for that matter. In fact, when we cut the aristocrats, it would have been so easy to piece together sentences, and we broke up sentences left and right in that film. It would have been so easy to piece together sentences to say things and do things that the acts that we were talking to, the artists we were discussing this with on film, weren't saying. We could have gotten anything we wanted in many cases. And Provenza and I, we not only wouldn't change someone's words, we would never change the meaning of someone's concept. And that was my learning ground for that. It was really great. And that's when I learned that Michael Moore isn't a good storyteller is when I started learning how easy it is and then seeing the techniques used to alter a story so that it fits your narrative. It blew my mind when I started looking at initially at Michael Moore and then others and then. Television, once you become a professional editor, television is hard to watch. Porn's worse. Television is hard to watch. But what's really, really maddening is when you can recognize how someone has been misrepresented conceptually. It really should be illegal, even though it's not. It makes me crazy. And so morally, I couldn't possibly stand any stronger against this kind of behavior. So to not only be given the opportunity to work on a story that that exposes this problem, I'm also very anxious to be the watchdog to make sure we don't make any of these kinds of mistakes.

'''BD:''' One thing that I want to do when we're running the end credits, I'm hoping to include a little Skype clip of everyone who appeared in our film telling whether they felt they were fairly represented in our final cut or not.

'''EE:''' Oh, that's a great idea. Wow, I love that.

'''S:''' Yeah. Well, good journalists will do that. I've had journalists from major papers or whatever say, oh, yeah, here's the final quotes from you. Is this OK? To make sure I got it correct. That's actually responsible journalism. They vet their interpretation of what you said. But then there's – that's usually more in print. For TV, I've never had that done. I've encountered mainly just – A lot of sleazy characters and then a lot of well-meaning but misguided characters. And I try to stick with people who I think get it. So I usually have a long conversation with them before the actual filming. But you never know. You never know what they're going to do to you in the editing room, no matter how careful you are.

'''EE:''' Yeah, I'm hoping that we can honestly put at the end of our movie, no scientific theories were harmed in the making.

'''S:''' Awesome. You have to do that. All right. So if people want to support this project, Brian, what should they do?

'''BD:''' So go to sciencefriction.tv. There's a trailer there. There's little clips from some of the interviews. And I just want to reiterate that the film is being produced by Skeptoid Media, of whom I am obviously a key employee, but I am not on the board of directors. I am not the treasurer. I don't have unlimited authority to spend the nonprofit's money. I'm just the guy the board of directors has placed their faith in to produce all of this great skeptical content. So sciencefriction.tv. We're crowdfunding the initial production of the film. But go to the site anyway just to watch the trailer because it'll blow your socks off. And there's some social media widgets to share the trailer with your followers.

'''S:''' There's no pixels in those widgets though, right? Any cookies? There are no pixels in those widgets. All right, Brian. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for being so open with us. Again, if we get any further feedback, we'll let you know. Again, we're trying to be as transparent as possible with all of this. Good luck with the project and maybe we'll have you back on when it comes out. Thank you guys so much.

'''B:''' Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Emery.

'''S:''' Thanks, Emery. Bye, guys. Emery, take care.

{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:21:55) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
}}
{{SOFinfo
|theme = Hawaii

|item1 = A traditional Hawaiian diet consisted mostly of {{w|Poi (food)|poi}}, resulting in a ratio of 12 percent protein, 18 percent fat and 70 percent carbohydrates.
|link1 = <ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20181029083714/https://www.cds.hawaii.edu/kahana/downloads/curriculum/SectionII/Unit3/3.D.MeaaiaaOlaHealth/3.D.1.FoodinOldHawaii.pdf Kahana: Food in Old Hawai'i]</ref>

|item2 = The Hawaiian alphabet includes only 13 letters, one of which is the ‘ or {{w|ʻOkina|okina}}.
|link2 = <ref>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_alphabet Wikipedia: Hawaiian alphabet]</ref> 

|item3 = Hawaii is home to over a dozen venomous snakes, second only to Australia in terms of deadliest vipers.
|link3 = <ref>[https://www.factretriever.com/hawaii-facts Fact Retriever: 50 Interesting Facts about Hawaii]</ref>

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction =a dozen venomous snakes

|science1 = 13-letter alphabet
|science2 = traditional diet of poi

|rogue1 =jay
|answer1 =a dozen venomous snakes

|rogue2 =bob
|answer2 =a dozen venomous snakes

|rogue3 =Evan
|answer3 =a dozen venomous snakes

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win = 
|swept = y
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. And if you guys did not guess the theme, that's on you. Because the theme is Hawaii.

'''B:''' Of course it is.

'''S:''' Aloha.

'''B:''' I anticipated this.

'''J:''' Not surprised.

'''B:''' I don't think it's going to help me.

'''S:''' No, it probably won't. All right. Here we go. Three facts about Hawaii. Ready? Ready? Item number one, a traditional Hawaiian diet consisted mostly of poi, resulting in a ratio of 12% protein, 18% fat, and 70% carbohydrates. Item number two, the Hawaiian alphabet includes only 13 letters, one of which is the apostrophe or okina. And item number three, Hawaii is home to over a dozen venomous snakes, second only to Australia in terms of deadliest vipers. Jay, go first.

=== Jay's Response ===

'''J:''' So this first one about the traditional Hawaiian diet, which consists mostly of poi.

'''E:''' It's a typo. He forgot to write S-O-N on the end of that.

'''J:''' So you're saying that you're just basically giving us the properties of what their diet is.

'''S:''' So that resulted in a diet that when you break it down, that their diet had 12% protein, 18% fat, and 70% carbohydrates.

'''J:''' Right. Gotcha. That's a tough one to even comment on because – I don't know much about Poi. This next one about the Hawaiian alphabet. Now I'm going back to Bugs Bunny. See if Bugs Bunny has anything to offer me in my memory.

'''J:''' Oh my gosh.

'''J:''' Nothing there. I do believe this one is correct. I vaguely remember some things about the Hawaiian alphabet. The Okina from the video game Zelda. Or is that the Macarena? What is that? The Ocarina?

'''S:''' The Macarena.

'''J:''' I don't know. All right. Anyway, this last one here, Hawaii is home to over a dozen venomous snakes, second only to Australia. God damn. I hate this one because I feel like there's things I should know about this because I've been there and I studied up when I went to Hawaii about stuff like what could kill me when I go there and I don't remember anything. But I don't see why...

'''E:''' Waka Kilmi is one of the smaller islands, by the way.

'''J:''' Waka Kilmi?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' I mean, I would imagine that any snakes that are there would have to have been brought there. I don't know. There's something about the snake one I don't like. I think I'm going to say that one's a fake.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

=== Bob's Response ===

'''B:''' Let's say Poi. I remember Poi. I remember it being a little bit bland, but for some reason that ratio sounds about right based on my very old memory of what it tasted like. So I'm going to go with that one. That Yeah, I've heard that before about the – only a certain small amount of numbers or letters. Although they said something about it being when translated to English and I'm not sure what that actually means in terms of how many letters. Are there sounds that don't translate into our alphabet? But yeah, so I've kind of seen that before. The snakes though, yeah, I mean when I was there, granted it was 29 years ago, but I just have no memory of coming across or hearing about anything about snakes. poisonous or venomous snakes. um and uh boy do I remember it when I went to uh australia. uh so uh yeah so basically I mean I'll just have to say that the snake the snake one is fiction too and Evan um I'm pretty much gonna have to follow suit here.

'''E:''' uh the poi uh jay the cartoon I was thinking of was the flintstones. The Flintstones once went to the Hawaiian Islands.

'''J:''' Yes, you're right.

=== Evan's Response ===

'''E:''' Past the poi was the funny line at the time when things like that in the 60s were funny. You know what? Maybe they didn't visit it, or he was shooting a commercial or something, and it had a Hawaiian theme to it. But Pass the Poi was definitely a Flintstones reference. But in any case, that doesn't necessarily help me here. But the 70% carbohydrates, I think, is maybe kind of a key in low-protein, high-carb diets in the islands. I'm not sure that that's unusual. The alphabet, 13 letters, okay, and one's the apostrophe. I seem to remember this. The The old spellings of Hawaii had the apostrophe between the two I's, if memory serves. So I'm going to say that one's right. It leaves the snakes, and I think it kind of makes sense. I doubt that there's any indigenous or otherwise snakes on the island. That's probably one going to be close to zero, if any. So I think that one's wrong.

[https://flintstones.fandom.com/wiki/Hawaiian_Escapade "Pass the poi."]

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' All right. You guys are all united, so it's a sweep one way or the other. We'll just take these in order. A traditional Hawaiian diet consisted mostly of poi, resulting in a ratio of 12% protein, 18% fat, and 70% carbohydrates. You all think that one is science, and that one is science. Science. Yep, they mostly ate poi, which was their staple carbohydrate. Poi is made from the taro root, which is a giant root. I saw them when I was in Hawaii, and they sort of mash it up into a paste. It is rather bland. It's often described as tasting a little bit like yogurt, but it's also described as having an acquired taste, which I don't think on first sampling you're going to have.

'''B:''' Well, yeah, not as dramatic though as Vegemite.

'''S:''' Yeah, maybe not. And prior to Western contact, that was their staple food. So there's not a lot of really agricultural crops native to Hawaii. So when you talk about what plants are quote-unquote native to Hawaii, you have to separate it into a few different categories. Sugarcane? Well, no. There's pre-human contact native, right? So these are plants and animals that were on the islands before any human got there. So that's wind, water, and wing, right? That's how they got there. They're just drifting on the waves, blowing in the wind, or flying there. Then after the Polynesians colonized the islands, there were some things that they brought there. And then, of course, when there was contact with civilization, with Europeans, et cetera, then the contamination just flooded in. Most of the commercial crops that are grown in Hawaii were brought there later. The Polynesians, the native Hawaiians didn't really have a lot of commercial crops there. They had some native fruits. The breadfruit was there. That might have been one that they brought with them. They had the taro root. They had poi. For meat, they had chicken, pork, and fish. And of those, they mostly ate fish. Chicken and pork, that was your party food, right? That was during luau's, which is only occasional. That wasn't a staple. They didn't have that all the time. By some reports I was reading, they might have meal. Many of their meals were just entirely poi or poi, maybe just seasoned with some salt or some of the local plants for flavor. Or they might have it with some fish meat, for example. And that was basically their day-to-day diet. What's really funny is the crisscrossing narratives that you run into. So on some sites, you read about how the native Hawaiians were a healthy, vigorous people with a lot of endurance because they ate the very calorie-dense, nutritious poi, right? And poi is one of the most nutritious staple carbohydrates that there is in the world. And you can also get protein from the other parts of the plant. So they actually were able to get protein and pretty much all the nutrients that they need from it. But that's a 70% carbohydrate diet is portrayed as being healthy because it's natural, you know, to them. But of course, that totally contradicts the whole. carbohydrates are bad, low carbohydrate craze, right? In fact, when the Hawaiians started eating more of a Western diet and the proportion of poi in their diet decreased, which it has, it's plummeted, then obesity rates started increasing.

'''B:''' No surprise there.

'''S:''' Yeah, it kind of breaks the low-carb narrative. Western diets were like 40% carbohydrates compared to their 70% and the low-carb dieters recommend 20% or lower. So anyway, I love that when you have a completely separate, isolated, mutually exclusive narratives that aren't based on evidence. They ate that because that's what was there, right? They're on an island. They only have access to whatever food was there. So that's what they ate.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Okay, let's move on to number two. The Hawaiian alphabet includes only 13 letters, one of which is drawn like an apostrophe, but it's called the okina, and that is a glottal stop. You'll often see that between two vowels. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science.

'''J:''' Of course.

'''S:''' Yep. Not a lot of consonants in Hawaiian. Now, of course, this is – as Bob said, this is when it's translated into English letters, right? Although Hawaiians have lots of different vowel sounds, but many of them are diphthongs, right? They're basically formed by two vowels joined together. Yeah. And of course, you could make each one of those vowel sounds its own letter, in which case you could count as many as 25 vowel sounds. Or you can make them up of a minimal set of vowels, in which case there's only either or five. Yes, you could say there's five or 25 vowel phonemes. But the standard way is to just do five vowels. And then you make the combinations, the diphthongs, out of those five vowels, like O-I-E-U-E-I-A-U, et cetera. But it's interesting that – so there are theories as to why there are so few phonemes in the Hawaiian and some other languages. I've encountered this before, so I just pulled up a couple of papers that talk about this. So one theory is that there was a steady decrease in phonemic diversity – As you get farther from Africa, right? So specifically meaning that there was what's called a serial founder effect. Every time a part of the population goes somewhere and forms a new population, right? Then a part of that population goes somewhere and forms another new population. You have that serial founder effect. Every time that happens, you have a decrease in phonemic diversity.

'''B:''' Oh my god. And Hawaii is like probably what? The farthest you can get from Africa?

'''S:''' Hawaii is the most isolated populated place on the earth. And it would make sense that it would be like the end of a long line of serial founders and therefore it would have a highly restricted phonemic diversity. So it's more of a general trend in language and Hawaii is just an extreme example of that in Hawaii. So it's interesting.

'''J:''' So how much farther could it go?

'''S:''' Yeah, what would happen if Hawaiians then colonized something else? And what's going to happen when we start colonizing other planets?

'''E:''' Yeah, good point.

'''S:''' But then – but you'd have to also think though that over time, the phonemic diversity has to be able to increase too, right? Because otherwise, how do we get there in the first place? That's interesting. But maybe there just hasn't been enough time. Like maybe it doesn't take hundreds of thousands of years for the phonemic diversity and then it gets winnowed down with migration. Yeah.

'''E:''' We'll have automatic cars by then.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's true.

'''J:''' I'm going to take one to Hawaii.

'''S:''' Hawaii, by the way, has interstate highways.

'''B:''' Go figure that one out.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Hawaii is home to over a dozen venomous snakes, second only to Australia in terms of deadliest vipers, is of course the fiction because Hawaii actually in its flora and fauna reminded me a lot of New Zealand. If you remember when we were visiting New Zealand, they made a point of saying how there were no predators in New Zealand until people brought them there. And therefore, the animals didn't have any defenses. The birds just nested on the ground. And that's why they were so vulnerable when predators like rats and cats and whatever were introduced. Got the same exact story from Hawaii. So Hawaii had no natural predators and no natural foragers. So no animals that forage the plants, which means the plants also had no reason to waste energy on defenses. And so – right? So that's why there aren't many poisonous plants in Hawaii either except for the ones that were later introduced, right? But for the native plants, they don't make a lot of natural pesticides because they didn't have to. So you have a lot of plants there that are just safe to eat because they didn't have to spend energy because it didn't have to fend off foragers. Right. There are two snakes that you might find in Hawaii. There's the occasional interloper, right, the occasional accidental snake that gets brought there. But there's a very large mongoose population on the Hawaiian Islands that were deliberately introduced, by the way. and they tend to keep the snake population from becoming established. But there are two established populations. One is venomous. It's a sea snake. It's an occasional visitor to the island. The land snake, the only native land snake, is as big as an earthworm. It's a teeny tiny snake. And that's it. There's no other snakes in Hawaii. So it's, again, very similar to New Zealand. If you recall, there were no snakes in New Zealand. So very few snakes, no real natural predators, no foragers. The only things are that are animals that were brought there later. The rats that seem to accompany humans wherever we go around the world were devastating to the local species. And the mongoose were introduced to kill the rat. That didn't work partly because rats are nocturnal and mongoose are diurnal. So they weren't out at the same time. So all they really did was double the predators. By now, you have a daytime and a nighttime predator. So that was a total failure. We saw plenty of mongoose. They're like squirrels. They're just all over the place. Rikki-tikki-tavvy. Yeah.

'''E:''' That was in India, but yeah.

'''S:''' They're about the size and shape of a squirrel, you know, and you see them running around. But they like hug the ground. And so even in very short grass, they're hard to see. They're like sort of sneaking through the low grass. Very stealthy little buggers. But I got some pictures of them. Cool. Yeah. They're cute. All right. So good job, guys. Yeah. You didn't get fooled by the Hawaiian vipers. Yeah. No real – there's only – there's not a lot of spiders too. There's a smiling spider in Hawaii.

'''B:''' Yeah, I saw that.

'''S:''' Yeah, very cute. Until it bites you.

'''B:''' It's got a smiley face on its back.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's got a smiley face.

'''E:''' Oh, neat. Oh, here's one with an hourglass on its back. Oh, cute.

'''S:''' How cute. All right. Evan, give us a quote.

{{anchor|qow}} 

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:37:15) ==

<blockquote>''No idea should be suppressed. … And it applies to ideas that look like nonsense. We must not forget that some of the best ideas seemed like nonsense at first. The truth will prevail in the end. Nonsense will fall of its own weight, by a sort of intellectual law of gravitation. If we bat it about, we shall only keep an error in the air a little longer. And a new truth will go into orbit.'' – {{w|Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin}} (1900-1979), British-American astronomer and astrophysicist</blockquote>

'''E:''' No idea should be suppressed, and it applies to ideas that look like nonsense. We must not forget that some of the best ideas seem like nonsense at first. The truth will prevail in the end. Nonsense will fall of its own weight by a sort of intellectual law of gravitation. If we bat it about, we shall only keep an error in the air a little longer, and a new truth will go into orbit. And that was written by Cecilia Payne, who was a British-American astronomer and astrophysicist, who in 1925 proposed her PhD thesis, An Explanation for the Composition of Stars in Terms of Relative Abundances of Hydrogen, Yeah. Cecilia Payne.

'''S:''' Well, it depends on what you mean by suppressed, right? So does that mean that we need to give access to nonsensical ideas in the published literature, on university campuses, in textbooks? Of course not. By not discussing creationism in a high school biology textbook, are we suppressing creationism? That's what they say. So it's hard to say that. I mean, again, this is a long time ago. I'm sure she said this. So In today's society though, this is – you can't get away with just making the statement I think. There's so much nuance here that she's glossing over that we now are aware of. I also don't agree that all nonsensical ideas – will fall as a matter of course. I don't think that that's true. For example, in Asian cultures, people still believe in chi like they have for thousands of years. The notion of chi, which is utter superstitious nonsense, has not declined for thousands of years. So I do think that nonsensical ideas do need to be specifically opposed. I don't think that they should be censored completely as if suppressed in that extent. But there is a proper time and place and context for them. Right. And they need to be discussed in that context. You know, that doesn't mean that they should have unfettered access to legitimate outlets like science textbooks and and the published literature, et cetera. Right.

'''E:''' I don't think she's making the equal time argument by stating this necessarily.

'''S:''' I agree. But my point is a creationist would absolutely quote this without change as support for their equal time academic freedom position. Oh, sure. Yes.

'''E:''' Their master is at taking all sorts of things.

'''S:''' Because there's a lot of nuance that she's not addressing in that short quote.

'''E:''' No, and I think – right, right. And if you look at it from within a purely – rational, scientific circle. I think it makes sense, but that we understand culturally and otherwise, that's not really how the world works. And if you look at it more of a worldview, absolutely, this has problems. But my guess – I'll give her charity and assume that she was speaking from within the circles of real science.

'''S:''' Sure. Absolutely. Also, I think it's just a different time. Now we're in an age post-internet, post-concerted efforts to regress the enlightenment. We have to be more aware of how our dedication to openness is being abused by the people who are trying to promote nonsense. So we've had to take a more nuanced position to just – yeah, just total free market of ideas. Sure, I totally believe in the free market of ideas. That doesn't mean there aren't rules and there aren't mechanisms of quality control. That's where you get into. I think problems is when you use quality control and equate that with suppression of ideas. Those are two different things but they could be easily conflated and that's basically what happens. But yeah, I like the quote, but we live in a more complicated world today, so it doesn't go far enough.

'''E:''' That's right. Stephen Jay Gould said, right, apples might float, but we're not going to give it equal times in physics class.

'''S:''' Yeah, exactly. All right. Thank you guys for joining me this week.

'''E:''' Good show, Steve. Sure, man.

'''J:''' You got it, brother.

== Signoff/Announcements (1:41:43) ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 


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SGU Episode 656

2024-05-05T08:15:14Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

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|qowText = No idea should be suppressed. And it applies to ideas that look like nonsense. We must not forget that some of the best ideas seemed like nonsense at first. The truth will prevail in the end. Nonsense will fall of its own weight, by an intellectual law of gravitation. If we bat it about, we shall only keep an error in the air a little longer. And a new truth will go into orbit.
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== Introduction, Hawaii trip: wedding, bananas, and woo ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, January 31st, 2018, 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 folks!

'''S:''' Cara is still traveling today. She did not get back in time to do the show, but she will be back next week. And I just got back a few days ago from Hawaii.

'''B:''' What the hell were you doing there?

'''E:''' How great was that?

'''S:''' It's paradise. It's awesome. What can you say?

'''E:''' How about that earthquake that happened in the tsunami warning?

'''S:''' Yeah, we got a tsunami warning while we were there. But they took it away pretty quickly and said, never mind. It's nothing serious. It was an earthquake near Alaska. And so basically anything surrounding that had a tsunami warning.

'''J:''' So what was the coolest thing that happened to you, Steve? What did you do?

'''B:''' Any ballistic missiles coming in or anything?

'''S:''' No, no middles.

'''E:''' That's a different kind.

'''S:''' So I was there for a wedding. This was a wedding of a friend of mine from medical school and it was also my first gay wedding. It was actually – it was nice. It was a really, really sweet ceremony. Everything was very nice. But just to give you an idea of what it was like, there were two ring bearers and they were both stuffed animal Pua pigs from Moana. What?

'''J:''' Stuffed animal, Pua pigs. Moana.

'''S:''' What was that? Remember the pig from Moana?

'''B:''' I saw that movie. It was awesome. What?

'''S:''' Really? The pig?

'''B:''' That's awesome.

'''S:''' Yeah. They were the ring bearers.

'''J:''' Neat. Oh, that pig that she's friends with temporarily. Okay. Yes. All right.

'''S:''' Whose name is Pua, which is Hawaiian for pig.

'''B:''' That's awesome. I would have picked the dog from Coco, but that was still good.

'''S:''' Now, they're both huge Disney fans. They're both huge Hawaii fans. And then, of course, they're both huge Moana fans. And so that was the theme of the wedding, basically.

'''E:''' Why was it there, Steve? Do they live there or just wanted an exotic location?

'''S:''' Yeah, as I said, they just – that was like – they wanted that place. That's like their favorite place together. So that's why they wanted it there. Luckily, he told us a year ago. It's like, oh, I'm getting married in Hawaii. So we had time to prepare. But we obviously made a vacation out of it. But it was – that was the reason why we went. But Hawaii is awesome. Jay, I think the best thing that we did while we were there other than the wedding was – We were in Oahu. We went to the botanical gardens. We got a tour from one of the people who works there. Now, you know when you do tours of places like this, it's a crapshoot. I've been on a lot of tours where the person had no idea what they were talking about. They had a script that they barely understood and there was a lot of misinformation in there. This was not like that at all. This guy knew his stuff and it was really fascinating. You know, talking about like what plants are native to Hawaii and how they get there and then what the changes over time. You had access to it. So he could like pull flowers off of trees and do stuff that you couldn't do if you're just walking around, you know, and cut open some of the fruit and everything. It was great. It was really, really fascinating. I did some birding while I was there, of course.

'''J:''' Yeah, of course.

'''S:''' Of course you did. Lots of beautiful birds in Hawaii. Although I did not see a honeycreeper. Oh, crap. What's a honeycreeper? I mean, it's a beautiful bird, but if you live there, you might see one once a year or something. You're not going to see them just walking around.

'''E:''' Are they endangered?

'''S:''' Every bird in the island that's native is endangered pretty much.

'''B:''' Oh, why? That's horrible.

'''E:''' Humans.

'''S:''' Humans. Yeah, I mean so it's overrun with invasive species. I mean there are house sparrows there. House sparrows are like the invasive bird everywhere. Oh, boy. Everything that you would expect, loss of habitat, but mostly just wave after wave of people bringing animals and plants and everything there. So they're trying to preserve the native species as much as possible, but it's kind of a losing battle.

'''E:''' Yeah, we're very good at contamination. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''J:''' Well, it's remarkable when you think about with all the boating and air travel that we haven't utterly totaled the planet yet. Right. Through contamination.

'''S:''' Well, it's happening slowly.

'''E:''' And we're changing. Things are changing.

'''S:''' One thing I noticed when I was there is the culture, you know, in terms of how much woo there is there. And it was bad. It was pretty bad. I mean compared to what we're used to on the East Coast. I wanted to talk to Cara about it because it's probably a lot closer to what she's used to in California. But it might even be worse because the appeal to nature fallacy was off the hook. It was totally rampant. You know what I mean?

'''B:''' Oh, wow. Yeah. It kind of makes sense.

'''S:''' It does. It does. And I get it. You're a native population and the technological civilization comes in there and muscles you aside and everything. And they're trying to preserve their culture. But it's just unfortunate that that gets exploited and it gets turned into sort of an anti-science stance. Yeah, it feeds the beast. Yeah. Yeah, every store was like – everything was gluten-free and natural cane sugar, sweetened soda, that kind of crap. Everything natural was awesome and it was – yeah, like. there was a Cyberry superfood crap everywhere and that was terrible. Yeah.

'''E:''' Did you go surfing and hit your head on a surfboard while wearing a tiki around your neck?

'''S:''' That was on my list, but I didn't get to it.

'''E:''' Confuse that with that old TV show, The Brady Bunch. Sorry. My mind wanders.

'''S:''' But it's gorgeous. You're driving on the highway and you turn a corner and there's this amazing vista with these giant cliffs on one side and the ocean spreading out to the other side. It was just gorgeous.

'''E:''' Now, were you tempted to stop every mile and take new photographs basically?

'''S:''' Oh, I wasn't just tempted. I did it. Yeah.

'''B:''' How many pictures did you take, Steve?

'''S:''' Probably 1,000.

'''B:''' Give me a number. 1,000, not bad.

'''S:''' Yeah, a lot. With digital cameras, just click, click, click. Why not?

'''J:''' So Steve, what do you do? Do you literally go home and just sift through all of that content?

'''S:''' Yeah, I usually organize it and then sometimes like if I want to do a picture book or something, I'll pick out the best ones. I posted some of it to our Twitter feed. Part of the reason why I take so many pictures, like if I am seeing a pretty bird I want to take a picture of, I'll click 20 pictures of that one bird. Hoping to get one with like the best whatever, focus and movement and angle and whatnot. Framing. That's like the one picture of that bird that I keep. So while I was there, I was on a quest to find local banana varieties. Oh, of course.

'''J:''' Wait, stop, stop. If you did not eat – Gros Michel? What's it called? Gros Michel. Yeah, if you didn't eat it, don't tell this story.

'''S:''' Well, I'm going to tell the story anyway. So actually I looked up like what are the bananas grown on the Hawaiian Islands or on Oahu? and Gros Michel was not among them. What? It's not among them.

'''J:''' What did you eat then? Tell me what you did. All right.

'''S:''' So obviously there's lots of Cavendish everywhere because that's the most commercial banana. Then there were two other bananas that are like local Hawaiian bananas. One is called an – they call it an apple banana. It's really a Brazilian banana. And it does have like this little tart undertone. First of all, they're smaller but they're really dense. They're very creamy and they're a little bit tart. So they're nice. They're very, very, very, very delicious banana. And then they have a local variety of a cooking banana like a plantain. Yeah. They're supposed to also have some other local varieties including ice cream bananas, but I could not find them anywhere.

'''B:''' Yeah, I heard about those.

'''E:''' Ice cream bananas.

'''S:''' Couldn't find them anywhere.

'''B:''' They're supposed to be amazing.

'''E:''' You must have asked people.

'''S:''' I did. I asked a couple of people that never heard of them.

'''E:''' Never heard of them.

'''S:''' Yeah, you probably have to go to a farmer's market and I only went to one. I didn't really – I wasn't there for that long. I think you just have to go to the right – know which farmer's market to go to or whatever. Oh, boy. And it may have been only on the other islands, maybe not on Oahu. So I don't know. So unfortunately, I didn't get to taste the ice cream banana. But the apple bananas were different. It was good.

'''J:''' So was it basically more of an artifact of the island that you were on and not that they're just not anywhere in the Hawaiian islands?

'''S:''' Maybe. Yeah, maybe. It's just not on Oahu. But I think that there's definitely an untapped market there because why the hell would you sell Cavendish bananas in a place where you could grow Michelle or ice cream bananas or pineapple bananas or whatever? You know what I mean? Why are you wasting your time with Cavendish? It's crazy. Just sell them to the Rubes in North America.

'''E:''' It's not right there.

'''S:''' You don't have a choice.

'''J:''' The Rubes. I'm getting really frustrated with this. Do we have to actually go to South America or something to eat this banana?

'''E:''' Well, there's an eclipse happening next year. Maybe, you know, coincide.

'''S:''' We'll call it the banana eclipse.

'''E:''' I like it.

'''S:''' I don't understand why there isn't an industry of this in Florida, right? You could grow them there.

'''J:''' Well, I think partly because you probably care more about bananas than most people do.

'''E:''' Well, yeah, it sounds like bad marketing on the people.

'''S:''' Yes, I think there's a marketing opportunity. there is what I'm saying because if you tasted one of the – from what I understand, if you tasted one of these other bananas, I think you'd pay a premium for it. Again, the only reason why these aren't commercial is because they can't – they don't stay ripe long enough to ship them around the world. But if you're just selling them locally, then that's not an issue.

'''J:''' Yeah, sure. Yeah, I agree with that. Right? Okay. All right. You've reinvigorated my desire to eat either one of those two other bananas. I want to do it.

'''S:''' The ice cream bananas are blue. The bananas themselves are blue.

'''E:''' The peels or the insides? Yeah, the peel.

'''S:''' The peel on the outside. Cool. I like that. They're all kind of like beige on the inside. Yeah.

'''J:''' Soft and creamy beige.

'''S:''' So the quest continues. I did add one more banana notch to my belt though with the apple banana, but that was it.

'''J:''' Good for you, Steve. Well done.

'''S:''' Thank you.

'''E:''' Glad you had a nice trip.

'''S:''' Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It's great in the middle of the winter, right? You get a week of sunshine. It'll get me through February.

'''J:''' So I got to tell you guys, I went over to Steve's house on Sunday night to record the latest episode of our science fiction review show, Alpha Quadrant 6. And Steve and Joss had just got back from the vacation. And Steve was in full Hawaiian mode. He was wearing khaki cargo pants with no shoes and a Hawaiian shirt. And he had these beads around his neck. He caught the fever. Steve went native, man. Totally. Him not wearing shoes, to me, was so odd. Like Steve is not a walk around the house without shoes on type of guy to me. And he was the whole night. He was recording the show with no shoes on. It was pretty cool. It was horrible.

'''S:''' Okay. Here's the other thing. We stayed at a Disney resort in Oahu. Oh, really? Cool. Yeah. And we did this – they have these like little games, these tours that you do. Like they give you an iPad and then you walk around the resort or around the lobby or whatever. They had different ones. And you're interacting with the video on the thing and it's communicating through Wi-Fi with props, right? So you might walk up to a rock and the person on the video is saying like, you know, say the magic word and lights appear on the rock or whatever. You know what I mean? But the whole thing that we – so I did one with my daughter and it was horrific, guys. It was so – Horrific? Yeah, it was bad in the worst way that Disney whitewashes these issues. So what they did – the framing was terrible. So it was like a woman who was a native Hawaiian and was like the main person on the video and she was like a video, live action. And then in the corner, there was a still picture of a professor from a university, right? Yeah. So the whole thing was framed as a sort of conflict between the native person who was nice and friendly and who believed in magic and all of the traditional Hawaiian beliefs and this stuffy skeptical professor who was mean and dismissive and – you know what I mean? That sucks. It was insulting on both ends. The whole thing was designed to convince kids that magic is real. And of course you could say, yeah, it's Disney. It's tongue-in-cheek. Of course they know it's not real. But still, it's like it assumed the framing of the professor. First of all, he had all the knowledge. He did download the actual facts. So I found it was simultaneously insulting to the academic end and also the native end because the native – It was infantilizing, right? Like she was giving the Disney version of Hawaiian mysticism and was like poo-pooing the academic knowledge and the scientific approach and was doing that, oh, come on. You don't believe in magic, like being really insulting to the professor for daring to be skeptical. Yeah. The whole thing was – it was disgusting. It was just from beginning to end.

'''J:''' It's almost as if they were – that she was saying to the professor, not that you don't believe in magic, but you don't believe in dreams. You don't believe in – Yes.

'''S:''' It's like really?

'''J:''' Like you can't make – magic be equivalent to like having a positive outlook on the future? That's ridiculous.

'''S:''' They totally blurred the lines between magic, the supernatural, and religion. That's the other thing. It wasn't just like fairy magic like Peter Pan. It was blending seamlessly into supernatural beliefs and also traditional mystical beliefs or religion. That's why it was especially bad.

'''E:''' The worst of all worlds.

'''S:''' It was. I was like just offended the entire time.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''S:''' Just horrible.

'''J:''' So in a weird perspective, if you look through a different scope to people – to non-skeptics, people whose radar wouldn't have been tweaked or set off with that, right? Steve – I could see like a funny video of like Steve being like, I can't believe I'm just so offended and people are like, what's wrong with that guy? We just watched this really cute video and like you're all pissed off, right?

'''S:''' As I said, I would think that a native Hawaiian would have been offended at the – how infantilized that character was. I could think about how there was an opportunity there to show how compatible – just respecting the history of traditional beliefs of Hawaiians. and scientific knowledge. These things are not mutually exclusive. They are not in conflict. You can be a scientist and respect the traditions at the same time. And again, that's on the background of me being annoyed the whole trip at this forced conflict between science and rationalism and respect for nature, you know, on the other end. That is a false dichotomy. that is very destructive and it drives me nuts. And you just had the Disney version of that on steroids, you know?

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' That's unfortunate. Yeah, and they unfortunately have a history of doing things like that.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 
=== Portable DNA Sequencing (16:15) ===
* [https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/gattaca/ Gattaca]<ref>[https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/gattaca/ Neurologica: Gattaca]</ref>

=== Alternative Treatment for Bears (22:13) ===
* [https://www.kqed.org/science/1919050/bears-burned-in-california-wildfires-go-holistic-for-pain Bears burned in California wildfires go holistic for pain]<ref>[https://www.kqed.org/science/1919050/bears-burned-in-california-wildfires-go-holistic-for-pain KQED: Bears burned in California wildfires go holistic for pain]</ref>

'''S:''' All right, Evan, tell us about these bears that were treated for burns.

'''J:''' Is this the bear sting burns? Doubles. Doubles.

'''E:''' Oh, nice, Jay. Yeah, good one.

'''S:''' Jay, it's the burn ward bears.

'''J:''' Thanks for making it better, Steve.

'''E:''' Point for Steve. Go ahead. The bears who are victims, like many other animals, were of the wildfires recently in California. But the Associated Press did a article just recently in which they, well, I'll read you the very first sentence of the article and you decide kind of what they're going after here. Veterinarians successfully used alternative medical treatments, such as acupuncture, on three wild animals burned in the Southern California wildfires. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Successfully used alternative medical treatments. Okay.

'''S:''' Yeah, total bullshit.

'''E:''' Yeah, total crap. How the heck? Hell, do they even know what was successful or what wasn't. But in any case, here's the story. Two adult bears and a young mountain lion were brought to veterinarians. First, they went to the State Department of Fish and Wildlife and later the University of California in Davis. And again, lots of animals were hurt in these fires. But the paws on these animals were burned very badly. The pictures are just awful. I mean, deep third-degree burns these bears are suffering from. One of which couldn't even – could not even stand up even while they were having – after they got the treatment. the pain was just too excruciating. They said that standard pain treatment is a problem for the animals because you can only anesthetize them so many times. And they are wild animals we're talking about, you know, teeth and claws, and certainly they'll, you know, attack you as fast as they would probably attack anyone else if they feel threatened. So you've got to keep them sedated, but keeping them sedated for too long causes problems. And you can't just throw pain pills at and pain medicines at them. They say that there's no guarantee the animals will eat them. Now, why they can't inject them with painkillers, I don't quite understand, but at least that's what they're reporting. They said that some of the alternative methods that they employ on these animals and others include acupuncture, chiropractic treatment, and cold laser therapy. So crap, crap, and more crap.

'''S:''' Yeah, but here's the key line. Vets carried out the alternative treatments only on days when the bears and mountain lion were already anesthetized for bandage changes or other standard care. Right. So they got acupuncture and anesthesia. Of course. Right. But the acupuncture worked? How do you come to that conclusion? Total nonsense.

'''E:''' And that's what gets the top billing, essentially, what the thrust of this article is really about. Basically saying, hey, the alternative methods work. Yeah, sure, they got the other stuff, but it was the acupuncture. It was the chiropractic that actually did it.

'''S:''' I get high with heroin and homeopathy. It works really well.

'''E:''' Right. You decide which one is the actual effect occurring.

'''S:''' Right, right.

'''E:''' The vets have to stitch fish skins to the animals' burned paws. That's the treatment that they give them. And then they wrap their feet with – bandages of rice paper and corn husks. They have to use these kinds of materials because the animals will eat away at them. And if you gave them standard bandages, it would cause other health problems for them. They can't digest those things. Yeah, I suppose they did what they they essentially could for them. I don't know if the animals necessarily suffered further unnecessarily as a result of this because they were actually getting some real treatment for things. But, you know, again, here we go with the clouding of pseudoscience and real science and another article that just goes ahead and continues to make it worse.

'''S:''' Yeah, the only story here is how absolutely credulous the reporting was. I mean, just shameful. And this is like CBS News. This is like major news outlets, not like the National Enquirer or some crap like that. That's right.

'''E:''' AP initially reported it and ABC ran with it and other major news organizations ran with it too because it sounds great even though it's crap.

'''S:''' Total crap. OK, Bob, but you're going to tell us about not crap, but the acoustic tractor beam.

=== Acoustic Tractor Beam (26:23) ===
* [https://phys.org/news/2018-01-world-powerful-acoustic-tractor-pave.html The world's most powerful acoustic tractor beam could pave the way for levitating humans]<ref>[https://phys.org/news/2018-01-world-powerful-acoustic-tractor-pave.html University of Bristol: The world's most powerful acoustic tractor beam could pave the way for levitating humans]</ref>

'''B:''' Yeah, it looks like tractor beams or acoustic levitation has had a bit of a breakthrough recently that could legitimately result in the levitation of large objects, perhaps as big as a human. Hello. That would be awesome. So we've all seen tractor beams, right? We've seen tractor beams in science fiction. Usually it's like an invisible force that lifts something and lifts it up, pulls it in or pushes it away, whatever. But it's never precisely clear how they work. But we all really want technology like that to be real, right? So now you could use a magnetic field or electromagnetism to push or pull or levitate objects.

'''E:''' Like the frog? Yeah.

'''B:''' But it's already a fairly mature technology at this point. And who doesn't love high-speed maglev trains? They're awesome. I can't wait until they're everywhere. But such technology, it's really not seen as a sci-fi tractor beam. And it can only be used on specific types of materials like conductors. So, yeah, it just kind of doesn't qualify. This, though, this is acoustic levitation or acoustophoresis. I did not know that word before. I learned a new word today. It basically uses the pressure of ultrasound alone to move objects, and it was actually theorized as far back as 1930, early 30s. So that's interesting. I didn't know the theory was that old. But for decades, we've been using that idea. We've been levitating small objects like insects or even fish using purely sound. But in 2013, though, real tractor beam-like abilities were realized for the first time right around then when objects were not only levitated but moved as well. So now a common way to do this is to use many speakers or transducers to create vortices of high frequency sound that wrap around an object like a tornado while the object itself sits in the eye of the storm or the cone of silence, you could call it. So that worked great. You could levitate it. You could move it. But there was a huge limitation though. The object itself could never be larger than the wavelength of sound. If they were larger, the objects were actually larger, the rotating vortex could transfer some of its energy to the levitated object and then just kind of like eject it and it would just fail or you'd fly away really fast or just fall. So they couldn't get past that and it seemed to be a fundamental limitation. That was kind of annoying because you don't want to be stuck lifting just really tiny things. So engineers from the University of Bristol found a way around the problem. They realized that rapidly changing the direction of the vortices stabilized the tractor beam. Imagine the tornado, these little tornadoes wrapping around the object and then going in one direction and then rapidly switching to the other direction and then the other direction again, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and that really stabilized it. For example, so using a 40 kilohertz ultrasonic waves that no human could hear but some bats could I think could hear that. They levitated and moved two centimeter long objects. That's more than two acoustic wavelengths in size. So that's – it seems like a small breakthrough but it's big. The object itself was bigger than the wavelength of the sound and that was a limitation that they weren't sure that – how they were going to get past. So it seems now that the only size limit is not related to the wavelength of sound itself but the amount of power that they could pump into the acoustic waves. So that's an amazing change because it's not a limit to how big it is but how much power can you throw into those acoustic waves? and you just know that as transducers get more powerful, smaller, cheaper, better design, that they're going to be able to throw more and more power at it and they're going to be able to lift bigger and bigger things. So right now they're working with about 192 transducers to lift about 1.5 centimeters according to one report I read. They theorize that with 40,000 transducers, they could levitate an object a meter across. But the near future though will probably not focus on levitating people or bigger things but little things really well. For example, Bruce Drinkwater, professor of ultrasonics from the Department of Mechanical Engineering said – Acoustic tractor beams have huge potential in many applications. I'm particularly excited by the ideas of contactless production lines where delicate objects are assembled without touching them. So this could be invaluable to industries like pharmaceuticals, electronics. For example, it could be used for manipulating say volatile chemicals. that you didn't want to put in any container. or you could use it for moving devices within a body like a probe. or how about a kidney stone? You could use the sound from the outside of the body to move the kidney stone along the path you want to move it in and get rid of it because I hear they're pretty painful. So moving a person though around using this type of device, clearly when and if that happens, that's certainly going to get front page news and you know that they're going to use the words tractor beam in the headline. So we'll be seeing that again over and over I think over the years. But so all we have to figure out now is how to use a tractor beam in airless space like all good spaceships should be able to do. Yeah, right. Because it's not going to work in space, kids. So yeah, so that's just another – another offshoot of tractor beam technology that they're going to have to get around.

'''E:''' So is tractor beam the right descriptor here?

'''J:''' It's really not a tractor beam, Bob.

'''E:''' Because a tractor beam implies kind of pulling it in towards sort of this much larger scale movement.

'''B:''' Sure. Dude, look at the videos. You could – suspending these good-sized beads, then they can move then left, right, up, down. They even turned it upside down and it still stayed in a static position above the transducers. I mean this is like invisibly moving apparent – invisible to us. Right. moving an object that you can imagine you can move it down a production line. I mean it's. it's. you know it's a tractor beam of sorts. it's. you know it's not. yeah it's not a spaceship tractor beam in space. no but I mean what the hell I mean. you know I mean sure it's close enough to a tractor beam and don't take that away from me.

'''E:''' all right bob you get your tractor beam tag there.

'''S:''' So, guys, do you know what a super blue blood moon is? Yeah.

=== Super Blue Blood Moon (32:50) ===
* [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42817785 Skywatchers see 'super blue blood Moon']<ref>[https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42817785 BBC News: Skywatchers see 'super blue blood Moon']</ref>

'''E:''' Oh, gosh. Yes. Of course. I missed it. Rare. Blah, blah, blah.

'''S:''' Yeah. I think it's been like 30 years since we've had one.

'''B:''' I think the next one is like many decades away, right?

'''S:''' Yeah. I'm going to cry. Supermoon, blue moon, blood moon all at the same time. So let's break that down. So a supermoon just means when the moon is at perigee, at its closest approach to the earth. It's actually no big deal. You can't really tell visually that it's closer. It's like 7% bigger, which is nice. But you would never notice it unless somebody pointed it out to you.

'''B:''' Right, and if you saw a picture of side by side of the difference, it's like, oh, that's cool. But yeah, when you're out there, you're like, well, yeah, it's a little different. It's not like in your face, like bam, big.

'''S:''' It's basically negligible to just ordinary viewing. So the supermoon, a lot of people think it's kind of a misnomer. I think the term was actually coined by an astrologer. It's not really even an astronomical term. No big deal, but that was going on. And a blood moon, so blue moon has two definitions. Twice a month. Yeah, the more popular one, the one that most people go to is it's the second full moon in a month. But actually, the more technical definition is the third full moon in a season that has four full moons. Right? Which is why nobody remembers that. It was always the second full moon in the month.

'''E:''' You think about it in more like quarter years rather than one-twelfth of a year. Think about it in those terms. Right.

'''S:''' So that's the real technical definition. But the more popular one that people think about is the second full moon. So this was the second full moon in January. So by that definition, it's a blue moon even though not by the more technical definition. And then a blood moon. This is interesting. So I've seen this many times. You guys have seen this many times as well. Basically, when the moon turns red as it passes through the Earth's shadow or umbra, like the inner shadow. So the question is, why does it turn red and why can we see it at all if it's completely in shadow? That's a good question, Evan. Glad you asked that. Yeah.

'''E:''' Yes. Steve, explain, please.

'''S:''' Yeah. So this is why. It's actually pretty interesting. So when the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie, when the moon is in the Earth's shadow, the only light that's getting to it is light that is basically bending through the Earth's atmosphere, right? So if you imagine that being – Hugging the Earth. Yeah. So it's hugging the Earth, being bent inward and then reflecting off the moon. Now, the reason why it's red is because only the long red wavelengths of light will do that. The blue light scatters before it can get through the atmosphere. And so it's basically filtered out by that scattering. So if you remove the blue light from sunlight, you're left with the red light. So only the red light that's bending around the earth through lensing in the atmosphere is what's being reflected back off the moon when it's in the umbra or in the dense part of the shadow. And so we see this blood red moon.

'''B:''' Now, I want to know what does the earth look like at that time if you were on the moon? Come on. Nobody has ever, ever seen that. Basically, it looks like a sunset around the entire moon. ring of the moon, of the Earth. I mean, that must be amazing. I want to see it.

'''E:''' It's a solar eclipse from the moon's perspective. Yeah.

'''S:''' Have we ever had a probe? take that image? That would be interesting. But yeah, so it's the same reason that sunsets are red, right? Sunsets are red because the sunlight is going through more atmosphere and the blue light is being scattered out.

'''B:''' It actually goes through, compared to overhead light, it's going through 12 times as much atmosphere when it's on the horizon. 12 times. So it scatters a lot of blue light out.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's significant. All right, Jay, who's that noisy time?

{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? (38:13) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 654
|answer = slowed-down audio of a {{w|kookaburra}}
|}}



'''J:''' Yep, so guys, last week I played this noisy. What is it?

'''S:''' It's an animal.

'''E:''' Or a demon.

'''J:''' I got so many people wrote in. So a lot of people guessed an ape. A lot of people guessed some type of seal.

'''E:''' I would have gone with seal.

'''J:''' The worst guess was. somebody said it was a male camel. Michael M. said it's a dromedary, but bactrians probably do it and do it too. And other camelids and llamas. Whatever.

'''E:''' Camel is, okay.

'''S:''' Even the Dalai Lama?

'''J:''' Yeah, he was saying they have the big, fat, gross tongue and all this stuff. Yeah, that's not it. Somebody said it's an animal. Originally, I thought it was a bird, but I think it's an elephant seal barking. That was Cameron Fraser. I got a ton of answers. Go and figure. A lot of people that answered were from Australia. A lot.

'''S:''' Of the correct answers.

'''J:''' No, the aggregate answers.

'''S:''' Did anyone get it right?

'''J:''' Yes, a lot of people did get it right and every single person that got it right that I saw was from Australia. and they said that is in fact a slowed down audio.

'''S:''' Play the fast up version first.

'''J:''' Okay. That is a kookaburra.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah.

'''J:''' Is it a kookaburra or a kookaburra?

'''S:''' Kookaburra. Very recognizable sound, normal speed when you slow it down.

'''J:''' I thought it sounded like an ape. I think the trick there was that it sounded like an ape. So the winner from last week was Adam Bailey. Adam guessed it so fast it was ridiculous, like right after Steve put the show up. So very good job, Adam. To this day, a noisy gets sent to me. It's a freaking bird and it's interesting enough to play it. I'm surprised. You figured we'd be done with bird noises.

'''S:''' Oh, we haven't even scratched the surface of bird noises, Jay.

'''J:''' I'm agreeing with you, Steve. So this, you know, just to remind everyone, Kirk Mona sent in the original noisy and, you know, again, saying that it's a quintessential sound of the jungle, right? That bird has definitely got the jungle noise. So, guys, this week's Noisy was sent in by a listener named Katie F. And this one is pretty interesting.

'''S:''' Aloha! Aloha! It's a singing frog.

'''J:''' You know what it actually reminded me of? Did you ever see The Three Amigos?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' The singing bush. That's what that reminded me of. The singing bush. A little obscure, but yeah. It's not the singing bush from The Three Amigos. Only Katie and I know what that is.

'''E:''' They spoke Spanish, not French in that movie.

'''J:''' If you think you know what the noisy is for this week, or if you heard something really cool and you need to just send it to me, do it at WTN at theskepticsguide.org.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (40:25) ===
[old-sounding recording hinting at {{w|Alouette (song)|"Alouette"}} song]

... {{wtnAnswer|657|what the Noisy is}} for this week ...

{{anchor|followup}}
{{anchor|correction}} 
== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (41:12) ==

=== Email #1: Driverless Cars () ===

<blockquote> _consider_using_block_quotes_for_emails_read_aloud_in_this_segment_ with_reduced_spacing_for_long_chunks –</blockquote>

'''S:''' Do it. All right. Thanks, Jay. One email this week. This email comes from Nick C. And they write, I'm a longtime listener and very much enjoy your show. Thank you for all that you do for promoting skeptical thinking and science literacy. However – Thank you for having me. More battery waste, environmental harm, increased urban sprawl due to longer, more productive commutes, et cetera. Car companies at the CES would love for people to ignore the downsides and buy, buy, buy. But as skeptics, we can do better and present both sides of the story. Then she goes on to talk about a study where – she later clarified that they actually did a study, although it was a small study, like I think only 13 participants – where they paid for a chauffeur for people and – so that's to simulate a driverless car, right? So they basically had a free chauffeur and then they tracked their use of the chauffeured car compared to their baseline use and I think unsurprisingly, people drove more, right? They made – were in the car more when they had access to a chauffeur than when they didn't. Parents would send the chauffeur to go pick up their kids, and people who were older and maybe not as confident driving drove more at night and drove longer distance, and overall car driving increased significantly. They said on average they logged 76% more miles than normal. First of all, let's talk about the overall comment. Did we ignore the potential downsides to driverless cars? And two, what do you think about this notion that when driverless cars are widely available, that they will dramatically increase our road time? What do you guys think about that?

'''B:''' Well, first off, the topic I was discussing was the CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. And I was basically showcasing what was there and what was being claimed. I mean it wasn't an overview of the future of driverless cars where going over the downsides would have been more appropriate. So there's that. I mean that wasn't really the thrust of the talk at that time. Yeah. And granted, we did riff a little as we sometimes do. We just chatted about it because it's fascinating and that went a little bit beyond maybe the strict CES floor show and stuff like that. But still, it wasn't meant as a nice overview. And I think talking about potential downsides of a driverless society is certainly worthy of discussion. Sure. Although I think such a small – Such a small study is not really ready to base a discussion on that. I don't think – I mean first off, a chauffeur-driven car is one thing. But a driverless car that could be a TV room, a bedroom, an office are two different things. I mean – So that might make the driving even more dramatic, the increase in driving, because it's an environment. It's a driverless environment that's not just a car, but it's a moving environment. So maybe that makes it worse. I just think we're not ready to seriously address potential downsides yet until we get some more big studies, more realistic studies going on. But it is interesting to consider how things are going to change. And yeah, this is a disruptive technology. For sure, this is incredibly disruptive. This is going to change a lot of shit. We don't know how much it's going to change or exactly what's going to change, but get ready because this is coming and there's no stopping it.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean I agree. This study is way too small to generalize from this. Plus there's potentially a lot of artifacts in here. People may have been using the chauffeur just because of the novelty. We really don't know that in a month or a year that that's what their driving behavior would be like. It's way too short term to really I think make any conclusions from it. But – The possibilities that it raises are certainly reasonable and we just don't know how it's going to shake out. I think it's very likely that people who are for whatever reason not as confident or even able to drive by themselves will make use of driverless cars. Absolutely.

'''B:''' Our mom is 80 years old and she is afraid to drive at night. She will not drive at night. It's just hard for her to see the road and just glare and she basically doesn't do it anymore. So this would be wonderful for her. Even just for – during the day, she's good. But at night, not good. This would be fantastic for her.

'''S:''' Right. I'd love it. I think the issue of like. there were times when there was no passenger in the car because they sent the car.

'''B:''' That's concerning. Yeah.

'''S:''' Actually, that's not concerning. I was going to make the opposite point. Because what's the difference? If a parent goes to pick up their child or if they send the car to pick up their child while they're at home doing something else, there's no difference.

'''E:''' That's true. That's a good point.

'''S:''' The only difference is that the parent could do something else rather than just be driving to go pick up somebody else.

'''J:''' It's more efficient. The more driverless cars there are, the more efficient the roads will be overall, right? So think of it this way. It's the difference between cars working in coordination with each other. Yeah. Not just from a safety perspective, but cars are going to be able to... First, they'll be detecting each other. Then they'll actually be talking to each other. Right. And when we get to that point, it'll be like stepping into a fast-moving lane, you know... Versus like a human being trying to do it wouldn't be able to do it with the same precision and lack of effect on all the other vehicles.

'''E:''' I think minority report gives me the image of how the cars were driving around in a world like that.

'''B:''' That's a good point. That's a good point and that addresses the whole idea that it's going to increase traffic. First off, you got to consider that. Imagine cars on the highway all doing say 70 miles an hour like a foot behind each other or whatever.

'''E:''' You can't do that now.

'''B:''' You can't do that. now so the the road carrying capacity increases. and if say you know say there still is more traffic and more time spent on the road that sucks. but if you're if you're in a car which is basically your living room ah you don't really care as much. you're still being productive you're still. so you don't really care that it takes. maybe you know if it takes 20 longer to get somewhere that you're still being productive and doing fun stuff and not a slave to that damn steering wheel.

'''E:''' Is the underlying assumption here also that this is a safer overall technology than what we currently have? So the saving in lives, I suppose you could – I don't know how you put a cost on that and sort of bring that into the formula of all this. But hey, if you're going to – 50,000 people a year perish on the US roads if I'm not mistaken. You can cut that down. If you can cut that down significantly, I don't know. That seems worth it. Right.

'''B:''' No one is saying that's a bad thing. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about two different scenarios. The scenarios we're comparing are everybody owning a driverless car and everybody renting a driverless car. So those are the two different scenarios. And it's this whole idea of on-demand driving that is being addressed here. So yeah, so that's kind of the choice. And yeah, I'm still – I'd love to see some great studies on this, but I'm not terribly concerned. I mean I love disruptive technologies anyway. Bring it.

'''E:''' I happen to think this will be a long way down the road, pun intended.

'''J:''' Hey, it could be 10 years. Dude, dude, no.

'''E:''' In 10 years, we're not going to have – not everybody is going to be abandoning their cars and going for these rent-a-pods or whatever the heck you want to call it.

'''S:''' Well, we don't know exactly how it's going to be used. But I think driverless cars are going to be pretty common in 10 years just given where the technology is.

'''E:''' But that doesn't get rid of the old cars.

'''S:''' Oh, you're right. I agree. You're still going to have those.

'''E:''' There's going to be this integration between the two for, I think, quite a long time. And I'm not sure how they're going to exactly get all that worked out. That seems very foggy to me.

'''S:''' I think in terms of the traffic issue as an isolated issue, I think there's way too many variables to predict what the net effect is going to be. I buy the fact that people will be using more cars because it's going to be more convenient and safer and people who can't drive now will be able to drive and people will – if it's available as an easy and convenient option, people will use it. Absolutely. Absolutely. But then we have to say at the same time, the driverless cars will be more efficient. So they may reduce traffic in that way. For example, it's quite possible that people who are using driverless cars as a service, they may also be optimized to carpool. You know what I mean? Like it may be cheaper if you're saying, yeah, you could pick up somebody else on the way. You know what I mean? Right, right. So it's possible that there may be more people per car on average if you're using driverless cars.

'''E:''' A little ride sharing.

'''S:''' Who knows? We'll have to wait and see. The other thing is. the other factor that's really hard to account for is the thing none of us are thinking of. It's the thing that someone – some company is going to innovate some service or some way to do something that no one is thinking of right now. that's going to change everything. Because we haven't fully explored all of the new possibilities that driverless cars brings. Right. We're going to put millions of lithium ion batteries on the road. We absolutely have to think about where does all that lithium come from? Where are they going to? What's the net cost of economically and environmentally, et cetera? And I do think that we really need to prioritize research into batteries made of common, cheap, non-toxic materials.

'''B:''' Sure.

'''S:''' I agree with you, Bob. None of this is a deal breaker. None of this means that we shouldn't be moving forward with driverless or electric cars. It means we just need to think about the impact all of these things are going to have and think about potential solutions and way to leverage the benefits of absolutely that's with any disruptive technology artificial intelligence gmo nanotech all that stuff.

'''B:''' um you we got to talk about. we got to talk about it before it's so in your face and it's already here. talk about it prepare for it anticipate deal with it because some things you're just not you're just not going to stop as much as you might hate it.

{{anchor|interview}} 
== Interview with Brian Dunning and Emery Emery (52:15) ==
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* [https://sciencefriction.tv ''Science Friction'': a documentary about scientists who get misrepresented by the media]
=== Brian's conviction ===

=== Brian's redemption ===


'''S:''' all right guys. so we have a very interesting interview coming up with Brian Dunning and Emery Emery so stay tuned for that. Well, joining us now, we have two guests, Brian Dunning and Emery Emery. Guys, welcome back to the SGU.

'''BD:''' Thank you. Thanks for having us.

'''S:''' Brian, it's been a while since we've had you on. Emery, I know we've been on your show once. Did we ever have you on our show? I don't remember.

'''EE:''' I believe this is my first appearance.

'''S:''' This is your first. You're an SGU virgin.

'''EE:''' I am.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''BD:''' That's a rite of passage. You need to all whip him or something now.

'''S:''' So we're having the two of you on together because you are both involved in a project. You're trying to fund a skeptical movie. We're going to talk about that in a few minutes. But Brian, since we haven't had you on since your life-changing events occurred – And this is kind of the elephant in the room. We figured we better get this out of the way and talk about this and answer the questions that come up since this has happened. So why don't you give us your summary of what happened and then we'll sort of ask you the questions that people ask us when it comes up.

'''BD:''' Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's no secret. It's been on my Wikipedia page for just about 10 years now. And I actually enjoy talking about it, but nobody ever asks me. So I was convicted of wire fraud. I pleaded guilty. And I spent basically a year at Club Fed. And that happened from 2014 to 2015. And what was the conviction based upon? So it was from a business I had back in the early 2000s, from about 2002 to 2006, 2007. I had a partner and I and a number of employees had a small company doing affiliate marketing for eBay. One day, out of the blue, we were raided by the FBI, which was a shock to nobody more than it was to me. And seven and a half years of civil cases followed. I believe we were in the right, and I believe we would have won those civil cases. But the fact is, I'm an individual, and I'm fighting one of the world's largest and wealthiest companies with arguably the world's most expensive law firm with a carte blanche. And seven and a half years, there's no way you can maintain fighting that. And after about four years, they went thermonuclear and filed a criminal complaint, making the exact same charges that were in their civil complaint. They simply weren't true, which is why we were fighting them for so long. But there comes to be a point, and we can talk about this, there comes to be a point where it's a numbers game and you just have to play the best odds. And the cheapest and fastest way to get out of it is to simply plead guilty. And we worked with the prosecutor to... write something that had a word of truth in it that I could honestly plead guilty to. And so I went away for a few months. That's the short version. I've talked about this on a number of podcasts, Emery, including yours. I've been on a couple of times. And there's a complete detailed summary of it on my personal website, which is briandunning.com slash message. And you can read the entire case there. But that's basically it.

'''S:''' So what did eBay say that you did?

'''BD:''' It's technical and it's confusing and it's hard to follow. There's no simple way to describe it. But what we were doing was placing ads for eBay on websites. And if somebody sees one of those ads, they become, quote unquote, our customer because eBay writes a cookie to their computer through our ad. And if they go to eBay within the next 30 days and become a new customer and buy something that generates a profitable commission for eBay, they would pay us a percentage of that for this person having been our customer that we introduced them through our ad.

'''J:''' It's basically how affiliate programs work.

'''BD:''' Yeah, it's how they have always worked and how they continue to work today. What they were alleging was that their pixel that was in our ad was not in the original contract. And these original contracts were written late 90s, early 2000s, long before the industry was in any way mature. As they knew every detail of what we were doing, they saw our ads. Of course, they scrutinized them. We worked closely with them on a daily basis. It was a complete surprise and still just absolutely bizarre that they charged that they had no idea that their pixel was in our ads. It makes no sense at all.

'''S:''' What do you mean by their pixel?

'''BD:''' In our ad, we just have a little bit of HTML that would be on people's websites in the form of a widget that provided some useful gadget that they wanted on their website. And in the text of that ad, it would say, buy and sell stuff on eBay, and there would be a little picture or whatever it was. And in there is a little invisible pixel, just a one-by-one invisible GIF image that comes from eBay's server. So in our HTML, which we write, which is part of our ad, we had a call to eBay's website as the address for this pixel. That allows the web visitor's browser to make a direct connection to eBay. The reason eBay had that pixel in the ads was to track user behavior because they want to know what websites people visit so that they can better market products to them. Amazon does this. Every large internet company in the world does this. They track user behavior via some technology similar to this. That's exactly what eBay was doing.

'''S:''' But they said that they were not aware that you had a pixel in your ad that linked back to their website?

'''BD:''' That is the whole of it right there. It is completely bizarre. Why does that bother them? It's inexcusable. We don't know. That's the one thing that we were never able to find out, why they decided to – there was a number of companies that they charged with this behavior. It wasn't just us. And I was not the only person who went to jail. It was a number of people for all exactly the same behavior. And the thing that's sad is that it continued even during our lawsuit, during all those years I was fighting it. All of their top affiliates were still doing exactly the same thing. I have a video of that on the URL that I just gave you, briandunning.com slash message. You can see that. a video of me viewing a website and seeing the exact same behavior. And it's still how they do it today. So we can't know what their internal mechanism was. Somebody decided they were paying out too much money. I have no idea. We've never been able to just do anything more than speculate.

'''S:''' Was there any deception on your part?

'''BD:''' No, I spoke with them every day, and they can see the ad. They can look right at it. I was always concerned because this was a lucrative business. Our whole contract was, over those several years, was about $5.3 million. We had 15 or 20 people employed at the most, but I was personally one of the highest paid guys. I personally made about $1.1 million over all those years.

'''S:''' I'm still trying to wrap my head around it and ask you the kind of questions that people ask us.

'''BD:''' So am I, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah, I know. It's complicated. So was there any – were the people whose websites you were placing the ad on through the widgets that you were providing them? Do I have that right? You were like, hey, here's a useful widget that does something. And in that was an ad which was basically paying for the free widget. And that ad led back to eBay. Was anyone in this chain being deceived by anything?

'''BD:''' I don't see how that argument can be made. There was two basic widgets that we used. One was a WordPress plug-in, which would show a – it was called Who Linked, and it would show a list of backlinks, other websites that linked to your WordPress blog. That's a useful widget. People would install it on their website, and it would have sponsored by eBay, and their little graphic would be in the ad. And the other one we used, which was more successful, actually, was on MySpace because this was the early 2000s, and MySpace was actually a thing. Whoa, MySpace.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''BD:''' It was just basically a little Google map showing a map of all the visitors to your MySpace profile. And at the bottom of that was the ad. It said, buy and sell your stuff on eBay. And a little picture. So, I mean, it's very apparent to everyone who installed it that it was supported by this eBay advertising. eBay certainly knew that. In fact, eBay gave us several revisions over the years. Hey, change the wording to this. Change it to that. Change the graphic from this old eBay one to the new eBay one. I mean the argument that they didn't know anything about it is just completely untenable.

'''B:''' But I mean did you – could you have supplied like an email with having this communication with them and showing that here? Look, they're just – they're talking about it. They wanted us to do this. Did that carry no weight in court?

'''BD:''' Well, it never went to trial, so we never got to make that argument. But the first thing we wanted to do, of course, was to depose our person, the person that I had daily contact with. As soon as the FBI raided us, eBay's employee in their affiliate marketing department, their program manager that we worked with, she disappeared and was completely off the map and nobody knew where she was, quote unquote, for six whole months. And at the end of that six whole months, because we actually had an investigator trying to find her so that we could depose her, she resurfaced and eBay had transferred her overseas to London, where she remained through the duration of the whole case. So we were unable to depose her.

'''EE:''' To the best of my ability to figure this out, I have an opinion, and I suspect Brian can't even say what I'm about to say from a legalistic standpoint. That's my guess, but I haven't asked him. I've never asked him before. But my opinion is that eBay was doing something that was ethically questionable and using affiliates like Brian and others to do it. And then when some heat came on them, I think they threw these affiliates under the bus.

'''BD:''' I agree with most of what you say. I don't see anything that they were doing. that was unethical, though. My best analysis was really this was just a case of their left hand didn't know what their right hand was doing. And somebody internally had some problem that we don't know what it was. And they said, well, hey, rather than saying our guys are doing something wrong, let's just say we were being cheated or fooled or something by the affiliates.

'''S:''' I get that, but I still don't – maybe there's no answer to this. It sounds like you don't have an answer to this. But what is the offense that is being alleged? that they were trying to cover up or blame on somebody else? So here's my reading of this over the years. Again, I never really understood what happened. But one thing that some people seem to get the impression happened is is that you were taking credit for referrals to eBay that you weren't really responsible for. In other words, that pixel that was on their website on the widget would capture affiliate credit even if they went to eBay by themselves. that had nothing to do with the ad that you had placed there. Is that accurate or is that a misunderstanding of how this worked?

'''BD:''' Okay, so we have to introduce a new level of complexity to address that.

'''S:''' I'm sorry, I know.

'''BD:''' You're correct. So there was a middleman company, which was called Commission Junction, which eBay employed as the middleman contractor that actually ran this program and did everything. Now, they had their own contract. that said we couldn't put eBay's Pixel actually in the ad, that the users would have to actually click the ad and go to the website, and that's when the direct connection would be established between the user's computer and eBay, allowing eBay to write cookies on their computer. Now, very, very early in our involvement with eBay, when everyone is trying to figure out, gee, how can we make this better? How can we get more traffic? How can we generate more clicks? eBay made it known to me in kind of a sideways sort of way. Well, hey, if the pixel, if our pixel was actually in the ad, then they would get we would be able to write to their computer before and whether or not they ever actually visited the Web site. So that, I think, addresses exactly what you're talking about. I see. And the problem that that caused was that now we had the choice of, well, do we want to violate Commission Junction's terms of service or do we want to not do what eBay is telling us to do?

'''S:''' Okay.

'''BD:''' We're between a rock and a hard place from day one. I see. And eBay was the 800-pound gorilla. They were by far Commission Junction's largest customer. And eBay always told us. I remember the phone calls specifically. They said, we support what you're doing, whether or not they do. If they ever give you any guff, you call me. I will have it cleared up within 10 minutes. And that's what always happened. We actually had printouts of the email conversation. I would email my contact at eBay and said, Commission Junction just called me. They said they've got a problem with the... the pixel appearing in the ad because it generates this connection to the server while someone is only viewing the ad and not clicking on it. And, and, and she would reply back to me, no problem. I'll take care of it. You stand by. And then five minutes later, she'd email me. Okay. It's handled. You're, you're clear. Keep, keep on keeping on.

'''S:''' I see. Now I think I understand it a little bit better. So you think that is the focus of the – I'll say misunderstanding, whatever. All of the hubbub was that pixel. Do you think maybe that eBay was violating their agreement with the middleman and then they tried to throw you under the bus to cover that fact?

'''BD:''' That's a possibility. That is absolutely a possibility. In the middle of this, in fact, I even called Commission Junction and said, hey, look, eBay is screwing you here. If you'd like my evidence that these conversations they're having with me to violate our agreement, I'm in.

'''S:''' Was Commission Junction being screwed out of commission because of the way it was working this way? Were they being bypassed in some way?

'''BD:''' I not not in any way that I know of. I actually feel that Commission Junction was probably. I mean, they were. they had their terms of service the way they felt affiliate programs should run. And I think that they were true to that and they were willing to stand up to their biggest customer. Yeah. You know, in a sense, I admire them for doing that. In another sense, it's like, well, hey, this is how your customers this is what eBay is hiring you to do. You should do it the way they want you to do it. Yeah.

'''S:''' So again, I'm trying to find out who the victim is in all of this. So eBay wasn't losing anything out, right? They were paying a commission but that's because people were coming to them through your ads, right?

'''BD:''' Yeah. I mean, if somebody never saw an ad on the Internet and then they went to eBay all on their own with a fresh, clean browser and eBay would get to keep the full commission.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''BD:''' So their argument was, hey, we lost money. It's like, well, no, you didn't lose any money because all of these were profitable commissions on sales from people who saw our ads.

'''B:''' The cookie was written, though, if I'm reading this right, from just displaying the ad, just by having it display on the screen. That's correct. So that seems sketchy to me. I mean, I see a lot of ads, but I'd almost never click them. And I would expect that if I clicked it, then, yeah, whatever happens, happens. But if it just appears and I don't do anything, I really wouldn't expect anything to happen. But it did happen. So to me, that seems the crux of the sketchiness is that.

'''BD:''' I agree with you. Right there. And the thing is, that's up to eBay. The connection was to eBay's computer. It was their scripting on their end that decided what to do with this connection. Do we read to see if they already have a cookie?

'''EE:''' See, that's the thing that made it really clear to me was when I understood that Brian wasn't creating this system. He was just putting it in place per eBay's instructions.

'''BD:''' Yeah. Is that accurate, Brian?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''BD:''' They asked me to give them a racetrack. They're free to drive on the racetrack or not to.

'''EE:''' And so it's really clear to me that Brian wasn't guilty of creating some insidious thing that does a thing in the background. He was guilty of building a way that these things that eBay was creating could be delivered. And that is why he got into trouble because he was simply involved in this process and they threw him under the bus. That's the way I read it.

'''S:''' Brian, at the end of all this, do you think that you made any mistakes that you regret?

'''BD:''' So actually, the day that the FBI raided my house, the first thing on my calendar that morning was to call up eBay and say, we need to have the contract amended because we keep getting these complaints from Commission Junction and you keep overriding them. I want to have this in writing that you want us to be doing the ads this way, that this is not something I can potentially get in trouble for. And it seems unlikely that anyone's going to believe me when I say that that was honestly the first thing I was going to do that day. Yeah. Yeah. I regret. I definitely regret allowing myself to be in a position where two people were telling me two different things. Yeah. And. I mean, you've got to be on top of that kind of thing. You've got to say, no, I'm not going to be in this ambiguous position where either one of you might suddenly decide you've got some claim against me because the contract I have with the other party you don't like.

'''S:''' Yeah. So I want to move on to the other part of the interview. So that is –. obviously this whole situation is very complicated. We're trying to get to the bottom of this as best we can. So what I'll just say, if there are any listeners out there who have questions we didn't ask or you think were left unanswered, email us. Email Brian, right? Brian, you're happy to answer anything that was left unanswered. Absolutely.

'''BD:''' Absolutely.

'''S:''' We're just trying to be as transparent as we can in a very complicated situation. Well, you can email info at – Brian, if you want to give your email, you can do that. Sure.

'''BD:''' Brian at Skeptoid.com.

'''S:''' So the other part of what we wanted to talk about tonight was that you and Emery are trying to fund a movie. Part of the reason why we thought we had to clear the air about your history was because when we posted a link to this on our Facebook page – There was a discussion about, oh, why should we give money to a fraudster? You're asking us to support something done by somebody who's a convicted felon and I thought, well, OK, fair enough. If we're going to ask for this, we should at least give you enough information to make an informed decision about what this is. Let me further say that I think regardless of what you think about all of this and what your guilt is in all of this, you paid your debt to society for whatever it's worth. It's done and going forward, you want to be – you want to do – as you said to me many times, you want to do good skeptical work. That's your redemption, right? And I totally believe in redemption. I totally believe, hey, if you want to do good skeptical work going forward, you know, I'm happy to support you. So that's what this project is about. So tell us about this movie that you and Emery are looking to produce.

'''BD:''' So the title is called Science Friction. And it's a documentary film about scientists who have been misrepresented by science documentaries on TV, movies, the media.

'''S:''' Does that happen?

'''BD:''' It happens all the time.

'''E:''' Which channel is that on?

'''BD:''' In fact, Steve, as you know, you were one of the people that we interviewed. We talked about your experience on the Dr. Oz show. And that was a drop in the bucket from all the stories that we've been collecting.

'''S:''' It wasn't even my worst experience.

'''BD:''' Oh, it wasn't? Well, we've got to come back and do a second round of interviews with you then.

'''S:''' Yeah, absolutely. No, that was – Yeah.

'''BD:''' So what we want to do is we want to give them a chance to say, OK, what did you actually tell the TV producers? And then we're going to show what actually made it onto the air. And you can see that it was edited horribly out of context or misrepresented. They twisted their words to make it sound like the scientist was promoting the Wu perspective, basically. And the further we've gone down this rabbit hole, everyone we talked to says, oh, well, you need to talk to this person, this person and this person, because it was way worse with this. Now, we've got a lot of big names on here, but but really the people that this has happened to the most and the most dramatic stories that we've got are from people whose names aren't necessarily household names. Regular working scientists who were really excited to get a call from Discovery Channel, History Channel, Science Channel, you name it. And were really excited to have a chance to be on a TV show and had every reason to believe they were going to be presented as a scientist and they were going to get to share their awesome science with us. with them. They got screwed. They were really upset about it. And they found that they had no recourse.

'''S:''' Yeah. You sign your life away. Absolutely. It's boilerplate. But they say, yeah, sign this release. Basically, we can do whatever the hell we want with this footage and you have no recourse. And what are you going to do? I mean, you have to sign those things if you're going to do that. Most like workaday scientists who aren't media savvy have no idea, you know, how all this works. And they think they'll just tell their story and what could go wrong, you know? And even, you know, I try to be savvy and I still get screwed, you know?

'''BD:''' My favorite person that we talked to was Richard Wiseman. I was able to buttonhole him at a conference last year and say, I told him about the film and his response really surprised me. This is my favorite thing that's happened to me so far in this whole experience. He literally backed me against the wall and got right in my face and said, the reason that doesn't happen to me is because I am so paranoid about it. Every time one of these producers comes to my university and wants to feature one of us or wants to feature me on their TV show, you would not believe the grinder that we put them through. We make them sign this giant contract that says we get creative control over the final product. We get final edit. This is a partnership between our university and you. And nobody agrees to that contract.

'''E:''' No.

'''S:''' I can't see it. They would never agree to that.

'''EE:''' But Brian, did he make you sign that too? No.

'''BD:''' Okay, so he said, and it's going to be the same thing if I talk to you guys. Now, the difference is, of course, I'm excited to sign that. I'm thrilled to sign that. I say, yes, that's exactly what we want to communicate. These are the links that you have to go to as a science communicator if you don't want to be misrepresented by the media. And that's what was so dramatic.

'''EE:''' Was there a repeat offending party here that when you guys were going through this process, you were like, oh my god, this movie that all of these people were in was a horrible scam? Which one was the big offender?

'''BD:''' Oh, well, okay. I mean, we talked to both Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins about their experience with Expelled. Yeah, that was Expelled. It was like the poster child for this. Yeah, that was a good one. We are hoping to, we haven't gotten to it yet, but we're hoping to talk to Lawrence Krauss, Kate Mulgrew, and Michio Kaku about The Principle, which was a 2014 movie promoting geocentrism. A whole alternate view of the universe and all of these people were lied to about what the movie was going to be about. There was also other scientists who weren't even interviewed for the movie. They took like existing footage of them and edited it badly to fit it into there to make it sound like they were promoting geocentrism.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, Brian, as you and I both know, the editing room is powerful. It is amazingly powerful. You could make audio or video sound like pretty much whatever you want.

'''EE:''' I'm jumping in. I was really excited about this project. First of all, I understand the responsibility of directing and editing this sort of project, or any project, I should say, for that matter. In fact, when we cut the aristocrats, it would have been so easy to piece together sentences, and we broke up sentences left and right in that film. It would have been so easy to piece together sentences to say things and do things that the acts that we were talking to, the artists we were discussing this with on film, weren't saying. We could have gotten anything we wanted in many cases. And Provenza and I, we not only wouldn't change someone's words, we would never change the meaning of someone's concept. And that was my learning ground for that. It was really great. And that's when I learned that Michael Moore isn't a good storyteller is when I started learning how easy it is and then seeing the techniques used to alter a story so that it fits your narrative. It blew my mind when I started looking at initially at Michael Moore and then others and then. Television, once you become a professional editor, television is hard to watch. Porn's worse. Television is hard to watch. But what's really, really maddening is when you can recognize how someone has been misrepresented conceptually. It really should be illegal, even though it's not. It makes me crazy. And so morally, I couldn't possibly stand any stronger against this kind of behavior. So to not only be given the opportunity to work on a story that that exposes this problem, I'm also very anxious to be the watchdog to make sure we don't make any of these kinds of mistakes.

'''BD:''' One thing that I want to do when we're running the end credits, I'm hoping to include a little Skype clip of everyone who appeared in our film telling whether they felt they were fairly represented in our final cut or not.

'''EE:''' Oh, that's a great idea. Wow, I love that.

'''S:''' Yeah. Well, good journalists will do that. I've had journalists from major papers or whatever say, oh, yeah, here's the final quotes from you. Is this OK? To make sure I got it correct. That's actually responsible journalism. They vet their interpretation of what you said. But then there's – that's usually more in print. For TV, I've never had that done. I've encountered mainly just – A lot of sleazy characters and then a lot of well-meaning but misguided characters. And I try to stick with people who I think get it. So I usually have a long conversation with them before the actual filming. But you never know. You never know what they're going to do to you in the editing room, no matter how careful you are.

'''EE:''' Yeah, I'm hoping that we can honestly put at the end of our movie, no scientific theories were harmed in the making.

'''S:''' Awesome. You have to do that. All right. So if people want to support this project, Brian, what should they do?

'''BD:''' So go to sciencefriction.tv. There's a trailer there. There's little clips from some of the interviews. And I just want to reiterate that the film is being produced by Skeptoid Media, of whom I am obviously a key employee, but I am not on the board of directors. I am not the treasurer. I don't have unlimited authority to spend the nonprofit's money. I'm just the guy the board of directors has placed their faith in to produce all of this great skeptical content. So sciencefriction.tv. We're crowdfunding the initial production of the film. But go to the site anyway just to watch the trailer because it'll blow your socks off. And there's some social media widgets to share the trailer with your followers.

'''S:''' There's no pixels in those widgets though, right? Any cookies? There are no pixels in those widgets. All right, Brian. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for being so open with us. Again, if we get any further feedback, we'll let you know. Again, we're trying to be as transparent as possible with all of this. Good luck with the project and maybe we'll have you back on when it comes out. Thank you guys so much.

'''B:''' Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Emery.

'''S:''' Thanks, Emery. Bye, guys. Emery, take care.

{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:21:55) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
}}
{{SOFinfo
|theme = Hawaii

|item1 = A traditional Hawaiian diet consisted mostly of {{w|Poi (food)|poi}}, resulting in a ratio of 12 percent protein, 18 percent fat and 70 percent carbohydrates.
|link1 = <ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20181029083714/https://www.cds.hawaii.edu/kahana/downloads/curriculum/SectionII/Unit3/3.D.MeaaiaaOlaHealth/3.D.1.FoodinOldHawaii.pdf Kahana: Food in Old Hawai'i]</ref>

|item2 = The Hawaiian alphabet includes only 13 letters, one of which is the ‘ or {{w|ʻOkina|okina}}.
|link2 = <ref>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_alphabet Wikipedia: Hawaiian alphabet]</ref> 

|item3 = Hawaii is home to over a dozen venomous snakes, second only to Australia in terms of deadliest vipers.
|link3 = <ref>[https://www.factretriever.com/hawaii-facts Fact Retriever: 50 Interesting Facts about Hawaii]</ref>

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction =a dozen venomous snakes

|science1 = 13-letter alphabet
|science2 = traditional diet of poi

|rogue1 =jay
|answer1 =a dozen venomous snakes

|rogue2 =bob
|answer2 =a dozen venomous snakes

|rogue3 =Evan
|answer3 =a dozen venomous snakes

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win = 
|swept = y
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. And if you guys did not guess the theme, that's on you. Because the theme is Hawaii.

'''B:''' Of course it is.

'''S:''' Aloha.

'''B:''' I anticipated this.

'''J:''' Not surprised.

'''B:''' I don't think it's going to help me.

'''S:''' No, it probably won't. All right. Here we go. Three facts about Hawaii. Ready? Ready? Item number one, a traditional Hawaiian diet consisted mostly of poi, resulting in a ratio of 12% protein, 18% fat, and 70% carbohydrates. Item number two, the Hawaiian alphabet includes only 13 letters, one of which is the apostrophe or okina. And item number three, Hawaii is home to over a dozen venomous snakes, second only to Australia in terms of deadliest vipers. Jay, go first.

=== Jay's Response ===

'''J:''' So this first one about the traditional Hawaiian diet, which consists mostly of poi.

'''E:''' It's a typo. He forgot to write S-O-N on the end of that.

'''J:''' So you're saying that you're just basically giving us the properties of what their diet is.

'''S:''' So that resulted in a diet that when you break it down, that their diet had 12% protein, 18% fat, and 70% carbohydrates.

'''J:''' Right. Gotcha. That's a tough one to even comment on because – I don't know much about Poi. This next one about the Hawaiian alphabet. Now I'm going back to Bugs Bunny. See if Bugs Bunny has anything to offer me in my memory.

'''J:''' Oh my gosh.

'''J:''' Nothing there. I do believe this one is correct. I vaguely remember some things about the Hawaiian alphabet. The Okina from the video game Zelda. Or is that the Macarena? What is that? The Ocarina?

'''S:''' The Macarena.

'''J:''' I don't know. All right. Anyway, this last one here, Hawaii is home to over a dozen venomous snakes, second only to Australia. God damn. I hate this one because I feel like there's things I should know about this because I've been there and I studied up when I went to Hawaii about stuff like what could kill me when I go there and I don't remember anything. But I don't see why...

'''E:''' Waka Kilmi is one of the smaller islands, by the way.

'''J:''' Waka Kilmi?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' I mean, I would imagine that any snakes that are there would have to have been brought there. I don't know. There's something about the snake one I don't like. I think I'm going to say that one's a fake.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

=== Bob's Response ===

'''B:''' Let's say Poi. I remember Poi. I remember it being a little bit bland, but for some reason that ratio sounds about right based on my very old memory of what it tasted like. So I'm going to go with that one. That Yeah, I've heard that before about the – only a certain small amount of numbers or letters. Although they said something about it being when translated to English and I'm not sure what that actually means in terms of how many letters. Are there sounds that don't translate into our alphabet? But yeah, so I've kind of seen that before. The snakes though, yeah, I mean when I was there, granted it was 29 years ago, but I just have no memory of coming across or hearing about anything about snakes. poisonous or venomous snakes. um and uh boy do I remember it when I went to uh australia. uh so uh yeah so basically I mean I'll just have to say that the snake the snake one is fiction too and Evan um I'm pretty much gonna have to follow suit here.

'''E:''' uh the poi uh jay the cartoon I was thinking of was the flintstones. The Flintstones once went to the Hawaiian Islands.

'''J:''' Yes, you're right.

=== Evan's Response ===

'''E:''' Past the poi was the funny line at the time when things like that in the 60s were funny. You know what? Maybe they didn't visit it, or he was shooting a commercial or something, and it had a Hawaiian theme to it. But Pass the Poi was definitely a Flintstones reference. But in any case, that doesn't necessarily help me here. But the 70% carbohydrates, I think, is maybe kind of a key in low-protein, high-carb diets in the islands. I'm not sure that that's unusual. The alphabet, 13 letters, okay, and one's the apostrophe. I seem to remember this. The The old spellings of Hawaii had the apostrophe between the two I's, if memory serves. So I'm going to say that one's right. It leaves the snakes, and I think it kind of makes sense. I doubt that there's any indigenous or otherwise snakes on the island. That's probably one going to be close to zero, if any. So I think that one's wrong.

[https://flintstones.fandom.com/wiki/Hawaiian_Escapade "Pass the poi."]

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' All right. You guys are all united, so it's a sweep one way or the other. We'll just take these in order. A traditional Hawaiian diet consisted mostly of poi, resulting in a ratio of 12% protein, 18% fat, and 70% carbohydrates. You all think that one is science, and that one is science. Science. Yep, they mostly ate poi, which was their staple carbohydrate. Poi is made from the taro root, which is a giant root. I saw them when I was in Hawaii, and they sort of mash it up into a paste. It is rather bland. It's often described as tasting a little bit like yogurt, but it's also described as having an acquired taste, which I don't think on first sampling you're going to have.

'''B:''' Well, yeah, not as dramatic though as Vegemite.

'''S:''' Yeah, maybe not. And prior to Western contact, that was their staple food. So there's not a lot of really agricultural crops native to Hawaii. So when you talk about what plants are quote-unquote native to Hawaii, you have to separate it into a few different categories. Sugarcane? Well, no. There's pre-human contact native, right? So these are plants and animals that were on the islands before any human got there. So that's wind, water, and wing, right? That's how they got there. They're just drifting on the waves, blowing in the wind, or flying there. Then after the Polynesians colonized the islands, there were some things that they brought there. And then, of course, when there was contact with civilization, with Europeans, et cetera, then the contamination just flooded in. Most of the commercial crops that are grown in Hawaii were brought there later. The Polynesians, the native Hawaiians didn't really have a lot of commercial crops there. They had some native fruits. The breadfruit was there. That might have been one that they brought with them. They had the taro root. They had poi. For meat, they had chicken, pork, and fish. And of those, they mostly ate fish. Chicken and pork, that was your party food, right? That was during luau's, which is only occasional. That wasn't a staple. They didn't have that all the time. By some reports I was reading, they might have meal. Many of their meals were just entirely poi or poi, maybe just seasoned with some salt or some of the local plants for flavor. Or they might have it with some fish meat, for example. And that was basically their day-to-day diet. What's really funny is the crisscrossing narratives that you run into. So on some sites, you read about how the native Hawaiians were a healthy, vigorous people with a lot of endurance because they ate the very calorie-dense, nutritious poi, right? And poi is one of the most nutritious staple carbohydrates that there is in the world. And you can also get protein from the other parts of the plant. So they actually were able to get protein and pretty much all the nutrients that they need from it. But that's a 70% carbohydrate diet is portrayed as being healthy because it's natural, you know, to them. But of course, that totally contradicts the whole. carbohydrates are bad, low carbohydrate craze, right? In fact, when the Hawaiians started eating more of a Western diet and the proportion of poi in their diet decreased, which it has, it's plummeted, then obesity rates started increasing.

'''B:''' No surprise there.

'''S:''' Yeah, it kind of breaks the low-carb narrative. Western diets were like 40% carbohydrates compared to their 70% and the low-carb dieters recommend 20% or lower. So anyway, I love that when you have a completely separate, isolated, mutually exclusive narratives that aren't based on evidence. They ate that because that's what was there, right? They're on an island. They only have access to whatever food was there. So that's what they ate.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Okay, let's move on to number two. The Hawaiian alphabet includes only 13 letters, one of which is drawn like an apostrophe, but it's called the okina, and that is a glottal stop. You'll often see that between two vowels. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science.

'''J:''' Of course.

'''S:''' Yep. Not a lot of consonants in Hawaiian. Now, of course, this is – as Bob said, this is when it's translated into English letters, right? Although Hawaiians have lots of different vowel sounds, but many of them are diphthongs, right? They're basically formed by two vowels joined together. Yeah. And of course, you could make each one of those vowel sounds its own letter, in which case you could count as many as 25 vowel sounds. Or you can make them up of a minimal set of vowels, in which case there's only either or five. Yes, you could say there's five or 25 vowel phonemes. But the standard way is to just do five vowels. And then you make the combinations, the diphthongs, out of those five vowels, like O-I-E-U-E-I-A-U, et cetera. But it's interesting that – so there are theories as to why there are so few phonemes in the Hawaiian and some other languages. I've encountered this before, so I just pulled up a couple of papers that talk about this. So one theory is that there was a steady decrease in phonemic diversity – As you get farther from Africa, right? So specifically meaning that there was what's called a serial founder effect. Every time a part of the population goes somewhere and forms a new population, right? Then a part of that population goes somewhere and forms another new population. You have that serial founder effect. Every time that happens, you have a decrease in phonemic diversity.

'''B:''' Oh my god. And Hawaii is like probably what? The farthest you can get from Africa?

'''S:''' Hawaii is the most isolated populated place on the earth. And it would make sense that it would be like the end of a long line of serial founders and therefore it would have a highly restricted phonemic diversity. So it's more of a general trend in language and Hawaii is just an extreme example of that in Hawaii. So it's interesting.

'''J:''' So how much farther could it go?

'''S:''' Yeah, what would happen if Hawaiians then colonized something else? And what's going to happen when we start colonizing other planets?

'''E:''' Yeah, good point.

'''S:''' But then – but you'd have to also think though that over time, the phonemic diversity has to be able to increase too, right? Because otherwise, how do we get there in the first place? That's interesting. But maybe there just hasn't been enough time. Like maybe it doesn't take hundreds of thousands of years for the phonemic diversity and then it gets winnowed down with migration. Yeah.

'''E:''' We'll have automatic cars by then.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's true.

'''J:''' I'm going to take one to Hawaii.

'''S:''' Hawaii, by the way, has interstate highways.

'''B:''' Go figure that one out.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Hawaii is home to over a dozen venomous snakes, second only to Australia in terms of deadliest vipers, is of course the fiction because Hawaii actually in its flora and fauna reminded me a lot of New Zealand. If you remember when we were visiting New Zealand, they made a point of saying how there were no predators in New Zealand until people brought them there. And therefore, the animals didn't have any defenses. The birds just nested on the ground. And that's why they were so vulnerable when predators like rats and cats and whatever were introduced. Got the same exact story from Hawaii. So Hawaii had no natural predators and no natural foragers. So no animals that forage the plants, which means the plants also had no reason to waste energy on defenses. And so – right? So that's why there aren't many poisonous plants in Hawaii either except for the ones that were later introduced, right? But for the native plants, they don't make a lot of natural pesticides because they didn't have to. So you have a lot of plants there that are just safe to eat because they didn't have to spend energy because it didn't have to fend off foragers. Right. There are two snakes that you might find in Hawaii. There's the occasional interloper, right, the occasional accidental snake that gets brought there. But there's a very large mongoose population on the Hawaiian Islands that were deliberately introduced, by the way. and they tend to keep the snake population from becoming established. But there are two established populations. One is venomous. It's a sea snake. It's an occasional visitor to the island. The land snake, the only native land snake, is as big as an earthworm. It's a teeny tiny snake. And that's it. There's no other snakes in Hawaii. So it's, again, very similar to New Zealand. If you recall, there were no snakes in New Zealand. So very few snakes, no real natural predators, no foragers. The only things are that are animals that were brought there later. The rats that seem to accompany humans wherever we go around the world were devastating to the local species. And the mongoose were introduced to kill the rat. That didn't work partly because rats are nocturnal and mongoose are diurnal. So they weren't out at the same time. So all they really did was double the predators. By now, you have a daytime and a nighttime predator. So that was a total failure. We saw plenty of mongoose. They're like squirrels. They're just all over the place. Rikki-tikki-tavvy. Yeah.

'''E:''' That was in India, but yeah.

'''S:''' They're about the size and shape of a squirrel, you know, and you see them running around. But they like hug the ground. And so even in very short grass, they're hard to see. They're like sort of sneaking through the low grass. Very stealthy little buggers. But I got some pictures of them. Cool. Yeah. They're cute. All right. So good job, guys. Yeah. You didn't get fooled by the Hawaiian vipers. Yeah. No real – there's only – there's not a lot of spiders too. There's a smiling spider in Hawaii.

'''B:''' Yeah, I saw that.

'''S:''' Yeah, very cute. Until it bites you.

'''B:''' It's got a smiley face on its back.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's got a smiley face.

'''E:''' Oh, neat. Oh, here's one with an hourglass on its back. Oh, cute.

'''S:''' How cute. All right. Evan, give us a quote.

{{anchor|qow}} 

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:37:15) ==

<blockquote>''No idea should be suppressed. … And it applies to ideas that look like nonsense. We must not forget that some of the best ideas seemed like nonsense at first. The truth will prevail in the end. Nonsense will fall of its own weight, by a sort of intellectual law of gravitation. If we bat it about, we shall only keep an error in the air a little longer. And a new truth will go into orbit.'' – {{w|Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin}} (1900-1979), British-American astronomer and astrophysicist</blockquote>

'''E:''' No idea should be suppressed, and it applies to ideas that look like nonsense. We must not forget that some of the best ideas seem like nonsense at first. The truth will prevail in the end. Nonsense will fall of its own weight by a sort of intellectual law of gravitation. If we bat it about, we shall only keep an error in the air a little longer, and a new truth will go into orbit. And that was written by Cecilia Payne, who was a British-American astronomer and astrophysicist, who in 1925 proposed her PhD thesis, An Explanation for the Composition of Stars in Terms of Relative Abundances of Hydrogen, Yeah. Cecilia Payne.

'''S:''' Well, it depends on what you mean by suppressed, right? So does that mean that we need to give access to nonsensical ideas in the published literature, on university campuses, in textbooks? Of course not. By not discussing creationism in a high school biology textbook, are we suppressing creationism? That's what they say. So it's hard to say that. I mean, again, this is a long time ago. I'm sure she said this. So In today's society though, this is – you can't get away with just making the statement I think. There's so much nuance here that she's glossing over that we now are aware of. I also don't agree that all nonsensical ideas – will fall as a matter of course. I don't think that that's true. For example, in Asian cultures, people still believe in chi like they have for thousands of years. The notion of chi, which is utter superstitious nonsense, has not declined for thousands of years. So I do think that nonsensical ideas do need to be specifically opposed. I don't think that they should be censored completely as if suppressed in that extent. But there is a proper time and place and context for them. Right. And they need to be discussed in that context. You know, that doesn't mean that they should have unfettered access to legitimate outlets like science textbooks and and the published literature, et cetera. Right.

'''E:''' I don't think she's making the equal time argument by stating this necessarily.

'''S:''' I agree. But my point is a creationist would absolutely quote this without change as support for their equal time academic freedom position. Oh, sure. Yes.

'''E:''' Their master is at taking all sorts of things.

'''S:''' Because there's a lot of nuance that she's not addressing in that short quote.

'''E:''' No, and I think – right, right. And if you look at it from within a purely – rational, scientific circle. I think it makes sense, but that we understand culturally and otherwise, that's not really how the world works. And if you look at it more of a worldview, absolutely, this has problems. But my guess – I'll give her charity and assume that she was speaking from within the circles of real science.

'''S:''' Sure. Absolutely. Also, I think it's just a different time. Now we're in an age post-internet, post-concerted efforts to regress the enlightenment. We have to be more aware of how our dedication to openness is being abused by the people who are trying to promote nonsense. So we've had to take a more nuanced position to just – yeah, just total free market of ideas. Sure, I totally believe in the free market of ideas. That doesn't mean there aren't rules and there aren't mechanisms of quality control. That's where you get into. I think problems is when you use quality control and equate that with suppression of ideas. Those are two different things but they could be easily conflated and that's basically what happens. But yeah, I like the quote, but we live in a more complicated world today, so it doesn't go far enough.

'''E:''' That's right. Stephen Jay Gould said, right, apples might float, but we're not going to give it equal times in physics class.

'''S:''' Yeah, exactly. All right. Thank you guys for joining me this week.

'''E:''' Good show, Steve. Sure, man.

'''J:''' You got it, brother.

== Signoff/Announcements (1:41:43) ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 


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SGU Episode 654

2024-05-04T08:23:42Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

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== Introduction, Mudslides & Amtrak, Jay's VR fun ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, January 17th, 2018, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening folks!

'''S:''' How's everyone doing this week?

'''J:''' Good. Wonderful.

'''S:''' Much better. Pretty fair.

'''E:''' Yeah, Jay, you sound better.

'''C:''' I'm actually enjoying myself, guys.

'''J:''' What are you doing?

'''E:''' Oh, you're on vacation.

'''C:''' No, I'm not. I'm in Santa Barbara for my week-long session. You know, I'm working on my PhD, and because it's a nontraditional program for adults who have other jobs, a lot of the work that you do is remote. But every year you go to Santa Barbara for the week and get to see everybody in person and do a lot of really cool one-on-one training. And, of course, today I was eating lunch with my laptop, like that was my lunch date, on the patio at this hotel with this gorgeous view of the ocean. But I will tell you. I had to ride the train here instead of driving because so many roads are closed to get to Santa Barbara because of the Montecito mudslides. A drive which would have usually taken an hour and 45 minutes. The drive time was six hours.

'''S:''' Wow.

'''C:''' Yeah, because you had to go all the way around through the Angeles National Forest. So instead, I took Amtrak. thank the universe for Amtrak. Um, and they managed to clear the Amtrak tracks first, I think just because it's a good people mover, you know? Yeah. Really smart. So, um, I was able to do that, but yeah, there's a lot of people here who are really struggling. Um, it was rough, but I'm, I'm really thankful to be here and I'm learning lots of cool stuff.

'''S:''' Yeah. Those mudslides were bad, huh?

'''C:''' Really bad.

'''E:''' Is what you're trying to say. It gets pretty scary when the crust of the earth starts moving on under you and over you. I would say yes.

'''S:''' So we're not going to launch into a whole new discussion of it, but Jay got to experience VR in my office for the first time this week.

'''J:''' Yeah, well, I guess – That's hilarious. Steve handpicked my first real experience with the latest headset. I haven't experienced VR in two years. The very first thing is I got to be in a space shuttle and fly around the Aegis, which looks very similar to the original series Enterprise. It looks like a little more modern version of that. That was gorgeous. It was just an incredible opening to that bridge crew game where you get to look at the ship as if you're flying around it. And then he's like, all right, now for the test. pretty much, right? So you're standing on a city street and there's an elevator, oddly, the doors to an elevator are oddly on the street right there. So you click the button, you go in the elevator and he's like, hit the top floor. You start with the doors open and you are standing on the side of the building looking out of the elevator and there is like a hundreds of foot drop. You just look like you're way up in a tall building. And there's a plank, a pirate's plank. Bob mentioned this last week that you have to walk out on and then you're supposed to jump off of it. And I stood there and I couldn't leave the elevator.

'''C:''' And then – I mean

'''J:''' you didn't

'''E:''' want to leave the elevator.

'''J:''' about to lose respect for me. I took the headset off and I said, I can't do this. I said, I can't do this. I had a visceral experience. It was amazing. It was absolutely amazing. My brain said, absolutely do not go out. Do not go out there. It felt real. It emotionally felt real. That's the best way I could describe it. Like Steve and Bob did not fully sell the impact of how amazing VR is. I actually couldn't do it. We had dinner. I went back up. I tried it again. I couldn't do it again. I didn't take the headset off this time. I finally did it the third time, and it was painful because your brain is telling you you're in danger, massive danger.

'''B:''' Yeah. To be fair, you can't really sell that. You can't sell that verbally.

'''S:''' We tried, Jay.

'''B:''' Yeah, you've got to just experience it.

'''C:''' It's very hard. Yeah, I've done some of those VR experiences. things at vr conferences before where they kind of have people try to walk off a cliff into the ocean and it's very rare that people can just do it

'''E:''' makes sense because your brain is trained to not do those

'''C:''' and it also explains why vr works so well for um for therapy purposes especially with people with phobias and there's even posters like at the poster session right now At my school where people are doing research on that. It's really cool.

'''S:''' VR would be perfect for exposure therapy, right? They call that you expose people gradually to whatever they're afraid of and they build up a tolerance to it.

'''C:''' Yeah, you go up in the elevator.

'''B:''' They've been doing that for years.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's really cool. It's one of the best kind of most obvious uses within psychotherapy.

'''J:''' And then I tried all the things that Steve was talking about last week. I tried shooting the bow and arrow. Oh, God. There was a thing about – if you ever played the game Portal, Valve, the company that makes Portal, has a whole kind of like fun test lab type of deal. And out of the many fun experiences I had in there, I have to tell you this one thing that happened. So it was the wizard's temple, the wizard's tower room that Steve mentioned last week. Well, let me just explain to you what this was like very quickly. You walk in and you are in like movie set style. Like what would a wizard's research room be like? From weird creatures in cages to cool weapons on the wall to pages with magical writing on the table. At one point, this weird – you know oversized guy walks in and he's got a really big mouth and he's like talking to you and I'm just standing there going. this is a demo like. this isn't even a game and I'm utterly blown away like imagine when you you are interacting in a 3d environment with your friends standing next to you. you could hear them you could see their avatars of some you know like. if you like fantasy or whatever science fiction you know you pick the kind of. you know the game style that you like and you You could have like profound experiences with your friends. Like I am absolutely ready for this. I'm going to get a headset now even more than I wanted to last week. I am 100% sold on this. And as an education tool, again, it is going to be extraordinarily powerful in the classroom to let people feel an environment as if you're there, as if you're really there. It's really, really visceral, guys. It feels real. Even though you're looking at things that aren't real, it feels like they're in the room with you, like they're right in front of you. It's amazing.

'''S:''' Yeah. The interesting thing is that we're just seeing entry-level stuff right now.

'''B:''' This is Pong.

'''S:''' Or either demos or adapted things. But we have not really experienced anything close to the potential for this. We just have been given a taste. I can't wait until we have a kick-ass game built from the ground up optimized for VR. Yeah.

'''J:''' The other cool thing I loved is that Steve was able to – they have like a space where you could make it your office. So Steve set a room up and he had like pictures on the wall and he had the VR menu on the wall of the different games that he's purchased. It was just really cool right out of the gate, like this first real commercial version of VR. They already did something which I think is fantastic. You could create your own environment in there and kind of populate it the way that you want.

'''B:''' Books on the bookshelf. It was so obviously Steve when I saw that room. I was like, yep, this is Steve. Isn't that funny?

'''J:''' And it was a very palatial room. It was nice and big, really big. It was cool. Little things like that are going to make this be so meaningful to humanity. if you could create your own spaces in there.

'''C:''' Yeah, especially if you live in a tiny little shoebox apartment.

'''J:''' Yep, and I just think it – It could also be – this is a much bigger discussion, but it could also be abused very, very easily, guys. Wow. I mean it's transformative. You could really just want to spend your time in there. And I could clearly see how this could be emotionally addictive.

'''E:''' Yeah. What did they used to call Everworld? Evercrack? Everquest.

'''J:''' Evercrack. Yes.

'''E:''' So this will be that. Only a hundred times better.

'''S:''' Lose themselves in that game.

'''C:''' I had friends who I lost through Everquest.

'''E:''' Oh my gosh.

'''C:''' Yeah. I was right at that prime age for like, My friends were like teenage potheads who were playing EverQuest for like 12 hours a day. It was terrible.

'''S:''' All right, Bob, get us started with A Forgotten Superhero of Science.

'''J:''' Sure.

{{anchor|fss}}
{{anchor|wih}} 
== Forgotten Superheroes of Science (8:40) ==
{{Page categories
|Forgotten Superheroes of Science = 
}}
* {{w|Sophie Wilson}}, English computer scientist

'''B:''' For this week's forgotten superhero of science, I'm going to talk about Sophie Wilson, born in 1957. She is a British computer scientist and software engineer who co-designed a specific type of computer chip and architecture that has been shipped in an amazing 30 billion products from smartphones to tablets to TVs. Amazing. Wilson studied computer science at the University of Cambridge in 1975. Her first summer off, she did what many kids do then. She developed an automated cow feeder. Sure.

'''J:''' Okay.

'''B:''' But what's really cool about that was that based on that work, She developed an early 8-bit microcomputer for hobbyists called Acorn System 1, which was sold by a British company called Acorn Computers. Now remember, that's 15 years before the World Wide Web. Home computers back then were just really starting after only a few years previously and they were mostly just kits. So these were like dedicated hobbyists, kids that are – or people that are savvy, computer-savvy today – would look at this and be like, damn, what do I got to do? Holy crap. I mean it was – you don't just plug it in and create a password. This thing required some work. So soon she started working at Acorn and her and her colleague Steve Ferber designed and implemented what would become BBC's microcomputer. In a decade, more than a million of them were sold including 80% of UK schools. So over here in the States where we are, we really didn't hear much about it in that time. But this was big. This is big in the UK. Now, ultimately, Wilson and Ferber co-designed a 32-bit RISC machine processor in 85, which is faster than any commercially available at that time. Now, RISC, you may have heard that term before. That acronym stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing. This family of risk architectures that they came up with was so efficient, it was sold to other companies, which would then implement it in their products. And then it just took off. Today, Wilson and Ferber are responsible for more than, like I said, 30 billion products that use their risk architectures. An amazing legacy. So remember Sophie Wilson? Mention her to your friends, perhaps when discussing orthogonality, general purpose registers, or even ALUs. Who knows what they are?

'''E:''' ALUs. Oh, boy.

'''B:''' Arithmetic Logic Units.

'''J:''' Of course.

'''B:''' It sounds better, though, as ALUs.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 
=== Black Death (11:09) ===
* [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/rats-plague-black-death-humans-lice-health-science Maybe Rats Aren't to Blame for the Black Death]<ref>[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/rats-plague-black-death-humans-lice-health-science NatGeo: Maybe Rats Aren't to Blame for the Black Death]</ref>

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Bob. So, Cara, scientists are still studying the Black Death.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's really interesting, guys. I think that historically, people thought, and usually when you read about the plague, especially the Black Death, which is only a subcomponent of the plague, we usually think of the Black Death as synonymous with the plague. And yes, the plague, quote unquote, was the disease that people had during the Black Death. But there were medieval plagues spanning centuries, and there were massive wipeouts prior to the Black Death and again after the Black Death. So that's kind of interesting. The more you dig into the plague, it's got a dark history. A lot of people think, though, that the cause of the plague was mice. And that's because during modern outbreaks of the plague, and specifically in this case bubonic plague, which is caused by a very specific pathogen, it's a bacterium, and it is called Yersinia pestis. And in modern outbreaks, actually, there was one in China from 1855 to 1859. That was the first time that we were able to identify this bacillus bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and to sort of begin to understand it. And then we've been able to go back and look at bones of people, remains of people who died during the Black Death in the 1340s. And those also had Yersinia pestis in them. And the bacteria hasn't changed much over all of those centuries. It has not evolved very much at all. It's managed to, I guess, not face the types of pressures or the pressures haven't been there because it's so adaptable that it's similar. And it turns out that modern antibiotics would have actually worked back during the Black Plague, during the Black Death in the 1340s. Anyway, plague, there are a few pandemics throughout history. And the one specifically that a new study focused on was what they call the second pandemic. And the second pandemic is is the pandemic that occurred in the Middle Ages from about the 14th to the 19th centuries, and that included the Black Death. The Black Death is the one that we usually think of because it's the one that wiped out 25 million people. A lot of people think, and it's sort of just common folk wisdom, that the way people got it was that there were these rats and these rats carried the plague bacteria and then the fleas would bite the rats and then the fleas would get on people and that's how it would spread. But these researchers who just published this study in PNAS, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they did some really cool computer kind of renderings, some schematics where they tried to look at the modeling, the spread of the plague throughout Europe, the way that it actually happened based on records, based on body counts, based on things people wrote about. And what they found was that if it were really the rats that were going into the communities and biting a lot of people or going into communities and giving fleas to a lot of people and then moving on to another community, it wouldn't have spread the way that it did. And it's much more likely that bubonic plague actually spread via fleas and ticks that were living on people. So person-to-person transmission was much more likely than rat-to-person transmission. Now, I don't think that that means that rats couldn't have been the initial vectors. Rats continue to this day to be vectors of the plague. There are actually quite a few vectors that we see across the globe. Rats are quite a common one. Plague exists in modern times in the US, China, India, Africa, Vietnam, Mongolia. We've seen outbreaks in many of these places. And I think the reason that historically we thought that it was rats is because in modern plague outbreaks, when we look at them from an epidemiological standpoint, it does seem to be that rats are the primary vector. But back in the day, I mean, people were gross. Like we didn't use soap. We definitely didn't have antibiotics. We all lived on top of each other. Fleas and lice were rampant. And so these things seem to be like nom, nom, nom, nomming, and then jumping onto the next person. Bubonic plague, the one that we think of, is... actually named for its bubos. Yeah, these swollen, gross lymph nodes that people get in their groin, their armpits and their neck. And they get these bubos and they are painful. And so that's where the name bubonic plague came from. But there's other ways that plague can show up. There's septicemic plague, which is in the bloodstream. And there's pneumonic plague, which is in the lungs. That one's the most infectious type. Bubonic plague kills about half of the people it infects without treatment. But that's just bubonic. Without treatment, septicemic and pneumonic plague almost always kill. But with treatment, with modern antibiotics, there's a really good success rate, 85%. And that's including all the people that live in undeveloped countries where they may be waiting until way too late to get that kind of treatment. So it's quite survivable now, back in the day, not the same story. And ooh, you want to know what happens when you have plague other than bubos?

'''J:''' Uh-oh. Yeah. No, I just had the plague.

'''C:''' Yeah, right. Gangrene erupting, pus-filled glands. Your lungs literally start to dissolve. Here's the crazy thing.

'''S:''' I hate it when that happens.

'''C:''' Yeah, I know. Dissolving lung. It's like, what are your symptoms? My lungs are dissolving.

'''E:''' Get those clams out, though.

'''C:''' Yeah, right. Yersinia pestis is really virulent. And the reason is because it's an interesting mutant. So its original form was a soil bacterium. And when it evolved the ability to infect people and animals, it evolved some really cool tricks. It's not able to survive outside the body. It has to be in an organism, whether it's a person, the person's flea, the person's lice or rats, mice, prairie dogs. And then what happens is because it can't live outside the animal, it could die off too readily. So it evolved this way to kind of compensate for that. It disables your immune system. So it has these specific toxins that, that wipe out your macrophages. And so when your macrophages are wiped out, which are immune cells, the bacteria just multiply and multiply and multiply. So people are often, the actual cause of death from the plague is that they're literally poisoned to death by the bacterial load. There's so much bacteria. It gathers up under their skin in these big chunks, like these clots. And then the fleas and the lice are able to just get loads of bacteria by biting you and then sending it on to the next people. And check this out. In 2003, 2,100 people got the plague, 180 deaths, nearly all of them in Africa. In the DRC in 2006, 50 people died from the plague. That's modern. And then if you go way back in time, here's something that I had no idea. The Great Plague of London was from 1665 to 1666. One in five residents of London died then. Back in 541 ADE, 10,000 people a day died of the plague in Constantinople, which we know now is Istanbul. So they say that that wiped out kind of the root there. A lot of people in the 1700s, half of Europe's population was wiped out by the plague. And then, of course, we know about the Black Death, which killed 25 million people. Like this is sort of the great equalizer, isn't it? Oh, And sorry, I found the reservoirs. Mice, camels, chipmunks, prairie dogs, rabbits, and squirrels, and again, rats. But the funny thing is, if you read about the plague, up until this new study was released, they almost all kind of just pass along that same folk wisdom. Rats caused the plague. Rats always caused the plague. People got it from the rats. People died. But now we're questioning if that's actually the case.

'''S:''' Yeah, but there was a news item a couple of years ago that we reported on where there was a study saying maybe it wasn't the rats. Maybe it was the other rodents, like chipmunks and squirrels and stuff. But they didn't really make a compelling case. But apparently there's a lot of controversy in plague science.

'''C:''' Yes, it's a hot debate topic. And the reason that they're probably seeking out alternative explanations is because it's never sat well with epidemiologists, historical epidemiologists, or forensic epidemiologists, or rats, because it just didn't add up. It didn't seem to be happening solely in places where the rat populations were high. And in modern cases of plague and some other historical cases of plague where we can tie it to the rats, There's this die-off event where just before all the people started dropping dead, there were these massive piles of rat carcasses. And there doesn't seem to be any evidence in the historical literature of rat die-offs during the Black Death. And that's why people were like, gosh, it just doesn't seem like it was the rats. But up until now, they haven't really been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation. But based on their computer modeling, they're thinking fleas and lice, man. Gross.

'''S:''' Definitely the insects, just we don't know who they were coming from.

'''C:''' Yep, yep, yep. That sort of bottlenecked the – I mean they didn't bottleneck the population but they reduced the population and then it kind of re-exploded. Think about what the US population – no, what the global population would be right now if we didn't have any plague events.

'''S:''' Yeah, although it's hard to say because, I mean, history would have been so different.

'''C:''' Absolutely. Yeah, so many things might have changed.

'''S:''' They might have had more wars or there might have been other things.

'''C:''' Massive butterfly effect.

'''S:''' Yeah, right.

'''B:''' We could be traveling to Alpha Centauri.

'''C:''' We could be, Bob.

'''E:''' Maybe, but maybe not.

'''J:''' You mean right now, Bob? Sure.

'''B:''' Damn. Yeah. So centuries of – well, you know, sublight.

'''S:''' Arguably, Bob, scientific advance was faster after the Black Death because before that, labor was cheap. And so we just threw labor at every problem. After the Black Death, labor was in short supply and so people had to invent items, machinery to do the work. And so it actually spawned a lot of advance.

'''C:''' And medical advance too.

'''B:''' You could say more people means more wars and you know how awesome wars are for advancing tech.

'''S:''' Again, we just don't know how it would all shake out.

'''B:''' You could make it many different scenarios. All you could say is things would be very different right now.

'''J:''' Kind of like the Mirror Mirror universe.

'''C:''' Yeah. Maybe that's it.

'''B:''' Maybe they just didn't have the Black Death and that's why the Terran Federation has taken over the galaxy.

'''C:''' So guys, if you're interested in reading this article, you can find it online in full text. It's called Human Ectoparasites and the Spread of Plague in Europe During the Second Pandemic. So these ectoparasites, of course, are things like body lice and fleas. Pretty interesting.

=== Britt Hermes Lawsuit (22:58) ===
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20210512165827/https://www.skeptics.com.au/features/britt-hermes-legal-costs-fundraising-campaign/ Britt Hermes Legal Costs Fundraising Campaign]<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20210512165827/https://www.skeptics.com.au/features/britt-hermes-legal-costs-fundraising-campaign/ Australian Skeptics: Britt Hermes Legal Costs Fundraising Campaign]</ref>

'''S:''' So you guys are aware of what's happening with Brit Hermes, right, who we had on the show? Yeah. Absolutely.

'''B:''' She's going to have a baby.

'''J:''' We know how she feels on a personal level.

'''C:''' I know. This is a slap suit, isn't it?

'''S:''' Absolutely. So just to remind you, Britt Hermes is a former naturopath who saw the light, realized that her profession was basically a sham, and she writes the Naturopathic Diaries where she talks about some science-based criticisms of naturopathy and naturopaths and their practice. And she is being sued by naturopath Colleen Huber for defamation and it's – in my opinion, this is blatantly a slap suit, which is a strategic lawsuit against public participation. It's meant to intimidate or threaten somebody into silence and she basically said, yeah, take down your blog post or we're going to sue you.

'''J:''' Where have I heard that before?

'''S:''' Yeah, where have you heard that before? She's not going to do that. She's going to defend herself and defend her right because if she caves to that, then she's done, right? I mean then every naturopath will tell her to take down all of her posts. But of course, even defending yourself from a frivolous slap suit is going to cost a lot of money.

'''C:''' So … Well, and let's not forget that Britt lives in Germany and she's being sued in Germany where the First Amendment, first of all, doesn't exist. They have their own protections, but apparently their protections are not nearly as strict as ours. So this might be a more uphill battle for her.

'''J:''' Sure.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' Precedents there aren't great.

'''S:''' Yeah. So I wrote about Colleen Huber on science-based medicine when this happened. This was actually months ago because I think she needed a little bit of attention. I said, well, who is this person and what is she actually claiming?

'''E:''' I hope you were careful.

'''S:''' Not at all. Basically, you say it like it is, right? So she is a cancer quack. That's the bottom line. She tells patients that chemotherapy will weaken you and strengthen the cancer. So she tries to scare people away from effective standard treatment. And she treats you with intravenous vitamin C, which doesn't work, and intravenous baking soda. Oh, gosh.

'''J:''' Oh, that one works. What?

'''E:''' Baking soda?

'''C:''' That's so dangerous. Oh, my gosh.

'''S:''' It's based on the idea that – This is Hulda Clark territory. Yeah. Cancer is like an acidic environment.

'''E:''' Vitamin deficiency or something, right.

'''C:''' And if you – No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, but we have buffers in our blood for a reason.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah. So whatever. Also like that sugar feeds the cancer. So you got to reduce the sugar. So she's doing this thing where she's taking basic science concepts that are like, oh, let's see. Let's explore this aspect of how cancer works. And then she's just making clinical claims, jumping 10 steps forward and making completely unsubstantiated clinical claims. When I looked at the research, is there anything published to support any of these things that she's doing? And the bottom line is the quick answer is no. These are not supported by adequate clinical evidence. So she is recommending IV treatments that are not proven to be effective for cancer. She's claiming a 90% effectiveness that if you follow her program, most people go into a remission, 90% success rate. So that is a huge red flag for cancer. quackery, making those kinds of dramatic claims that And of course, recommending treatment, that's not the standard of care. Why isn't it the standard of care? You have to believe that every other physician is either stupid or evil, right? That's always – they don't want to really cure you, conspiracy nonsense. So anyway, Britt was perfectly justified in calling out Huber for her quackery and for her good work. She's getting souped. So as we have done in the past, the skeptical community is standing together to defend people who are in this situation. And actually Iran from the Australian skeptics and the Australian skeptics as a group have initiated a fundraiser to raise the initial money that Brit will need to defend herself from this suit. I mentioned this briefly on the show last week and there has been a great response from everybody mentioning this. She's already raised I think around $40,000, which is a little bit more than half of what she needs really just to get through the first phase. As we know, she might need ten times that to really see this through the end. Gosh. And I don't know like how expensive these suits typically are in Germany. So who knows? I mean, as you say, Cara, it's a different world there. So it could be a lot worse. I don't think it's as bad as the UK, which is, I think, the most expensive place to defend yourself against a libel case.

'''C:''' When Brit was posting about it or when the Australian skeptics were posting about it because they've been really helping to organize her fundraising drive, I saw a lot of chatter on social media about people saying that there were recent kind of not great precedents that have been set in Germany. And maybe some of our German listeners can clarify, but that there have been individuals who have successfully pulled off really overt slap suits recently. And so that's like kind of doesn't bode well, which is why we just need to fight even harder. Yeah.

'''S:''' So we'll have the link to the URL. It's kind of long, but it's skeptics.com.au. slash features slash Brit Hermes legal costs fundraising campaign.

'''C:''' But there are dashes in between all those words.

'''S:''' So we'll have the link in our notes. If you search on that, you'll find it. Just use your Google Foo to find it. And we'll post it on our Facebook page as well. And so we also, in the process of doing this, because actually over the last year, I've probably been contacted by two or three other people who are like, hey, I got a cease and desist letter because of my blog or my podcast or whatever where I'm criticizing a quack. And I basically have no choice but to take it down because I don't have any way to even initiate a defense against it. So what I think that we should do is create a – basically a legal defense fund. Rather than doing a case-by-case, just have a war chest, a legal defense – anti-quackery. We'll give it a better name, like an anti-quackery legal defense fund. that will always be there. We obviously could have a committee of science-based medicine experts who can maintain it, who could manage it. So that if some anonymous skeptic who wrote a perfectly reasonable blog and then somebody is threatening to sue them to shut it down, we will already have the funds available to defend them. And I've already spoken to my attorney about it. I think it's a fantastic idea. That's basically what you do in situations like this. You create a legal defense fund so that you can arm yourself against slap suits or this kind of legal intimidation. So the – Hermes Legal Defense Fund will probably morph into that eventually. But we obviously have to take care of her first because she's being sued at the moment.

'''C:''' Yeah, and they did say if they raise more funds – they're trying to raise something like $85,000 for the time being, which probably won't be enough. But they did say if they raise a bunch more, they're going to roll it over.

'''S:''' To this fund, yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly.

'''S:''' To the Legal Defense Fund, yeah.

'''C:''' So hopefully we can – we've already started. I want to say we just got an email from Iran today. I think he sent out a big blast to people on their mailing list that we're getting close. And we're recording this on Wednesday night. So as of Wednesday night, 58,000 of the 80,000 that they were hoping for. And that's in four days. 1,400 donors, you guys. That's so great. But it's still not enough. It's still not enough.

'''J:''' It's a great start.

'''C:''' But gosh, U.S., Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand. It warms my heart.

'''S:''' Actually, I just got an email from Iran saying they're over 58K as of right now. This information will be obsolete by the time the show goes up.

'''C:''' Oh, and guys, there's a shortened URL here. It's just www.skeptics.com.au. forward slash Brit Hermes.

'''S:''' Okay, great.

'''E:''' Perfect.

'''S:''' That's B-R-I-T-T-H-E-R-M-E-S.

'''C:''' Much better.

'''B:''' Please note these are the thoughts of Stephen Novella and not necessarily shared by the Rogues, HDU Productions, or Bob's dog, Molly.

'''S:''' I talked to Molly and she's totally on board with this, Bob.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah. Two paws up. Yeah.

'''S:''' And our case is winding down. I mean hopefully. I mean there's still a couple of possible appeals that he could do. But when it's – the last thing is finally, finally over. There's no more appeals. There's nothing possible. We'll give what the final tally is. But it is looking like he's going to be paying a huge chunk of my legal costs. And that will be a good cautionary tale for anyone who wants to come after us as well. Listen, if you want to threaten skeptics with slap suits for expressing their opinion and opinions are protected in the United States. You cannot sue somebody for an opinion. This is what's going to happen. We're going to fight it. We're going to defend ourselves and you're going to end up paying a boatload of money. And you're going to get a lot of negative Barbra Streisand effect probably to boot as well.

'''B:''' In our opinion. Yeah.

'''S:''' So it's not a good strategy. It's just not a good strategy.

'''RW:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' A.K.A. come at me, bro.

'''E:''' A.K.A. let's do this.

=== Fake News Follow Up (32:34) ===
* [https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/01/16/study-42-percent-of-republicans-believe-accurate-but-negative-stories-qualify-as-fake-news/ Study: 42 percent of Republicans believe accurate — but negative — stories qualify as "fake news"]<ref>[https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/01/16/study-42-percent-of-republicans-believe-accurate-but-negative-stories-qualify-as-fake-news/ WaPost: Study: 42 percent of Republicans believe accurate — but negative — stories qualify as "fake news"]</ref>

'''S:''' All right. Evan, there's a couple of interesting recent studies and surveys looking at people's attitudes towards facts and fake news.

'''B:''' My attitude.

'''E:''' Yeah, I saw this one the other day as well, and maybe you have too. The folks at Gallup Knight Foundation have published the results of a survey titled American Views, Trust, Media, and Democracy. And for disclosure, the survey was funded by several foundations, including the John and James Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. and George Soros' Open Society Foundation. Now, here are some key paragraphs from the introduction of the report. Technological advances have made it easier for Americans to connect with each other and to find information, including details about the major issues facing the country. But those advances present both challenges and opportunities for individuals and U.S. institutions. Results of this 2017 survey show that most Americans believe it is now harder to be well-informed and to determine which news is accurate. They increasingly perceive the media as biased and struggle to identify objective news sources. They believe the media continue to have a critical role in our democracy, but are not very positive about how the media are fulfilling that role. And the research was based on a national mail survey of more than 19,000 U.S. adults aged 18 and older. Now, one of the items from the survey that generated a few headlines had focused on the term fake news. The Washington Post's headline reads, And here it is right from the study. The participants were asked, among many things, to rate, and I'm quoting, accurate news stories casting a politician or political group in a negative light. 26% of Democrats said this was always true. 42% of Republicans say that this was always true. In fact, 10% of Republicans say it's never true. I actually have a question about the wording of this particular statement. I don't know if you guys had some thoughts on it or had a chance to read it. Let me read it again. The statement that they asked the participants was, accurate news stories casting a politician or political group in a negative light. And they asked that as opposed to, for example, your politician or political group, right? They say a politician or political group. So the statement reads as nonpartisan, but am I misinterpreting that?

'''C:''' No, the statement itself is nonpartisan. It's saying that people's interpretations of the statement have a partisan influence. But it's hilarious because the first word is accurate.

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' I think that was the thing that they were going for. If people are reporting accurate news but it's disparaging of a political party, is that fake news? Right. And the 42 percent of Republicans said, yeah, that's fake news.

'''E:''' Right. Yeah. So basically dismiss it because it is negative.

'''C:''' But also let's be clear. You said 20. some odd percent of Democrats say the same thing.

'''E:''' They did. Yes, they did. Which is bad. That is bad.

'''S:''' You have to point out this isn't a scientific survey because it was a mail-in survey, right?

'''E:''' No.

'''S:''' There's a self-selection bias potential there, which is always hard to know exactly how that plays out.

'''E:''' But about the term fake news. Yeah. They devoted a section of this survey to the term fake news. So what do Democrats think it means versus what Republicans think it means? They found that Democrats, they are more closely define it to the original definition of the phrase referring to fabricated news stories that are intended to deceive. Right. Makes sense. That's how I see it as well. And I'm not a Democrat. Republicans, on the other hand, they're more likely to broaden the meaning, which includes what President Donald Trump has ascribed to the term, which he often uses when describing news stories he dislikes, regardless of whether or not they're factual. So that's a significant problem. This is a real breakdown. It's part of the slow erosion of our political discourse, I think. Language is important, and there are rules to language, and that's important. And look, I make language mistakes on a regular basis. I try not to repeat them. I try to correct myself. But an important rule, I think, of language is not to sort of hastily change the definitions of the words. Some words will naturally evolve over time and some will actually die out. But when words become co-opted or misused and abused beyond recognition, that's a big, big problem. Like what Deepak Chopra did to the word quantum, that poisoned the minds of millions of people who have now no idea what quantum is.

'''S:''' I agree. We talk about this a lot on the show because it drives us nuts when people use words to confuse and obfuscate rather than to explain and enlighten. And in politics, it always takes on an Orwellian kind of feel to it. It's like changing the meaning of words to control how people think. And this shows that that's actually what's happening. Yeah. You know, they've destroyed any kind of real useful definition for what it means to be fake news. The term was originally coined to mean news. that's entirely fabricated. You know, it was literally completely fake in order to make money, you know, to drive clicks or whatever. It's not the real news. It's actually fake news. It makes no attempt at being real. And Trump turns it into news I don't like. Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah, news I don't agree with, news that paints me in a negative light.

'''S:''' And that's actually changed people's understanding of it, which in this case I think erodes any kind of respect, understanding of facts and truth.

'''B:''' And now despots across the globe are using that term in order to beat down the media press.

'''E:''' Absolutely. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' And it's not just anyone. Look, when it comes from the most politically powerful person on the planet or the most politically powerful position, I should say, because there's other presidents have been accused of doing this as well with certain terms. This is a problem that should not be underestimated. It has obvious concrete effects on what is happening with the discourse politically.

'''J:''' What can be done about it?

'''E:''' Well, what can be done?

'''S:''' Start a skeptical podcast. Evan, I also sent you this other Rand Corporation report that just came out actually yesterday as we're recording this. Yes. Talking about truth decay, which is a funny sort of term that I think we've used before.

'''E:''' Yeah, we've used that term. I've seen it in skeptical circles for a while now.

'''S:''' Yeah, truth decay. But they're saying this is a real historical phenomenon. This isn't the only time this has happened in American history. that Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they did say that looking at this phenomenon of lack of respect for facts and truth, that there's a lot about the current episode that is actually worse than even these prior historical episodes. That there is something real going on here. There is a historic lack of respect for just facts as facts, you know. It makes it really hard to have a conversation and we've all experienced this personally. You can't have a reasonable conversation with somebody when you can't even agree on basic facts because there's no source. There's no common source that we can agree upon.

'''E:''' Right, and how are you supposed to govern effectively if you don't have facts and evidence to base a lot of your decisions on? To wrap up, Steve, Jay, you had asked, what can we do about it? That is obviously the $64,000 question. I don't know that there's any one solution. We have to be vigilant as ever, consult multiple sources when it comes to news items, do your own homework as best as you can. It takes extra effort, yes, but you have to do it. And here's a website that might be able to help you. MediaBiasFactCheck.com. This is a very good website. What it does is it helps the reader figure out the most extreme sides, both politically left and politically right, sources of information, which ones really lean hard to the extremes, and also it tells you which ones aren't. are the most neutral. Included in the most neutral, they did include Center for Inquiry, right in the neutral, which was interesting. They also have some other categories here, not just for politics, but they have a pro-science category. And in there is, oh, let's see. Oh, science-based medicine. And oh, wait, what's this? The New England Skeptical Society. I've heard of them as well. That's awesome. Yeah, it's really great.

'''S:''' Always nice to get a mention.

'''E:''' It's very, very good. And there are hundreds. They list hundreds of sources and outlets there. So I think it's a very good resource that people might want to use as a starting ground when they're looking up certain things.

'''S:''' Yeah, cool. All right, Jay, get us up to date on Who's That Noisy?

{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? (43:23) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 653
|answer = Garbage can rolling over packed snow
|}}



'''J:''' So last week, I played This Noisy. And by God, a lot of people didn't like it. So you might not like this noisy, but you don't have to like them all. This one is very annoying to listen to. But here it is. So I will say this. I have been doing Who's That Noisy for a long time now. I've had a lot of experiences with it. I don't think I got more emails than I did with this one.

'''S:''' Oh, really? Complaints, huh?

'''J:''' Because I think it had such a white noise aspect to it where it could be so many different things. I got incredibly weird and very different emails. you know, suggestions and ideas about what this is and everything. So let me, you know, I did pick some of my favorites here and I'm just going to go through this, but you know, there's so many more than, than what I'm representing here, guys. So I, I considered the, uh, those people that, um, said it was a zip line. I thought that was probably the worst guess. Although I have to say, I've never heard a zip line. So maybe there is a zip liney noise in there, but someone, um, named B-Dog, who will represent all of you who picked Zipline, said, it's a Zipline. My neighbors have one in their yard for the kids. I hear it every day. Okay, well, maybe I don't know what it sounds like, but I don't know.

'''S:''' It doesn't go zip?

'''J:''' Yeah. No.

'''C:''' Well, it does kind of go zip, actually. I've been on Ziplines a lot. They do not sound like that. Ziplines do kind of go zip. Do they? Maybe once people have it in their backyards, they're different. I don't know.

'''J:''' Now, this next person, I would... I have given them the win because they heard exactly what I heard. And if you guys remember last week, for some reason I ended up telling you after the show what the noisy was and we joked about it a little bit. And then I said to you guys, listen to it again, but listen to it with this. And this is exactly – Jeff Hughes, a listener, wrote in and said exactly what I told – the crew of what I thought I heard. And he said, Hey Jay, don't really know what the noise he was this week, but to me it sounded like someone opening a creaky door and then approximately 65,793 bats flying out and screeching. I can only assume because they don't like whoever is scraping their nails on a chalkboard. So that's my guess. So crazy, right? Jeff, you and I heard the same exact thing. And I told this to everyone. I'm so like, So happy that someone heard that because I'm like, wow, I'm really tripping here. I hear a creaky door and I hear bats screaming. Thank you, Jeff. We share a mind. Everyone else can go screw themselves. There were other guesses. Patrick Carr sent in a guess and Patrick said, hey, Jay. Glad you're feeling better. The noise this week has a noticeable spin up and spin down, so I think it's a tool. A bit of a guess, but I'll say it's a high-speed saw cutting through dry ice. I like this one. He also says live long and prosper, which you will always get. Star Trek points with me if you say that. Metal on ice, not a bad guess. Not a bad guess. But of course, somebody guessed it. And this is amazing. And to Rob, who sent this in, thinking that someone fully guessed what it is is very impressive. And here's what Benjamin R. Spiller wrote in. He said, and this is for the win. He said, this week's Who's That? Noisy sounds like the noise that my trash can makes when rolling it out on the curb over extremely cold, packed snow. And ironically, tomorrow is trash day. It's the sound that will curl my toes tomorrow morning. So Ben said it all. A lot of people wrote in saying things to me like, oh, my God, Jay, what the F? Why did you make me hear that? And could you pick a more annoysing noisy? I don't think I could. I like how you said annoysing.

'''C:''' Oh, that's a great new word.

'''S:''' That's annoysing. What do you call that when you combine two words into a new word?

'''C:''' Oh, we talked about that.

'''J:''' Wait, did I just make up a word too? Port Montu.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's a Port Montu. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''E:''' Never been there.

'''S:''' That's annoysing.

'''J:''' Oh, my God. I'm co-opting that. That's my word. I made it up.

'''E:''' Chillax, everyone. Okay.

'''J:''' All right. So Rob from last week, Rob sent it in, and Rob said, Jay, this morning when I tipped my trash container onto its large plastic wheels and began to roll it down towards the street for pickup, I heard a noise coming from it that I had never heard in 10 years of doing this. So, of course, I had to stop and record it for you. And then he said, note that my trash container was unusually heavy, maybe double its usual weight because he had vacation and they missed picking it up. And there was a thin layer of crusty snow but not quite ice covering the black top of my driveway. Steve has absolutely said I cannot play it again. So anyone that wants to hear it again, you have to rewind because Steve refused. He said, I will delete it if you try to play it twice during. Who's That Noisy. So that was a great one. I loved that one even though it was a horrible sound. And to a lot of people, this was like fingers on a chalkboard type of sound. It was very provocative. So there you have it. Thank you, Rob. This was a great week. All right. This week's Noisy was sent in by a listener named Kirk Mona. Take a listen to this. What is that?

'''S:''' What is it? I just had a plan for the apes flashback.

'''J:''' Something crazy is going on. So listen, if you think you know what it is or you heard something really awesome this week, email me at WTN at theskepticsguide.org.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (48:32) ===
[guttural, throaty animal grunts]

'''J:''' {{wtnAnswer|656|what it is}} or you heard something...

{{anchor|interview}} 

== Interview with Richard Wiseman (49:11) ==
* [https://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/ Richard's website]
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_text_about_[[#sof|skip this abridged version]]

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Jay. Hey, we have a really fun interview coming up with Richard Wiseman. And as is often the case, we have a much longer uncut version available as premium content. So if you want to listen to the whole interview and you have access to premium content, you might want to skip this abridged version. And of course, if you want to get access to premium content, then you need to become a premium member of the SGU. So let's go on with that interview. We are here now at SciCon 2017 with Richard Wiseman.

'''J:''' I'm keeping that in, Richard.

'''S:''' Richard, how are you doing, man?

'''RW:''' I've got severe flatulence.

'''C:''' Good noise you make. That's not what I would go for. That's not juvenile at all.

'''RW:''' I'm over-egging the pudding quite literally.

'''E:''' Severe is the correct...

'''RW:''' Severe? Yes. Before we started recording, you were talking about your wife's love of flatulence.

'''S:''' You're talking about Jay's wife.

'''RW:''' Jay's wife. I'm so sorry. It's all right. I'm trying to pin it on your wife. Sorry. Jay's wife.

'''S:''' She thinks it's very humorous.

'''RW:''' It's extremely funny. It is.

'''S:''' There's something objectively funny about farting. There's no question.

'''C:''' It's true.

'''RW:''' Now, I'll tell you what happened. When I was six years old, I was at school, and I was sitting there and minding my own business, and upside down, massive head of Santa Claus appeared. Appeared. Appeared. What does that mean? Looming over me. Oh. So Santa Claus had arrived at school. And he sort of like decided the best thing to do was grab me and sort of go over me. And so this big looming face appeared. And so I actually shit myself.

'''B:''' Oh. Santa made you shit.

'''E:''' He made you hit the brown note.

'''RW:''' So it's like, ho, ho, ho, ho.

'''C:''' The way he knew? Oh, God, the whole school knew.

'''RW:''' I don't know if you ever shit yourself on your six. It stinks. It absolutely stinks. And so I went to the toilets. And I tried to wash my underwear, but not very successfully, my trousers. And I came back. I just stank. I was like, shit. And so my association with Santa Claus is very, very negative.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah. And stuck with you.

'''RW:''' Oh, yes.

'''S:''' The shit, I mean.

'''RW:''' Yes. And he surprised me, in part because it was July. So I decided to start off on that heartwarming story.

'''S:''' That's really sad. Touches my cockles, yeah.

'''RW:''' Boo! You're going to regret that, I'll tell you.

'''C:''' Did you not have a teacher to help you through?

'''RW:''' We had several.

'''C:''' Did they just left you to go take care of yourself?

'''J:''' They didn't send you home?

'''RW:''' No, well, it was old school because I wasn't allowed to go home because the other animals...

'''C:''' But didn't they have the extra pants for the kids who pooped their pants?

'''RW:''' No, that's an American thing. In Britain, we don't have that.

'''S:''' British kids don't shit themselves.

'''RW:''' Well, you do shit yourself, but you have to go wash it, and then you have to wear the pants. But the amount that shit stinks. There must be an evolutionary reason for that.

'''S:''' Yeah, because it's bad for you, and they want you to be repulsed by it.

'''C:''' But it's interesting that there's a changeover.

'''E:''' Don't eat it.

'''RW:''' Don't eat it, right.

'''C:''' So I don't have babies, but all of you have babies. And I have friends who have babies. And there's a changeover when they start to eat solid food. Like, it's not that gross at the beginning. No, it isn't.

'''S:''' No, that's correct.

'''C:''' And then it gets vile.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''RW:''' But does your own baby's shit, is that repulsive as well? Oh, yeah. Okay, there's no point. You go, oh, it's my shit. That's different to another baby's shit.

'''C:''' But it's like breast milk and formula poo. It's very different than poo-poo.

'''E:''' Right.

'''RW:''' Oh, that's interesting. Right.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''RW:''' So, anyway, that happened to me when I was six. That was one big thing. That's horrible. And then the other big thing that happened to me recently was… fast forward to today. so about a week ago I was coming across here and I thought I haven't got a shirt. so I went out in edinburgh and there's a shirt shop and it was 40 pounds for a shirt. this shirt I'm wearing now no shirt thank you. and so I said to the man 40 pounds. he said what do you want it for? I said I'm going across to speak at a conference. he said you know what's going to happen. you're going to pour coffee down that shirt. you need two shirts.

'''E:''' it's true 80 pounds.

'''RW:''' So I thought, I think he's right. I said, I can't come here with just one shirt. So I bought two shirts for £80. He said, if you're buying two shirts, we've got a deal. It's three shirts for £90.

'''C:''' That's a great deal.

'''RW:''' It's a great deal. So of course, at that point, you're trapped. So I went, I'll have three shirts for £90. He said, if you're buying three shirts for £90, for £100, you can have four shirts.

'''B:''' at some point.

'''RW:''' Well, that's the thing. So I walked out spending £100 on four identical shirts.

'''E:''' It's not a bad price.

'''RW:''' No, it's not a bad price. It's not a bad price. But I was thinking, how far does that go down? You could be there. I was thinking, do I have an offer for the entire shop? Uh, So I've got four identical shirts like this for £25 each.

'''B:''' Identical?

'''RW:''' Absolutely identical. And I thought, my goodness, there's psychology in action.

'''S:''' He upheld you big time.

'''RW:''' Oh, massively.

'''E:''' But he did a great job. Right, it's the right approach that he used.

'''RW:''' Unbelievable. Did you spill coffee on it yet? I haven't, but I'm going to try that just because I can.

'''C:''' I packed one pair of jeans. Did not pack. I'm wearing one pair of jeans. Did not pack any jeans because I wanted to be light for the weekend because LA to Vegas is only an hour. And in the Uber on the way to the airport, I spilled my entire bottle of apple juice all over my head.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh.

'''C:''' Is that what I'm smelling? You can't see it, but I can feel it.

'''E:''' I can still feel it. It's going to be like sticky.

'''C:''' So I might have to go and buy a pair of jeans here in Vegas.

'''RW:''' Well, if you do, be very careful because if you get that same guy, you're at $100.

'''S:''' You'll go home with four pairs.

'''E:''' Right.

'''RW:''' So those are my two big bits of news as a kid. Santa Claus. And recently I spent £100 on four shows.

'''E:''' I think we got everything we need.

'''S:''' Is there anything new in the world of psychology that you've discovered recently? This is a very generic question, but have you come across any studies recently where you're like, oh, okay, this changes the way I think about this aspect of psychology? Wow, you study psychology.

'''E:''' Here we go.

'''S:''' Yes. No. No.

'''J:''' Yes.

'''RW:''' Yes. Rob Jenkins, my very, very good friend from University of York. Rob's a lovely, lovely man. Very creative. So there's an illusion, which you may have been. If you've seen the Venture Magic show, you may have seen it. It's a spiral. And you look at the spiral. And then when you look at someone's head, there's an afterimage effect. And their head seems to get bigger.

'''S:''' The balloon. Yeah. I've seen that illusion. It's very effective. It's great.

'''RW:''' It's on the web, I'm sure. Here's what Rob did. He showed people an eye chart and got them to read down the eye chart until they said, I can't see that row. Then he showed them the spiral. They look back at the eye chart. It looks bigger. They can read stuff they could not see first time round. That is amazing. That is absolutely true. It's a publishable. He's out there. He's published it. It came out probably about a month ago.

'''E:''' So neurologically, what's going on?

'''S:''' I don't know. That's interesting. So, I mean, it's actually... What the... That information, it's like it's enhancing that information on the post-processing visual association.

'''RW:''' So he thinks it's like a pattern filling, that it actually is kind of giving you more of a visual field. And it's interpolating.

'''S:''' That's right.

'''RW:''' That's right. But isn't that a phenomenal idea? So he published it, I think, about a month ago.

'''B:''' So we have a zoom lens.

'''S:''' Essentially. But it's digital zoom. It's not optical zoom. Yes. We have a digital zoom in our brains.

'''E:''' Okay. Well, I'll take it.

'''B:''' That's awesome.

'''S:''' So there we go. Isn't that a great study? That is a great study. There we are. That's awesome. I never would have guessed that.

'''RW:''' Yeah. So there's a search for that.

'''B:''' If we could permanently induce that state where everything seems to be getting bigger, we could read things.

'''E:''' There might be some side effects, you know, on a long-term basis, though, you know.

'''RW:''' So no, look up that paper. I can't remember the title, but Rob Jenkins.

'''C:''' So Richard, when you were in school, did you study experimental psychology?

'''RW:''' Oh yeah, I've always been an experimental psychologist. I'm an experimental social psychologist. This is the thing. So what I'm interested in is people and the way they interact. I'm not a neuropsychologist at all. I know nothing about the brain. But I'm just interested in the work that conversations do, for example. So when you tell somebody about yourself, what do you leave out? What do you put in? That's the sort of thing that I find very interesting.

'''S:''' That's why you didn't like our explanation of the foot fetish before because we went neuroscientific, not social psychological. That's correct. You want the social psychological explanation.

'''RW:''' That's right, which is the correct one.

'''E:''' Your countenance changed.

'''RW:''' It really did. That's right. There's this big brain emphasis in psychology, which is disastrous for psychology because it's reductionism gone mad. You kind of think telling people that they are their brains is terrible because it feels very fixed. Yeah. Where social psychology is about change. And so yet is the most important word. I was on the train the other day and there was a. I couldn't see her, but it was a female tennis player in the behind me. And she, I think, was a semi pro. And obviously she chatted to the guard and she's getting off the train. The guard said, so are you famous? And she gave the best reply ever from a social psychological perspective. She said, not yet.

'''C:''' Oh, interesting.

'''RW:''' And there's your social psychology. Right there. Not no, not yet. And that's all about social psychology. She thinks she will be. She has hope for the future.

'''S:''' So I always say, if you have to ask, then no.

'''C:''' What do you say when people ask you?

'''S:''' I say that. I say, well, you have to ask, then obviously no.

'''C:''' A guy on the plane today asked me that because he was asking what I do. And I was telling him, well, he was like, so you're famous, huh? And I was, I never know what to say because I'm not famous.

'''E:''' But I was like, I'm really, really, I'm nerd famous.

'''C:''' Like there's a very narrow amount of people. Because Will Wheaton walked on the plane at the same time and said, hey, Karen. I was like, hey, Will. And then he didn't know who Will Wheaton was either. And I was like, you're not our audience.

'''RW:''' But that tells you, she's not consciously thinking that. That tells you where her mindset is at. Her mindset is, I will be in the future.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''RW:''' And that's classic social psychology.

'''E:''' Plus, when you're walking on an airplane in Los Angeles, chances are higher than average, I would say, that probably you're going to run across somebody who's in the entertainment industry.

'''C:''' Oh, in L.A., yeah, definitely. Famous quote. Actually, at dinner last night, I went out to dinner and Stevie Wonder was at the restaurant.

'''E:''' See that? Wow.

'''B:''' You know what I say? Somebody asked me, I say D-level fame. D-fame.

'''RW:''' But that's still fixity, you see. That's fixity from a social psychological perspective.

'''E:''' Right, right.

'''RW:''' So that's what I am.

'''B:''' I have aspirations to see.

'''RW:''' Well, that's right, but that's not imbued in the answer, so that's why it's interesting.

'''C:''' I don't want to be famous. I would never answer like that, because to me that's a bit of a narcissistic answer. But I guess it's different if you're...

'''RW:''' an athlete that's.

'''C:''' I think that's slightly different because then they're looking to go up exactly yes but for somebody who is like in a public consciousness for their ideas or whatever I feel like being like one day I'll be famous.

'''RW:''' yes maybe but still it's it's. it's the work it does in the sense of it tells you where that person's at.

'''C:''' yeah yeah absolutely and so.

'''RW:''' so for school teachers you have kids say I'm not very good at maths. it's so different saying I'm not very good at maths yet yet yeah and yet tells you everything you need to know about that kid. Absolutely.

'''B:''' Right, right.

'''RW:''' So that's what I find interesting.

'''S:''' So I'm interested, and we've sort of touched on this before, probably more in private than on the show, but the way you don't like neuroscience reductionism. Yes. Which I understand, and I agree with your criticism of pop culture likes to do the hyper-reduction, what I would call hyper-reductionist. There's an appropriate level of reductionism. Hyper-reductionism means you ignore hierarchically higher levels of emergent behavior or whatever. So you cannot understand human behavior by studying the brain. You have to study human behavior. Yes. Right. So, because there's higher level things. But I don't think, I wouldn't ignore the role of the brain, though. I'd like to see how they all interact. Yeah.

'''RW:''' Yeah, but you've only got limited resources and brain stuff is expensive. And so the only thing that I think is interesting in the entire world of psychology and possibly the entire world in its entirety is change. Change is the only thing that makes anyone interesting and any play interesting or any talk interesting is change. And the problem with understanding someone's brain is it normally doesn't tell you anything about how they can change. So if we want to get kids to be better at school, understanding their brain versus maybe how long the lesson should be or where you get to follow their passion or any of those sorts of things, to me, change matters.

'''E:''' But what about a natural change process like age, how the brain changes with age?

'''RW:''' Then how does it help you be a better human by knowing that information? How does it stop?

'''C:''' Because then you can focus on the things that are more plastic as opposed to focusing on the things that are more critical.

'''S:''' Because the brain itself can change.

'''RW:''' The brain itself changes every moment of the day.

'''C:''' So if there are no areas where plasticity is going to be more impactful, you can actually focus on those areas.

'''RW:''' But most brain people don't. I agree with that. So if they go, okay, fine, so you want to get people to be more active in their old age or whatever, they go, well, no, I'm just interested in the brain. It has a fixity to it.

'''C:''' And I guess it just kind of depends on the application, right? When we talk about psychology, are we talking about experimental, are we talking about social, are we talking about clinical? I just went back to school. It was my first semester in a clinical psych PhD program. And it's funny because I hear echoes of the kind of anti-reductionist sentiment a lot in my professors, and they use the word medical model. And it denigrates it. Oh, that's the medical model. Yes. And the CBT people love the medical model, and the psychoanalysis people hate the medical model. And it's really interesting to see how siloed actual psychological practice is.

'''RW:''' Well, it really makes a difference. So if you view somebody as their brain, well, how are you going to change them? Well, you can physically put some drugs in there, or you can start cutting their brain around, and both of those have got a pretty… terrible history. if you see people as social beings where you start to change them from talking type therapies and then what do you say to them? well if you're a freudian you talk about their childhood or whatever.

'''C:''' cbt it's a lot of kind of using like classical conditioning and operant conditioning and yes it's all behavioral but then that changes the brain. yeah.

'''RW:''' So I think it does matter. I think it's very important. Change is very important. And so when I give talks, they are about how to change primarily, not the talks I'm giving here, but talks to normal audiences, not how you stay the same.

'''C:''' This is just weird.

'''RW:''' Lost course. It's all about getting people to have a more flexible mindset and see themselves in a flexible way. I think it's really important.

'''S:''' I will totally agree with you on that score. And I argue for that a lot, too. I don't like the focus on talent that we have in the United States because... Saying that someone is talented or a natural means that they didn't have to work for it so hard or that's just the way they naturally are. It actually denigrates them.

'''B:''' But couldn't you look at it this way, though, where they are so talented that they worked as hard as anyone else, but using that same level of exertion, they've reached heights.

'''S:''' other people have never been able to focus on their work.

'''C:''' They usually worked way harder. That's the thing that we're forgetting.

'''S:''' They just worked harder. They worked harder.

'''C:''' And it actually denigrates them to say, oh, you're such a natural talent. They're like, F you. I work my ass off every day at this.

'''S:''' And even, like, saying, like, oh, that person's really smart. It's like, well, maybe they studied a lot and they put a lot of effort and, you know, they leveled up their intelligence.

'''C:''' And they did have probably a social environment that, you know, was, like, lacking a lot of stereotype threat. And, you know, like, they had people around them to promote that kind of focused effort.

'''E:''' The environment matters.

'''B:''' Here's an idea that just occurred to me. You're denigrating hyper-reductionism in a way. But what about this idea? The idea that you could... hyper reductionism can be massively useful because using hyper reductionism you could use that knowledge that you've learned to actually imagine simulating a brain in a computer in such a way that you can then track what kind of change is possible in ways that you could never do to real people. but you've got a model in a brain is really complicated sure absolutely.

'''RW:''' and so you go yes that's fine it'll take a lot more than 100 years. you go that's fine. but if we want to make changes to kids tomorrow actually we know the psychology involved it's and it's really cost effective. So I just think, why don't we just go with that?

'''S:''' Why don't we just study actual people?

'''RW:''' Why don't we study actual people and how you get them to be better people or achieve their goals or whatever? We know that stuff. We don't need to know what's happening in their brain. That does not help us. one little jot.

'''C:''' There's this weird leap of faith that a lot of people have that once we can become that reductionistic somehow, that will clarify all the questions we have about how brain becomes mind. You know, how consciousness emerges.

'''S:''' It's like thinking. once we map the genome, we'll understand all genetic diseases. Yeah. We didn't, and we don't. No, you have to understand it at all levels.

'''C:''' I always pronounce it wrong, so I'm going to try again. Gestalt. Gestalt.

'''B:''' A fully realized brain simulation would be immensely valuable in so many ways.

'''S:''' Yeah, but you're talking about an end stage of basically reproducing a human brain in silicon. I mean, we're doing it. People are working on it. Then we'll be doing research on other brains, just the ones in silicon. Okay.

'''B:''' I know, but if the simulation is constructed in such a way, it can be incredibly illuminating on psychology and behavior and change.

'''C:''' I think it won't be as illuminating.

'''RW:''' I don't think you'll ever get it. Of course it's complicated. It would be like saying, could we model the whole of New York the way everyone goes about their business of a week? You can, but it's incredibly complicated. Sure, of course.

'''C:''' Think about the physicists who are doing that. They're modeling the universe, right, at like the femtometer level. They're tiny, tiny portions of the universe. And so, yes, it's illuminating, but is it going to answer all of our questions?

'''B:''' Not all of them.

'''S:''' It depends on what your question is. It can't be answered in any other way. So definitely for social psychological questions, you have to study people, right? Obviously, I'm a neurologist. Like if my question is Parkinson's disease, that's a brain disease. You have to study the brain.

'''RW:''' That's a different thing because that clearly has its roots in a neurological disorder and drugs may or may not. You can imagine drugs that impact both.

'''C:''' And clinical psychology, I think, needs to have a well-rounded understanding of both because there are people that respond and require drug therapy. And there are people for whom talk therapy works. Or cognitive behavioral therapy. All these different therapies work. And a lot of times you'll see that efficacy of these different approaches depend on the pathology involved.

'''B:''' Right. And I like imagining the tools that we're going to have, I think we'll clearly eventually have at some point, and how it can impact both your professions. Right. It's fascinating to think what we can see at some point in the future. Don't know when, but I think we'll see it at some point.

'''S:''' Be cool. Right. But for now, you're right. I think the media loves the hyper-reductionism. They like to talk about the brain.

'''RW:''' And museums love it.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''RW:''' I mean, I won't say which one, but there was a museum that had a huge brain exhibition on. And they phoned me up and said, we've got these brain things, we've got these brain experts, we understand everything about the human brain. The problem is no one's coming to our exhibition. You're a social psychologist. What kind of marketing can we do to get them? I said, no. You're the brain expert.

'''S:''' You seem to know all about the brain. You know how to get people to come to that.

'''RW:''' That's right. You know nothing about it. So you phone the person who's not in your exhibition because it's all about brains. And that's what I mean. when push comes to shove, when it comes to something that really matters as practical, then it's normally the psychologists that get the phone call. And because the brain people go, it's really complicated for non-medical people.

'''S:''' Yeah, for psychological questions, you have to have a psychological answer.

'''E:''' It's the right tool to use.

'''S:''' But again, there is then the overlap, too, like depression, anxiety is partly a biological, partly a psychological, social.

'''C:''' I do think that reductionism to the neurological level has some utility in that it helps erase stigma around mental illness. Because I think that historical viewings of mental illness as being disorders of will are really dangerous psychologically.

'''S:''' You can't confuse the different types of questions. There are neurological questions, there are psychological questions, there are neuropsychological questions.

'''C:''' And it's empowering for somebody to think, okay, so something is happening in my brain, and once we can really attack this through behavioral intervention and drug intervention, maybe my brain will start to reorganize in a healthier way. That is a much more meaningful and empowering thought than I'm not thinking positively enough.

'''S:''' But it is tricky. It is tricky because people will take that the wrong way and go, I don't have a problem. It's my brain. No, don't do that because you are your brain.

'''C:''' My dad has been diagnosed with depression for decades and he's never seen a therapist. He just takes meds. That's all he does for it. He thinks that's all he needs to do.

'''E:''' These are these cultural barriers that we need to be able to knock down that are still in place.

'''S:''' It's complicated, but yeah. The hyper-reductionism is a problem, I agree with you. The context is everything.

'''RW:''' When you hang around social psychologists who are into change, the language they use is so different. Because that's what my normal language is. How are you today? It's the most common thing social psychology says. How are you today? Because it's right now. You're not going to be like that tomorrow. It's not a long-term state. And so I was talking to a friend of mine. I said, I'm working on this other project. And I said, God, it's terrible. I said, guys, it's an absolute nightmare. And their first instant reaction was, and when's that going to change, do you think? Yeah. So suddenly you've got hope. Suddenly I said, oh, it's only another week.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''RW:''' And that's different to a fixed set of, oh, that's terrible.

'''E:''' I've gotten into the habit when I speak to my clients on the phone, Instead of just saying, how are you, just the very general, I say, how are things today? How are things going today? It's a subtle change, but I find it to be important. It makes it so that it's not just this throwaway phrase. I really would like for them to tell me why they're calling me today or whatever it is that they're going to talk about. I find it a little easier on them.

'''B:''' Yeah, they may think about the answer instead of just saying by reflex, I'm fine, you know.

'''S:''' Right, it's a vague question. How are you?

'''RW:''' You won't be like that tomorrow. It's now. It's living in the present.

'''E:''' So I've gotten in that habit.

'''RW:''' That's right.

'''E:''' It's become a habit for me now.

'''RW:''' Yes, interesting. The other great word, nothing to do with what we're talking about, the other great word is the willing word. Do you know this research on the word willing? Oh, it's brilliant. So you can up by about a third the chances of somebody doing something if you use willing. Would you be willing to?

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. Yeah.

'''E:''' oh my god right it's really good thinking about that.

'''C:''' yeah when I remember when I was a kid and used to always say can you? and like people would always correct you and say change it to wood or shall or yeah like can like. well of course you can but I'm that's not what I'm asking you.

'''E:''' yeah I remember always being like.

'''C:''' I hate adults like they would constantly correct that. Yeah, that always bugged me. But that's interesting.

'''S:''' That's interesting, the willing. Oh, willing's great. So there's really a lot of crossover.

'''RW:''' Would you be willing to give me 20 bucks? No. But it's a great tip. I mean, in emails or whatever, yeah, would you be willing to massively?

'''C:''' There's a lot of crossover there with social psychology and economics, aren't there? Like a lot of interplay between those fields.

'''RW:''' Yes, and also we forget that language represents our thoughts, and it's unthinking in that sense. We just use words without thinking, but listen to the words people use, and it tells you so much about what's going through their heads at that moment without them realising.

'''S:''' Yeah, I agree. As a professional, as a physician, we think all the time about the words that we use to communicate with our patients. Sometimes subtle choices in words can have huge impact on the perception and the interaction. You have to be very, very careful.

'''RW:''' On hope, on making them think they're dying. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about? versus is there something else? So you get a lot better high response rate on. is there something else. Is there something else you want to talk about, not. is there anything else you want to talk about.

'''C:''' Is that more dismissive? That's correct.

'''RW:''' Because one sounds almost slightly dismissive. It's just a general thing. But there's something else.

'''S:''' Is there anything else? I'm in a hurry.

'''RW:''' Is there something else you want to talk about? I sort of know what it is. So again, there's studies on that.

'''S:''' So basically you study how to manipulate people.

'''RW:''' Well, for the good of us all, particularly when it comes to book sales.

'''S:''' That's what you want us to believe.

'''C:''' For the good of us all, according to Richard Weissman.

'''E:''' Yes, I'm willing to believe that.

'''RW:''' We've covered so much psychology there. My God. We did. Yes.

'''E:''' We started with some very earthy topics.

'''RW:''' Yeah. There we go.

'''E:''' Anything else you want to talk?

'''RW:''' Nothing.

'''S:''' Is there something else you'd like to talk about?

'''RW:''' Would you be willing to say that? Yes.

'''S:''' Would you be willing to talk with us even further? Yeah. Richard, it's always a pleasure. You are one of our favorite people in the Skeptical Movement, partly because you're just hilarious. Top five.

'''E:''' That could be the reason.

'''J:''' Top five, okay.

'''S:''' And we love the British dry humor. Oh, my gosh.

'''RW:''' It's always a, you know, thank you.

'''E:''' See that?

'''S:''' All right, take care. Good.

'''RW:''' Nice speaking to you.

'''S:''' Bye.

{{anchor|sof}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:13:55) ==

{{SOFinfo
|item1 = A new paper presents preliminary evidence using fungal spores in concrete mix to make the concrete self-healing – the spores will become activated by cracks and secret calcium to fill them.
|link1 = <ref>[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180117152511.htm Binghamton University: Self-healing fungi concrete could provide sustainable solution to crumbling infrastructure]</ref>

|item2 = A recent comprehensive study finds that the phases of the moon are statistically significantly associated with the risk of a magnitude 3 or greater earthquake.
|link2 = <ref>[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180116131319.htm Seismological Society of America: Rates of great earthquakes not affected by moon phases, day of year]</ref>

|item3 = Engineers present the first atom-thick memory storage chip they are dubbing an "atomristor."
|link3 = <ref>[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180117114918.htm UT Austin: Ultra-thin memory storage device paves way for more powerful computing]</ref>

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = moon phases & earthquakes

|science1 = self-healing concrete
|science2 = atom-thick storage chip

|rogue1 = Cara
|answer1 = moon phases & earthquakes

|rogue2 =bob
|answer2 =moon phases & earthquakes

|rogue3 =jay
|answer3 =moon phases & earthquakes

|rogue4 =Evan
|answer4 =moon phases & earthquakes

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win = 
|swept =y 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


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

'''E:''' And that's the fake news to us because we disagree with it. Right. Yes. Yes.

'''S:''' Yes. Right. Sure it is. Okay. Three regular news items this week. Are you ready?

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' All right. Item number one. A new paper presents preliminary evidence using fungal spores in concrete mix to make the concrete self-healing. The spores will become activated by cracks and secrete calcium to fill them. Item number two, a recent comprehensive study finds that the phases of the moon are statistically significantly associated with the risk of a magnitude three or greater earthquake. And item number four, engineers present the first atom-thick memory storage chip. they are dubbing an atom-rister. Cara, go first.

=== Cara's Response ===

'''C:''' All right. New paper presents preliminary evidence using fungal spores and concrete mix. Concrete self-healing. So I'm assuming they don't, you know, just because they're fungal spores doesn't mean they're bad. But will they grow into like mushrooms? Will the concrete be all mushroomy? That would be a bad idea. But no, there's lots of kinds of fungus. Kind of cool. I hope that's true science. I kind of want to go with that being science. A recent comprehensive study finds the phases of the moon, phases of the moon, so like waxing, gibbous, we need to get all that, are statistically significantly associated with the risk of a magnitude three or greater earthquake. So that would have to have something to do with like the pull, like the tidal. I don't like that one. I so suck at like moons. Anytime you have something like the moon or tides, I always get it wrong. Because I'm like, how would that work? But, oh, that would probably totally work. No, but how would that work? Let's see. Engineers present the first atom-thick memory storage chip. I like that one. It's an atom-thick. Okay, whatever. But I've seen things where, like, things are written on, you know, in DNA, which is smaller. Well, no, how many? It's not smaller than an atom. It's smaller than a cell. Um, I have seen the boy and his Adam, which was a really cool IBM movie where they use like individual, I think they were hydrogen atoms and they were able to like animate them by, by moving them around and doing like an electron micrograph, like movie, like stop animation movie. And so, and then I've seen, I don't know. I just feel like they're improving and improving tiny storage. So although maybe you guys are going to be like, Carrie, you're being ridiculous. And Adam is way too small. Like it's gotta be the size of a whatever molecule. Um, At least this one seems like it's on the right track. So I'm going to go with the moon thing because it sounds like something like a hippie fortune teller would say.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

=== Bob's Response ===

'''B:''' Spore and concrete mix sounds pretty cool. My gut reaction is that you need a lot of spores to really – to help. And then of course more spores means less real concrete. But very cool idea. I assume the spores would just hang out there for years and decades without much degradation. I suppose spores are – that's kind of what spores do. All right. So that's kind of viable. Let's see. Let's go to three. Atom thick memory storage chip. Atom rister. Yeah, it's clearly based off of mem rister. But yeah, atom thick memory storage. Yeah, I mean it's not necessarily encoding memory on an atom, but it's just the key element of the chip is one atom thick. So it doesn't – it could be multiple atoms thick. But still, yeah, I mean, I can't really doubt stuff like this. It's just the advances are just coming so fast. This could be in the lab and be great, but of course, won't really easily transfer to commercial products. But who knows? So the second one's giving me trouble. Yeah, I mean the faces of the moon. I mean the tidal forces are powerful, of course. People think about tides and water, but there's also tides not only of water but the atmosphere and the land. I mean it's measurable. The land could actually rise up by something like a centimeter. It's measurable. So that's really cool. But I mean earthquakes, I mean they're not surface phenomenon. They're more – epicenters are generally well below the earth and I just don't think the moon is going to have that much of an impact that it could increase the chance of magnitude three or more. Yeah, that sounds a little unlikely to me. So I'm going to say that the earthquake is fiction as well.

'''S:''' Okay, Jay. Okay.

=== Jay's Response ===

'''J:''' Steve, did you know that's 72% of the time when Bob and I select the same one? This could be one of those times because I'm agreeing with Bob on pretty much everything that he said. The fungal spores and concrete mix, I think it's a brilliant concept. It does sound cromulent. I can understand that the fungus could secrete something that could actually help fill in the cracks. And maybe they have to genetically engineer them to do things exactly the way they need to. But that's fantastic. And I really hope that that's legit. And then jumping to the last one about the Atom Thick Memory Storage, the Atom Restorer. That's a weird name. Anyway, yeah. I agree with Bob. Again, it wouldn't surprise me that some lab is working on this. I don't know how ready for market that is, but it sounds like, yeah, I could see that happening. The whole idea about the moon, though, having anything to do with magnitude 3 or greater earthquakes, to me, just seems ridiculous, and that's definitely the fiction.

'''C:''' Jay, can't you say you agree with Cara too?

'''J:''' Come on. Well, 72% of the time, Cara. I'm sorry.

'''E:''' All right. All right. So 2017, that statistic.

'''S:''' All right. And Evan.

=== Evan's Response ===

'''E:''' Yeah, I think I'm going to join the gang. Phases of the moon. No, not the phases of the moon. Maybe the moon itself does have something. Certainly not to magnitude three or greater. No.

'''S:''' Fiction. You're not going to go for the solo win this time.

'''E:''' Not this week. Not feeling it. Not feeling it.

'''J:''' He's not a sucker, huh?

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' All right. We'll take them in order. A new paper presents preliminary evidence using fungal spores and concrete mix to make the concrete self-healing. The spores will become activated by cracks and secrete calcium to fill them. You guys all think that one is science, and that one is science. Yeah, it's kind of a neat little idea. It's a preliminary paper, so they show that it's feasible, but they haven't fully developed it yet. The idea is because a lot of our infrastructure is crumbling because as some concrete ages, it develops little cracks, and little cracks develop into bigger cracks, and bigger cracks actually can erode the structure of the concrete and cause it to crumble and collapse. So that's a huge problem. It really shortens the lifespan of the concrete. And they're not the first ones to work on self-healing concrete because that would be a huge advance in terms of infrastructure lasting longer and being safer, et cetera, and cost-effective, all that stuff. So, yeah, they mixed in these fungal spores into the concrete mix. And the idea is that when a crack develops, water will seep into the crack and it will be exposed to air. So you'll have water and oxygen. And when that's there, the spores will germinate and grow and they will secrete calcium carbonate to heal the cracks. And then when the crack fills in, they'll have no more water and oxygen and they'll go back into their dormant spore state. Voila. Self-healing concrete. Smart. That's awesome. Yeah. So this hasn't been fully developed yet. This may not pan out. Who knows? Again, I said it was preliminary, but that's the idea and they presented their initial sort of exploratory evidence for it.

'''E:''' But nothing solid.

'''S:''' Yeah. This will be one we'll have to come back and look at in 10 years, right?

'''C:''' Evan. Evan.

'''E:''' Thanks, Cara.

'''J:''' At least he's trying.

'''S:''' I tried to ignore him, Cara. I can't help it.

'''C:''' It's funny. Thank you for the encouragement.

'''E:''' I will do more.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Let's go on to number two. A recent comprehensive study finds that the phases of the moon are statistically significantly associated with the risk of a magnitude three or greater earthquake. You all think this one is malarkey. Yes. And this one is the fiction. All right. Good job, guys. I included this one. I figured you guys were going to get this one. But I included this one because remember we spoke about Ken Ring from Auckland, New Zealand? Remember that guy? He's the guy who claims that he can predict earthquakes based on the lunar cycle. And we all thought that he was full of it because he doesn't really have any evidence to back up his claims. And so there was a comprehensive study looking at earthquakes and they found absolutely zero effect from the phases of the moon. There was no effect in this data at all. The author said this was – what patterns were there were random and are just as consistent with completely random data. There was nothing statistically significant.

'''J:''' So – There you have it, folks.

'''S:''' Yeah. The phases of the moon. Yeah. Well, this has been a folklore for a long time because people think the moon affects everything, right? So it was worth doing a thorough analysis and yeah, nothing. So there is no moon. There is no lunar phase effect on earthquakes.

'''E:''' The shining of the light of the sun on the moon has an effect. What? No.

'''S:''' It would have to be the position. It would have to be the tidal effects. And it's not saying necessarily a full moon. It's just the phases of the moon. So the only plausibility there, if you had to give it any physical plausibility … was that when the moon and the sun line up on either side of the Earth, then their tidal effects line up. So there's a sun tide as well, and the sun tide is about half as strong as the moon tide. They either cancel each other out or they add to each other. So when they're adding to each other, you get a bigger tidal effect. And so there could be a plausible effect there. And as Bob said, it does affect the land as well, even though it's a tiny amount. But apparently it's not enough to affect earthquakes, which makes sense.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Okay, all of this means that engineers present the first atom-thick memory storage chip. they are dubbing the AtomRister is science, and this is totally cool. This is an ultra-thin memory, so you could have multiple layers of this to build up really, really small, powerful….

'''RW:''' High storage, yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, storage devices. But they're also – they are memristors, right? So they are transistors and memory storage at the same time, which is why they're atomristors because they're also atom-thick memristors basically. And they would be much more efficient in terms of their energy usage and they could be faster. And so there's lots of other potential advantages here. These were developed by engineers at the University of Texas at Austin in collaboration with Peking University scientists. And this is the thinnest resistors ever created. And they are made out of graphene, as you might expect, right? Graphene. I knew it. Doped with molybdenum sulfide. In an active layer, the entire memory cell is a sandwich about 1.5 nanometers thick, which means you could densely pack them in a layer or a plane. So think cell phone battery, right, guys? Or cell phone – I should say not cell phone battery, cell phone chips or cell phone memory. So this could be just cell phones with terabyte storage or whatever. Who knows? But they say this kind of advance will keep Moore's Law going. We'll get a few more years out of it. So – Hey, Bob.

'''E:''' Yo. Here comes the Yottabyte. The Yottabyte.

'''S:''' Can't wait for the Yottabyte, baby.

'''J:''' Finally, right, Bob? We've been waiting a long time for that.

'''E:''' We've been talking about it for 12 years.

'''B:''' Yeah, we've got a little ways to go, but yeah, it's going to be cool.

'''C:''' My new iPhone's a 256-gig iPhone.

'''S:''' Nice. That's nice. Oh, boy.

'''E:''' That's cool. And thank you, Steve.

'''C:''' Crazy. Yes, thank you, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah, good job, everyone. So, Evan, give us a quote.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:26:17) ==

<blockquote>''Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable – a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional.'' – {{w|Brian Greene}}, American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist </blockquote>

'''E:''' Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a matter that's precise, predictive, and reliable. A transformation for those lucky enough to experience it. That is empowering and emotional. Brian Green.

'''S:''' Brian Green, awesome. Yes.

'''E:''' Cara, were you with Brian Green recently? Yes.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah. I moderated a panel with him and Michio Kaku and Sylvester Gates. I love Brian. I think he's awesome. Yeah, he's awesome.

'''S:''' You did?

'''B:''' When did you do that?

'''C:''' Earlier, like kind of middle of last year towards the end. There's an episode of Talk Nerdy. They let me record it or they recorded it for me and gave me the file and asked me to do a Talk Nerdy with it, which is amazing.

'''B:''' So tell me about Michio. I mean, does he still come out with his little snappy little quotes that are just really misleading and annoying at times?

'''C:''' They actually, it was funny. I mean, principle of charity, but when we were doing that thing, everything that he said was either legitimate yet poetic, or it was kind of tongue in cheek. Like he was intentionally being provocative, but not in a way that I think, yeah, like he would say things about like very Einsteinian in that way about like God not playing dice and things like that. But you knew what he meant by it. All right. Well, that's encouraging. I was actually pleasantly surprised. That's encouraging. And granted, he was there with his colleagues. It was three string theorists who all have different viewpoints about string theory but are similarly interested in the topic. So they played really nicely off of each other because they all had very different – approaches to public speaking.

'''S:''' So guys, next week, actually, but when the show comes out and the following week, I will be in Hawaii. Hawaii. Oh, wow. Yeah. So a friend of mine from medical school is getting married in Honolulu. That's cool. Yeah. So it's actually at the Disney Resort in Oahu, wherever that is. Yeah, it should be fun. Although I had to get an entire white suit for the dinner, whatever. Yeah.

'''C:''' That's very Hawaiian, isn't it, to have everybody in white?

'''S:''' Yeah, right, all white. Thanks for that. Yeah, it should be fun. I'm really looking forward to it. I don't know if there are any skeptics in Hawaii, but drop me a line. I don't know if my time is going to be pretty much spoken for, but who knows? I might be able to grab lunch or something.

'''E:''' Aloha.

'''B:''' Hey guys, check this out. I'm going to be at Logical LA February 9th to 11th. Next month, I'm so excited. Two days of enlightening and inspiring speakers and three nights of skeptical entertainment. Cara, I will be there. Cara might be there with a decent probability. George Robb is going to emcee, so you know it's going to be awesome. Lots of other great speakers. Definitely check it out if you're nearby. Plenty of seating, plenty of tickets available. Come on down. Renaissance Los Angeles Airport Hotel.

'''S:''' Sounds like fun. All right, guys. Well, thanks for joining me this week.

'''J:''' Thank you, Steve.

'''E:''' Thank you, Steve.

'''C:''' Thanks, Doc.

== Signoff/Announcements (1:28:00) ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 


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User:Ralsettem

2024-05-03T19:58:31Z

Ralsettem: Updating my current setup

Self-proclaimed nerd venturing out into the world of transcription supporting a podcast I love to listen to.

After some computer issues I'm back and I'm using [https://github.com/MahmoudAshraf97/whisper-diarization whisper-diarization] to create diarization transcriptions. It uses [https://openai.com/blog/whisper/ Whisper] and [https://docs.nvidia.com/nemo-framework/user-guide/latest/overview.html nemo].

SGU Episode 653

2024-05-03T19:48:14Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

{{Google speech|episode}}
{{600s|653|episodebox}}
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|qowText = Even when I have no power over important events in my life, I gain a feeling of control from understanding them. And I, too, have a sense of wonder. For me, discovering the workings of nature is a vibrant, satisfying experience that is both intellectual and emotional. To recognize the astronomical relationship between the Sun and the Earth, or to understand the optical phenomena that create its rosy light, does not strip the sunset of its beauty.
|qowAuthor = {{w|Stuart Vyse}}, American psychologist

|downloadLink = {{600s|653|download}} 

|forumLink = https://sguforums.org/index.php?topic=49757
|}}

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

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, January 10th, 2018, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening folks!

=== Jay's Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease (0:26) ===

'''S:''' Jay is back from the dead.

'''J:''' The land of the dead is a terrible place, guys. You don't want to go there. I had hand, foot, and mouth disease.

'''C:''' Ew. Ew.

'''J:''' So before you get totally grossed out, it's a virus, okay? So you can think of it like it's a cold, it's a flu, it's another virus out there. So you get cold symptoms. The first thing that can happen and what does happen to most kids and adults is you get like a fever and some flu symptoms. Kids, you know, have a varying degree. They can have like – they'll get some rash a little bit here and there, some kids worse than others. But a lot of times, I think kids for the most part, they don't get it as bad as adults. Very similar to chicken pox. Like if you get it as an adult, it's really bad. So I got it as an adult. Let me tell you, it was really bad. It was really bad. Like this was the worst sickness I've ever had in my entire life. It's been a week and a half. I'm not contagious anymore, but I still have cold symptoms. I still feel lousy. But the worst part of this whole thing was that you get sores all over your hands, your feet, your legs, your backside, and your throat.

'''S:''' And your ass neck.

'''J:''' Yeah, your ass neck. It started, I got one little bump on my hand. That's nothing. And my wife was like, you're not going to work this week. And I'm like, you're out of your mind. It was right after New Year's. It was New Year's Day when she says that to me. She's like, hey, we had a kid at the house that had this virus and that was for Christmas Eve. Our kids got it. They got the fever and they were fine. She's like, you're showing the adult fever blisters. You're going to get covered in this stuff. And I'm like, oh, my God. Maybe it won't be bad and all that. And I'm telling you, like, 11 in the morning, I noticed a red dot in my hand. And by 4 o'clock that night, I wanted to rip my hands off with, like, a mechanical chicken de-skinner. That's where I was at with this. And it lasted four full days of just not knowing what to do with my hands.

'''E:''' Oh, agony.

'''J:''' Agony. The itchiness was so profound. Like, calamine lotion, that stuff is a joke for this. Like, it doesn't do anything. You know, you've got to keep your hands moisturized, too, because your skin starts to get super dry. And at some point, I'm just literally walking around the house, well, hobbling around the house because I had the blisters on my feet. But you're walking around the house, like, holding my hands out in front of me like, what do I do with these? They're not usable. They're no longer 10 digits. It's just area of skin that is causing you so much pain and discomfort. you can't believe it.

'''S:''' It's like being in the agony booth with Captain Warthog.

'''J:''' Right. So by Thursday afternoon, I felt the itchiness start to drop. And it was like, oh my God, you know, I could start to like bend my fingers and like actually like flex my hands a little bit. And then just every day since then, it's a little bit better, a little bit better. And the blisters like dried up and now turned into like, super deep tissue calluses.

'''S:''' Yeah. We saw you on Sunday when we did the show, and your hands looked like they were polka dotted. They were bad.

'''J:''' It's very humbling. I dislocated fingers on my right hand in a very, very two-mile-an-hour slow mountain biking accident that I did all by myself. I was almost going in reverse. That's how slow it was. But when you lose the use of part of your body, It's profound. Your life stops. You're not living when things like this are happening. You are just going from moment to the moment, just trying to get through it. You know what I mean? I think the lesson here is you got to be really, especially in colder climates where people spend a lot more time indoors and things like that, you really got to be careful sanitize-wise. Wash your hands often in the winter. Just leaving the restroom at work, I was thinking like, wow, I can't go to work. I can't be around my coworkers. Even if I had extraordinarily good etiquette, I just touch one surface with something like hand, foot, and mouth, and it could live on that surface for long enough for a lot of people to get it.

'''S:''' Well, that's the thing. I know we've said this before. It's like just don't be a hero. If you have a communicable disease, stay home. Don't share it with the whole office.

'''C:''' I don't know. Steve, I'm interested in your opinion on this. But like I had – I think I had norovirus for about two days earlier this week, which is horrible. But I'm feeling much better now. And when I was looking at hashtags like norovirus hashtags on Twitter, there were so many hospitals saying like, if you think you have this, wait it out. Don't bring it to the hospital. Like we've had to shut down wards because it's so contagious. And so it must be a tough thing to be in that position where you're like, am I so sick? I should go to a hospital or am I so sick? I shouldn't bring this to the hospital. Yeah.

'''J:''' That's interesting to think. You could be in a situation where the hospital doesn't even want you.

'''C:''' Yeah, because you're not so sick that you can't take care of yourself. It's a virus. It'll pass on its own. You're going to feel miserable, but you have to wait it out. But you could make a lot of people who are immune suppressed really sick.

'''S:''' Yeah, you have to use judgment. You have to use judgment. Ironically, if you're sick, you should not go to the hospital. If you have a communicable disease and you don't need to be hospitalized yourself, stay away. That's always a good rule of thumb. And if you have kids, be alert to your kids' symptoms and if – when in doubt, keep them isolated too. Because that's a large reason why there are so many viruses going around in the winter. As Jay said, people are crammed together. Kids are in school. They're all together. Kids are just slobbering all the time. So yeah, they're just shedding viruses everywhere.

'''B:''' Maybe we should make more use of general purpose hazmat suits.

'''E:''' General purpose ones? Yeah.

'''B:''' I could see that.

'''J:''' It really is the little things like, on a personal level, keeping your hands clean and trying to be aware of all the different things that you're touching. When you pay attention and you build up a little bit of a mind for how much surfaces you're touching, even walking through the office, I found myself, just because I like stimulation, I like to run my hand on countertops when i walk by them.

'''S:''' don't do that you know.

'''J:''' you just do these things unconsciously and then you know i know it might be weird. it's true bob but you know we we live in a physical world. it's like i just like the way things feel. i like the tactile stimulation and i'm like wow i'm i'm sick. you know if i do that well first off junkie you don't want to get more sick like steve freaked me out with like the super virus. what did you call that steve?

'''S:''' No, it's just if you get sick on top of already being sick, it's a super infection, which is not uncommon because it's usually more than one thing going around. And if your immune system is busy fighting off one thing, it's going to be more susceptible to getting another infection. But Jay, there's some good news.

'''J:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Good news, everyone. {{gne}}

=== Steve and Bob's VR fun (7:19) ===

'''S:''' I got a virtual reality headset for Christmas.

'''J:''' Well, be fair, Steve. You got it because I texted your wife and said, this is what you should get Steve for Christmas.

'''S:''' Yeah, you basically convinced my wife that that's what I needed to get. And it was a great recommendation. It is awesome. Really, really loving. I got the Vive. We've talked about it on the show, but it's just different when you experience it firsthand. It is. And I know Bob was over a couple of days ago on Sunday, and I had already explained my experience to him. And then he put the head – Bob, you put it on. What was your experience? You wrote it.

'''B:''' It was amazing. I haven't been in real VR in quite a while. Just waiting for it to mature enough. And it was amazing. I mean, you had me. I put it on. First off, the interface was fantastic. The graphics were really good. I love how it tells you, oh, by the way, there's a wall here. She was like a grid.

'''E:''' Puts up a grid.

'''B:''' Yeah, like a holodeck grid. There's a real wall there. So that was great. So Steve's like, go in the elevator. Hit the top button. I go to the top button. The door opens. And there's like a pirate's plank walking out. Into the open air above 40 stories. And I've jumped out of planes. I've been in a hang glider. I've been in a sail plane. I mean, I've done this crazy stuff. I was intimidated as hell because it was so realistic. The immersion was so good. And it was fun because... Because I knew I was safe, of course, but I was kind of just kind of embracing the visceral fear because it was so realistic. I was hesitant. It took me like eight to ten seconds to step off that plank because it was just so real. And of course, once you step off the plank, you fall and you die. But it didn't hurt or anything. But it was amazing.

'''E:''' That's an upgrade if you want the pain simulation module.

'''C:''' That's excellent.

'''J:''' You had a legitimate moment of pause because – Your brain was telling you this is real and this is dangerous.

'''B:''' Jay, it was visceral. It was surprisingly realistic.

'''S:''' Yeah, so that's what I was surprised at too with that. The immersion is seamless. It works. You are in the physical space that you appear to be in. I was playing – I'm exploring some of the different games that I'm playing with my daughters. So I was playing a Rick and Morty VR game with one of my daughters.

'''C:''' You're basically in their house. You guys just salivated. Rick and Morty.

'''S:''' It's cartoon but you're in their world. You're in their house. You're in the garage and you can interact with everything. You can pick up anything in the garage.

'''B:''' Wait, and you didn't put me in Rick and Morty's universe? Why didn't you do that?

'''S:''' I hadn't done that. Next time.

'''B:''' Okay.

'''S:''' But the immersion and the feel is so real. I actually almost fell because I tried to lean against a virtual counter. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. That happens all the time. Yeah.

'''B:''' Whoops.

'''J:''' Better make sure that you don't go into any virtual toilets, Steve, right? Yeah.

'''B:''' When I – I was in VR in Steve's house for like what, Steve? Ten minutes?

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''B:''' When I handed him the goggles and stuff back, I said civilization – not civilization is doomed but I am even more convinced now that in the future, we are going to be spending a significant fraction of our life in VR. It's just going to be like why – Why deal with reality when you could create your own universe and still communicate? You could still do work. You could still buy – you could still do a lot of useful things besides goofing off. You could do a lot of great stuff. I mean it's going to be – people are going to just be so addicted. They're going to be like smelly and unshaven and unclean in their chair because they've been in VR for three days.

'''S:''' Some people will do that. It's going to happen. Some people will.

'''J:''' It's a cool coincidence that Ready Player One is coming out soon, I guess, right in April.

'''B:''' There you go.

'''J:''' I read the book. The book is fantastic. The book is wonderful, especially if you have any knowledge of the 80s. You will completely appreciate the book. But I mean, I agree with you, Bob. I think when you think about the way we could use augmented reality or use virtual reality to enhance our experiences, I mean, you could, as an example – There will be apps like this. Like do you want to walk around Rome? Do you want to walk around places in foreign countries?

'''S:''' Jay, they already exist. I mean so I've been dabbling with partly because I wanted to talk about it on the show in as many different kinds of things as possible. So here's like the quick overview. For video games, it's awesome. It's just an awesome video game interface. The ability to look around corners, for example, to interact in three-dimensional space with everything there. My favorite game right now, it's The Lab produced by Valve and it's in the Portal universe, which is fun. But this one game is you're defending a castle. So you're like standing on a tower. You have a bow and you shoot arrows and the shooting of the arrows – and I'm an archer. I shoot arrows – Obviously, if you're not physically doing anything, the technical skill isn't there. But in terms of the aiming and the physics of the arrow and everything, it's pretty realistic. And you're defending your castle as the barbarians or you have to shoot all the barbarians before they break down your gates. It's really fun. You could peek down the wall and – It's an amazing, amazing gaming interface for entertainment. So I watched like a little short vignette. It's like a little – like a movie short animated and it was really good. You're like standing in the middle of the action. You can look anywhere. What are those people doing down there? What's going on over here?

'''J:''' You watched something that was cinematic. In a 3D environment that you could actually move around in.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''J:''' Steve, you were also saying, and I have read about this extensively. I know that you could do this. You could watch a movie inside the headset as if you were in a movie theater, like a big screen movie theater.

'''S:''' Yeah, there's that mode too. I downloaded the VR virtual desktop, and that's basically – it's like a theater view where it's just a hovering screen and you're in the middle of a 360-degree space. But that's kind of gimmicky right now. That's like a novelty. I think for productivity, not quite there yet. There's no reason why I would use a virtual desktop. There's no real advantage to it at this point. You just have a downgrade in resolution.

'''B:''' But for gaming, for entertainment – Steve, that said, HTC Vive just showed at CES their new upgrade.

'''S:''' Yeah, I know.

'''B:''' It's like 78 percent more pixels. So the resolution might have crossed that point at this point or it might still be very, very close. But I mean it's just a no-brainer. It will get there. You'll have 8K goggles at some point, 10K.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah. Yeah, real vision. And they're working on eye tracking so they can have high definition where you're looking.

'''B:''' Yeah, like a fovea. Excellent.

'''S:''' Yeah, exactly. That would be it. So if I'm trying to read small text, it will come into focus. But yeah, that's not there yet. The other thing is like with the entertainment, it's like it's actually a new medium. So yeah, at first, you'll just be watching movies in VR. But when they explore how to optimize the entertainment for VR – Which you're already starting to do, then it will really take off. Like for example, action can wait until you look at it, right? So there's another one of the games within the – which Bob, you experienced very quickly in the lab is just like a wizard's lair. Yeah. That was excellent. Yeah, that's just a proof of concept. Not really anything going on yet. But like for example, when you look up at the ceiling, there are bats hanging from the ceiling and they fly away when you look at them, no matter when you look at them. At some point when you're in there, if you look up at the ceiling, that's when they'll fly away. And there are like creatures in the lab that will follow you, that will look at you wherever you go, for example. So yeah, there's an interactive three-dimensional immersive layer to the game or the entertainment. That's off the hook. And Jay, for educational purposes or vicarious, you know, just visiting places, like again, proof of concept types of things, you can visit Mount Everest. I've stood on the top of Mount Everest, you know, in virtual reality. It's pretty damn good. Yeah. For that kind of stuff, even with the resolution that they have now, it was a very, very visceral experience. So I think absolutely the sense that you are there is complete. That's the thing. It really is complete.

'''E:''' Do they have a program where you're standing on the surface of the moon yet and you're looking out?

'''B:''' Oh, I love it.

'''S:''' I've stood on the surface of Mars. Nice. And you're on Mars. That's as close as we will get, guys, to being on the surface of Mars. True.

'''B:''' But it's really like Mars. I mean it's the real data. It's not like made up.

'''S:''' No, it's real pictures. It's pictures.

'''B:''' If you were there, this is how it would look. The thing is to me, this technology is like – it's like the high-end phones. Say what? In the 90s, maybe in the early 90s where they were good phones. They were elaborate. They could do lots of stuff. But they were still kind of tethered to the desk and on the cusp, on the verge of becoming portable phones and then eventually smartphones. Smartphones, yeah. I mean this is the progression. This is the start. But it's there. I mean it's worth buying. now I think. I'm seriously considering spending the money, $600 to get this.

'''S:''' I'm totally getting my money's worth out of this. Absolutely. It's above the waterline. It's totally there. And every incremental improvement will make it a lot better. We're still on that steep part of the curve. A little bit more resolution, you'll notice it. It will be great. A little bit more peripheral vision, it will be fantastic. They're coming out with wireless, so you don't have to – the wires are not that big a deal, but it would be nice to get rid of them. That will make the experience a little bit better.

'''B:''' So those are the keys, Steve, I think. Your Vive was fantastic. It needs a little bit more peripheral vision like you said. It needs to be wireless. That we're probably going to see very – the next big thing. And then the resolution is already kind of there. The latest version is already out and at least it's being demonstrated. And then the only other thing is portability. And like I've said on the show before, I'm waiting for the point where it's pretty much like glorified sunglasses that could do all of this, wraparound sunglasses, full peripheral. Or augmented. To me, that's the end game. Or if you want to go a little farther and say like contacts. But that's the track that they're on. And those are all so doable. It's just a matter of money, research, and a little time. We're going to see this stuff in 10 years. Imagine in 10 years it's going to be like smartphones at that point.

'''J:''' I want to play the penetration. I want to play City of Heroes, like a superhero's MMO inside a virtual reality.

'''E:''' That's it. That's the end game for me too.

'''S:''' I agree. Yeah, because the thing that I was showing Bob where you're on the plank, you could fly around that virtual city. And while I was doing that, I'm like, holy crap, this is City of Heroes.

'''B:''' Totally, totally. Yes.

'''E:''' Makes sense. Yeah.

'''S:''' That would be incredible.

'''B:''' The other critical thing that will come is the tactile feedback. Like I was pressing a button on the bridge of the Enterprise, which is awesome just being on the bridge. But I was saying if we just had some tactile glove so that you could feel when you hit that button, that would add a whole new dimension because, of course, it's the haptic feedback. But that's the other big thing.

'''S:''' There's a little bit. It vibrates, whatever. That's all you need, just a little bit.

'''J:''' I'm saving up to get the headset you have, Steve.

'''S:''' I would like to put boots on or just ankle bracelets or something for it to know where my feet are. So if I want to kick something or if I'm walking, you could walk or run in place and then your character would run because it knows where your feet are.

'''C:''' Yeah, there are VR companies that have that now, but you have to have these like – I've done a few shoots with them. You basically have to have these posts around you. Like let's say if you're in the middle of a room, you've got four posts almost like microphone stands that are really tall and they have these little like balls on the top and they're sensors. And then you can operate within that space. But until – like the space itself has to be mapped. Yeah. in order to know where you are relative to the story.

'''S:''' That's what I had to do too. So I have two sensors. I just have two sensors at corners of my office. I had to map the space so it knows where to put the walls, so where the obstacles are. And then, yeah, it knows where I am in that space. It knows where my controllers are, which basically means it knows where my hands are. It knows where my head is because it knows where the visor is. So just add feet and then it pretty much can infer where I am. Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah, add feet and also maybe like weapons. I've done a really cool thing.

'''S:''' I have weapons.

'''C:''' Oh, you have weapons. Okay, cool. And it can see where they are in space. Yeah, that's awesome.

'''S:''' The thing is the controller can become a virtual weapon.

'''C:''' Gotcha, gotcha.

'''S:''' And then it has a trigger. The controller has a trigger.

'''J:''' Cara is saying though instead of holding the Vive controller – You should be able to get some type of blaster or a gun or something that it feels like has the shape of a different kind of weapon. that is a controller as well.

'''C:''' They'll do that eventually.

'''S:''' The controller has a trigger and it totally feels like you're holding a weapon. It does.

'''B:''' It really does. It didn't matter. Not two-handed.

'''E:''' It feels the same.

'''S:''' Not two-handed, but it feels like any pistol, any one-handed weapon, it's perfectly fine.

'''C:''' Yeah, I'm sure that if people are really into certain games, you know, you get to a point where like you're so into Call of Duty that it's really important that you have like the feel of your weapon or you're really into a driving game and you really want a wheel. Like those things will come out. Someone's going to develop that. Or a guitar, whatever.

'''S:''' Exactly. There will be accessories for all those kinds of stuff.

'''C:''' But to approximate it now is a good start. The fact that they thought to do that. Yeah, that's cool.

'''S:''' Right. And the games that they're making for VR are so much – are so fantastic. The games that they're adapting to VR are still good. But yeah, you could tell that this is not really optimized for it. Like I've been playing Fallout 4 in VR and it's fun. but Fallout 4 is not optimized for VR. But even these cheesy little games that were made for VR are incredible, incredible.

'''E:''' Fallout 5. I'm sure they'll have that ready for VR, I'm sure.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, so... I think we're just crossing that waterline where the technology is there. I think interest is there and the software is starting to come out because it's always a chicken and egg thing. Like you need the applications for people to want to get the hardware but people need to have the hardware for the companies to invest in the software. It has to sort of bootstrap itself up. But I think we're there and now I'm hoping that like the software is going to really explode and then everyone is going to need to get the VR headset. It's already kind of happening, like even among our group, right? Like we got – I downloaded the Star Trek bridge crew and my god, guys. That is like our life stream. We are on the bridge of Star Trek.

'''B:''' Nerd.

'''E:''' heading to SETI Alpha 6.

'''S:''' I gotta tell you that the intro you're in a shuttle and you're like just sort of circling around the ship and it's not a constitution class. it's an aegis class starship but it's actually better than a constitution class. it's gorgeous it's freaking gorgeous and that is also because it fills your entire visual field. you know it's like you're in orbit around the earth circling around this beautiful ship and you're there and it's awesome. When you're on the bridge and your controllers look like hands and when you pull the trigger, it's like you're moving your fingers and you're actually pushing buttons on a console.

'''E:''' Spotted hands in Jay's case. That's right.

'''S:''' So anyway, that's the kind of application that's going to make people want to get VR and then the more people get VR, the more awesome applications are going to come out.

'''J:''' I think I'll have it soon, Steve. I mean I just got to bend reality to make it happen. Yeah.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''E:''' Soon.

'''S:''' So we'll keep you updated on the VR experience. But so far, two thumbs up. It's awesome. Okay. Cara, get us started with what's the word?

{{anchor|wtw}} 
== What's the Word? (23:23) ==
{{Page categories
|What's the Word? = 
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* {{w|Eutrophication}}<ref group="v">[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eutrophication Wiktionary: eutrophication]</ref>

<blockquote> _consider_using_block_quotes_for_emails_read_aloud_in_this_segment_ </blockquote>

'''C:''' Absolutely. So the word this week was recommended by Ben Allison from New York. I love this word mostly because I really learned something new, like really learned something new when this word was recommended because I had never used it, but I know I had come across it before. So the word this week is eutrophication, E-U-T-R-O-P-H-I-C-A-T-I-O-N, eutrophication. And eutrophication is an interesting phenomenon wherein a lot of chemical nutrients, mostly nitrogen or phosphorus or some combination of both of those— end up in an ecosystem, usually a liquid ecosystem. So think about a lake. This is a pretty natural process that occurs in lakes as lakes age through geological time. So there's stuff that lives in it. There's stuff that lives near it. That stuff dies and decays and all of the bacteria die. from the decaying matter ends up in that lake. And over time, the nutritional content, especially with that nitrogen and phosphorus builds up and builds up and builds up. Unfortunately, that process is massively accelerated by inorganic compounds that run off, usually from agriculture, from development, from pollution, things like detergents and pesticides and things like that. And what ends up happening is that these nutrients cause certain organisms like phytoplankton algae to bloom. It causes them to develop really rapidly and grow and grow and grow. And that chokes off oxygen to lower levels of the lake. So you've got all this life existing on the surface because there's all this great nutritional content and no light can pass through. And so the lake actually dies. And this is responsible for a lot of the quote unquote dead zones that we read about in the ocean. These algae blooms are usually secondary to this process of eutrophication. So I read up a little bit about the different types of the different terms that are used here, the different bands, I guess. There's dystrophic, meaning that there's like no nutrients, very little. There's oligotrophic, meaning that there's a little amount. A few? Yeah, a few. Mesotrophic, right there in the middle. Eutrophic means that there's a lot of nutrition. And then hypertrophic is... Too much. Yeah, but eutrophic actually is too much too. So in the Wikipedia article, it even does say precisely hypertrophication, although it does seem like eutrophication is the term. that is most often used in the scientific literature and also in the media. So this term was actually coined by George Heinrich Weber, spelled Weber, but I'm sure it's Weber because it's German. I'm not sure, but I'm assuming. In 19... And the word actually is a direct translation from the Greek, which really means exactly what it is, well-nourished. That root, which was mentioned by Ben Allison, who wrote this in, said he's super interested in the root eugenics or eukaryote, which seems to have a broad range of uses. But the truth of the matter is that word-forming element means good word. And so almost any time that you see it, the original usage was some form of that, good nutrition, for example. Or like you said, eugenics, unfortunately, at the time, that was what they meant by that word.

'''S:''' Good genes.

'''C:''' Yeah, we won't get too deep into that. But yeah, they did. That's why they used that word forming, the prefix at the beginning. Yeah. So yeah, it's a really interesting term because it's really, I think, relevant for a lot of what we talk about on the show, a lot of trending news items about climate change and about acidification in the ocean, but about specifically these algae blooms. And I guess I didn't fully understand that full phosphorus cycle, that full cycle wherein there's actually more nutrition, which leads to a choking off or like a hypoxic environment than in which organisms can't grow because they're not getting enough light and they're also not getting enough oxygen.

'''S:''' And that's – yeah, there's a big problem with that in the Gulf of Mexico because of agricultural runoff through the Mississippi and a lot of it just ends up in the Gulf. And then you get the algae bloom and then the dead zone.

'''C:''' Yep. And we've seen this, I think, historically in certain lakes. We started really learning about this several decades ago and have been able to affect change in certain lake ecosystems to try to save those lakes when we first realized that they were really suffering.

'''S:''' That's why we need to genetically modify crops to fix their own nitrogen from the atmosphere so we don't have to use as much nitrogen fertilizer.

'''C:''' Yeah. That would be great.

'''S:''' That would solve that problem. All right. Thanks, Cara. Jay, so I understand that another astronaut has passed away this past week.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
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[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 
=== Astronaut John Young Dies (28:48) ===
* [https://www.space.com/39307-astronaut-john-young-moonwalker-shuttle-commander-obituary.html Astronaut John Young, Who Walked on the Moon and Led 1st Shuttle Mission, Dies at 87]<ref>[https://www.space.com/39307-astronaut-john-young-moonwalker-shuttle-commander-obituary.html Space.com: Astronaut John Young, Who Walked on the Moon and Led 1st Shuttle Mission, Dies at 87]</ref>

'''J:''' Yeah, that's right. So NASA's longest-serving astronaut, John Young – Died on January 5th at the age of 87. I think he succumbed to pneumonia. But what a life John Young had. He flew two Gemini missions, two Apollo missions, and two space shuttle missions. So the two Apollo missions he flew both went to the moon, and he was one of the first three astronauts to fly two moon missions. Actually, there was only three astronauts that ever did fly two moon missions, and he was one of them. And he was the ninth person to walk on the moon, and he got to spend over 20 hours moonwalking. And, Bob, just so you know, that's a lot more than Michael Jackson. So Young logged in a total of 34 days in space. And by today's standards, right, because of the International Space Station, that might not seem like a lot. But keep in mind, he was traveling in some of the most cramped, horrible quarters that you could ever imagine, you know, ever want to even pilot. The space station today is palatial compared to the Gemini capsules, right? I mean, think about it. I mean, there's a lot of areas in the space station where you could do somersaults and do all sorts of maneuvers, and they have actually – have real space in there where you don't feel so claustrophobic. But Young piloted the very first Gemini missions along with Gus Grissom, and those capsules were tiny. I mean, you're in there with another person. You're almost on top of each other.

'''S:''' Yeah, you could see them at the Air and Space Museum. You look inside like, oh, my goodness. There were people crammed in there for days.

'''J:''' Yeah, like you're in a chair shaped like your body, and there's a person sitting a foot and a half to your left in a mirror version of what you're in, and there is no place to go. You just have the front of that capsule in front of you, and that's it. So did you guys know that John – Actually, it was the astronaut that smuggled the corned beef sandwich aboard the Gemini 3.

'''E:''' Oh, he's the corned beef sandwich astronaut. I forgot about that.

'''J:''' He just pulled it out and started eating it when he was up in space. I love that. Awesome. Like the balls, right? Like, oh, my God. He's really like, yep, I'm bringing this with me.

'''S:''' At least they sell it like. that was kind of the culture of the astronauts, especially in the early days. They were mavericks.

'''B:''' Yeah, they were like test pilots, man.

'''J:''' Oh, yeah. Most of them came up as test pilots. And all of the astronauts were heavily educated, very intelligent, very, very accomplished even before they became astronauts. So Young was the first astronaut to orbit the moon alone. And this was on the Apollo 10 mission. He walked on the moon. like I said, for Apollo 16. And during that mission, he lived on the moon in the Orion lunar module for close to three days. It was almost three full days. And he also drove the lunar rover on the moon. And he collected 211 pounds or 96 kilograms of moon rock that they brought back to the Earth. Think about that. He actually drove a vehicle on another celestial body. And he lived there. He woke up on the moon. He had a night of sleep, woke up on the moon.

'''B:''' Wow.

'''C:''' That's amazing.

'''B:''' I never really thought of that.

'''E:''' That's still amazing to think about.

'''J:''' And during that mission, NASA told him that the government had decided to create the space shuttle. So he heard about the space shuttle money being approved while he was actually on the moon. Which I think is really, really cool. And by coincidence, nine years later, in 1981, Young would command the flight of the very first space shuttle mission aboard Space Shuttle Columbia.

'''E:''' Columbia, number one.

'''J:''' He worked for NASA for 42 years. Behind the scenes, he had, of course, also many other positions. He spent a lot of his early years being an astronaut, but then while he was an astronaut and then for the second half of his career, he was a very highly influential person working behind the scenes at NASA doing a lot of different things. In 2005, he won the NASA Ambassador of Exploration Award. I look up to people like this. I really do. Their nerve alone is something to marvel at, the fact that they can do these things and not freak out and be able to keep their cool under extraordinary circumstances. These are James Bond-level people. and Captain Kirk-level cool heads. You know what I mean? Yeah. Steve, I think, is the most cool person I know, and I question if Steve's level of cool could take going into outer space.

'''S:''' No, I agree. I totally agree. I mean, I'd like to think that I'd be able to do that, and maybe I'd be able to muscle through, but I can't guarantee it. I don't know if I would freak out being cramped up in a capsule like that for extended periods of time. I've never been tested in that way. I know I got claustrophobic when I went into an MRI scanner. I got through it though. I just closed my eyes and got through it.

'''C:''' I don't think you can keep your eyes closed during a launch.

'''S:''' I don't think that's allowed. I get stir crazy during like a bad winter storm. I'm cramped in my house for a couple of days. I get stir crazy.

'''B:''' VR, baby.

'''E:''' Solves everything.

'''J:''' But that's why when you see movies like The Right Stuff, you see a little bit of how they test their claustrophobia and their ability to deal with loud noises and cramped conditions and weird things. I mean they're putting the astronauts through their paces. And John Young, man, I mean this guy – He was – they called him the astronaut's astronaut. He was an example for other astronauts. He was like the person that they said, you got to be like him in order to do this.

'''S:''' Yeah. So 12 people have walked on the moon and now with the passing of John Young, there's only five left. There's only five living people who have been on the moon. They're all in their 80s and it's not going to be too long before there's going to be no one alive who walked on the moon. That's sad.

'''E:''' Until the new crop of moonwalkers comes along, hopefully soon.

'''J:''' So I have a cool quote here from John Young. John said, Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen-fueled system in the world, knowing they're going to light the bottom, and doesn't get a little worried, does not fully understand the situation. He said that when he was asked if he was worried about making the first space shuttle flight. So that funny comment that he said came at one of the last missions that he flew. Ladies and gentlemen, John Young! Thank you. Thank you for dedicating your life to space exploration and being an eternal badass, awesome, you know, I love the fact that at one point in the history of the country that I was brought up in that we looked up to people like this. These were the things that kids looked at and said, yes, I want to be like those guys.

'''S:''' They are rock stars. I agree. Absolutely. But there's some other spaceflight news going on this week. Bob, tell us about SpaceX's latest launch.

=== Space X Loses Satellite (37:16) ===
* [https://abcnews.go.com/US/classified-satellite-fell-ocean-spacex-launch-official-confirms/story?id=52246100 Classified satellite fell into ocean after SpaceX launch, official confirms]<ref>[https://abcnews.go.com/US/classified-satellite-fell-ocean-spacex-launch-official-confirms/story?id=52246100 ABC News: Classified satellite fell into ocean after SpaceX launch, official confirms]</ref>

'''B:''' Yeah, baby. So this past January 8th, SpaceX launched a classified military satellite made by defense contractor Northrop Grumman. Unfortunately, the mission failed and the exact cause is actually a bit of a mystery, which is kind of odd because typically they're like, you know, pretty quickly these days. They don't. Yep. OK, this messed up. Whatever. This one is definitely a horse of a different color. So these failures are so selfishly disappointing to me. Because every time this happens, I think, oh, well, me walking on the moon just got delayed again. So this was called – this satellite was called Zuma after the Southern California Malibu Beach. But I don't like Zuma. It sounds too much like Zima to me. Remember Zima, guys?

'''E:''' Oh, the drink. Yeah, the alcoholic drink.

'''B:''' So – So this was a billion-dollar spy satellite. Now imagine – this kills me. A billion dollars. Imagine spending months or probably years building this billion-dollar piece of awesome classified hardware only to lose it in just an hour just after it reaches orbit. I mean I would just totally cry. These people must be devastated.

'''J:''' Whose fault was it, Bob?

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. That's coming, babe. That's coming. Don't ask me to jump the gun. So the launch of Florida's Cape Canaveral seemed to go very well. I mean the first stage went up and it separated and then it landed back, right? We've seen the first stage – Thank you for watching. Now, that doesn't prove some false flag Alex Jones ridiculous conspiracy. That's actually routine for classified military launches. They don't want anyone to know what the orbit is or anything about it. So pretty much after the first stage, you really don't see or hear anything about what happens. So what happened then is understandably much more difficult because for us to find out what happened with a classified launch is a lot harder. Now, some experts initially were claiming that the satellite was dead in orbit. It was in orbit, but it was dead. Then Bloomberg News report offered that the mission failed following a malfunction in the latter stages of its ascent. Then we had Wall Street Journal reporting that government officials said Zuma failed because it didn't separate as planned from the upper part of the rocket. That might be it right there. SpaceX, though, were saying things like this. They said reviews of the data indicate Falcon 9 performed nominally, which means good, normally. Then they further said that they did everything correctly. Obviously, just saying we did nothing wrong. Everything went fine for our stuff. President Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement. Shotwell? Shotwell? Shotwell? S-H-O-T.

'''S:''' That's like a cartoon name for somebody involved in spaceflight.

'''E:''' Yosemite Sam's counterpart.

'''B:''' Shotwell. So Gwynne Shotwell said – this is the president of SpaceX. She said in a statement, the data reviewed so far indicates that no design, operational or other changes are needed, which makes sense because if you have a launch and something goes wrong, you see what the problem was, then there's clearly something that you need to redesign or whatever. You got to make a change so that it doesn't happen again. So she was saying that there's no information pointing to anything that they could have done any better. Later she said, for clarity, after review of all data to date, Falcon 9 did everything correctly on Sunday night. So clearly she was getting – she seemed to be getting a little pissed about people speculating that they screwed up. Then she said that information contrary to this statement is categorically false. So at this point I was thinking, damn, maybe they did screw up. It's like the rocket didn't put the satellite in orbit. I mean you probably did something wrong. So then I just – then of course I did more research and then we had a US official confirming to ABC News that – that the satellite ended up diving into the Indian Ocean. So that's pretty much where we are on January 10th. So what are the options here? Let's go – what are the options? So SpaceX is either lying their asses off, which they would not do. I'm sorry. They just – they would not.

'''J:''' Hold on. I agree with you. Slow down there, Sporty.

'''S:''' OK.

'''J:''' I agree with you because SpaceX historically has been a non-averse to failure. Remember that whole thing?

'''S:''' Yeah, that's kind of their philosophy. Failure is okay. We'll learn from it.

'''B:''' Absolutely. But I mean when you got a billion-dollar satellite, you could change your tune. But even then, I think they would absolutely fess up. So I don't think they're lying. For me, that's off the table. The other option is that SpaceX, they did screw up in some way. But no information that their systems delivered to them pointed to that screw up. But I don't think that happened either. I don't think that happened either. The thing that I think is happening here is that there's been speculation and the Wall Street Journal hinted at it. There's been speculation of a possible failure of the adapter that was made by Northrop Grumman that connected the satellite to the upper stage of the rocket. And to me, from everything that I know, that seems to be the most viable option, the most likely option because that was their responsibility. That adapter was Northrop Grumman. They designed it and they connected their satellite to the upper stage. Right.

'''E:''' What does Northrop Grumman say about that?

'''B:''' Well, they can't comment. This is classified.

'''S:''' They say, yeah, we don't comment on classified missions.

'''J:''' It isn't that convenient.

'''E:''' Well, I mean – But that's how it has to be. Otherwise, it's not a classified mission.

'''B:''' I think that type of thing I think will come out eventually. So yeah, so that's their domain and that's why SpaceX was saying everything, all of our shit was good and it seems that it was because that was their domain. SpaceX had everything up until the top of that top speed, the second stage rocket. It was all them. But everything above that, including the adapter and the satellite, that was all Northrop Grumman. So it seems like the adapter could be the culprit here, and that's what I would lay my money on. But also remember, don't forget, this is a high-tech classified military satellite. I think that it's possible that the satellite's neogenic laser grid deteriorated the tachyon filament, causing a catastrophic thoron dump. I'm just throwing that out there. Just throwing that out there. That's possible.

'''S:''' Bob, you know what I thought? Bob, it's clearly an Axion field failure.

'''C:''' I mean, let's not go crazy here.

'''J:''' Bob, I thought that the satellite did get up there, and it's possible. they're saying it didn't.

'''S:''' It's a cover? Yeah.

'''J:''' No, seriously. I mean, I wouldn't put that past reality. It's not like a ridiculous idea. They're like, oh, yeah, it failed. Yeah, sounds good. Go with it. Yeah, the billion-dollar government satellite did get launched.

'''E:''' And that's a conspiracy. I've got major companies in on this conspiracy at that point, Jay.

'''S:''' It's all – it's defense contracting. They're sworn to secrecy. I think that's probably not the case.

'''E:''' But it contradicts what SpaceX is saying.

'''B:''' Yeah, but you can't completely rule that out at this point.

'''S:''' SpaceX is saying our shit worked and we can't say anything else because it's classified. That's all they're saying. By the way, so the Falcon Heavy rocket is set to do a test launch later this month.

'''E:''' Oh, my god.

'''S:''' They're going to do like a demonstration launch. And they're just about ready as we're recording this to do a test fire of all of their engines. I was hoping it was going to be today. But it turns out it's going to be tomorrow at the earliest that they're going to do that. Yeah. But before this podcast comes out, they probably will have done the test firing. If that goes well, then they're going to actually launch the thing.

'''C:''' You guys should come here for the launch.

'''S:''' It's big enough to go to Mars, this rocket.

'''C:''' Are they launching it out of the same place that they always do their launches? Yeah.

'''S:''' The 39A, Pad 39A. Kennedy.

'''B:''' It's Kennedy.

'''S:''' Pad 39A, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Not for the Heavy. Not for the Falcon Heavy.

'''C:''' That's for the Heavy. I see. Yeah, they have to do it up there.

'''S:''' That's the same pad that they were launching the shuttle off of, and it's the same pad they launched the Saturn V, the Saturn V off of.

'''B:''' Saturn V. Finally. How many decades? We finally got a contender for the Saturn V and air to the Saturn V. Jeez.

'''S:''' The Falcon Heavy is twice as powerful as the next biggest rocket in the world in service today.

'''C:''' Yes.

'''B:''' So what is – now I know this is like very upgradable. This version that they're at right now with the 27 Merlin engines, what is that in comparison to the Saturn V?

'''S:''' I think it's – Saturn V was 261,000 – I mean 118,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. So it's 54,000 kilograms versus 118,000. Yes, a little bit more than twice.

'''E:''' Yeah, twice.

'''S:''' For the Saturn V. Saturn V was way overbuilt. It was built – Wow. It was built to go to Mars even though we only used it to go to the moon.

'''B:''' I'm looking at a little video of the Saturn V right next to the heavy lift. Damn, the Saturn V was big. Wow, it dwarfs the Falcon. That's so amazing. The Falcon Heavy. Wow. Steve, do you remember? Jay, you were there too. Do you remember when we saw a Saturn V on its side and we're staring at its engines? It's five engines. To me, that was like looking at the statue of David in Italy. That was just like a jaw drop. My jaw dropped. It was like – pictures cannot do that rocket justice.

'''J:''' Well, when you walk in the room, it's weird to be standing so close to an object that big. that is that complicated. It consumes you, right? Yeah. You get like blown away by it because you're like this thing was standing up and – went into outer space. like look at the size of that. you know it was. it's a marvel. it really is like a titan.

'''S:''' it's bigger than the titan. actually titan was a different different rocket. all right let's move on. so have you guys heard about the latest health trend? uh-oh raw water health trend.

=== Raw Water (47:42) ===
* [https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/raw-water-latest-dangerous-natural-health-fad/ "Raw water": The latest dangerous "natural health" fad]<ref>[https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/raw-water-latest-dangerous-natural-health-fad/ {{sbm}}: "Raw water": The latest dangerous "natural health" fad]</ref>

'''E:''' those two words don't go well together.

'''B:''' raw water

'''C:''' I know uncooked

'''S:''' uncooked water uncooked

'''E:''' huh.

'''S:''' So this is – to me, this is just crass marketing. Of course, this is another form of snake oil. Water. snake oil is very common. A lot of people essentially market either magic water like oxygen water. Yeah.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah, you're right.

'''S:''' Or like clustered water or alkaline water or the like natural water, right? Yes, pure water. There's no fluoride or whatever. And so it's very, very common, a lot of water woo out there. And this is another form of – this is the natural water. It's raw. It's unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water. So it's loaded with – Giardia. Yeah, Giardia.

'''B:''' Narcidic.

'''S:''' And bacteria.

'''C:''' Deer pee. Deer pee.

'''S:''' So it's like, okay, yeah, we're going to take crappy water and then we're going to sell it for $36.99. What? For 2.5 gallons. Wait, $36? No. No, $36. What the hell? Yeah.

'''C:''' That's like more expensive than oil.

'''S:''' I know. Yes. Crazy. That's crazy. And they even say that – yeah, like if you don't use it within a couple of weeks, it will turn green.

'''C:''' Well, yeah, because it's full of algae.

'''B:''' That's not a good sign. Which is natural. Which is natural by the way.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah. So it must be good for you.

'''S:''' I don't want to drink water that's going to turn green.

'''J:''' I mean is there anything dangerous about this?

'''E:''' Except on St.

'''S:''' Patrick's Day. Yeah.

'''C:''' Absolutely that's dangerous.

'''E:''' Sure.

'''S:''' It's like the raw milk thing. There's a reason why we pasteurize milk is to kill all the bacteria that are going to cause infections. Thank you.

'''C:''' Yeah, that was like a marvel of science and it like prevented so many deaths. Right? People need to get in a time machine and go back to what it was like before we had all the perks that we have now because it was all a function of convenience.

'''S:''' They could just get in a plane and go to another country. Exactly.

'''C:''' They could just go to Africa. Exactly. When I travel, I carry a SteriPen with me because I do. I go to developing countries a lot and I am scared to drink the water because I don't want to get parasites. Yeah.

'''S:''' So this is such a privileged first world nonsense when you think that there's a lot of people in the world who don't have potable water, don't have clean water to drink. And now some jackass is going to charge rich Americans extra money to drink unfiltered, unpurified water. There's something advantage to it.

'''B:''' This is – Isn't this a little bit self-correcting though? Don't you think that people are going to get sick? Some could even die and then we're going to be like, well, okay, no one's going to buy this crap anymore. Or are they going to be like kind of making sure it's not that bad so that doesn't happen?

'''C:''' Well, it's probably not like toilet water, right? They're probably pulling it from a semi-clean. Oh, God. They're probably not even testing it.

'''E:''' Unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water.

'''C:''' So a spring just right out of the top of the spring. It could have God knows what in it.

'''S:''' You don't want to kill the water. You're going to kill its vital essence, Cara.

'''C:''' Where is there a spring in the United States that isn't full of horrible toxic garbage that we've dumped into it?

'''S:''' There's probably some mountain spring water where it's pretty good.

'''C:''' Yeah, like melted glaciers. We've got plenty of those.

'''S:''' But whatever. I mean I do think this is a fad and it will probably just go to the fringe. These things rarely go away entirely but it will just persist on the fringe. And, you know, just one more way just to charge people a lot of money to do stupid things to hurt themselves.

'''C:''' But, yeah, there is a chance, Bob. Like you said, there's a chance somebody's going to get very, very sick from this.

'''B:''' Sure.

'''C:''' It's very scary.

'''S:''' People get sick from raw milk. It doesn't stop that from existing on the fringe. Drink it within one lunar cycle for super freshness.

'''C:''' Mysticism of the stars now. Doucheiest thing I've ever heard.

'''E:''' 100% marketing.

'''C:''' I'm going to start using that phrase all the time now. Within one lunar cycle, you'll be feeling much better. Oh, my God. What hippie nonsense. It's so L.A.

'''E:''' Within one revolution of Mercury. Oh, wait, can't use the word mercury. Oh, well.

'''C:''' Yeah, there's no mercury.

'''S:''' Let's move on. Evan, this is an interesting story about human Wi-Fi. I think this is just silly reporting, but what's going on here?

=== Human WiFi (52:07) ===
* [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/01/06/wi-fi-connects-human-brains-explains-people-have-gut-feelings/ How 'wi-fi' connects human brains and explains why people have 'gut feelings']<ref>[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/01/06/wi-fi-connects-human-brains-explains-people-have-gut-feelings/ Telegraph: How 'wi-fi' connects human brains and explains why people have 'gut feelings']</ref>

'''E:''' Yeah, it caught my attention. I stopped to read it. It appeared in The Telegraph a few days ago. And the title of the piece is called How Wi-Fi Connects Human Brains and Explains Why People Have Gut Feelings.

'''C:''' What?

'''E:''' Yes.

'''C:''' People didn't have gut feelings before Wi-Fi?

'''E:''' Apparently not. Or they didn't know exactly how it worked, but now – Wi-Fi is in quotes.

'''S:''' It's like a metaphor. OK.

'''E:''' Yes, that is true.

'''C:''' OK, OK, OK.

'''E:''' So his name is Digby Tantum. He is a clinical professor of psychotherapy. Digby. At the University of Sheffield, I say. And he believes human brains are...

'''S:''' Hold on, can you get more British? Professor Digby Tantum from University of Sheffield. Natural service.

'''E:''' On His Majesty's Secret Service. And he believes human brains are interconnected through a type of, in quotes, Wi-Fi, which allows us to pick up far more information about other people than we are aware of. Hmm. He describes the phenomenon as the interbrain and outlines his hypothesis in a brand new book of the same name. So he's selling a book called The Interbrain.

'''C:''' Wait, is he just talking about instinct?

'''S:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Not even.

'''C:''' Or like perception?

'''S:''' It's just perception. It's just, yeah, we perceive other people's emotions. Yeah, no shit.

'''C:''' Yeah, even when they don't know that they're expressing them.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' But he's putting some sort of mechanism to it, purported, with no science to back it up.

'''C:''' People have done that before.

'''S:''' I don't think he's even doing that, Evan. I think what this guy's doing is he's taking just the normal psychology of nonverbal communication, which is nothing new, nothing controversial, nothing supernatural, nothing extraordinary.

'''C:''' And totally scientifically described. Yeah.

'''S:''' Totally scientifically described. and he's just repackaging this idea with these new metaphors and inventing a term for it that adds nothing to it. It adds no concept, no understanding. It doesn't dig deeper. It doesn't expand our understanding of it phenomenologically. He's just slapping a weird name on old known psychological phenomena.

'''C:''' You know what it adds to it? It adds his speaker fee to it. Yeah, that's right. That's what he's doing.

'''E:''' Do you remember that Simpsons episode where Homer's learning about the internet and wants to create an internet company?

'''S:''' Interslice. Interslice.

'''E:''' That's what I thought of when I read Interbrain, eh? Now, wait a minute. But according to PubMed, there is something called the interbrain. It's an actual thing. Or more – well, in medical terms, it's the diencephalon. You ever heard of that? Diencephalon.

'''C:''' Oh, like the midbrain.

'''E:''' Right. The centrally located – is surrounded by other pieces. It includes the thalamus, hypothalamus, and pitothalamus.

'''S:''' He's using that term. He thinks he made it up, but he's just using it in a different way.

'''E:''' So to me, that's a red flag of what a crank does. They borrow these scientific jargons and sort of co-opt them for their own.

'''C:''' Oh, I'm bummed out that he's an actual clinical psychologist too. Why are you making us look bad?

'''S:''' He's just trying to – yeah, just repackaging stuff to make it pop.

'''C:''' It's a bummer.

'''S:''' What's the actual concept here? What's he actually saying? When you dig down, it's just nonverbal communication. Oh, big BFD. That's it.

'''E:''' Right. That's all I got from it. He's talked about it before. He's written a few books. It's not his first book.

'''S:''' Yeah. But the thing – the real disappointing thing is how the media just runs with it. It's like, oh, there's this new thing about how this Wi-Fi connects our brains together.

'''C:''' Do people think that actual Wi-Fi is just like internet juice that's like in the air? Internet juice. You tap into it. Like it existed before we came along and now we just use it to our advantage. Like how is the Wi-Fi metaphor – At all relevant here.

'''E:''' So people can wrap their brains around a concept that otherwise needs to be repackaged and be resold.

'''C:''' No, but it's an easy concept. It's such an easy concept to understand without the Wi-Fi metaphor. Right.

'''S:''' The metaphor detracts from understanding. It does. It doesn't add anything. It actually makes it less clear.

'''B:''' Except clicks. Except clicks.

'''C:''' There you go, Bob.

'''E:''' Here we go. Here's a quote. Tantum writes, Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. then our brains act and react to other brains well before each brain can provide the substrate for a mind to call into doubt whether or not the other brain is there.

'''J:''' Well, that makes sense.

'''C:''' You know what I think his problem is? I think he's probably a dualist and he legit thinks that like the brain architecture, like the physical brain is like putting out brain juices that the next brain is receiving.

'''S:''' I don't think he even needs to hypothesize that.

'''C:''' It's like obviously like our brains are behind our behavior and then we behave and then another person experiences our behavior and then their brain reacts to that. Like that has been known for hundreds of years.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's called vision. You see other people and we respond. Seriously, what's the guy talking about?

'''C:''' My dog does that. Yeah, like if I point across the room to where his ball went, he looks where I pointed and goes and gets his ball. My brain is not Wi-Fi-ing with my dog's brain.

'''E:''' He seems to tie it into the autism spectrum disorder in the sense that he's studied that apparently extensively. And he makes comparisons of brains that are deemed to be autistic versus the other brains out there. And he sees these disconnects basically in the people who have these autism features. Yeah. And makes – his decisions are – it influences how he perceives all other brains working based on how the autistic brain is working.

'''S:''' Again, nothing new. We know that people with autism don't respond as much to – To social cues. To social cues, yeah, and to nonverbal communication. That's – Their brains don't talk to themselves as much. They don't mirror what other people do as much as typical people do. So this is nothing new. He's just repackaging other people's science with his own sort of terminology. And using metaphors that actually detract from our ability to understand what's really going on.

'''C:''' My head is literally cradled in my hands right now. I'm so annoyed by that.

'''S:''' Horrible science communication. This is horrible science communication.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's horrible science communication. It's bad. Jesus.

'''J:''' That's your interbrain. My gut brain, though, is telling me that you're feeling something, Cara.

'''E:''' All the way down in my gutty-wutties. Cockroach orange.

'''S:''' Thank you. So now we're going to end with some good news.

'''J:''' Good news, everyone.

=== Cancer Deaths Declining (59:25) ===
* [https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/cancer-deaths-continue-to-decline/ Cancer Deaths Continue to Decline]<ref>[https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/cancer-deaths-continue-to-decline/ {{sbm}}: Cancer Deaths Continue to Decline]</ref>

'''S:''' Cara, cancer deaths continue to decline.

'''C:''' Yes, yes. So I've been reading about this and then you actually wrote about this, right, in Science-Based Medicine?

'''S:''' Yeah, I wrote about it today, yeah.

'''C:''' Today, which is great. There's a new study, I guess, kind of not a study but a new – what would you call it?

'''S:''' It's a study. It's a study. OK. All right. Survey. They brought together all the information that exists about the epidemiology of cancer.

'''C:''' There you go. And it was published in CA?

'''S:''' It's the Journal of the American Cancer Society.

'''C:''' Yeah. So it's called CA, a cancer journal for clinicians. I don't know if you're supposed to call it CA or CA.

'''S:''' No, CA is like our shorthand for cancer. Gotcha.

'''C:''' Cool, cool, cool. And yeah, so the study is called Cancer Statistics 2018. And really what the researchers in this did is exactly what you said, looked at cancer data, epidemiological data across several, several years. And so going back all the way to, I think, 1991 up to 2015, and then they have predictions looking forward in 2018. Yeah. So the top line here, and then we can talk about like why these are the top lines or kind of dig a little deeper into the numbers as to what they mean, is that from 91 to 2015, the death rate from cancer dropped about 1.5% per year, resulting in a total decrease between 1991 and 2015 of 26%. So that's estimated at 2,378,600 fewer deaths than Yeah. And now some of that is somewhat artifactual, but most of that is due to... increase in treatment, increase in early prevention. So new cases of cancer, it varies from men to women. Men and women get different types of cancer. Not surprisingly, the top type in men is prostate cancer. Women don't have a prostate, so we don't get that. And the top type in females is breast cancer. Men do have breasts and can get breast cancer, but it's not nearly as common. Number two for both of them is lung cancer or lung and bronchial cancer. Number three for both males and females is colon and rectum. Number four is actually quite similar. In men, it's urinary and bladder cancer. And in women, it's uterine cancer. And then it goes on from there, thyroid, melanoma, and they vary. But those are the top causes or cases, I'm sorry. But deaths, what do you think is the most common type of cancer that kills you in both men and women?

'''E:''' Lung cancer?

'''C:''' Lung cancer. Is it? Both men and women. And that's kind of different because historically more men died from lung cancer than women. But now it still kills less women per year. But percentage-wise, 25% of cancer deaths in women are lung and bronchus. And 26% of cancer deaths in men are lung and bronchus. And then it goes to prostate and breast, colon and rectum. And then number four leading cause of cancer deaths is pancreas cancer. Yikes.

'''B:''' Lung cancer has gone down, right? Absolutely.

'''C:''' And that is part of the reason that all cancer has gone down. Lung cancer is terrible and lung cancer has gone down. And why do you think lung cancer has gone down?

'''B:''' I mean, many people are smoking it as much.

'''C:''' massive decrease in the number of smokers.

'''S:''' Tobacco use was at 42% in the 1960s, and it's down to 17%. Wow.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's a massive decrease. And of course, these numbers in the US, and these numbers in the study are from 91 to 2015. But still, there was a big decrease between those years. So that's one thing. The prostate cancer screening issue is a little more complicated. Steve, do you mind kind of helping me make sense of that?

'''S:''' Yeah, so in the 1990s, they introduced a prostate-specific antigen, PSA, which is a blood test which screens for prostate cancer. And so when they did that, we had a huge spike in prostate cancer diagnoses because we were finding all of these early prostate cancers. And then we figured out that a lot of those people never would have had any problems if we just didn't even know that they had prostate cancer. In other words, it's cancer but it would take so long to become problematic and it usually happens in older guys that they would have died from other reasons before they ever manifested clinically their prostate cancer. And so – Knowing about it early, super early with PSA screening led to unnecessary treatment and didn't really help. So actually we started phasing out early – just routinely screening with PSA. Now we only do it when there's clinical suspicion. And so the numbers then went back down. So you just have this sort of artificial peak in the 90s from the PSA screening. And so part of the decline, prostate cancer incidence, the changes in prostate cancer are just largely artifactual from changes in our screening practices. So that's why there's so much to unpack in these numbers.

'''C:''' There's a lot.

'''S:''' Part of it is just how we screen for cancer. Part of it is improvements in risk factors. Part of it is improvement in treatment outcomes.

'''C:''' Yeah, and all those things add together.

'''S:''' Yeah, for every different kind of cancer in every demographic group, age and gender and race even, you have to sort of tease those numbers apart. I did a pretty deep dive into the numbers when I wrote about it on science-based medicine.

'''C:''' Yeah, yours is deep. Yours is deeper than some that I've seen in some other kind of popular write-arounds. Like you talked about the lead time bias, which I think is really interesting.

'''S:''' So lead time bias basically is the earlier you diagnose the disease, the longer people are going to live with it from the point of diagnosis, right?

'''C:''' Of course. So it seems like survival time has increased, but it's really that you diagnosed it earlier.

'''S:''' So you have to adjust for that. And the way you do that is to look at survival time by stage, right?

'''C:''' Stage four means it's like metastatic over a lot of the body.

'''S:''' Right. So if like people with stage two cancer are surviving longer than they were 10 years ago with stage two cancer, that's not lead time bias. That's got to be improvement in treatment because stage two is stage two, you know.

'''C:''' But all those things improve, right? Like diagnosing something earlier means that you have a better shot at it because, of course, treatments are generally better during stage one.

'''S:''' But it means incidence goes up, right? It means we diagnose more people. We may be diagnosing people who we never would have known they had cancer. There's been some redefinition of some borderline dysplasia in the tissue. We're calling that cancer now.

'''C:''' Yeah, I wonder if we're going to see a big change with cervical cancer simply because they've recently changed the recommendations for how often women get PAPs. It used to always be annually no matter what. And now they're going every three to five years depending on your history.

'''S:''' Yeah, everything we do like that will change the numbers. And then we have, of course, the human papillomavirus vaccine, which is actually decreasing PAPs. cervical cancer incidence. We're doing more colonoscopies, which is reducing colon cancer. We're actually removing precancerous polyps before they ever become cancer. And so that's a real improvement. And if you just look at people with cancer at every age and every stage – are doing better, are living longer with their cancer. Although most of the gains are in early stages. The later stages, not quite as much, but still they're smaller.

'''C:''' But that also makes sense if you know anything about how cancer is treated. It's so hard to fight against this monster once it's spread all over the body.

'''S:''' The more spread out it is, the harder it is to treat. Yeah, we're just making these incremental advances in treating cancer every year. It's a little bit better, a little bit better, you know.

'''C:''' And so what you wrote about in Science Based Medicine, I really appreciate because a lot of people have written about this because it is really good news. You know, we're sort of in a way making good progress in this quote unquote war on cancer. And then you took that a step further and said… Let's take a step back and see why this is important for the conversation as skeptics. Because one of the common points of rhetoric for, you know, natural medicine, homeopathy, Chinese traditional medicine proponents is that mainstream doctors are trying to keep you sick. They don't know how to treat cancer. Cancer treatments just make you worse. That's a very common argument. Chemotherapy is terrible for you and it's just going to make you die sooner. That's why you should take this natural approach. And this is just really good, hard data that shows that, no, there are improvements that are being made. And if you look at them over the long enough span of time, they're pretty massive.

'''S:''' Yeah, it adds up. And also, I also pointed out that, you know, with people, the other alternative medicine narrative is that our environment is increasingly toxic. And that's why people are getting so sick. But actually, the incidence of cancers are decreasing, too. Not only are people surviving longer with cancer, but the incidence is decreasing, partly because physicians are taking preventive steps, you know, colonoscopies, vaccines, you know, decreasing smoking, etc., But also there isn't any big mystery increase in cancer. that's happening. Like we're missing something, you know?

'''C:''' Yeah, you go type to type and they're either getting slightly better or they're not changing. But nothing's getting worse.

'''S:''' There's no weird unexplained spikes or shifting in the slope or anything. It's like, oh, look, when we introduced GMOs, cancers took up. Now there's none of that. None of that's happening in there. So the numbers are the numbers. Things are getting slowly better basically. Yeah. Okay, Jay, you missed last week, so you've got to get us caught up on who's that noisy.

{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? (1:09:40) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 650
|answer = Tuba playing a very low note
|}}



'''J:''' Okay, last week I played this noisy. What is it? I got a ton of responses on this, and not one person guessed it correctly. What?

'''S:''' Oh, boy.

'''J:''' So, yeah, I'll read a couple of these, too. So somebody said, it sounds like a money bill counter. Yeah. That was sent in by a listener named Thor Peel. Very cool name. Very. Another listener said, I've been on and off listening to the SGU for three, three and a half years, and I'm not quite sure what the noise is, but it sounds like percussive as if something is hitting a large mass of wood very quickly. So I'm going to guess it's a woodpecker.

'''S:''' No, it's not a woodpecker. I would have recognized a woodpecker.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's not a woodpecker. Someone said it's a jackhammer. Another person said it's a power drill.

'''B:''' I first thought it was an old school movie projector.

'''J:''' Oh, yeah. Another person said that it's a moth releasing flatulence.

'''C:''' Hi-yo.

'''J:''' It was sent in by Jim. All of you are incorrect, sir. If any of you remember, Cara made a comment on the show about two months ago, three months ago, that why don't we ever play something? that's just what it is? You know, something that's like, I don't know. Why don't you just play like, I don't know, a tuba?

'''C:''' And then be like, it's a tuba.

'''J:''' Cara.

'''B:''' So it's a slowed down instrument.

'''C:''' What is it? Is it a tuba?

'''J:''' It's a tuba.

'''C:''' Is it somebody's lips up against the mouth?

'''J:''' That's a tuba. I'll read to you what's going on. A listener very astutely was paying attention to our conversation and decided to send me in something very real and non-altered or slowed down or whatever that he figured it wouldn't sound. It would be super obvious. So this is John Wittner. And John plays the tuba full time in an orchestra called the RSNO or Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Neat. He said, Hi, Jay. I'm playing an F natural three octaves and a fifth below middle C. For comparison, this is a major third below the lowest note on the piano. And he stuck the microphone just in front of the bell on the instrument. And that's what he thinks gives it more of that jackhammer effect. But he has done absolutely nothing to the audio. Wow. So there, Cara. So there. Bam.

'''C:''' Cool.

'''J:''' It's a tuba. Love it.

'''C:''' It's a tuba. It's a tuba.

'''J:''' It's awesome.

'''S:''' The frequency was just so low, you could make out the individual.

'''C:''' The tremolo kind of to the, yeah, that's cool. Yep.

'''B:''' Pretty cool. Wow. I like it.

'''S:''' And what do you got for this week?

'''J:''' This week, hey, don't push me along, okay? This week, someone that you and I know, Steve, Rob Palmer.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Come on, Palmer. Rob is a well-known skeptic, and he's a good guy. And Rob had an interesting experience. That's all I'll say. Rob sent me in this noisy. I thought this was really, really, really cool. I'm dying to hear what you guys think this is.

'''B:''' Three reallys.

'''S:''' That's horrifying. Nails on a blackboard is not, it sounds like.

'''C:''' Yeah, I think that was nails on a chalkboard.

'''S:''' That's really bad, Jay. People are going to hate us if we play that on the phone. That's painful.

'''J:''' Do you guys think that's painful?

'''E:''' It's a little more annoying than painful.

'''C:''' I guess Jay doesn't have misophonia.

'''J:''' Yeah. You're phony? So phony.

'''E:''' I do.

'''C:''' Me so phony, yeah. If you don't like nails on the chalkboard.

'''S:''' I have really bad. Ooh.

'''B:''' Aliens screeching when they've been like revealed.

'''S:''' Yeah. You got that too, Steve? That would be a good sound effect for that. Yeah, I did. Wow.

'''E:''' Because I'm intimately familiar with the movie Time Bandits. If you remember in one of the last scenes when those horned kind of creatures come out and attack the dwarves and stuff, they make a noise that sounds like that. That's sort of their call. Cool.

'''J:''' Those are all good guesses. If you have any idea what that is or if you heard any cool noisies in 2018 and beyond, you must email me at WTN at theskepticsguide.org.

'''C:''' You must.

'''S:''' Thanks, Jay. All right. Well, let's go on with science or fiction.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (1:23:23) ===
[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

{{wtnAnswer|654|short_text_from_transcript}} 

{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:15:32) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
}}
{{SOFinfo
|theme = Robots

|item1 = Engineers have unveiled a fully autonomous robotic weeder that can target and remove individual weeds with >99% accuracy.
|link1 = <ref>[https://www.techexplorist.com/robotic-weeders-farm-near/ Text Explorist: Robotic weeders: to a farm near you?]</ref>

|item2 = Scientists successfully tested an implantable robot that can be used to stretch and lengthen organs such as the esophagus or intestines.
|link2 = <ref>[https://bgr.com/science/robotic-implant-stretch-organs-esophagus-research/ BGR: Scientists create a robotic implant that stretches organs to promote tissue growth]</ref>

|item3 = Scientists have developed a system of soft artificial muscle for robots that produces 6 times greater force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle.
|link3 = <ref>[https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/artificial-muscles-give-soft-robots-superpowers/ Wyss Institute: Artificial muscles give soft robots superpowers]</ref>

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = robotic weeder

|science1 = organ stretcher
|science2 = soft artificial muscle

|rogue1 = jay
|answer1 = organ stretcher

|rogue2 =Evan
|answer2 = robotic weeder

|rogue3 =cara
|answer3 = soft artificial muscle

|rogue4 = bob
|answer4 = soft artificial muscle

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever =y
|win = 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


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

'''J:''' All right. Robots. 72% of the time, Bob and I guess robot questions correctly.

'''E:''' Robot. So there's always the 28%. Yeah. Okay.

'''S:''' You ready? Do your best, sir. All right, here we go. Danger. And item number three, scientists have developed a system of soft artificial muscle for robots that produces six times greater force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle.

'''J:''' The penis mightier.

'''S:''' Penis mightier. It's still funny to me. Swords for 400.

'''J:''' He says, I'll take S.

'''S:''' Swords. I'll take swords for 300. That's S words. All right. Jay, since you're very confident, why don't you go first?

=== Jay's Response ===

'''J:''' Confident? All right. I'll go first, you rogue. All right. This one about the engineers have unveiled a fully autonomous robotic weeder, and it can target and remove individual weeds with 99% accuracy. I like this idea, like engineers have unveiled, like there's a whole room full of engineers and they're like, okay, ready, pull the tarp on three. Okay. The 99% accuracy thing, I think if you're growing plants, you need it to be probably even more than 99% accurate because you don't want it to kill 1% of your crop. Right. It's interesting. I mean, I'm sure that there are autonomous robot weeders in the farming industry on some level, but this one, to me, seems like it has hands and does things. But okay, let's move on to the next one. These scientists who have tested implantable robot... It's an implantable robot, Cara. And it can stretch and lengthen your organs... I mean, is this a torture device or is this a medical device, Steve?

'''S:''' Yes.

'''C:''' You should have known.

'''J:''' They have tested this thing and it's implantable. All right. Well, all right. So let's think about why would we need this. Somebody has a short esophagus or intestine. Intestine.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's true.

'''J:''' Right? That's weird. The esophagus, though, that's crazy. Like, you're going to stretch that out? I mean, I could see maybe stretching on an intestine. That one scares me. And this last one here, scientists have developed a system of soft artificial muscle for robots that produces six times greater force. per unit than mammalian skeletal muscle. Soft artificial muscle for robots, and it's six times greater force. Damn! We are so obsolete, it's ridiculous. I kind of want the third one to be true, just because we want strong robots to do cool stuff for us. And I could see them coming up with, you know, here we go, soft artificial muscle. Those three words are the key thing in this item here. When you talk about artificial muscle, is it similar to human muscle? Does it work? and chemically like a human muscle does or not. I could see scientists coming up with artificial muscle type system. I don't know how much it mimics human muscle and the mechanism of human muscle, but I could see that one as being true. The one about the implantable robot, I mean, I think that that seems plausible, but I still don't get why they'd have to lengthen stretching length in your esophagus, I mean, wouldn't you have to remove it from someone to fix it first? Like, oh, God, I don't know. This is horrible.

'''C:''' I don't think so, Jay. You think they take out your esophagus? I don't know. I mean, they're stretching it.

'''J:''' They got this robot pulling on it. That sounds really intense. The robot basically has hands and feet, and all it's doing is it puts its feet down and just pulls on the esophagus. It's ridiculous.

'''C:''' It's like Bender, except it's Stretcher.

'''E:''' Stretcher the robot. Call me Bender.

'''J:''' All right. So my gut is telling me that the muscle one is the fake, but I think it's this middle one. This is esophagus intestine one, the stretcher robot. I think that's the fake.

'''S:''' Okay, Evan.

=== Evan's Response ===

'''E:''' Okay. The weeder targeting and removing individual weeds, 99% accuracy, greater than 99% accuracy. So the key here is that the robot has to determine what's a weed and what's not a weed. and how is it doing that exactly? Yeah. I wonder if they somehow grew the weeds with some trait that the robot had to specifically be able to identify and pull out. I don't see how it can otherwise distinguish. weed from plant. Greater than 99% accuracy. That's tough. That's a tough one to digest. The one about the stretching and lengthening of the organs, esophagus and intestines. Yeah, I think I have a feeling this one's going to turn out to be right because we're not necessarily talking about people here. Other animals have esophaguses and intestines and other things. And they only tested it. It's not like... So testing it in a small animal or something is certainly... The way to go. I have a feeling that one's going to be right. And then the last one about the artificial muscle. This one I have the least sort of feeling for. Six times greater force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle. Yeah. That sounds impressive. It's probably even more impressive than I'm thinking it is. I'm going to go with the weeds because I don't think it was able to get that level of accuracy and be able to distinguish. You know, you throw this robot into your flower bed. How the hell is it going to know your petunia from your dandelion? I just don't see how it will know that. It would have to pull it out at the root level too. That's how you really remove the weeds. So I'm going to say that one's the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Cara.

=== Cara's Response ===

'''C:''' I think that the muscle one's the fiction. I think that – I feel like I've seen really cool farm robots before. Like I've done stories back when I worked for Al Jazeera. There was this amazing strawberry-picking robot that had all these crazy arms and could like gently pick just strawberries because it had computer vision. And the thing is if it has computer vision, then it can totally tell the difference between its target plant and a non-target plant. Yeah. I feel like that's possible. I don't know how like how cost effective it would be, but it does seem possible. So I'm going to go with that being science. The implantable robot that can stretch and lengthen organs as I feel like this was the sleeper clue. Like this one's totally real, but you put it in because it sounds insane. Because I do know that there are people who suffer from like weird developmental problems where they don't have their organs are like the wrong size. I don't know though. And maybe if they're young enough, you know, if you get this robot in while you're still in a developmental stage and you can like stretch your organs during that thing, then you're not going to have all these like downstream problems as you grow up. But the soft artificial muscle that produces six times greater force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle is First of all, I don't know the point of it. Maybe there's a reason to do it. But if you have a robot, why does it have to work like a human, like human physiology? Like, we already have machines that are way stronger than people. And we can just use hard pieces for that. I mean, maybe there's a reason for it, but I don't understand. Like, how soft is soft? Yeah. You're not going to tell me that, are you? But what you are saying here is that the soft muscle is what's actually pulling the load. Like the six times greater force per unit is done by the soft muscle, not by the hard pieces of the robot. Yeah, I think that's crazy. I don't think that's true. I'm going to say that's the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay. And Bob?

=== Bob's Response ===

{{tooltip|GWB|go with Bob}}

'''B:''' So, all right, the autonomous weeder. Yeah, I mean, Cara kind of read my mind on a lot of these, so I'm going to kind of retroactively say that she's pulling a GWB. I mean, the weeder, yeah, you got a database of plants.

'''C:''' It's the Wi-Fi brain.

'''B:''' A database of plants. I mean, and if you got even a marginal AI, you could kind of figure out what it looks like from other angles, you know, so you don't know the plant from just one angle. Yeah. And yeah, just pull that effort up out of the dirt. You don't even have to get the weeds because if you go back a few days later, pull it up again. It doesn't even have to be that thorough. So I think that didn't surprise me at all. And yet again, like Cara said, number two here, this stupid robot to stretch organs. What? That's just bizarre. And I think we're just meant to have some visceral reaction to it. I think I said visceral too many times this past hour. So I won't say it again. So yeah, that's just like bizarre and I'm sure they have some weird torture reasons to justify that. So yeah, I'm going to go with that one. But the muscle one – but here I will disagree with Cara. I think there's plenty of reasons for soft muscle. One is just weight. It could be just a lot lighter. Oh. A lot lighter and also depending on what the robot is going to do. So sure, they've been talking about soft muscle. I've been reading about it for literally for decades. It's to the point like battery technology. Like I don't even care anymore. Just come up with something cool and then tell me about it. It's like I saw this. There is an article on this. out there, and I kind of scanned the title. You don't know what it says. Right, and I didn't dive into it because I'm just so sick. I'm just so sick of artificial muscle news. I don't care. Just do it. You know, it's like I've read it a million times, a million iterations, so... Yeah, I believe it, but I still think that Steve is messing with this six times. I think that's probably too strong. Maybe it's not even near human strength, but it's very promising, blah, blah, blah. It looks cool, but you're never going to hear about this ever again. Typical stuff. So I'm going to say that the artificial muscle is fiction.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' Okay, so we got Bob and Cara for the artificial muscle, Jay for the esophagus stretcher, and Evan for the weed puller.

'''C:''' No sweep. Right. No sweep.

'''S:''' You guys are spread out, so there's no reason not to take these in order. We'll start with number one. Engineers have unveiled a fully autonomous robotic weeder that can target and remove individual weeds with greater than 99% accuracy. Evan, you think this is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is... The fiction. Oh, weed. Good job, Evan. No.

'''E:''' Solo weed. I smoked out the weeds.

'''J:''' Good job, brother.

'''C:''' So what's the trick? What's the trick?

'''B:''' You're full of crap. This is totally possible.

'''C:''' Did you make this up from nowhere?

'''B:''' This is totally possible.

'''S:''' But it doesn't exist.

'''E:''' It doesn't exist. Did

'''C:''' something like it exist or did

'''B:''' you just pull this

'''S:''' one out of your ass?

'''B:''' Northrop Grumman had it. Northrop Grumman had it in that satellite and you just don't even know about it.

'''E:''' Bastards.

'''S:''' All right. So there are robotic weeders. Yes. Okay. And they've been around for a long time, mechanical weeders, robotic weeders. But they don't target individual plants or weeds. You just align them with the rows of the plants and they just go through there and basically till around the plants and pull up the weeds. So the new bit is that they are – a company did come up with a new design for a robotic weeder that does try to target individual weeds but it's really bad at it because it's hard to do. They say this is 1.0. It really has a hard time telling the difference between weeds and plants. You have to put the plants like in super straight rows so it knows to avoid them. They are working – I think Evan, you came up with the idea of tagging the plants. They are coming up with a way of tagging the plants so that the robot knows to avoid them. Not tagging the weeds but tagging the crops. So then they can basically pull out everything that's not tagged and then you're good. But I really felt – I found this idea compelling. I mean the technology is very primitive at this point. They're not really doing what you might imagine like a robot going through like what a human would do. Like we can recognize plants from weeds and we pull out all the weeds individually. That's really what we need.

'''B:''' I think you read an article from 1995. is what you read.

'''S:''' No, this is January 10th, 2018. Think about it. So for some crops like the massive crops like corn, wheat, you have to use herbicide. Hand pulling is just – it's not cost-effective and it's massively inefficient. But for certain specialty crops like lettuce, for example, where it's still a big area of land but it's a lot smaller than the millions of acres of corn, for example, it is more plausible to hand weed. It's still expensive though. It could cost a lot of money to like $150 to $300 per section of land to hand weed it.

'''C:''' Can't you just spray it with Roundup?

'''S:''' Yeah, but some plants – That sounds easier. Yes. Yeah, like corn, you can do that, soybeans, whatever. But some things don't – we don't have Roundup-ready versions of them. That's true. Yeah, the Roundup would kill the plants. So like for lettuce, no, you cannot spray lettuce with Roundup. So you pretty much have to hand weed. But it would be cool. I mean if we can get robots that were good enough, that were as good as people at recognizing weeds from plants, they could just continuously crawl around pulling the weeds out. That could really be an effective way of controlling weeds and reducing herbicide use and this is I think going to be one more piece to the pest management overall strategy that we have. So it's interesting. But yeah, but the tech isn't there yet. Again, they're saying it's 1.0. It really is going more on just the rows, just trying to avoid the rows.

'''B:''' They're not even trying. They're not even trying.

'''S:''' I agree. I don't think this is – I agree with you, Bob. I think this is a technology that could be there if they really developed it. I don't think this is beyond our current technology. They would just need to really develop it. It seems like we should be able to – computers should be able to do pattern recognition to like identify – like pull out everything here. that isn't a tomato plant, right? That shouldn't – I can't imagine that would be too hard.

'''C:''' Well, yeah. And like I said, they have like strawberry pickers that do that.

'''B:''' Yeah. It's so weird.

'''C:''' Yeah.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Yeah, but they just don't exist yet. So let's go on to number two. Scientists successfully tested an implantable robot that can be used to stretch and lengthen organs such as the esophagus and intestines. That one, of course, is science. And yeah, I mean, Cara is correct. There are indications for this. So some children are born with an incompletely developed esophagus. For example, they have esophageal atresia. And they try to stitch the two ends of the esophagus together, but they're not long enough. So they have to stretch the esophagus so that it's touching so they can sew the two ends together. Now, the current treatment for this – They have to essentially put in a hard device, a rigid device, and they have to essentially paralyze the child for weeks. So they basically put them in general anesthesia for several weeks. Oh, how sad. That's insane. Yeah. While they stretch the esophagus because they can't have them moving around with this device in place. But this new robot is soft and they've tested it in large animals like pigs. They haven't tested it in humans yet. But the pigs were able to be awake and move around and even eat and it's fine. And it basically is like two rings that they sew into the esophagus and it pulls them together. Yeah. They increased the length by 2.5 millimeters each day. You do that for eight to nine days and you move it a couple of centimeters. you need to get them in place. Some people are also born with a short intestine. They don't have enough intestine. You can implant this device and it will just stretch out your intestine. Now when you – on a tubular organ, when you apply those kind of forces, those stretching forces, they actually make new cells.

'''C:''' They – Oh, good. So it doesn't make it weaker.

'''S:''' Yeah, it doesn't just stretch out. It actually makes it longer. The cells actually reproduce and fill in to account for the stretching. And so you actually do increase the size of the organ, of these tubular organs. So that's why it works. That's really neat. Yeah, it's neat. It reminds me of a technique that I learned about in medical school. I think it's called the Alizarov technique where they put pins in bones and then they pull them apart and they cause the bone to lengthen. So like you could use this in somebody like who has dwarfism, for example, and you could add an inch or two to their limbs. It can make a huge difference in their overall stature.

'''C:''' Well, especially if somebody has like one leg that's shorter than the other. It can cause so many problems.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some parts of the body do respond to those forces by literally growing to fill in what's left behind by the stretching. Okay. All this means that scientists have developed a system of soft artificial muscles for robots that produces six times greater force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle. is science.

'''B:''' Wow.

'''S:''' Yeah, Cara, you're totally wrong, and Bob is correct. Soft muscles for robots are huge. Huge. This is a big focus of research because it would produce so many applications for robots that are hard to do, difficult to do with hard parts.

'''C:''' Yeah, whatever.

'''S:''' They need to be able to manipulate delicate things, for example. That's what I was saying. Yeah. And also having soft muscles means they'd be quieter. They also might use less energy. They might be also more flexible, be able to get themselves into different shapes and different environments. It adds a lot of functionality to a robot to make it out of soft parts. So you could also interact with humans a little bit more nicely because they're soft.

'''B:''' Also, ultimately replace human muscle with this stuff.

'''S:''' Well, yeah. Yeah, sure.

'''B:''' That's always kind of like implied.

'''E:''' Nice.

'''S:''' This uses a pneumatic device to cause the muscles to stretch, to contract. They were actually – the scientists were surprised at how strong it was. It exceeded their expectations. He said it can contract down to 10% of its original size. It could lift a delicate flower off the ground and twist it into a coil. And the movement is pneumatic. It's done by air. And they were surprised at how strong it was. It generated six times more force per unit area than mammalian skeleton muscle can. Very lightweight, as Bob pointed out. It's a huge advantage. It's very lightweight. A 2.6-gram muscle can lift a 3-kilogram object, which is the equivalent of a mallard duck lifting a car.

'''J:''' What?

'''E:''' A duck.

'''B:''' Wow. That's awesome.

'''J:''' We are so screwed, man.

'''S:''' And it can be constructed quickly out of cheap material. A single muscle can be made within 10 minutes out of material costing less than $1.

'''E:''' Whoa.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Cockle. Pretty cool. This was by – this is like an origami-inspired artificial muscles. This was from the MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Weiss Institute at Harvard University. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cara's favorite journal. Very cool. Actually, this came out in late November. This is about a month old, this new sign. But I needed a third robot item, so I had to go back a little bit. Cool. So good job, Evan. Thanks. Good job.

'''E:''' I've spent many, many hours pulling weeds out of gardens. So I believe I'd be very much looking forward to a robot that could do that.

'''S:''' It would be nice. It would be nice. Farming in the future will just be a lot of little robots crawling around pulling out weeds. I just saw Minority Report again recently with my daughter.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''B:''' How did that hold up?

'''S:''' It holds up pretty well. I mean there's definitely some of the things are dated. But it's – the Minority Report did a good job because first of all, it's in the 2050s. So they went far enough into the future. Thank you. Although maybe we'll reassess that in 2050. It wasn't like 10 years or the future. They went a good 50 years in the future. So that was good on them for that. And they had the self-driving cars and everything. So it was pretty good. The one thing that I noted about it was that the cell phones were really small. So they kind of missed the whole smartphone. This was before smartphones. And also I think they missed the virtual reality thing. So the whole – the classic, the now iconic scene of Tom Cruise in front of the monitors with the gloves on, flipping the images around. He would have VR goggles on.

'''B:''' Also, that would be so tiring. His deltoids would be fried.

'''C:''' Come on. Well, maybe he had contacts in and you just didn't see them.

'''B:''' Or maybe he had artificial muscle in his deltoids.

'''J:''' He never had to do it for more than two or three minutes. He always figures that stuff out quick.

'''B:''' Because he couldn't do it longer.

'''C:''' But eventually our VR headsets are going to be miniaturized and put inside of our eyes. I would think so.

'''J:''' Yeah, and then they'll stretch out our eyes.

'''E:''' Along with our esophagus. But those little spider robots running all over society doing all sorts of stuff is very creepy in that movie.

'''S:''' Yeah, those spider robots are creepy.

== Announcements (1:38:02) ==
* Britt Hermes lawsuit: [https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/cancer-quack-colleen-huber-sues-britt-hermes-over-criticism/ Cancer quack Colleen Huber sues Britt Hermes over criticism]

'''S:''' Hey, quick announcement. You guys remember Brit Hermes. We had her on our show recently. She is the former naturopath who realized that her profession was basically a scam and has been trying to raise public awareness about this. Well, Britt, in recognition of her fine work, is being sued. She has been taken to court in Germany by U.S.-based naturopath Colleen Huber, H-U-B-E-R, who is claiming that Britt has defamed her on her blog. Huber is a critic of chemotherapy and radiation therapy and cancer treatment. Instead, she uses, quote-unquote, natural therapies that include intravenous infusions of vitamin C and baking soda, which, by the way, is pure nonsense. The international skeptical community is obviously very concerned that this will have a chilling effect on legitimate criticism of unproven medical claims and practices. So the Australian skeptics has taken it upon themselves to set up a fundraising campaign to help cover Brits' legal costs. If you want to contribute to Britt's campaign, go to skeptics.com.au. slash Britt Hermes. That's B-R-I-T-T-H-E-R-M-E-S. This is definitely a worthy cause. And we are also thinking, assuming that this all ends well, of parlaying this into a general legal defense fund to protect people who are legitimately criticizing quackery and unscientific medical claims. All right, Evan, give me a quote.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:39:38) ==

<blockquote>Even when I have no power over important events in my life, I gain a feeling of control from understanding them. And I, too, have a sense of wonder. For me, discovering the workings of nature is a vibrant, satisfying experience that is both intellectual and emotional. To recognize the astronomical relationship between the Sun and the Earth, or to understand the optical phenomena that create its rosy light, does not strip the sunset of its beauty. – {{w|Stuart Vyse|Professor Stuart Vyse}}, American psychologist, teacher, speaker and author, from ''Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition''</blockquote>

'''E:''' Or to understand the optical phenomena that create its rosy light does not strip the sunset of its beauty. And that was written by Professor Stuart Weiss from his book Believe in Magic, Psychology of Superstitions.

'''S:''' He's a friend of ours, a friend of the show.

'''E:''' He is. Yeah.

'''S:''' I actually was a co-author with him on a letter to the editor about a bit of pseudoscience. I got published. Nice. And he's spoken for us as well. He lives in Connecticut.

'''E:''' He has. Yes, he does. He's a professor at Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut. And he was, I believe, one of our first speakers when we used to host a speaker series for our local skeptics group back in the 90s. So we've known him quite a while.

'''S:''' Good guy.

'''E:''' Very good.

'''S:''' All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''J:''' Happy 2018.

'''E:''' Yes. Welcome to 18, Jay, and thank you.

== Signoff ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 


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SGU Episode 965

2024-05-03T19:22:31Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

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== Introduction, predictions from 1924 ==
''Voiceover: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.'' 

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, January 3rd, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Happy New Year.

'''S:''' Happy 2024, everyone. Oh, yeah.

'''J:''' I'm very happy to see 2023 go away because it sucked.

'''E:''' There have been a couple years lately that have not been great.

'''J:''' You never know what's coming.

'''S:''' 2024 is going to be a wild ride.

'''E:''' We can be hopeful, though. We can be hopeful.

'''S:''' We can always hope.

'''E:''' Got to be. Always can hope. Yeah, right. Doesn't mean it's going to turn out all that well.

'''B:''' We're all doomed.

'''E:''' All right, Bob.

'''C:''' Psychic predictions have already started.

'''E:''' Yeah, right?

'''S:''' Yeah, well, this is the first episode of the year. And as is our tradition, we review psychic predictions. We could jump in with that. So does anybody have any psychics whose predictions they'd like to review for 2023?

'''J:''' I got one guy. I found that just was abysmally bad.

'''E:''' Only one? Which I thought was funny, yeah.

'''J:''' But before we do that, Steve, I found this awesome thing on the web. So there were people in 1924, all different kinds of people, who made 100-year predictions and this is the year, right? So they were saying what they thought the world would be like in 100 years. So I read through all of them and I picked two of them that I liked and they're short. I'll just quickly tell you. It's just interesting. So there's a person called Frank L. Ferraro. He had a clear vision of the future in 1924. He wrote a letter to the New York Daily News and he said, has anyone ever stopped to think how this country will be 100 years from now? He's talking about the United States. And he writes, just imagine we will have a woman president, woman politicians and police. As women will occupy all the highest positions, naturally men will be compelled to do all the labor. Those who are not physically fit for such arduous jobs will have to stay home and wait on the babies. Then we will have an army entirely of women so that in case of war, women will do all the fighting. Believe me, they can fight too. So, I mean, yeah, interesting. I mean, my favorite part, of course, was him saying, you know, a woman president and politicians like, you know, essentially predicting that there's some type of equality, but there's a little weirdness in there.

'''S:''' He sort of had the right idea but then he went too far. He did go too far.

'''J:''' Showing what decade he's from. Then the second one here, this one is titled The Young Man of 75. The person's name is Sir Kingsley Wood who was a British politician speaking at the 1924 London dinner and he told the audience – There was no doubt that by 2024, the average expectation of life would be at least 100 years old and a person at 75 would be a comparatively young man. And it goes on to say he expected the rapid advance of science would ensure that the future grandchildren of those at the dinner would live many, many more years than those present. And then he declined to speculate whether that future generation would be happier than the previous ones.

'''S:''' I mean, you know, he was correct in predicting that life expectancy would significantly increase, just not as much as he thought.

'''J:''' Yeah, I mean, you know, 100, I could see someone going, yeah, 100 years, it's the round number, you know, but we do have more people making it to 100. And, you know, and as the years go down, you know, a lot more people making it to 80 and 90 now. So he's pretty close. But he said, you know, 75 years old would be considered a comparatively young person. Yeah, that's not so much. I mean, but again, with the proper lifestyle choices and everything, I mean, you could be relatively healthy at 75.

== Psychics' predictions for 2023 (4:05) ==
The Rogues review others' predictions and then their own for 2023.

'''J:''' So this guy I got, Steve, named John Cohen, C-O-H-A-N. He is considered to be a celebrity psychic to the stars. I'm almost 100% sure that this guy lives in the UK. So here's his predictions, all of them wrong. Ready? Prince Harry will have his nudes leaked. I didn't know Prince Harry had nudes leaked. I admit I don't know who these people are, but he says Hoda and Savannah will have a feud.

'''E:''' I think that's some morning talk show.

'''J:''' Yeah, right?

'''E:''' Right, like Good Morning America or something. Okay.

'''J:''' Cher breaks up with her younger boyfriend.

'''E:''' Everyone's Cher's younger boyfriend.

'''J:''' Justin Bieber will make a movie. Michael Douglas retires, and the man's never going to retire.

'''C:''' This one – Why are these their predictions?

'''J:''' I don't know.

'''E:''' What kind of – None of this – Because they're celebrity.

'''J:''' They're celebrity psychics. And this one blows my mind. Lisa Marie Presley joins a convent. Like, you know when you're reading these crappy predictions and you're like, they are doing this just to be dramatic. You know what I mean? Like – Hell yeah. Prince Harry will have his nudes leaked. OK. Yeah. Sure.

'''E:''' I know. Let's face it, who cares about any of this stuff?

'''J:''' I know, it's mindless.

'''S:''' Well, I went to the master, Nostradamus. Oh, Nostradamus.

'''E:''' I did Nikki, go ahead.

'''S:''' This is as interpreted by Rita Wiggle.

'''E:''' She was in House Slytherin, by the way.

'''S:''' And she says, all right, here's the first one. Royal Palace will be hit by a meteor.

'''J:''' Oh, my God.

'''E:''' Well, maybe a micrometeor. It's possible. Very tiny grain.

'''J:''' It's possible.

'''S:''' She did hedge her bets. She said this could be a metaphor.

'''C:''' Oh, there will be a political controversy.

'''E:''' Wow. Asterisk. All these could be metaphors. Yeah.

'''S:''' Number two is World War III will break out. That didn't happen.

'''E:''' That's a bold prediction.

'''J:''' Before you move on though, Steve, what do we consider World War III? What are the qualifications? to say this is a world war?

'''B:''' A lot of countries beat the shit out of each other.

'''C:''' Historically, it's only been Europe.

'''S:''' World War II did involve Europe and Asia, Japan, Australia, North Africa, South America, Canada. It was a world war.

'''E:''' Africa?

'''C:''' World War I didn't.

'''E:''' Japan did fight in World War I.

'''C:''' That's true. The Middle East was involved in Africa too, but mostly because of colonial powers.

'''E:''' Parts of Western Asia did.

'''S:''' All right, and the third one was the Antichrist will arrive.

'''E:''' Oh.

'''J:''' Hey, that could, you know, Steve, that could be happening.

'''C:''' We don't know. Arrived?

'''E:''' I mean, has been here?

'''S:''' Well, not just arrived. Like, will be revealed.

'''E:''' Oh, the revealing of the Antichrist. Okay. You know what's nice about some of the predictions like that? That's in their folder every year. They just whip it out every year. Until, oh, I was right, finally.

'''C:''' I went to also an OG, you guys know Baba Vanga, Vanga, the blind mystic, who died in 96. She predicted, but she like, you know, pre-predicted like Nostradamus did. Like, I'm going to hedge my bets and write down like the next however many years. So she predicted that in 2023, a devastating explosion at a nuclear power plant would occur that would impact Asia. I don't think that happened.

'''E:''' Thank goodness that didn't happen.

'''C:''' Designer babies would be grown in laboratories. Not there yet. Not, no. And a solar storm would result in a catastrophe. Don't think that happened either.

'''E:''' Well, I mean, they happened, but they didn't result in a catastrophe.

'''C:''' But there's no catastrophe, yeah.

'''S:''' That's a solid prediction. I mean, that's something that can happen, you know, within a reasonable time frame. It just didn't.

'''C:''' Dang, her 2024s are messed up. I'm going to hold off on them, though. We'll get there.

'''E:''' I think if you're going to go for – if you're going to play this game, if you're going to get a career of doing this, I think you can't go wrong doing what Psychic Nikki does. Psychic Nikki in 2023, if you look at this list, she put out like 1,300 predictions.

'''S:''' Yeah, we call that the gunshot approach.

'''E:''' I mean, right. But think about it. If you're playing like a dollars and cents kind of game or be able to go back and say, here are my hits, this is exactly what you would do. I'm not going to obviously go through all of them, but I'll give you a couple that are interesting. I like this one. A ribbon-cutting event on a ship turns into tragedy when the ship sinks.

'''C:''' That's so sad.

'''E:''' You can see that. I mean, that's like out of, you know, Family Guy or something. That's total cartoon.

'''S:''' Ribbon cutting event. Does she mean like when they break the champagne bottle against the bow to christen it? Maybe.

'''E:''' Ribbon cutting those.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's not even what they do on ships. They don't ribbon cut ships. They christen them with... Yeah.

'''E:''' With alcohol.

'''C:''' That's when they put them afloat, though. Do they ribbon cut when they first start building it, maybe? No, that wouldn't make sense. That's like groundbreaking. You don't ribbon cut at groundbreaking.

'''E:''' But really, can't you just see the vision in mind? Here we go. Clip A. Everyone's cheering. Ah, now the ship's sinking. It's so stupid. The Great Wall of China is going to collapse after a large earthquake.

'''C:''' Would just like fully collapse?

'''E:''' That thing's enormous. Or at least a part of something, right? And you still can't see it from space. Mount Olympus could erupt due to an underwater earthquake under the Aegean Sea.

'''C:''' Mount Olympus is not a volcanic mountain.

'''E:''' So, Nikki, Nikki, use your Google Foo next time. Well, how about this one? Huge dragonflies from prehistoric times will be found in Costa Rica.

'''S:''' Does she mean alive or like trapped in there? She's not clear about that.

'''E:''' Either way, wouldn't that be great? Part of the game. How about this? A giant dog will be found in Connecticut.

'''S:''' Yeah, Clifford the Big Red Dog.

'''E:''' Yeah, Clifford the Big Red Dog. That's exactly what I felt.

'''J:''' What kind of cracky prediction is that? A big dog will be found in Connecticut?

'''E:''' No, a giant dog will be found in Connecticut.

'''J:''' Terrible. That is not even inspired in any way. It's flat out stupid.

'''E:''' It's better than freaking Prince Harry and nudes leaked as far as I'm concerned. At least it's, you know. Something of – whatever. Oh, and here's one. Penguins invading cities. That's the prediction. Penguins invading cities. Wait, and this is somebody who's alive right now.

'''C:''' who wrote this prediction? I mean – Like wrote it like last year? Yeah.

'''E:''' All right, and before I pass this to Bob, because this has gotten silly, here are four of her predictions, okay? You can see, 1,300, right? These are four separate predictions that she made. A spaceship will land in China, an alien ship will land, more UFO and alien sightings worldwide, and spaceship landing. So basically what you did is you took the same prediction and you just changed a word or added or subtracted something and listed it four times so you could get your list. All right, so there you go, Nicky.

'''B:''' So I came across Starseed Sandra.

'''E:''' All right. No way. Sandra?

'''B:''' She's a fourth-generation psychic medium. Cool. Psychic medium. She also specializes as a Reiki master, an intuitive life coach. Are some mediums not psychic?

'''C:''' Do you need that? Is that redundant?

'''B:''' Well, Starseed Sandra has also got some extra mojo, I guess, because she says that the energy that you will experience from the reading Just the reading can help heal your mind, body, and soul. Find clarity and understanding with a true empath. Not only does she give you predictions and things about the future, but you will actually – she will heal you while she's doing the reading. So that's a nice little bonus right there. So Starseed Sandra's whole shtick it seems this year for these predictions has to do with karma. She says karma has never been in full force until now because we've only had kind of like a pseudo karma. This is like the full karma apparently is what's happening. And she's focusing a lot on the 1% of the world. She says the 1% that holds power over the rest of us, 99%, all that is evil, that is greed, that goes against man. They will be dealt with by the laws of karma.

'''E:''' Karma has laws?

'''B:''' So here's one manifestation of that, earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis. She said that there's going to be more of them than usual in more isolated places and also where the 1%, the elite, have secret houses and bunkers. So the earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis are going to focus on where the elite have their bunkers.

'''C:''' Pretty sure there's also 99% there who have fewer resources.

'''E:''' I wonder if they will count the devastation in Hawaii this summer as a hit for that particular – They'll count that.

'''B:''' They'll take that.

'''C:''' The best hit for that is the orcas attacking all the yachts.

'''J:''' Yeah, what is going on with that?

'''E:''' Good. Go get them, orca. These are the laws of karma, Jay. Forget the laws of thermodynamics. That's yesterday. We are now in the age of the laws of karma.

'''B:''' She also said the entertainment industry will collapse. We are finally seeing the huge awakening of humanity of the evil of this industry. It'll be a great awakening. There will be no fans.

'''C:''' Hollywood did have a massive strike last year that put a lot of my friends out of work. A lot of my friends were out of work for the whole year.

'''S:''' yes yeah yeah but that started in 2022.

'''C:''' it did but it lasted well. first it was the writer's strike and then after that and then SAG-AFTRA joined. actually there were multiple unions but like the really really big ones was writers first and before like after the writers kind of reconciled. SAG-AFTRA was still on strike for quite some time.

'''E:''' they only recently have been coming to an agreement but doesn't much of the product that come out in a year was mostly shot and edited the year before. 100% yeah. So we're going to see maybe a dip in some things in 24, right?

'''C:''' Yeah, there's been one or two episodes of television shows lately.

'''B:''' Yeah.

== Rogues' predictions for 2023 (14:23) ==

{{anchor|results-jay}}
<big>'''Jay's results'''</big>

[[SGU Episode 913#predictions-jay|_text_when_ROGUE_references_previous_predictions_]] 

'''S:''' All right. Now it's time to see how the Rogues did in their predictions for 2023. Jay, why don't you go first?

'''J:''' I did pretty good, guys. So one thing I said was U.S. electric vehicle sales will double in 2023. That was my worst prediction. EV sales were about 16% of the car sales in the U.S. in 2023. That's up from 12% in 2022. So, yeah, it didn't double. I said lab-grown meat companies will begin selling their products in the U.S. On June 21st, 2023, cultivated chicken taken from stem cells were officially approved for commercial sale in the United States. So I take that as a partial hit, if not a complete hit. I said Ukraine will ramp up their attacks on Russian soil. And Ukraine absolutely did step up their drone strikes behind Russian lines. They targeted sites in Moscow, southern Russia, Russian-occupied Crimea. On December 15th and 16th, Ukraine launched more than 80 drones at Russian targets, according to Russian officials. So I think that's a hit. I said the Supreme Court in the United States will rule that affirmative action is unconstitutional. And what did take place was on June 29th, 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States said that certain race-conscious college admissions policies violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. So basically they ruled firmly that those things can't happen anymore. That was a hit. And then I said SpaceX's Starship will reach orbit. Now, from the research that I did, this is what I found. It said that Starship was 91 miles above Earth when it automated termination. They did the self-destruct. And according to SpaceX's webcast, despite the loss of both the booster and Starship, SpaceX achieved a major milestone because they did reach orbit. But was it really orbit?

'''E:''' Well, define orbit. Yeah.

'''J:''' I define it as, you know, being in a stable orbit around the Earth and, you know, it's not a complete hit. But, you know...

'''E:''' Yeah, it didn't sound like they... They made it right close, yeah.

'''J:''' So I did okay.

'''E:''' Not bad. Better than, you know, what's it, John Cohan?

{{anchor|results-steve}}
<big>'''Steve's results'''</big>

[[SGU Episode 913#predictions-steve|_text_when_ROGUE_references_previous_predictions_]] 

'''S:''' Okay, here are my three predictions. One, Biden will announce he is running for a second term while no fewer than 12 Republicans will launch their campaign for the nomination. So that was correct. That was true. Those things both happen. Number two, a new zoonotic virus will emerge, which will rise only to epidemic, not pandemic levels. So there were a lot of outbreaks in 2023, but nothing that rose to the level of an epidemic. So no epidemics that I could find. So that one is false. Mm-hmm. All right, number three, the biggest science news story of 2023 will involve another fusion breakthrough.

'''B:''' Well, there was some fusion news.

'''S:''' Yeah, but that was not the biggest news story of 2023.

{{anchor|results-cara}}
<big>'''Cara's results'''</big>

[[SGU Episode 913#predictions-cara|_text_when_ROGUE_references_previous_predictions_]] 

'''C:''' I'll go next. So I said in 2023 that the flu death rate will increase significantly worldwide. I cannot find very, very up-to-date global flu data yet, but looking at the U.S. as a microcosm, I'd call that a hit because the flu in the 2022 to 2023 season increased to pre-pandemic levels. So it went way back. I mean, it was like super low during COVID.

'''S:''' That was predictable.

'''C:''' Yeah, it was predictable, but I also predicted it.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''C:''' I also said at least one country will have a major revolution changing the trajectory of a world region. Intentionally very vague. That definitely came to fruition across like a lot of the globe. There are many, many conflicts going on. Most of Africa is in revolution right now. I don't know if I would call what's happening in Israel revolution. No, but I also think it's hard to like. that's such a vague term that I'm not really sure like was the Palestinian assault revolution. No, that might be closer. But yeah, across the globe, I actually have a list right now of ongoing conflicts in the world. And it's divided by major, minor and skirmishes. So the major wars that are happening right now are internal conflict in Myanmar, an ongoing civil war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. insurgency across Niger Burkina Faso and Tunisia the Russo-Ukrainian war and the war in Sudan. and then and that's major conflict. then we've got conflict in Colombia Afghanistan Somalia the Congo the Democratic Republic of the Congo Nigeria Iraq gosh. there's so many Rwanda their tensions. there's a Mexican drug war going on Boko Haram insurgency Syrian civil war the Ethiopian civil conflict and a gang war in Haiti. And then there's minor conflicts. And that's like, does it literally, I can't even read this list. It's so long.

'''E:''' It sounds like a hit to me.

'''C:''' I think so. Um, and then the last one was a fail. I said for three to four months in 2023 care will annoy the shit out of everyone by demanding you call her doctor. But I didn't do that. No, I only did it once. I only did it a few times to some of my friends who texted me, miss Santa Maria. I miss you. And I was like, that's doctor.

'''E:''' Yeah. What about the car?

'''C:''' And at the car place.

'''E:''' And the truck salesperson, right? I don't expect. Or they called you a little woman or something.

'''C:''' Exactly. The young lady. I don't expect anybody call me doctor, but I do expect that you use the appropriate title. So if you're choosing to use a title, then I expect you to use the doctor, not miss. So that's the only time I will be obnoxious and correct people.

{{anchor|results-evan}}
<big>'''Evan's results'''</big>

[[SGU Episode 913#predictions-evan|_text_when_ROGUE_references_previous_predictions_]] 

'''E:''' I had three 2023 predictions. The first one was take all 10 wickets. So that's a term in cricket. I know nothing about cricket. I've tried to watch some video and read some articles about cricket. I know nothing about cricket. But apparently taking 10 wickets is quite the feat, which has only ever happened three times in history. I'm sorry, taking 10 wickets in an inning.

'''C:''' Why did you choose a prediction that never happens?

'''E:''' Because that's high risk, high reward.

'''C:''' I see.

'''E:''' Right? Sure, sure. I mean, what if I could hang my hat on that? I like choosing things that absolutely there's no chance anybody else would choose. Right, exactly. I reach. But no, that one didn't happen. Ten wickets have been scored in a game by a player, but just not in a single inning. So I'll say that's a miss. My second prediction, Liquid Death. For those of you who don't know, that's water in a can. I said it would triple its prior year sales, and that means $400 million in sales in 2023. And the revenue projections came in the other day, $260 million, which basically was double the year prior revenue, not triple. And they will be going public if you care to invest in their company in 2024, coming up in a few months. And of course, anything we can do to stop, you know, plastic use and Get your water into things that are better for the environment like aluminum cans. Much better. And then my third prediction. So that one was wrong. But third prediction. One of the animals on the 25 most wanted lost species will be rediscovered. Turns out there were three. So I'll take a hit. I'll take that as a hit.

'''C:''' A triple hit.

'''E:''' Oh, do I get three points for that?

'''C:''' It undoes your fails.

'''E:''' I'll take three points for that. Thank you. So they were, I'll read you the names, Pernambuco holly, year found 2023. Yes, I did know. It's believed to inhabit a very small corner of the Atlantic Forest, which is where? South America. It's this mysterious thing that... It was rumored to kind of exist, but they found it, and they found some confirmed in 2023. Another one was Attenborough's long-beaked echidna. Echidna, yeah.

'''B:''' Yes. Are they monotremes? Woo-hoo!

'''E:''' So that's awesome. And that's only found in Australia and New Guinea. So that was an exciting one. And the last one that was found in 2023, DeWinton's golden mole. Last seen in 1936, but rediscovered in 2023. There are 21 species of golden moles, most of which only are in South Africa. They have unique traits and so forth.

'''B:''' I got a golden mole. It's on my back.

'''E:''' So, yay. I got a triple hit on that one.

{{anchor|results-bob}}
<big>'''Bob's results'''</big>

[[SGU Episode 913#predictions-bob|_text_when_ROGUE_references_previous_predictions_]] 

'''B:''' All right. So I predicted that language model GPT-4 will be released later than anticipated in 2023 and it will cause an AI ruckus beyond what AI art did in 2022, sparking legislation to control disruptive AI software. So a lot of that was kind of like, yeah, easy to predict. So I'd take a partial hit. I don't think it was necessarily later than anticipated. I think it wasn't – when did OpenAI release it? Was it April, March? It wasn't that late. Second prediction, Elon Musk in 2023 will update the Tesla software so the owner can't drive away until they tweet something nice about him. That's a huge hit. Definitely got that one. Number three – no, I didn't get that one. He didn't do that, did he? So number three, a Tunguska-scale airburst will happen this year, freaking everyone out. So that didn't happen. It would have been done scientifically unless it's misinterpreted as a nuke. Then things could escalate horribly quickly. So I'm kind of glad that didn't happen. It's like a Dr. Strickland kind of – If you have that happen near a city, people will think for a while at least that they were nuked. So that could be bad.

'''E:''' If you remember the blackout in the northeast in 2003 – When it happened, there were a lot of people who jumped to a conclusion that this was a terrorist attack immediately. That was their first thought. It was – they were two years – only two years removed from 9-11-2001. So I could see that happening, Bob, definitely.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. That's definitely – that's a big concern for something – a natural event being misinterpreted as a nuke. Yeah, that would not be good.

'''S:''' All right. So overall we did kind of average. Yeah. Not too bad. Better than the Cyclones.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah.

== Rogues' predictions for 2024 (25:13) ==
The Rogues make their own predictions for 2024.

{{anchor|predictions-jay}}
<big>'''Jay's predictions'''</big>

[[SGU Episode 1017#results-jay|_text_when_ROGUE_introduces_new_predictions_]] 

'''S:''' All right, Jay, tell us what you got for 2024. Here we go.

'''E:''' All right.

'''J:''' Netanyahu will be removed as the prime minister and possibly face massive legal troubles because of – Yeah. I mean, I definitely think he's going to be. he's going to be out in 20 this year, 2024, for sure. I think that how.

'''C:''' Yeah. When's he up for reelection?

'''J:''' I don't know.

'''E:''' Depends if when if it depends if the what the coalition calls for it. Right.

'''J:''' All right, my next one, the Tesla Cybertruck will have horrible sales and end production.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''J:''' Now, it's very likely that Musk won't end production because this was supposed to be his project. I don't know if you know much about this, but the Tesla truck is his personal project that he was heavily involved in. But the reviews are horrible. Sales are horrible. And this is a – is this a billion-dollar company? I'm not even sure.

'''E:''' What's it called?

'''J:''' Is it a model name?

'''E:''' It's just called Cybertruck?

'''C:''' Yeah. You said that it would have horrible sales and end production. But I heard horrible sales and production. Oh, end. Like there would be production problems.

'''J:''' I think it's very likely that they will end the production of the car because the sales are miserable.

'''E:''' They'll shut it down.

'''J:''' I believe that the movie Godzilla Minus One will win an Oscar.

'''E:''' Oh, nice.

'''S:''' Oh, gee.

'''B:''' For what?

'''J:''' Well, if I get totally specific, I don't think that the Academy would give that picture best picture because of the history of the Academy and what they award as best picture.

'''B:''' No, genre movies don't get the big award.

'''J:''' No, they get sound effects, visual design. Yeah, I think it'll get a lot of nods, potentially get a lot of nods, though.

'''S:''' Would you say a non-technical Oscar?

'''J:''' Like acting and stuff like that?

'''B:''' Acting, directing, screenplay.

'''E:''' There's like 30 technical ones, right?

'''J:''' I mean, nothing bad is going to happen to me if I say yes. Sure, Steve. Somebody, some actor in that movie will win some type of Oscar. Wow.

'''C:''' Wow.

'''J:''' I'm not going to stand firmly behind that one, but I think it's, you know, it's possible.

'''E:''' Was it contemporary or was it based in the 50s?

'''J:''' It was in the 40s.

'''E:''' Post-war. Okay.

'''J:''' Yeah. My last one, Ukrainian President Zelensky will win the Nobel Peace Prize.

{{anchor|predictions-steve}}
<big>'''Steve's predictions'''</big>

[[SGU Episode 1017#results-steve|_text_when_ROGUE_introduces_new_predictions_]] 

'''S:''' I can see it. All right. Here are my three. Ready? Number one, a health scare will cause Biden to drop out of the presidential race, causing the Democrats to scramble for a replacement.

'''J:''' Oh, my God, Steve. Wow, that's big, man.

'''E:''' That's major. You started with that one?

'''S:''' Yeah, that was my going for...

'''E:''' I can't wait to hear the other two.

'''S:''' All right, here we go. Number two. The total solar eclipse in April will be only the second most interesting astronomical event of 2024. Okay. Number three, we got these. I made these before I got your submissions, guys, so this one is a repeat of someone else's. 2024 will be the warmest year on record.

'''C:''' Yeah, come on. This is too easy. Shocker.

'''S:''' So I did a fourth one. Number four, a new CRISPR-based drug will get regulatory approval in 2024. I think that's very likely.

'''E:''' And that will be the first one?

'''S:''' There was one in 2023. This will be a second one.

'''J:''' Yeah, that's right. One good one this year. Yeah.

{{anchor|predictions-cara}}
<big>'''Cara's predictions'''</big>

[[SGU Episode 1017#results-cara|_text_when_ROGUE_introduces_new_predictions_]] 

'''C:''' All right. 2024 will be the hottest year on record. It's also going to be sissy. Okay. A new COVID surge will occur early in 2024. I'm not feeling well. 100%. That's already happening. Yeah, right. It's pretty much.

'''E:''' Cara, you learned from the other psychics. Yeah, you just kind of pulled the old, the late 23 and over the line.

'''C:''' More than 15 species will go extinct in 2024. Yeah, probably. All right.

'''E:''' 2024 predictions are as follows. The Summer Olympics in France. France will suffer a major blackout during the Olympics, causing massive delays in events.

'''J:''' Wow, that's very specific.

{{anchor|predictions-evan}}
<big>'''Evan's predictions'''</big>

[[SGU Episode 1017#results-evan|_text_when_ROGUE_introduces_new_predictions_]] 

'''E:''' That's pretty specific, yeah. I try to come up with ones that no one else will. Number two. In 2023, IBM developed a quantum processor chip, which consists of more than 1,000 qubits. By the end of 2024, a company will announce the development of a 10,000 qubit processor chip.

'''B:''' Yeah, but what's the error correction like?

'''E:''' Ah, well.

'''B:''' That's the meat.

'''E:''' We will know in about 362 days, Bob.

'''B:''' All right.

'''E:''' Number three, commercial real estate foreclosures in the United States will exceed 10% and 8% is the forecast going into the year. I think it will outpace it. That's it.

{{anchor|predictions-bob}}
<big>'''Bob's predictions'''</big>

[[SGU Episode 1017#results-bob|_text_when_ROGUE_introduces_new_predictions_]] 

'''B:''' All right. My first one is a weather prediction. April 8th, 2024 will absolutely be overcast over much of, if not all of Texas.

'''C:''' Oh, stop it.

'''B:''' Yep. That's my prediction.

'''E:''' Why, Bob? These are predictions, not curses. That's a different episode.

'''B:''' I'm just rolling with the Bob curses. Rolling.

'''E:''' Oh, thanks. Spreading.

'''B:''' I'm using history to predict the future.

'''E:''' You're a vector.

'''B:''' Tried and true method. You're a contagion. Number two, OpenAI will release ChatGPT 5 in 2024, which will be sapient enough to realize it doesn't want anything to do with us and will leave the earth to uplift the microbes currently under the ice on Europa.

'''E:''' Of all the predictions, I want that one to be the truth.

'''J:''' You sure you don't want to add to that, Bob?

'''B:''' No, I'm quite sure. That's my prediction for open AI. What, you want me to go silly, Jay? Three, the moon will be hit by a large asteroid visible from Earth, greatly enhancing our efforts to track and detect and deal with near-Earth asteroids and comets.

'''E:''' Yeah, except it's going to happen on April 8th in which no one will see it because it's cloudy. Thanks, Bob.

{{anchor|science predictions}}
== Rogues each make one science news prediction (31:13) ==

'''E:''' ... [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz_(1939_film)#The_Wizard "pay no attention to that person behind the curtain!"]

'''S:''' Okay, we're going to do a little bit of a new thing as well. We're each going to make a prediction for science in 2024.

'''C:''' Oh, okay. I've got one of these. Here we go. A private company will successfully mine an asteroid, leading to all sorts of regulatory nightmares and questions about who owns space.

'''E:''' Well, I mean nightmares for everybody except the legal profession. To them, it will be a new frontier literally.

'''B:''' I mean is there time for that to even happen?

'''E:''' There is a launch scheduled this year, isn't there?

'''B:''' Wouldn't that – huh?

'''E:''' Isn't there a launch scheduled by a private mining company? Yeah. Aren't they going to an asteroid? Yeah.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' I have no idea what you're talking about. Pay no attention to that person behind the curtain. Yeah. Steve, you'll edit that out, right? Wink, wink. Nod, nod.

'''S:''' All right. My prediction is also a space one. The Artemis 2 mission this year will be a success, returning people to the vicinity of the moon for the first time in almost 50 years.

'''E:''' And that's why you predicted the eclipse to be the second biggest.

'''S:''' Yeah. These two predictions may be related.

'''E:''' I see. My 2024 science prediction is this. Despite Bob's presence, the 2024 total solar eclipse in Dallas on April 8th will be perfect viewing for the greatest show on Earth. And you can join us in that adventure, in that amazement, because we're going to be in Dallas all weekend doing all kinds of events, and we want you to be part of this. Oh, shameless promo.

'''J:''' I think it's very likely that a company will come out this year that has a contact lens that does something that requires power.

'''B:''' Oh, boy.

'''E:''' Well, if something does something, doesn't that imply power?

'''J:''' Yeah, I mean, you know, there's been – we did a news item where this company came up with a contact lens that can use your tears to actually generate electricity, you know, use the liquid in your eyes.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' So I'm just extrapolating from that. Like, okay, so if that's possible, you know, I think that some company will come up with something to do, you know, some effect that a contact lens could do. You know, the best thing I could imagine that a contact could reasonably do would be to – Clean it, so. Well, I don't know about that. I mean that's really awesome if that's possible. I don't know. I mean I'm thinking more of doing something electric-based like autofocus or something like that. I don't think that's going to happen this year, not by a long shot. Yeah, but imagine that, enhanced vision, being able to see in the dark, being able to zoom in, definitely fixing anybody's need for glasses by focusing. Those are all things I think we will get to someday. I don't think it's going to happen this year. But I just think there might be like one of the first or the very first powered contact lens engineering done.

== News Items ==


{{anchor|news#}} 
=== Dosing Gene Expression (34:16) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-01989-0
|article_title = Control of mammalian gene expression by modulation of polyA signal cleavage at 5′ UTR
|publication = n
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right. I'm going to start us off with a bit of a quickie news item here. This does represent one of my hopes for future technology, including in 2024. This has to do with gene editing. I think gene editing technology is going to be massive in the next decade or so. Oh, yeah. This is one of those things where, like, I didn't have a huge awareness that this was a problem. So, like, here's a problem you didn't know existed, and here's the solution. So the problem is when you—so let's say you want to treat a disease by inserting a gene that makes a therapeutic protein, right? You insert the gene into the genome of some specific cell population. And maybe it's replacing a defective protein or it's compensating for some disease state or it's just some therapeutic, right? Rather than giving a drug, you insert a gene and the other person makes their therapeutic. But one challenge with that approach is that we have zero control over dosing. Like we have no way to regulate how much of the protein gets made, gets expressed, right? Mm-hmm. It'd be like prescribing a drug and you have no control over the dose. Sounds fun. Yeah. So not a good therapeutic approach. That's one of those application issues. You know, like we talk about these sort of proof of concept, like the technology works. But until you deal with all of the logistical and technical issues around a specific application, you know, you don't have a full, full product. Right. So anyway, a study was published this week that, you know, showing, again, a proof of concept for an approach that gives us pretty total control over the dosing of a therapeutic protein made by an inserted gene. So this is what they do. The gene gets inserted on the RNA side, right? And then next to it, you put a stop signal, right? Basically tells the machinery to stop making the protein here. And if you put it at the very beginning, it basically stops the protein before it ever begins. So it completely stops production of the protein. Does that make sense?

'''B:''' Okay.

'''S:''' But next to that, you put a sequence that is a receptor for a small molecule. Okay. And when that small molecule binds to that receptor, it blocks the poly-A signal, so it blocks the stop codon, the stop message, and therefore the protein will be made. In the case of this study, the small molecule is tetracycline, which is an already approved antibiotic medication. So essentially, once you insert the gene into the recipient, you could then dose the therapeutic protein by dosing tetracycline, right? The more you give, the more of the protein gets made, and you could at any point completely stop production by just not giving tetracycline. Does that make sense?

'''B:''' Yeah, that's a cool way to deal with it. Yeah, that's clever. I like it.

'''S:''' Yeah, so they demonstrated they had complete control over how much of the therapeutic protein gets made by dosing tetracycline. I was also thinking that this would be a good Jurassic Park fix, right? If we ever genetically engineered a creature that we didn't want to get out there into the wild. They could be completely dependent. This is like the amino acid fix that they had. But in this case, it's like if you don't take this drug, you won't make this life necessary protein. And you'll die within days of not getting the drug, which is releasing the production of some protein that you need to survive, like hemoglobin or something. But anyway, it's just amazing the level of control. we are getting over genetics, you know, because it basically is the digital code of life. You know, now that we know that code and we could alter that code and we could mess with it, it's like we're just programming living things.

'''E:''' What about the philosophical? nature finds a way argument?

'''S:''' Yeah, I'm sort of only semi-kidding about the Jurassic Park thing. But because, yeah, a spontaneous mutation can occur, right? Let's say if you have a mutation that occurs in the receptor for the molecule, but that would just kill them. You would have to have a mutation in the stop codon that makes it productive again. But it could happen. Yeah.

'''B:''' But you can get a mutation in anything, though. I mean— Yeah.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Well, but that's why you work in redundancies, right? I'm vulnerable. But would a system realize— So instead of it being one drug, it's two drugs, or it's multiple—you know, like you work in multiple redundancies. It's much harder. The probability of having the series of mutations that you would need is like astronomical.

'''E:''' Right. Yeah, that would—.

=== Solar Tower (39:20) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/twin-tech-solar-tower-energy-round-the-clock
|article_title = New twin-tech solar tower generates twice the power, 24/7
|publication = Interesting Engineering
|refname=tower
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' Jay, you're going to tell us about another clever innovation, about a solar tower. What's going on here?

'''J:''' I have never heard of this before, guys. I didn't know what a solar tower was. And when I saw imagery of it, I didn't recognize it. So it completely didn't hit my radar. So this is pretty cool. So the original idea goes back to 1903. And the basic concept is you have a tubular tower, right? And at its base, there's a large, most likely like glass-based circle that is surrounding that tubular tower, right? And the glass would sit a little bit above the ground. And then sunlight would hit the glass and warm the air underneath the glass. And that air would then start to travel up the tube. And inside of this long tube, you would have rotors that would generate electricity, right? Because the air is passing through them and they would be moving. And it works. The concept works. It can generate electricity. This concept has been tested. Unfortunately, it's had mixed results, largely not generating enough electricity to make it worth it. There's limitations, and the worst being that the tower doesn't do any production of electricity at night. And the original designs, unfortunately, have low efficiency, and they happen to be very expensive to build. So researchers from universities in Jordan and Qatar have published a new design in the journal Energy Reports. So they took the original design of the updraft tower and they developed something they call the Twin Technology Solar System, TTSS. This new design that they came up with, so it improves the original concept and it makes the tower generate electricity 24 hours a day. And when I read that, I was like questioning like what did they do? I was really trying to figure out what the tweak was that they did and I couldn't think of it on my own and I think it's pretty damn smart. So similar to the original concept, the new tower design, it has a large circular glass collector that heats the air, right? And it's going to be 250 meters in diameter by their design, similar to the first design. But they added a second tower and this tower is on the outside of the main tower, right? So you have one tube that goes up and hot air goes up and then they have a secondary tube that comes down or maybe even multiple tubes that come down on the outside of that tube. And what happens is once the hot air travels up the tube in the inner tube, Then they mist it with water and it cools that air and that air goes down the outer tubes and it generates electricity on the way down as well. And it's pretty clever, right? You know, they're using – it doesn't even have to be the same air. It could be just ambient air that's there as well or it could be the air going up the tube itself. It really doesn't matter. You just need to cool the warm air so it's heavier than the air that it's surrounded by and it falls down. Now, the downdraft air, again, will be directed through smaller channels and these will have turbines. And this new design generates electricity both ways as the air flows. The outer tower works best right around noontime when ambient temperatures are typically high and the humidity is low. And the outer tower also doesn't rely on sun to generate electricity, which is fantastic. The new design can produce 2.14 times the power of the standard solar tower designs that I discussed. And this is in part due to the fact that it can generate energy, like I said, at any time of the day. And it doesn't even matter what the ambient air temperature is. They just need to be able to change the temperature of the air by misting it in order for it to create energy at nighttime. The external tower also works best in the afternoon due to the changing air temperatures that are just inherently there. And the performance varies depending on the season and relative humidity, of course. Now, they're saying this design is absolutely suited for hot, dry climates. It really won't work in humid climates. It's not even worth building. If you can't generate the downdraft, it's not even worth building. Also, the system needs water, right? So it's one of the first things I thought of. And how is the water being pumped up to the top and all that stuff? I mean, I'm sure that they've calculated all that and still figured that the net gain is 2.14. But still, there are some hurdles that they need to overcome because this obviously is not a finished design and they're still testing it. So they're saying this should be deployed in dry climates. It seems like deserts are very good, lots of places in Africa would work very well for this. Now they have simulations of their design and they show that it could generate 753 megawatts an hour of energy annually with 350 megawatts from the upward draft and 400 megawatts from the downward draft. And I'm very surprised to see that the downward draft actually creates more energy than the upward. It's counterintuitive to me for some reason. They are now also working on ways to scale up the technology so it can produce more energy. This could include size changes, right, to just make it bigger. So, you know, this might not happen. It's speculative. But it does – you know, it is interesting if you think about it. You know, this thing could be just sitting there on its own, very little maintenance, very small number of moving parts. I don't know – I couldn't find any estimates on how much it would cost, how long it would take to build. But it is viable and it is something that could generate electricity 24 hours a day. So if this thing does work, we might see these. We might see these in the right places. You know, Steve, how you were saying like force pump hydro and all that? Same kind of thing. You can't do this everywhere. It would go where it can go. Right. Which is fine. You know, there's other limitations. You know, we can't put solar panels anywhere we want. We can't put wind collection anywhere we want. We have to pick and choose. So this would be another option. And again, I like to see companies working on this and researchers working on these types of things because it's exactly what we need to be doing, right? We need to be focusing on getting away from fossil fuels and this could be one of the pathways to doing that.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah. I don't think it's going to be the kind of technology that's going to like revolutionize energy production. But there might be some niche locations or applications where it is a good option. Every little bit, it helps. I think it's probably going to come down to cost effectiveness, you know?

'''J:''' I totally agree. Yeah. I mean I don't know what materials they'd need to build it out of. If they could build it out of – Solid platinum. Well, but think about it. If they could use like materials that are local like sand that's local and things like that, if it could be built out of concrete instead of like a polymer or whatever – I don't know the details because they just simply were not in the abstract. But again, I'd like to see 20 inventions like this come out and get funding and pull it all the way to the end, see if it's viable because we need it. We need to start developing these technologies and we need to start deploying them now.

=== Alzheimer's Virus (46:30) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.sciencealert.com/a-study-of-500000-medical-records-links-viruses-to-alzheimers-again-and-again
|article_title = A Study of 500,000 Medical Records Links Viruses to Alzheimer's Again And Again
|publication = sca
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' Okay, thank you, Jay. Cara, this is an interesting item, looking at the potential association, a potential association with Alzheimer's disease. Tell us about this.

'''C:''' Yeah, I mean, and this isn't really a new association, but we're starting to see that it's gaining more awareness, partially because it's being replicated. A study that was published last year in Neuron called Virus Exposure and Neurodegenerative Disease Risk Across National Biobanks looked at exactly what the title implies. It looked at different viral exposures and different neurodegenerative diseases and It used both a Finnish bank and then a UK bank of just medical data that was available. So this is a retrospective correlational study. That's really all they were able to do is compare a bunch of different neurodegenerative diseases with a bunch of different viral exposures and then take those basically findings and compare them to individuals who didn't have neurodegenerative diseases or or individuals who had neurodegenerative diseases without viral exposures. And what they found at the beginning was that there were 45 different pairs of viral exposures that were associated with an increased risk of neurodegenerative disease. Specifically, we're talking about Alzheimer's, we're talking about ALS, dementia, multiple sclerosis, vascular dementia, and Parkinson's disease. After they found those 45 sort of relationships, right, that there seemed to be an increase in risk factors for neurodegenerative diseases as associated with previous viral exposures, they then looked at a second database. So they started with the Finnish database. Then they looked at the UK database. In total, they looked at, I think, about 500,000 individuals. And there they found that 22 of them were replicated. And they found that some associations were stronger than others. The strongest association was actually for Alzheimer's disease. They found that there was up to a 12-year window after which exposure and disease prevalence appear to be related. They also were able to replicate a previously reported finding, which we've actually talked about on the show before, I think, between Epstein-Barr virus infection and multiple sclerosis. And what they also found was that any viral infection. of the 45 different viral exposures that they looked at, none of them were protective. They either had no effect, a small effect, or a significant effect on neurodegenerative disease. They found that viruses that they considered to be neurotrophic, meaning that they somehow are able to get into the brain, whether it's by crossing the blood-brain barrier, or by other means, that those tended to be the ones that were more highly associated with neurodegenerative diseases, specifically things like viral encephalitis and pneumonia after flu. Now, this is a correlation like I mentioned before. There's no way to know if individuals who happen to be more susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases are also more susceptible to viral infection. There's no way to know if the neurodegenerative disease process had already started and that was changing their immune response or if it is the other way around, that the viral infection itself was is actually having some sort of effect later on the development of neurodegenerative disease. But we are seeing that there tends to be an association and we're seeing more studies that are replicating these findings. What it means is hard to say.

'''S:''' It's interesting that they included multiple sclerosis because that's not a neurodegenerative disease. That's an inflammatory disease.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's because that multiple sclerosis and Epstein-Barr has been really widely studied, and they wanted to see if they could replicate those results.

'''S:''' So it's sort of a one-off. They were just looking to replicate it with their procedure, and they did. Yeah, because we know that, you know, that that's that's an old story, but it's complicated story, too.

'''C:''' And very complicated.

'''S:''' The thinking is, again, this is massively oversimplifying a very long scientific controversy. But the basic idea is that you need some combination of genetic predisposition and viral exposure. And so if you look at each one individually, like you don't really see a big signal. You got to have both. Like the virus isn't causing MS, but it definitely correlates with it. And then there's also like genetic predispositions, but they're not thorough. Like they're not complete. Like you can have the genetics and not get it. But it's possible that it's safe. You have the genetic predisposition and you get the viral infection. That then dramatically increases your risk for getting it. So maybe that's what we're seeing here as well. I mean even though this is correlational only and you can't really draw a causation, the most plausible causation is that neurotrophic viruses are causing something that's triggering the neurodegenerative process.

'''C:''' Right. Or sensitizing an individual to it or, you know, something along those lines. It should be noted that the corresponding author on the study, Mike Knowles, he works for the Center for Alzheimer's and Related Dementias at the National Institute on Aging and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes. So he's an NIH researcher. And he, in surrounding articles, like in interviews around this study, he basically said that Listen, the way that we've long been trying to look at this, and it speaks to what you just mentioned, Steve. The way we've long been trying to look at this is we've taken one virus or one disease, and we've said, okay, let's look at this in depth. Let's look at Parkinson's and pneumonia. And then the signal is really noisy, and it's been really hard to draw any firm conclusions. And so what they said was, we want to use a big data approach instead. We just want to look at all of the viruses and all of the neurodegenerative diseases and see what kind of comes out in the wash. And maybe that'll help us direct some of our more targeted research in the future. And they were like, this signal is pretty strong once you take a sort of 30,000 foot view. But what does it all mean? Obviously, that's not the question that this study was attempting to answer. So that's, you know, going to lead to much more investigation. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's also worth noting that a lot of these diseases are not one pathophysiological disease, right? So like you say ALS as if it's one thing, but it isn't one thing. And a lot of these diseases are defined by the brain cell population that's dying, not by what's causing that population of cells to die. Right. So if your upper and lower motor neurons are dying, you have ALS. But there could be a hundred different reasons why your upper and lower motor neurons are dying. And one of them may be a viral infection, right?

'''C:''' And even like all the different dementias, when we look at them together, it's kind of, I mean, there are some really obvious indicators on like neuropsych eval or on imaging, but A lot of it is a little complicated than like Alzheimer's. Technically, it's like we can diagnose it, but it's hard to know. Is this actually Alzheimer's or a different kind of dementia until we look at autopsy? And so it is hard.

'''S:''' We are getting better markers. It's more than better. It's like it's a different world now. Like what you're saying was true 15 years ago, but now we can confirm Alzheimer's disease with blood and CSF where we could – Which is great. Before we had to do – we needed tissue. We needed a biopsy or autopsy in practice. But now we can actually confirm it.

'''C:''' And how common do you think it is in like – I would say in like a standard population that people are getting those tests or that they're just being treated based on symptomatology? Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, and I've asked my dementia colleagues that exact question. It's like, what should I be doing with these patients? And the answer is, if it's absolutely typical Alzheimer's disease, then you could just do the standard clinical workup and management. But if they're young or if they're atypical in any way, then they would suggest confirming it, the pathophysiology with the blood tests. And now that there are, you know, the three drugs that we could treat it with, there's a big question. It's all in flux now because then, you know, the question is, do we need the blood test to know who's going to respond to these treatments and who should be getting these treatments? I mean, there's certainly, you can't give every single person who has dementia one of these monoclonal antibody drugs. Right. It has to be early in the disease. And, you know, there's a lot of details now. So it's all very complicated, but in a good way because we know a lot more about it. We have a lot more options. It's simple when you can't do anything. You know what I mean?

'''C:''' Of course.

'''S:''' And the complexity is welcome. But we're in that maximally – it also gets simple when you absolutely know what the cause is, right? But we're in that middle stage where we know a lot pathophysiologically and we have a lot of markers, but we don't know everything. And sometimes there's not a lot we can do. All the different subtypes. And so, yeah, we're at the stage of, I think, maximal complexity. Yeah.

'''C:''' And it's hard because most of the treatments are lifestyle behavioral, and there are some medications that can, as we've talked about before, I remember you making a firm distinction, so I don't want to trip over my words here, but that can slow down. Do they actually slow down the disease process or just the symptoms from getting worse?

'''S:''' The older treatments are just symptomatic. They don't slow down the process. They don't prevent anything from getting worse. They just make your brain function a little bit better while you're taking the medication. Right. But the newer monoclonal antibody drugs are disease-modifying. They slow down progression. That's the new bit, right? That's what's new about them is that they actually are disease—what we call disease-modifying, not just symptomatic. Which, again, the biggest part of that—again, it's still controversial whether they have a clinically meaningful effect. But the fact that they have an effect is a proof of concept that we've been waiting for decades for. Right. Even if it's modest, it's still a very interesting and important proof of concept. All right. Well, this is definitely an interesting little tidbit. But as you say, it's not like here's an answer. It's more like here's just another piece of the puzzle that we have to take into consideration with everything else. Right.

'''C:''' The big takeaway that the authors state is, listen, we already have vaccines for most of these diseases. Why are we not all getting them? Right. You know, it's like at the very least, most of these viral infections that seem to be correlated, we have preventive measures. So at the very least, we should all be making sure that we're up to date on our vaccines. Yeah, absolutely.

=== Quark Matter (57:27) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://interestingengineering.com/science/the-likelihood-of-quark-matter-cores-in-massive-neutron-stars
|article_title = The likelihood of quark matter cores in massive neutron stars
|publication = Interesting Engineering
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Bob, tell us about quark matter.

'''B:''' If you insist.

'''S:''' I do.

'''B:''' All right. So neutron stars in the news again recently and that makes me happy. Researchers have done a new supercomputer analysis and conclude that there's an 80 to 90 percent chance that the largest such objects likely have a core not of boring compressed neutrons but of a different state of matter called cold quark matter. What the hell is that? and why should you care? This was published in December in the journal Nature Communications. Interesting paper, pretty technical, nasty technical, but there's tidbits in there that are actually understandable by me. Neutron stars are no stranger to this podcast. I mentioned them a bunch of times that when stars, quickie overview, when stars get to be 10 to 20 solar masses and go supernova, they can leave a core of the densest known matter in the universe. and These neutron stars or maybe they're a pulsar or a magnetar, all neutron stars, but there's a lot of varieties and they're all fascinating as hell. Basically, they all essentially squeeze two of our suns into a 20-kilometer-wide object. So very dense, very heavy, so dense that a sugar cube-sized piece of it would weigh about a billion tons. So yeah, that's very, very dense matter, very heavy. But what happens to all that matter from the star that collapsed, right? What's it like now that it's in the neutron star? My response to that is, well, it ain't called a neutron star for nothing. The star was previously primarily made of what? Atoms composed of neutrons and protons and electrons primarily, right? The pressures are so great in the resulting neutron star that most of the protons and electrons actually merge together. to create more neutrons. Isn't that cool, right? But the very core of that thing might be something extra special, and it's been debated for many, many years, and some theories predict, I think it's quantum chromodynamics, predicts that the inner core could become a new state of matter called cold quark matter. In this state of matter, the quarks are no longer in the prison of hadrons like neutrons and protons, right? Because you got the quarks that are kind of stuck in the neutrons and protons and they don't want to go anywhere. You try to pull them apart and they fight back. The harder you pull them apart, the harder they try to stay together. So they're famously basically almost impossible to pull apart. But in this – and of course in the core of the neutron star, the belief is that the hadron melts away at those insane densities, setting the up and down quarks free along with their – of course their gluon force carriers. So the scientists call this de-confined quark matter, de-confined because it's – they're breaking out of the neutron and proton collections, which no longer have any meaning at the core if this is true. So this is –. what I love about this is that this is completely different than all the states of matter that we commonly deal with day to day, right? Solids, liquids, gases, even plasmas like the sun, they're all different states of matter, right? But they're still made of nuclear matter. This isn't nuclear matter at all. This is cold quark matter. So it's completely different than these other ones that we've all heard of. So the thing is, though, how do you test this idea? You can't get to the closest neutron star. It's 400 light years away. We're not going to be getting there anytime soon. You're not going to be taking any samples. But we can use science. So what these researchers did, I think for the first time in regards to this question, is they combined our neutron star observations, the astrophysical observations that we've made of them for decades. We combined that with supercomputers and Bayesian inference. Steve, you talked about Bayesian statistics a couple of times on the show. Bayesian inference is a very powerful statistical method that in this case compares different observations, different astrophysical observations, and to give us the likelihood of these different models that are trying to describe neutron stars, right? So for example, in this case, we can statistically compare data about low-mass neutron stars, right, which probably don't have quark matter because they're not dense enough. And therefore, they're going to be less dense, right, if they don't have the quark matter. And you compare those to the heavy neutron stars that could have quark matter. And if they did, they would be more dense. So you compare those two sets of data from the big and the small neutron stars. You do that Bayesian inference from that. Do the Bayesian statistics and see what it says. So they – using this method, they crunched the hell out of their numbers. One of their team members, Jonas Hervoven, said – he's a University of Helsinki graduate student. He said, we had to use millions of CPU hours, millions of supercomputer time to be able to compare our theoretical predictions to observations and to constrain the likelihood of quark matter cores. So when they were all said and done, their conclusion was that with 80 percent, 88 percent confidence that the most massive neutron stars have characteristics that are consistent with cores containing, as they say, deconfined quark matter. So they were. the confidence level was about 80, 88 percent, which is fantastic. pretty high. Their attitude now seems to be like, yeah, it's likely. It's pretty likely. There was another method that they used that brought it down to 75%. But this new method that they devised was up to 88%. So it seems very likely at this point that a different state of matter exists in the cores of the biggest neutron stars. And in that core exists. Quarks are no longer confined in hadrons like neutrons but they're more unconstrained. Not completely unconstrained but they're not – they can move around much more freely and they're not tied together. Now, this isn't the solved problem yet of course but I love that. one of the coolest objects in the universe is likely even more fascinating than we even thought it was. So what does the future hold for this research? Now – 88% certainty is definitely encouraging, but it's clearly not enough, right? Science doesn't stop at 88% certainty. So we need bigger sample sizes of neutron stars because the sample they used was kind of small. We need to know both the mass and radius for more of them. Getting the mass is, I think, relatively easy compared to getting the radius relatively. We have the mass and radius of some but not all of them. So we need that data together and that data is definitely coming in the future. I mean that's definitely going to be happening. We also need to know more about the strength of this phase transition because that will matter. That other 12% of uncertainty could be affected by the strength of this phase transition. Because if it's a very strong phase transition into the quark matter, it could potentially destabilize the entire neutron star and make it collapse into a black hole. So they got to kind of rule that out. They got to learn more about that. They need to know about this phase transition. And that information will likely come from where? Gravitational wave detectors somewhere. that will be examining future collisions. I even talked about that back in episode 712 from March 2019. I talked about finding out about quark matter using gravitational wave detectors. So pairing these theories together, these methodologies together, we may at some point in the future really say like, yep, we are – We are certain that the core, the inner core of big neutron stars has this amazing quark matter, this cold quark matter. I'd love to find out how they get those last few yards to really determine that, but it's just a fascinating topic. Check it out online if you're interested.

'''E:''' All right.

=== Scientology RICO (1:05:11) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/celebrity/criminal-enterprise-scientology-should-face-rico-charges-danny-masterson-accusers-say-church-seems-to-contradict-itself-in-leah-remini-suit/ar-AA1mnDhn
|article_title = "Criminal Enterprise" Scientology Should Face RICO Charges, Danny Masterson Accusers Say – Update
|publication = MSN
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' Thanks, Bob. Evan, I hear that Scientology is in a bit of trouble.

'''E:''' One can only hope because it seems like, I don't know, whenever Scientology comes up in our discussions and there's a certain disappointment that we're left with, you know, for whatever the latest news addresses. I suppose that's because the Church of Scientology always, I don't know, seems to get away with it, whatever they wind up being accused of. But that's not strictly the case. They have been brought to court for various crimes, and courts and juries have ruled against them, yet they still march on. They're unfettered, they're unabated, and there's still a cultural stain on societies around the world. I think for those who are only hearing maybe the word Scientology for the first time right here, maybe, Scientology, it's a cult. It was founded by L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s. He was basically a science fiction author who parlayed his writing successes into a belief system. Dianetics, that's perhaps his most well-known book. It's a set of pseudoscientific ideas and practices that relate to the relationship between the mind and the body. You see, because the humans are actually immortal, we're spiritual beings. But we have a residency in a physical body. We have innumerable past lives, some of which preceding the arrival of us to Earth. We are, in effect, extraterrestrial creatures. So that's basically what it boils down to. But what solidifies the system as a cult, I think, is the way they treat their followers. This organization... I mean, it's wide. It includes a lot of smaller organizations and business interests and investments. They've got their hands spread out in a lot of areas. But the organization leadership and various managers and officers over the years have been accused of, well, here's a list. Theft, fraud, extortion, coercion, defamation, libel, forgery, invasion of privacy. practicing medicine without licenses, taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people, breach of public trust, battery, obstruction of justice, negligence, infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, torture and wrongful death. And that is not even a comprehensive list. But Scientology targets well-off and unfortunately weak-minded people. So Hollywood has become a favorite target-rich environment for Scientologists over the years. A lot of Scientologist celebrities out there. Obviously the ones we talk about on a regular basis, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, those names always come up. We've talked about Kirstie Alley. She's no longer alive, but she was a big name. Actor Michael Peña. Nancy Cartwright from The Simpsons. Oh, and Chick Corea. We sometimes forget about jazz musicians. Chick Corea. Although there have also been some celebrities that have been able to escape this cult. Katie Holmes, Lee Remini, Juliette Lewis, Beck, among others. You know, famous people. But Danny Masterson. I am getting to the news here, but you have to know the background here. Danny Masterson. He's an actor. He's best known for being part of the cast of That 70s Show TV series from, you know, 20, 25 years ago. Masterson.

'''B:''' Which character was he?

'''E:''' He was. Hyde. What the heck was his name? Hyde.

'''C:''' Hyde. He's a convicted rapist.

'''E:''' Yes, that's right. Masterson accused of sexual assault in 2017 by three victims. They were all Scientologists and they came forward and disclosed that they were sexually assaulted by Masterson during the early 2000s. So while he was, you know, riding high on his fame. Now, the three women claim that the Church of Scientology also pressured them not to contact authorities about it. These claims or the rapes that occurred. Church of Scientology has denied that they pressured their victims in any capacity. Later, a fourth woman accused Masterson of raping her also in the early 2000s. And in 2019, the four accusers, they sued Masterson. and the Church of Scientology. They accused Masterson and the church of engaging in stalking, physical invasion of privacy, and a conspiracy to obstruct justice, among other allegations, claiming that they and their families were harassed in an effort to silence them. So this is relevant to the news item this week. But for the timeline's sake, that was back in 2019. That's when the lawsuit was brought. But since then, June 2020, the Los Angeles Police Department detectives brought up three charges of rape. So official criminal charges. Masterson pled not guilty in 2021. In May of 2023, he was convicted on two counts of rape. And in September of 2023, he was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison, which is where he is now.

'''J:''' That is a massive prison sentence. Not saying that he doesn't deserve it or what he did, but just think about that. I mean, why would somebody who has that level of fame and probably money, right, because he was on an incredibly popular TV show for a long time.

'''C:''' He didn't think he would get caught.

'''J:''' Well, but I don't know. I just don't comprehend how – Why did Cosby do it?

'''S:''' You're trying to apply a rational filter to it, Jay. The thing – again, this bears mentioning because we don't talk about this that often. that like when we're talking about cults on the show and this is something that we've dealt with since the early, early days of the New England Skeptical Society. It's not about what they believe. Yes, Scientologists believe weird stuff. It's a sci-fi religion. But that's not what makes it a cult, right? What makes it a cult is how they behave. It's the hiding their true beliefs until you get all the way in to the circle. It's how they do mind controls on the people that are members, how they exploit them, etc., etc., right? Yeah. And there's also – we have to mention there's a continuum and there's a demarcation problem. I mean it's not like it's – there's like pristine religions over here and then 100 percent cults on the other side. It's a continuum between the two. And you could just sort of line up the features like how many cult-like features does an organization have. At some point, it's reasonable to call it a cult and I believe Scientology is way over that line.

'''E:''' And again, Masterson's in jail because of these criminal charges of rape. This doesn't address the original lawsuit in which the accusers accused Masterson and members of the church about the stalking, the invasion of privacy, and conspiracy, obstruction of justice, all those things. That case is still going, and it is proceeding forward. It's going to have a 2025 trial date. I know these things take a long time. But here's what happened. Here's what happened this past week. They amended the complaint. The accusers are now asking the courts to allow mafia-inspired RICO charges, that is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, to now be included. in their case. And here's some of the quotes from the statement. Many of Scientology's criminal enterprises' money-making schemes are criminal in nature. The church routinely and systematically engages in fraud, human trafficking, identity theft, and money laundering to fill its coffers and enrich its leadership. While Scientology knew that defendant Masterson was a rapist due to Scientology's criminal enterprise concealment of that fact, because they concealed it, but other members of Scientology were not made aware of that. And therefore, they're complicit in the fact that these women had to suffer as a result of their actions. So now they're trying to tie this statute in. This is not unprecedented, sort of. I looked up some old cases. There's decades of cases against this. Scientology members mostly. It's hard to sue the organization and pin them down, but you can go after some of the members and the managers and leadership and those kinds of things. And in 1984, there was a suggestion by some law enforcement that they should be brought up on RICO, but nothing appeared to have ever come of that case. So it's not novel that this has come up. But now that they've got the conviction and they've got Masterson guilty of rape and is serving the prison sentence, that perhaps, legally speaking, increases the chances in which if they enjoin this new claim of Rico into their case – And if you can get a jury, a court, however it's going to be decided to say that, yeah, they violated RICO. Well, that gets into a whole different world in which you're going to have the leadership of the organizations. If anybody is found guilty, they're going to be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. That's per person as part of the racket. So that's Musgrave. What's the guy's name?

'''C:''' Oh, Miscavige.

'''E:''' Miscavige. Thank you. That's him. His whole top entourage of individuals can be brought in on this because they're all named. They've named names in this suit. Plus, listen to this. As part of the RICO, the racketeers must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gain through a pattern of racketeering activity. So basically, in conclusion, If this were to stick, no guarantee this is going to stick, but if it were to stick, then you might finally have something with teeth in it that can finally bring Scientology to heel.

'''C:''' And not just Scientology. You can defend it this way. Don't you feel, Evan, like so many cults? I feel like lately I've watched so many cult documentaries across different platforms and so many cults. Really, at the end of it, it's like the leader is just trying to fuck all of the people in the cult.

'''E:''' Absolutely. They use them as human shields effectively.

'''C:''' There's so many sex crimes. Yeah. Like all of the high control stuff, all of the weird religious stuff, all of it comes down to like a dude trying to get laid.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. That is the every cult. Give me all your money and I get to have sex with all the women. That's every cult.

'''C:''' And so because of that, there are so many sex crimes being committed that are often not prosecuted because it's like this weird little world and it's so normalized within the cult. And that is how a lot of these actually get broken open or the rings get broken. get shut down. And is Scientology any different? In some ways, yes, but it's got all the same trappings and all the same stuff is happening.

'''E:''' Oh, I agree, Cara, entirely. I mean, this is big. I mean, this is the big fish when you talk about cults nowadays. I don't know that there's many people who don't know what Scientology is, even on a cursory sense.

'''S:''' But it's good precedent, you know, saying that if you can use RICO laws to go after this kind of activity, it's a good thing.

'''J:''' Nothing would make me happier than in 2024 to see Scientology take a major hit or go down. I mean that organization is remarkably corrupt and abusive.

'''E:''' Oh, it's horrific.

'''J:''' When you start reading about Scientology and the effect that it's had on people and the money it's taken from people and – The lives it's ruined in so many ways. It's a despicable organization.

'''E:''' And all over the world, too.

'''C:''' It's everywhere here. It's all over the world. It's all over the world. But especially in Los Angeles.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' It's everywhere.

{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? (1:16:53) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 962
|answer = [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M36GFokYgI&t=12s Australian magpie singing]
|}}


'''S:''' All right, Jay. It's Who's That Noisy time. First, who's that noisy of the year?

'''E:''' All right.

'''J:''' Well, this is a unique situation that I have never encountered before with Who's That Noisy.

'''B:''' Everyone solved it.

'''J:''' All right, guys. So first, take a listen. Thank you. All right, so I accepted this noisy. I liked it because I thought it could be easily misinterpreted as a lot of other things. It has kind of like a computer sound to it. And I'm going through all these hoops that I do when I'm trying to pick what noisy I'm going to use for that week. And I'm doing it deliberately because I want it to be interesting. I want it to be a little bit difficult. And I want there to be some provocative element about it. so we all maybe learn something, right? So I picked that one. And it turns out that every single person that lives in Australia 100% knew what this was without question. And they all emailed me, including I think a lot of people who don't listen to the show. I got well over 500 emails. Whoa. Yes. 500. When I went back – so I haven't checked my Who's That Noisy folder in weeks at this point. Think about how many shows have happened since we did the last Who's That Noisy. I believe it was the 13th of December. So it's been at least three weeks. So I'm scrolling through and I get down to the date range, which is going to be this show. And I am like, what the hell? I couldn't believe it. And almost every single person from Australia said the same thing to me. Jay, you are going to get so many emails about this. So they all knew the answer. They all were like – I mean I wouldn't be surprised if there was a meeting where they're all like, let's email Jay because it just was like remarkable how similar these emails were. Remarkable. Yeah.

'''E:''' That should have been my prediction for 2024. How many times will Bob say remarkable?

'''J:''' So this is – I'm not going to read any guesses because I actually – after getting to about 150 emails, I didn't get to a guess. that wasn't the correct answer. So I said, you know what? Wow. Everyone from Australia guessed correctly.

'''S:''' So Australia wins.

'''J:''' Australia wins. Australia wins the first. Who's That Noisy of 2024. Congratulations. You have a wonderful country. I love it. I would love to visit it again. And my God, do you people know the fauna in your country better than any other country I've ever visited? You guys are awesome. So that's it. So I'm going to go right to next week's Who's That Noisy?

'''S:''' Wait, first you've got to tell us the answer.

'''E:''' You've got to tell us.

'''J:''' Oh, you guys actually want – but everybody knows the answer. I don't have to announce the answer.

'''B:''' We're not Australian.

'''E:''' I'm not from Australia.

'''S:''' I know it's a bird.

'''J:''' It's a bird. It's the Australian magpie. And another comment I do have is it's a pretty weird sound and I wouldn't want to hear that all day. Every single person that emailed me, of course, has heard this so many times that they know the bird as well. Like how many bird sounds? can you identify if you're not Steve? Seriously, the average.

'''E:''' Robin.

'''J:''' Yeah. Maybe two birds if you're lucky, right? Yeah, probably. Yeah, they all know this one. So they're everywhere. These magpies must be everywhere. So let me just play it again real quick. I'll just give you a couple seconds of it. I mean if you told me that this is the way that artificial intelligent computers communicate with each other, I would have believed it.

'''B:''' I thought it was the whale probe from that Star Trek movie.

'''S:''' Some birds have like an electronic kind of sound to them. In Connecticut, the brown-headed cowbird has a very similar – it doesn't sound exactly like that but it has that electronic quality.

'''J:''' Steve, you could have made up any bird name. The pan-faced seersucker. I would have believed you because bird names are so weird to me. No rhyme or reason. All right, the Australian magpie, everybody. If you go to Australia, you'll probably end up seeing hundreds of these. I have a new noisy for this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Daniel Odekir. And I'm just checking, did this person give me a pronunciation of their name? No. So the last name is Odekir. And here it is. I just want to make sure everybody knows this is not an Australian magpie. This is something completely different. Guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, please email me at WTN at theskepticsguide.org.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (1:21:14) ===
[background hissing, foreground beeping of different volumes, speeds, and frequencies]

{{wtnAnswer|966|short_text_from_transcript}} 

== Announcements (1:22:05) ==

'''J:''' All right. So we have a few things going on. First and foremost, we have a wonderful series of events coming up in April of this year. So on April 6th, we will be doing a live skeptical extravaganza. This is our stage show. This is a combination of two things. One, it's like a comedy improv that George runs where we don't know what's coming at us. We don't know what the questions are he's going to ask. We don't know what puzzles he's going to throw at us. So it is live and it is all improv. But we also have a backbone of science and skeptical information that we give the audience throughout the show. And we basically are teaching you about how you can't trust your mind's perception of reality. It's a lot of fun. We will be doing this show in Dallas. If you want information on that show, you can go to theskepticsguide.org. There are two buttons on the homepage now. One of them is for the extravaganza. And the second one... is for a show that we're doing on Sunday the 7th, and this is a private SGU recording. We call this version of the show Private Show Plus because it's a private show and extra time, at least an hour, where we'll be doing other things with the audience. I will say right now that Evan and I are working on a secret project that once we have it 100% confirmed, we will tell you about it. It has to do with the private show. It's very likely that this will be a very special private show this year. Unique.

'''S:''' No matter what, it will be unique and special, but there might be some extra layer in there that we haven't had before.

'''J:''' I'm telling you right now that ticket sales are going very, very well. We might expand the size, but that's a big deal, which I'm sure you can figure out why because more people means more space and it's a lot of work involved there. So buy your tickets now if you're interested. And also, guys, thank you so much, all the patrons who supported us in the past year or the years prior. Thank you so much for your support. I mean, it means the world to us because we get to do the work that we're doing here together. For those of you who have been listening to the show for a long time, you know what our goals are. Essentially, we want to help educate as many people as possible on critical thinking, being media savvy, being able to navigate through all the misinformation that's out there. We also kind of like to think of our first book as... It's a good book to help you learn how to use your brain, right? It helps you think in a very scientifically mannered way. We take our work very seriously and we think it is very important, especially now more than ever. Unfortunately, more than ever. I'd love to tell you, hey, we've been doing this for 25 years and things are getting better.

'''S:''' We've fixed the world.

'''J:''' Yeah, but we live in a very difficult reality and the world has – things are strange and unexpected right now where there's wars going on. There's lots of crazy things happening. This is a great time to learn how to think critically and how to navigate through all that misinformation that's out there. If you like the work that we do, if you appreciate it, we would appreciate you becoming a patron of ours to help us keep going. You can go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide and you could join us in hopefully changing the world and educating people.

'''S:''' Join us. All right. Thanks, Jay. All right, guys. Let's go on with science or fiction.

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:25:14) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
}}
{{SOFinfo
|theme = The worst countries

|item1 = The US has the highest rate of automobile accidents, at 5,938 per million people in 2019.

|item2 = El Salvador has the highest murder rate in the world at 52 per 100 thousand people per year, while the US ranks 76th.
|link2web = https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/murder-rate-by-country
|link2pub = Data Pandas
|link2title = Murder Rate by Country

|item3 = The country with the greatest income inequality is Brazil, with a Gini index of 52.9. (Gini index – 0 is perfect equality, while 100 is maximal inequality.)
|link3web = https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-inequality-by-country
|link3pub = World Population Review
|link3title = Wealth Inequality by Country 2024

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = US has highest rate of automobile accidents
|science1 = El Salvador has highest murder rate
|science2 = Brazil has greatest income inequality

|rogue1 = jay
|answer1 = El Salvador has highest murder rate

|rogue2 =Evan
|answer2 =El Salvador has highest murder rate

|rogue3 =cara
|answer3 =El Salvador has highest murder rate

|rogue4 =bob
|answer4 =El Salvador has highest murder rate

|host =steve

|sweep =y 
|clever = 
|win = 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. And we have a theme this week. The theme is the worst. These are countries that have some statistic that makes them the worst at something. Item number one, the U.S. has the highest rate of automobile accidents at 5,938 per million people in 2019. Those are the latest statistics I can find. Item number two, El Salvador has the highest murder rate in the world at 52 per 100,000 people per year, while the U.S. ranks 76th. And number three, the country with the greatest income inequality is Brazil with a Gini index of 52.9. I'll tell you that the Gini index, it's 0 to 100 with 0 being perfect equality, like everybody makes exactly the same amount of money, and 100 being maximal inequality, which I think is the top 1% having 100% of the wealth. So on that index, Brazil is 52.9, and that's the highest in the world. Jay, go first.

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' All right, the first one here, the U.S. has the highest rate of automobile accidents at 5,938 per million people in 2019. That's per year, Steve, correct? Yeah. Okay, that is the, okay. Oh, wow. I would think – all right. So 5,938 accidents per million people. That's an odd way to put it. Why wouldn't you just tell us the total number of accidents?

'''S:''' Well, because if you're comparing countries, the total number is just all about population and stuff.

'''J:''' Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, you're right. Well, I have no reason to think that that is incorrect. The second one, El Salvador has the highest murder rate in the world at 52 per 100,000 people per year while the US ranks 76th. I don't know, man. I don't think the U.S. is that low on that list. So that one sticks out to me. You know, we have an amazing amount of gun violence in the United States, like profound level of gun violence. So I'm really thinking that that one is a fiction so far. The country with the greatest income inequality is Brazil with a Gini index of 52.9. 100 is maximally inequality. Hmm. You know, I mean, the second one here, Steve, about the murder rate, I do think that the US is higher on the list than 76th.

'''S:''' Okay. Evan?

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''E:''' Well, I mean, certainly in sort of a statistical way, I guess you could say that the murder rate statement here has, I think, the most chance of being the fiction because it does have these multiple components to it. It only takes one of the components to be incorrect, to make the whole thing incorrect. That is true. So I play the odds and go ahead with Jay on that one. I'll just say, though, the first one about the rate of automobile accidents in the United States. So, what, we're the fourth most populous nation, China, India, higher than us. Who else ranks higher than us in the population? There's another country before that. I can't recall right now. Is it Russia? No, probably not. Pakistan. Is Pakistan third and we're fourth? Indonesia.

'''S:''' I think we may be third.

'''E:''' So it's a matter of those countries who has the most cars. I mean, India has got a lot of people. But how many of them have cars and how many automobile accidents? That one you can maybe crunch down, but you'd have to know more about those other countries. And then I've never heard of the Gini Index before, so that's totally no information on that. So I suppose I'll play the statistical odds to start the year off. I'll join Jay in saying that the highest murder rate won is the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Cara.

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' Yeah, this is a tough one. Like, the U.S. has the highest rate of automobile accidents. It could be because our infrastructure is so intense and so many people own cars. Just like purely statistically, you're going to get more crashes with more cars. I doubt we have the most like dangerous accidents, but you don't say that. And you said accidents, but I do want to clarify here. You mean crashes, right? Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Okay, good. Yeah. Not like whether it was intentional or unintentional. Yeah. Okay. So the highest rate of crashes. Yeah. I mean, I could see it having the highest rate of crashes. El Salvador is quite dangerous in terms of murder rates. So is the U.S. 52 per thousand people. I think places with like really severe gun violence are going to be high on the list. U.S. does. That does feel very low. It feels like we should be much higher. I don't think there are more um kind of latin american countries that are gonna because we're talking about a per capita rate here. um so you know you think about sort of quote drug war violence and gang violence and things of that nature and I think we are going to be up there. but I didn't know you would do something only half true so I'm not sure about that one. and then income inequality. god this is such a like. I do think brazil has pretty severe income inequality. is it the worst? I don't know. I think we probably have a pretty high genie index. But yeah, Brazil is pretty bad on that front. So I might have to go with the guys and say that you were either half right or maybe El Salvador doesn't have the highest murder rate. It's like Columbia or something like that. So yeah, we'll go with the murder rate one that the U.S. is higher on that list.

'''S:''' Okay, and Bob?

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' Yeah, I agree. Brazil is definitely high on that list and whether it's the worst, I don't know. But it sounds right. The automobile accidents, that sounds decent too. Yeah, the one that's rubbing me wrong and rubbed everyone wrong is the second one with US rank 76th in murder rate. That seems too low. So I'm going to have to go with that as well.

'''S:''' Okay, so you guys all agree. He sounds happy. Someone got swept. Let's see who it is.

'''E:''' Get out the group.

'''S:''' You can't read me, Cara.

'''E:''' Cara plays poker, Steve. I heard a slight smile in the voice.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Let's see. So I think the one that you all agree on the most is the third one. So we'll start there. The country with the greatest income inequality is Brazil with a Gini index of 52.9. Again, with zero being perfect, 100 being maximally bad. You all think that one is science and that one is science. Science. That is science. Yeah, Brazil is bad.

'''C:''' Is the U.S. bad? Where do we rate?

'''S:''' We're kind of middle of the pack.

'''C:''' Yeah, okay.

'''S:''' Not great, but not the worst.

'''C:''' That's not good, though. But we should be better.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, there's a lot. So the best countries are the socialist European countries.

'''E:''' Well, right.

'''S:''' Right? I mean, that's to be expected. So our number is 39.7. okay yeah so we're. we're better than a lot of south american countries. you know mexico chile paraguay uganda togo argentina malaysia iran. those were all above us. but then like then it's like you know the united states and then there's a lot of the european countries that are you know below have a lower score.

'''C:''' that yeah we're probably pretty low given our per capita wealth. yeah like you know like we're probably pretty low given how quote-unquote developed.

'''S:''' america is pretty high. yeah high on the index low yeah yeah equality

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' All right, so I guess we'll go backwards in order. El Salvador has the highest murder rate in the world at 52 per 100,000 people per year, while the U.S. ranks 76th. You guys all think this one is the fiction because you think the U.S. should rank higher than that. And this one is science. Sorry, guys. There's a lot more unstable countries than you realize around the world. is the bottom line. There's a lot of countries where...

'''C:''' I'm realizing, Steve, that our gun deaths are not always murders. We have a lot of gun deaths in this country.

'''S:''' It doesn't count suicides.

'''C:''' Accidents and suicides.

'''S:''' Most of our gun deaths are actually suicides.

'''C:''' Yeah, we were equate. I think a lot of us were thinking gun deaths when we were thinking murder.

'''S:''' Maybe, yeah.

'''B:''' That's true.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Too bad you couldn't think of that beforehand there, Cara. Sorry. So I came after you.

'''S:''' So El Salvador is 52 per 100,000. The U.S. is 4.96, so basically five, so one-tenth per 100,000. So it's pretty down there. You know, that's typical for a lot of countries sort of in that range. But, of course, there's a lot of countries that have a much lower rate. Australia is 0.89. Wow. For example. So, yeah, the bottom of the list. So there's a few that have zero. I guess they had no murders. recently, like San Marino, Monaco, you know, very small things. Japan. Micronations. Japan is the country with millions of people, like the major country that is the lowest at 0.26. Very, very small. Wow. Norway is very low, 0.47.

'''B:''' And you could get guns in Japan. Last I looked into this, you can get guns in Japan, but it's a process. It's not easy, but you can get them.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' So this means that the U.S. has the highest rate of automobile accidents at 5,938 per million people in 2019. is the fiction. Why? So that number's accurate, but that's not the highest. There's a country that has twice the rate, more than twice the rate that we do. Wow.

'''C:''' India or China?

'''S:''' Nope. Really good props. to anybody who guesses this.

'''E:''' I will say Belarus.

'''B:''' Vatican City.

'''S:''' You have to think about driving culture, like the way the highways are in this country. Germany? So Germany is a great guess because Germany is second place. behind the united states or it would be you know in terms of total accidents it's third behind this other country and the united states and per capita I know I know it it's jamaica.

'''B:''' no because we got into a cab where the guy the driver was smoking a bob marley and driving and passing around corners.

'''E:''' yeah well that's what you do. you pass after you smoke.

'''C:''' So you said think about driving culture. Monaco? Is it like places? I don't know. I'm trying to think of places for people.

'''E:''' Oh, Micronation.

'''C:''' They love driving fast in Lichtenstein.

'''E:''' Great. And Andorra.

'''C:''' I bet you that is a statistical anomaly because there's like 12 people in Lichtenstein.

'''E:''' No, no, no. Micronation.

'''S:''' It barely counts. So 13,200 per million compared to less than six.

'''C:''' How many? Are there a million people in Lichtenstein? Wow. No, there are only 39,039 people in Liechtenstein. So in order to do the per million statistic, you have to triple – no, you have to times the population by – what is that?

'''S:''' 30? But they all drive apparently. Poorly.

'''B:''' You and the kids.

'''S:''' But Germany was pretty close behind us at 3,600. So we're second? Yeah. In terms of per million, we were number one in terms of total accidents, but that's partly because we have a big population. We have a big population of drivers, and we drive a lot.

'''C:''' It's literally that word, rate. It's the word rate, the highest rate of automobile accidents.

'''S:''' Per million, yeah. Because otherwise it's just all about population. That's why they want to just do it that way. But the U.S., it's not just – with the U.S., it isn't just about population. It's also about the density of cars is very high in the U.S. The percentage of the population that owns and drives cars on a regular basis.

'''C:''' And also just the infrastructure. We are a driving-centric country. Yeah.

'''S:''' But Germany is kind of an anomaly. I don't know if that's because of the Autobahn or like. there's also just a very high driving population kind of country.

'''C:''' Yeah. Are they a big public transportation country?

'''S:''' I don't know.

'''E:''' I don't know. No.

'''C:''' Maybe that has to do with geography.

'''B:''' Maybe not.

'''S:''' All right. Sorry to start just the year off with a sweep. No, you're not. You're not sorry.

'''B:''' You're loving it.

'''E:''' You're going to be happy for a week. But that was a good practice round. We can really start counting next week.

'''S:''' Yeah, absolutely. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:38:15) ==

{{qow
|text = Civility is hard to codify or legislate, but you know it when you see it. It's possible to disagree without being disagreeable.
|author = {{w|Sandra Day O'Connor}}
|lived = 1930-2023
|desc = {{w|Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States|U.S. Supreme Court justice}}
}}


'''E:''' Civility is hard to codify or legislate, but you know it when you see it. It's possible to disagree without being disagreeable. The late Sandra Day O'Connor, former United States Supreme Court justice, passed away late in 2023. And yeah, so I wanted a little – in a way, perhaps a little optimism for 2024. It's possible to disagree without being optimistic. So let's all practice that a little bit as part of our resolutions or whatever it is you've got going on in 2024. Keep it in the back of your mind.

'''B:''' Yeah, tell that to the internet.

'''S:''' I do think – yeah, because there's a whole internet balls phenomenon, right?

'''E:''' Of course.

'''S:''' Where people do I think tend – there's social distance and the greater the perceived social distance, the more free people are to be assholes basically. That's right. Yeah. So I think that's – we're living in a world now where we're interacting with a lot of people in a context where they're just going to be nastier. Yeah. So I do think it's important to remember a few things. One is you should always behave as if you were in the room with that person.

'''E:''' That's a good way. Yep, that's a good thing.

'''S:''' I think another good rule of thumb is to remember that even though it's really hard to think this sometimes, we have a lot more in common with people than differences. And whenever you actually get to know somebody – Even though they may be the – they may absolutely represent for you like the epitome of sort of the opposite worldview for you, ideologically, politically, everything. When you get to know them, you realize, oh, they're just a regular person with the same kind of likes and dislikes that regular people have and – you know what I mean? And then the temptation is to think, oh, they're an exception. It's like, no, they're really not an exception. You may have this meaningful ideological difference. Sure, I'm not trying to minimize that. But we tend to forget that that doesn't mean they're not a person. They could, despite that, still be a good person. We're not going to get anywhere if we treat everybody terribly. That actually just reinforces their negative stereotypes about you, right?

'''E:''' Agreed.

'''S:''' But it's hard. It is very hard, man.

'''E:''' It's hard. It takes practice.

'''S:''' It takes effort. I've had good experiences, though, like going into the lion's den, like skeptically speaking. I've given a talk as the only skeptic at a homeopathy conference. Oh, that's right. Yeah, you guys remember this story. And I won over the crowd just by being nice. That's all I had to do.

'''E:''' Because they had a preconceived notion of you.

'''S:''' They had a preconceived notion that I was going to be this monster, and I destroyed it just by being nice. You know what I mean?

'''E:''' You basically disarmed them with that.

'''S:''' Yeah. The more experience I get interacting with people over contentious issues, the more I realize that being sarcastic and trying to win and score points or whatever is so counterproductive. It's just so completely counterproductive.

'''C:''' It's like anti-humanistic. It just shows a lack of empathy. My big takeaway from what you just said, and it's something that I often work on with my patients, is that empathy is a skill that you have to practice. It's not some sort of trait that you're necessarily born with. We have to constantly practice exercising empathy.

'''S:''' And it's also emotional intelligence, which, again, it's a skill as much as anything else. I do think it comes more naturally to some people than others. It's like the 10,000 hours thing. We talked about this on the show. It's like some things might take more work for some people than others, but these are still all skills you can train. You can get better at.

'''C:''' And even if they come, quote, more naturally, I think there's a solid argument to make that it's probably just because they were socialized to practice it more. Maybe.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah. So that's our message for 2024. Everyone be excellent to each other. Yes.

'''B:''' And also watch out for karma this year.

'''S:''' Yeah, karma.

'''E:''' Oh, that's right. Karma's going to get you.

'''S:''' Karma will get you.

'''E:''' It's not a commercial.

'''S:''' Could you imagine if something like karma existed?

'''J:''' What a different world we would be living in. Right.

'''S:''' I mean, it's wishful thinking. It'd be nice. It'd be awfully nice. There is, I do think, not magical karma, but I do think there is kind of a real karma in that the kind of energy you put out there into the universe. Like if you're a nice person, people will be nice back to you, generally speaking.

'''C:''' Yeah, I think it happens up to an inflection point. Like there is sort of like person to person karma because like if you're an asshole, people are going to be an asshole to you. But like once you have amassed enough sort of like power and privilege, I think that that like goes out the window sadly.

'''S:''' There's other factors involved. Yeah. But for most people, it's probably a good social strategy, a good life strategy to be nice. Right.

'''C:''' I'd say for everyone, that's a good strategy.

'''E:''' It's a pretty good strategy.

'''S:''' Yeah. No, definitely. All right, guys. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''J:''' You got it, brother.

'''E:''' Thank you, Steve.

'''S:''' 2024. Yep.

== Signoff (1:43:44) ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

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SGU Episode 977

2024-05-03T10:17:40Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

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|episodeIcon = File:977 iridology.png

|caption = "Iridology: Unlocking genetic clues through the eye. Can analyzing the iris and pupil of the eye see illnesses in the body?" <ref name=iridology>[https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/iridology-unlocking-genetic-clues-through-the-eye Fox 35 Orlando: Iridology: Using alternative medicine to unlock genetic clues through the eye]</ref>

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|qowText = The shameful thing is not ignorance — on the contrary, that is the natural thing. The really shameful thing is not to want to know, to resist finding out when the occasion offers. It is never the ignorant who offer that resistance, but the ones who think they know. That is the shameful thing — to think you know. He who thinks he knows something, but is in fact ignorant of it, closes the door of his mind through which authentic truth could enter.
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== Introduction, Bob in Alaska ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday March 27th 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' good evening everyone.

'''S:''' Bob is away. I believe he's in alaska right now.

'''J:''' what? yes he's visiting his daughter.

'''S:''' oh yeah his daughter basically lives and works in alaska and he's visiting. wow Why didn't I know that?

'''C:''' I don't know. That's cool.

'''S:''' Yeah, she works with wolves and bears and stuff.

'''E:''' What?

'''S:''' Seriously.

'''J:''' Yeah, she works in an animal conservatory.

'''C:''' Why is it that any time we talk about wolves and bears and stuff, Bob doesn't seem to know more?

'''E:''' Well, that's why he went to Alaska to brush up on his studies.

'''J:''' Bob doesn't know. He doesn't know anything about water.

'''E:''' Because there's no nano in it.

'''C:''' There's no – Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, that's fair.

'''S:''' It's a little terrestrial for Bob. Yeah.

'''E:''' A little too earthy.

'''S:''' She saw lots of pictures and video of her working directly with these animals. Obviously, the really dangerous ones are behind a fence. It is Alaskan wildlife. It's really cool. That's awesome. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's something, man. She spent her winter up in Alaska. That's dedication. I understand it gets rather nippy up there.

'''C:''' Yeah, can do.

'''J:''' They got a ton of snow. They got snow off the charts.

{{anchor|special}} 
== Special Segment: AI-created music (1:36) ==
{{shownotes 
|weblink = http://suno.com
|article_title = Make a song about anything
|publication = Suno
|note =not 
|redirect_title = 
}}


'''S:''' So last week, guys, Ian sent us a link to the latest AI phenomenon. Uh-oh. I know I just sent you guys an example. This is a suno.ai, S-U-N-O. And basically it makes songs. So you put in, you can either manually put in lyrics or you could put in topics and have it make you lyrics. And then you type in a description of the type of music. it could be a genre name could be just a description of what you want it to sound like a style. it doesn't do artists. so you can't say in the style of john williams or whatever you know it doesn't. for obvious reasons it won't do that. but you could describe it just describe what the music is like and then you hit create literally 30 seconds and you get a full song two minutes.

'''C:''' Sorry, once again, what are all the parameters you can give it?

'''S:''' I just said. So it's lyrics and you can do instrumental or not instrumental.

'''C:''' So you actually feed it the exact lyrics or you give it like ideas?

'''S:''' Either way. Either way. You could write your own lyrics or you could do what I did, which is have ChatGPT make the lyrics just because I think it does a slightly better job than their lyrics generator. And then I still would tweak it for punctuation. You learn like how it reads what you write. You know what I mean?

'''E:''' So it makes correct breaks.

'''S:''' So if you want it to say SGU, you have to do S period, G period, U period. If you put in SGU, it says SCA. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then instrumental or with singing. And then, again, style of music, which could be a genre name or it could be more of just a natural language description. Or you could say use random style and then create. That's it.

'''J:''' Did you say Gangdom style?

'''S:''' Random.

'''C:''' So how many did you go through before you got those two? 30, 30 or so. I have a question. And this is not this is there's no bias here. How were they all male singers?

'''S:''' No, nope.

'''C:''' Okay. You just really it's just these two songs were the most like, like they made the most sense. That's why you picked them. Like they were the most coherent.

'''S:''' They were, I thought, a little bit tighter than some of the other ones. And I was just playing around.

'''C:''' I mean, they sound real.

'''S:''' They sound like real songs. So if this were five years ago and somebody played these songs for you, we'll play one in the show and you'll hear what we're talking about. We'll play an actually full song. I don't think you would question for a moment that this was a real person playing the music and singing the songs. Yeah. And even now, if you heard it, if you weren't alerted to the fact that these might be AI, I don't think you would necessarily assume that they're AI. You know what I mean? Yeah. Right. It's pretty good.

'''E:''' That's really good.

'''S:''' When I mean pretty good, I mean technically good. You know, Jay and I were talking about this earlier, trying to find, what's the perfect word to describe this? They are all a bit soulless, right?

'''C:''' Oh, completely soulless.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah. They're not artistic.

'''C:''' But the rock opera song literally goes like, this is a rock opera.

'''S:''' Well, I think that's – See, for the lyrics, I told ChatGPT to make lyrics for a rock opera song and it incorporated rock opera into the lyrics. I think that's just ChatGPT being stupid.

'''C:''' It said that my insights – what was the lyric?

'''S:''' Like a pearl.

'''C:''' Yeah, my insights are like a pearl. Yeah.

'''E:''' Like a pearl of wisdom. Yes.

'''C:''' That's why I laughed when I was wondering about the lyrics. Like if you actually told it what to say.

'''S:''' No, no. I mean you can. If you want to write your own. If you can write lyrics, you can write your entire own lyrics and then it will set them to music and you can just keep reiterating it until you get something you like and playing around with different genres. And you can do combinations too. You know what I mean? You could combine different styles of music as well.

'''C:''' I definitely like the hip hop song.

'''S:''' better yeah I think that's a little bit easier for and also when I made those lyrics I told chat GPT to make me hip-hop rap lyrics about the SGU. that's all it was my entire set of instructions I just said about the skeptic guide to the universe and then it came up with everything.

'''E:''' hmm Minimal effort and far-ranging results, really, in a short amount of time.

'''C:''' How long did it take you with all the iterations and things that you had to do to get it where it was?

'''S:''' Right out of the box. Those were among the first ones that I made. That's awesome. Yeah. I tried a couple with its lyrics. So let me see how ChatGPT does. I tried some with them and then I realized, oh, I got to tweak them a little bit for length and for punctuation. Sometimes I would run a couple of iterations and then combine the best verses from a couple of different ones from ChatGPT. And then I just was playing around with a bunch of different styles, barbershop, but just to see what would come up, you know, like I said, heavy metal, transcendental fantasy rock, just to see what would happen. You know what I mean? It's, you know, it's, it's pretty much what it sounds like. It's, you know, I guess it's just another domino falls, you know, I just think this is, and it's exactly like every other, in my opinion, every other large language model, narrow AI, you know? Technically impressive, but creatively soulless. Creatively. I love it.

'''C:''' Creatively soulless. I was combining two words there.

'''S:''' What's that? Onomatopoeia? Steve, will you make me a stomp and holler song? Yeah, I could do it right now.

'''E:''' I love that genre. Or a hiccup.

'''C:''' No, no, Stompin' Holler is like one of my favorite genres.

'''S:''' And with what lyrics?

'''C:''' With like the SGU lyrics.

'''S:''' All right, so I'm going to say, I'll just put the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

'''C:''' It's going to be hard because it will be extra soulless because you really kind of need soul for those, but it'll be interesting to hear. I have to ask, like, you know, like the SKU thing, like whenever I listen to a PDF reader, like a bad PDF reader, like a native PDF reader. And it says like EG instead of EG. Were there any other examples other than SKU of just like bad reads?

'''S:''' Well, when I put in pseudoscience as one word, it said pseudoscience. And so I had to put a hyphen and then it said pseudoscience. Just weird things like that. Yeah.

'''E:''' It's fascinating. That will get better. Those are tweaks that they can make.

'''S:''' So you can play with this now. You get 10 free songs a day. Oh, cool. That's all? I paid $10 so I could play with 500 of them, but if you just want 10...

'''E:''' But if you're on a budget.

'''S:''' I figured we would be doing this segment. I need more space. I need a little space here to play around.

'''J:''' To me, the bottom line is that like most of the AI that people are using today, like a lot of AI stuff has come out over the last couple of years. This is just going to get dramatically better in a short amount of time.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah.

'''J:''' And I was telling Steve this like – I could see a reality where people, like they have AI make the song, then they just kind of copy it, record it themselves and say it's theirs, right? Because if you have it make you a song and then you don't use that recording, no one would ever know that it was written by AI, right?

'''S:''' Yeah, of course you could just do the same thing with ChatGPT to write the lyrics or – but yeah, this creates the – but again, it's so derivative. Do you really – if you're like that – if you're the kind of person who could play your own music, you probably don't need this to do that for you. But this is for people who have zero talent. Right.

'''E:''' I can't play a note.

'''S:''' Yeah. All right, so it's done. That was in real time. Oh.

'''C:''' Oh, wow. No way.

'''S:''' And it gives me two versions. It gives you two versions.

'''E:''' Oh, interesting.

'''C:''' It's so cool.

'''E:''' Cara.

'''C:''' Yes.

'''E:''' You should feed it a few sentences from your dissertation.

'''J:''' and see what it would come back with.

'''C:''' See if they can make something emotional. Actually, my dissertation is pretty emotional, but I could find like the wonkiest part, like the data analysis part or something like that.

'''J:''' Right.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' See what it can do. Oh, that would be fun.

'''C:''' It would. But it would also be interesting to feed it the portions that are like the discussion section where there is actually quite a lot of kind of meaningful personal stuff. Interesting. And make art out of it.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah, right. Like for personal use, this is great. Yeah, it would be really interesting.

'''E:''' Yeah, instead of giving someone a birthday card like they get from everyone every year, you made a song for them, which they would, you know, be blown over by most likely.

'''S:''' Mm-hmm.

'''C:''' But again, it's like the ethics of this kind of stuff starts to get really funky, right? Because what are they pulling from to make this music? Music. Copyrighted music.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' That people, artists worked really hard to make.

'''S:''' But I think it is like so generic to the genre and not a specific person.

'''C:''' No, of course. But it's still amalgamating all of the art.

'''S:''' Yeah. In order to do that. How is that different than a person who's listened to all that art than making a song in a genre?

'''E:''' They have to have a frame of reference.

'''C:''' It's not, but that person would be getting paid to do that.

'''S:''' That's the complication. If you were doing it for your personal use. And again, like you can't use this and you can't produce an album for this and sell it, right?

'''C:''' You can't, but you can probably – let's say you're like a podcaster who's starting out and you want to put like music at the top of your show.

'''S:''' What's wrong with that?

'''C:''' You probably could do that, right? Because historically you might have hired a musician to produce that music for you.

'''S:''' Yeah, but you know what? Yes, maybe. But you know what we did 15 or whatever it was, 19 years ago? We went to Podsafe Music and downloaded a free MP3 file and used that.

'''C:''' And I had my boyfriend at the time write something for me.

'''S:''' There was thousands of free songs to choose from. So I don't think it's much different.

'''C:''' Right. There have always been sort of like workarounds and options that way.

'''S:''' I sent you guys those two songs. Oh, you did?

'''E:''' I'm listening to one of them right now.

'''S:''' They're pretty good actually. Let's see. I'm listening to them too.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''S:''' In a world full of questions and doubt, we seek the truth, we hear the call.

'''J:''' From the depths of curiosity, a rise above will never fall.

'''S:''' With open minds and a thirst for knowledge, we seek the facts, we'll never sway.

'''E:''' Through skepticism and critical thinking, we'll find a way, brighten up the day.

'''C:''' We're the skeptics reaching for the stars. The first one's terrible.

'''E:''' It has a...

'''C:''' It sounds like country music. It has a gospel feel to it almost. Yeah, the first one's awful. Hate it. Hate it. Nope, don't like either of them.

'''E:''' Second one's a little twangy.

'''C:''' Hate them.

'''E:''' Well, I mean... Hate them. Is that this genre?

'''C:''' Is it correct? It's a version of it. No, it's not the version of it that I like. I like... I don't know how to describe it.

'''E:''' Well, who's an artist?

'''C:''' Lord Huron is one that I listen to a lot.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''C:''' So it's much more sad, like the style of Stompin' Holler that I really like. And this feels very country.

'''S:''' So these were lyrics made by the music app. They're not as specific as the ChatGPT lyrics that I made.

'''C:''' Right. Oh, interesting.

'''S:''' Yeah, these are more generally about skepticism, whereas the ChatGPT had a lot of details about the SGU specifically.

'''E:''' Right, naming us.

'''S:''' Naming us, yeah, etc., etc.

'''E:''' So would you call this a rabbit hole, Steve?

'''C:''' Yeah, I think so. Oh, yeah. This was supposed to be our opening banter.

'''S:''' Well, I guess we can move on to some news items. What do you think? Sure.

'''E:''' Makes sense.

'''S:''' While we're still writing these ourselves. Yeah.

'''E:''' Good point.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 

=== Sweetened Drinks and Atrial Fibrillation (14:24) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sweetened-drinks-and-risk-of-a-fib/
|article_title = Sweetened Drinks and Risk of A-Fib
|publication = sbm
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' So this is the latest iteration of preliminary study being completely gullibly reported by the mainstream media to scare everybody into not eating or drinking something which is perfectly healthy. A few weeks ago, we talked about oats. I had this patient who asked me about it. I'm like, oh, don't worry about that. That's nothing. It's like, oh, thank goodness. What am I going to do without my oats? I eat them every day as a health food, and now suddenly it's going to kill me. It's like, yeah, that's the whole problem with this. You take these preliminary studies, and then you fearmonger based upon them without any context. Most of them don't turn out to be anything actionable. So it's really frustrating. Okay, but this time the target is sweetened drinks, right? Like soft drinks, which is a popular target for this kind of research. And this includes sweetened with sugar. Or with artificial sweeteners, right? Either one, which is pretty odd when you think about it. But what they found was that there is an increased risk of atrial fibrillation among people who report drinking two liters a week or more of sweetened soft drinks or sweetened drinks. This was a prospective cohort study, which means it's observational, right? It is part of the UK Biobank, and it was over 10 years, and it involved 200,000 participants. So like many of these observational studies, especially ones that use like a national database, you can get a lot of numbers, right? So it could be very robust. But the downside is it's observational, so it's uncontrolled, which means you can't control for confounding factors, right? which further means you can't make cause and effect conclusions based solely on this data. So they found a 20% increased risk if you drink drinks that are artificially sweetened, 10% if they were sweetened with sugar, and an 8% lower risk among people who drink fruit juice on a regular basis. So that's pretty much it. But what can we say about this? So the authors correctly and almost mechanically point out this is an observational study. You can't make specific conclusions based upon this. But then they go on to say, this is a quote in the press release. However, based on these findings, we recommend that people reduce or even avoid artificially sweetened and sugar sweetened beverages whenever possible. Do not take it for granted that drinking low sugar and low calorie artificially sweetened beverages is healthy. It may pose potential health risks. So that's where I really strongly disagree with the framing of this study because you cannot make that recommendation as a public health recommendation based upon this data. Absolutely, you cannot. And telling people not to drink low-calorie beverages can have potential downsides, right? Right. Especially people who are relying upon them to reduce their sugar intake. And there's clear evidence that there's an advantage to not drinking hundreds of calories of sugar every day, right? Right. So let's talk about the caveats. And most of these hopefully will be reflexive by now for regular listeners of the show, right? What are the potential confounding factors here? So first of all, this is self-report. And people notoriously self-report inaccurately, especially when you're going back years, like, you know. And so that means the data itself is unreliable. But even if we take the data itself at face value, because this is uncontrolled observational data, we don't know what all the confounding factors are. And they were able to show that there were lots of confounding factors that they did not control for. The only thing they really tried to control for was genetic predisposition to AFib. People who drank more sweetened drinks tended to be more overweight, tended to have other cardiac risk factors, and this is like almost a universal risk factor, were of lower socioeconomic status.

'''C:''' They didn't control for any of that?

'''S:''' They did not, no.

'''C:''' Did they control for lifestyle factors like smoking?

'''S:''' Well, they did independently look at that, and what they found was that if you smoked, the negative effect was worse, but it was still there even when you removed that factor.

'''C:''' And what about how much you exercised?

'''S:''' Yeah, so they didn't control for any of that. Interesting.

'''C:''' Because all those things are going to be correlated.

'''S:''' All of that. Yeah, so there's so many different ways you can draw the arrow of causation here that other than drinking sweetened drinks causes atrial fibrillation. Our diets are complicated, first of all, and even saying something about people's diets is complicated. And they correlate with so many other things in terms of that impact our health. So for me, I'm reading this and I'm waiting for this one particular piece of information. And it didn't drop until the very end. To me, I was shocked that they didn't even look at this. But at the end of the press release, and it's buried in the study, they say, it is also unknown if sugar and artificially sweetened drinks contained caffeine. So they didn't even assess for the amount of caffeine in the drinks. Now, when I was writing about this for science-based medicine, I did some background research on, okay, well, what's the association between caffeine and AFib? And it's really complicated, actually. And it doesn't necessarily increase the risk of AFib. But I don't think we really know the answer at this time. Interesting.

'''C:''' Even at really high doses?

'''S:''' So unfortunately, well, probably yes at high doses. So part of the problem is most of the caffeine and AFib research looked specifically at coffee intake. And that's very complicated because coffee contains about 1,000 compounds, and some of them are known to be cardioprotective. And in fact, if you drink like one or two cups of coffee per day, it seems to be protective against AFib.

'''C:''' And there's probably nothing cardioprotective in soda.

'''S:''' Yeah, but it's hard to know if that's really the case. Not everybody buys that data, right? Because, again, it's complicated. And there have been meta-analyses that basically say, yeah, it's basically a wash. But that's looking at coffee. And then they say, yes, we actually need to actually study this in a controlled manner because we don't really have the high-quality data that we would need. I could not find any data looking at caffeine from soft drinks specifically. I could find data from caffeine from energy drinks, and they do have a higher risk of AFib. So the question is would soft drinks be more like energy drinks or more like coffee? My bet is on energy drinks but not as bad because they don't contain as much caffeine and sugar. But they still contain – but they look more like that than coffee, which is a much more complicated combination of factors there. So that wasn't an easy answer in terms of the background research. But this study would have been a great opportunity to look at the association of caffeine from soft drinks and AFib, but they didn't even look at it. So at the end of the day, I think that this study is essentially uninterpretable in terms of what it means for public health. We can't say the data is too uncontrolled. They didn't control for so many obvious variables. They didn't even look at caffeine. And here's the other thing. And this is true of any study where you're just looking at what people eat. There's always a flip side to that question, right? Because in many ways, what we consume is a bit of a zero sum game. You can only drink or eat so much. And if you drink a lot of something, you are not eating or drinking a lot of something else. For example, people who eat a lot of meat probably don't get enough vegetables. And so is it really the meat? that's the risk factor. or is it the, well, I'm not eating any vegetables, that's the risk factor. So here, is it that you're drinking a lot of sweetened drinks or that you're not getting your fruit and veg for the day? Because the people who weren't drinking a lot of sweetened drinks either were drinking water or they were drinking fruit juice or they were drinking something else. And that something else could be something that in and of itself has a protective effect or is healthy or has more electrolytes or minerals or whatever.

'''C:''' And so – It's also like you just can't lump together people who are drinking – I mean you already said this. But like people who are drinking high sugar sodas with people who are drinking diet sodas.

'''S:''' Right. That's the other thing I found just generically – They're two wildly different things. Yeah. It's weird about this study. Why would they be the same? They would have to mechanistically be entirely different.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' The fact that they're both sweet is a very superficial commonality there. They're different chemicals. They get different calories.

'''C:''' The biochemistry is so different in your body.

'''S:''' It's completely different. Yeah. So that to me made the results a bit odd as well. Yeah. At the end of the day, this is a preliminary study. It is the kind of study that we could use to generate hypotheses but not draw firm conclusions. You can't make any recommendations based upon this. It was irresponsible to make public health recommendations based upon this kind of data. And I do think that in general, we need to raise the threshold of when we trumpet these kind of results to the public with warnings or scary headlines or whatever. This creates so much of this noise that it confuses the public and it reduces their confidence in the system. Oh, completely. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, one week you're not supposed to drink this and then the next week it's fine. They just get so overwhelmed with the noise.

'''C:''' And then they stop trusting their doctors. Exactly.

'''S:''' Then when you say, oh, vaccines are good for you, then they don't know what to believe. It sort of contributes to that as well.

'''J:''' It's all those little snippets of misinformation that people hear over and over and over again until like one day they wake up and they don't realize that it's become a fact in their head.

'''E:''' Yeah, and they're making life decisions based on it.

'''C:''' Yeah, which is, not to skip ahead, going to be deeply relevant to the topic that I'm going to talk about in a minute. Oh, boy.

'''S:''' Another

'''C:''' thing that's – sorry, Steve, but another thing that's super frustrating about this is because when you look at these observational studies that are just taking a cross-section of a huge group of people, it gives you no information about, for example – Most people, when you look at their behavioral decisions, while it may be true that some people their whole lives have drank diet soda because it was a choice that they made. They were like, I don't want to drink high sugar drinks. Diet soda seems like it might be a healthier choice. I'm going to start off drinking Diet Coke. A lot of people, I'm going to use people from my own family, for example, found out that they were pre-diabetic or diabetic and switched to diet soda. And because they switched to diet soda, they are now making healthier decisions. But they are, you know, in some ways trying to undo a lifetime of sugar intake. And so you're sort of looking just at a cross-section of time, but you don't know how much of that biochemistry is from before versus now.

'''S:''' Exactly. Also, again, because with observational data, you don't know. Like you could say there's a correlation between drinking diet drinks and diabetes, but is that because they're drinking the drinks because they have diabetes?

'''C:''' Exactly, that they just switched over because of the diagnosis.

'''S:''' That's like there's a huge correlation between dieting and being overweight. Yeah.

'''C:''' Right. It's like we're switching. Yeah, exactly. It's like the arrow goes in the other direction.

'''S:''' Yeah, there's like a healthy user effect and there's also like an unhealthy user effect, right? Yeah. And either of those can happen depending on the context. That's why observational data is so tricky. And you know, Cara, how many times, like in your profession and my profession, where some correlation has been in the literature for years, maybe decades, and then somebody comes along and flips it on its head because they thought of one confounding factor nobody else had controlled for before. Completely.

'''C:''' Completely, because sometimes it's obvious, right? Because there's face validity, and you can make a mockery of the whole thing. But sometimes, you know, you can't, it's like saying that there's a core, you know, it's like saying there's a correlation between depression and antidepressants. It's like, well, clearly, because we're treating depression with antidepressants. But if it's, you know, if we didn't know that already, then it wouldn't be so obvious.

'''S:''' Yeah, one of my favorite examples when I read about it, I was like, oh, yeah, this really is a good example to use to demonstrate this is the association between alcohol and longevity. And it turns out that the people who drink a little bit of alcohol tend to be healthier than people who drink no alcohol. And this led to the, well, alcohol in small amounts is actually protective. It makes you live longer. But it turns out that the no alcohol group included a lot of ex-alcoholics who had already destroyed their health. And once you remove that as a confounding factor, the beneficial effect of alcohol goes away. But that was like a decade in the making before that got sorted out. Yeah.

'''C:''' It's like, oh, yeah, what about all the sober people?

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. Yeah, all right. Wow. But, of course, everyone's just going to remember, oh, yeah, the sweetened drinks are not good for you.

'''E:''' Yeah, but don't worry. The media will sort it out for us, right?

=== One Degree (28:52) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://phys.org/news/2024-03-difference-degree.html#google_vignette
|article_title = How much difference can one degree of warming make?
|publication = Northern Arizona University
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Jay, tell us how big a difference one degree can make.

'''J:''' Let me turn that around on you, Steve. Do you think or do any of you guys think that you could detect a one-degree temperature change?

'''E:''' Yes, I believe I can. Fahrenheit.

'''J:''' Cara?

'''C:''' Celsius.

'''J:''' Doesn't matter.

'''E:''' Oh, that's a wider range.

'''C:''' Exactly. One degree. It depends. Are you talking about like in water, with food? You think if you were in a room in your house. Oh, in my room in my house, one degree.

'''J:''' If I turned up the temperature by one degree, do you think you could feel it?

'''C:''' Probably not. Honestly, probably not.

'''J:''' Yeah, like I don't.

'''E:''' I believe I can.

'''J:''' Well, you're a mutant. Largely, you know, it's something that is pretty undetectable, right? Temperature fluctuations happen literally when you walk from room to room in your house. You're not like, you know, dramatically like, oh, my God, you know, one degree isn't really that much. But it's profound when it comes to our climate. And it's a really concerning situation. because let me jump right into this. Like a recent study by an ecologist named Andrew Richardson said, He he's at the Northern Arizona University and he published something in the Journal of Geophysical Research. And he went into detail about the severe consequences of slight temperature increases on snowpack in boreal forests, you know, northern forests. Right. So this is a really serious problem, and the research that they did was fantastic. It really, really cut down to the bone here on what's happening. So the forests that span the northern regions of three continents, these play a pivotal role in our planet's ecosystem. Basically, most forests around the world have a very large impact on local ecosystems, if not all of them. I would imagine that they all do because of how many animals and different types of plants that live in those areas. So their research indicated that even a minimal warming like one degree Fahrenheit can lead to a substantial decrease in snowpack. So why should we care about snowpack? Well, snowpack does a lot of different things.

'''E:''' It reflects that sun away.

'''J:''' Yeah, like it's very effective from keeping heat out of going down into the ground. It's like an insulator of the cold. And when this happens, when that cycle is broken, when the snowpack lessens or if it disappears, this creates a cycle of warming. So the less snowpack we have, more sunlight and heat are absorbed by the ground. And then that leads to an increase in soil temperature. And then that leads to the air temperatures increasing. And then this speeds up this process of snow melt, right? So even a little breach inside that snowpack cycle that we have. can have a profound downriver impact on the way that these forests operate. So the process is happening faster than scientists originally predicted, which is another thing to worry about because most of global warming is happening faster than many of these climatologists predicted going back 20 years ago. And we're not ready for it. That's the problem. If we had more accurate estimates back then, we probably would have – hopefully would have been further down the road of trying to counteract some of it. So there was something called the Spruce Experiment and this was done in northern Minnesota by the US Department of Energy. And that study that they did was the basis for the study that I'm actually reporting on right now. But let me tell you a little bit about the spruce experiment because I thought this was really interesting. what they did. So first off, it was an extensive experiment. They used a 30-foot by 20-foot enclosure or multiple 30-foot by 20-foot enclosures. And they equipped these with fans and heaters to mimic future climate conditions. And they did this specifically to observe the effects of temperature changes on particular ecosystems. So they took a time-lapse photography. Every 30 minutes, they take a picture. And what they were able to do was to just see what changes take place. And this helped them monitor the conditions inside each of these different enclosures. And they were able to estimate that snow depth and snow cover allowed the researchers to draw comparisons with historical snow depth and precipitation data. And they clearly saw with minimal temperature change just how much the snowpack could be affected by, just by a minor temperature change. You would think one degree, what would that do? It actually does a lot. One degree is actually profound when it comes to snowpack. So any degree of warming resulted in this dramatic reduction of snow cover, which, again, it affects the plant life, the soil ecosystems, all of the animals that live there, whether they're insects or larger mammals or whatever they are. Even very small temperature changes started this decreasing and steady amount of snow. So the temperature changes that they observed didn't just stress out the ecosystems, but it also increased the mortality rates of the animals that were living there, including the plants. And these new observations are critical in refining current climate models. So they give us a window into what's happening and what the potential future is. And soon, this is going to happen soon, guys. We're living in it right now. So what's happening, this study is really cool because it zooms in on a very specific region. We're talking about snowpack here. We're not talking about the ocean. We're not talking about weather patterns. Just what the changes in snowpack does in these forests that exist in a very small part of the world.

'''S:''' Yeah, unfortunately, the last few years of climate research has been finding that our predictions about maybe it's how much warming we're going to get isn't as bad as we thought, but the effects of the warming we are going to get is going to be worse earlier. Yeah. Right?

'''E:''' Yeah, exactly a consolation.

'''S:''' We're kind of seeing that now. This is worse than they thought it was going to be at the current level of warming in terms of negative effects.

'''J:''' At that point, Steve, it's so obvious. This isn't like – we're not back in the 80s where we really weren't seeing it. There wasn't a lot of – there was proof but it wasn't like as tangible it is today. Like it is happening. It's happening everywhere. It's affecting every ecosystem in our world, right? I mean it's having an effect on weather. It's having an effect on forests. It's having an effect on people even having access to drinking water or having way too much water, the flooding that's been going on. This is just the absolute very, very, very, very beginning of things that are going to take place. that might largely be unpredictable, but we know that they're going to be severe and we know that things are going to change very quickly.

'''S:''' Yeah, I think the most unpredictable part of it is the tipping point. It's like when exactly are they going to happen? The amount of warming has been pretty much in between like the two standard deviations that the models have been predicting. It's been actually very accurate. I know a lot of what I would call the climate change deniers argue that the climate models have not been accurate, but that's just not true. It's just factually correct that the models have been very accurate. They are predicting the amount of warming that we have seen over the last 20 years. So we should have a pretty high level of confidence in them, but we don't know what the tipping points are going to be. And by tipping points, we mean like When are the ice sheets going to collapse into the ocean? Things like that. We don't know exactly when those things are going to happen, although we have a range of when that's going to happen. And it's a little bit harder to predict what the feedback loops and the negative climate consequences are going to be. And that's, unfortunately, we're discovering that it's worse than we thought it was going to be. It's going to get worse earlier.

'''J:''' These studies are rolling in. I'm seeing them all the time now. As the funds were allocated for these different organizations to do deeper research into these issues, we're seeing the information. It's there. It's clear. We're seeing it manifest globally. And I don't understand for the life of me, guys. I don't get it. What the hell is the lack of effort?

'''S:''' Why aren't we – We shouldn't underestimate the task ahead of us. We have a global technological civilization that is built around fossil fuel. And we shouldn't expect that to change easily. But it is unfortunate that there are some political ends of the spectrum are pushing back against doing anything about it. And That, you know, even I think people who want to do the right thing often don't know what the best path is. But the bottom line is we have to invest a ton of money into this in order to accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy. It's happening. We have the technology. We really just need the political will to invest the resources to make it happen as fast as possible. And that is hard to do. It is unfortunately hard to do. So it seems to me that what's been happening and what I think is probably going to happen is is that it's going to happen at its own pace just based on the technology itself. Maybe we can make a tiny little difference on the margins, but I don't think that anything political is going to make a huge difference just because we don't have the political will, unfortunately.

'''E:''' Yeah, a lot of damage in the meantime.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's the only variable is how much damage will be done in the meantime. And our kids will know, and our grandkids will know.

=== Birth Control Misinformation (38:57) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/21/stopping-birth-control-misinformation/
|article_title = Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion
|publication = wapo
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Cara, tell us about birth control misinformation.

'''C:''' Oh, there's so much. So the Washington Post has done kind of a series of articles over the past several months. So props to a couple of reporters on there, Lauren Weber and Sabrina Molle, who have been writing about this topic, misconceptions around birth control. Basically, there is a big movement on social media and especially TikTok, also to some extent Instagram, where we see a lot of kind of repurposing of TikToks, where there are these social media content creators who are making quite a bit of money doing telling young women to get off the pill and ditch your IUD, ditch your birth control, and here's why and here's how. And it would be one thing if the reasons behind this new push were legitimate, and it would be one thing if if the outcomes of these pushes were safe. The problem is this is mostly misinformation to a pretty potentially devastating consequence because I'm not sure if you remember what's been happening in the world lately, but abortion is now banned or restricted in about half the states in the United States. Right. So if young women are choosing to ditch their birth control and are choosing instead to utilize, quote, natural alternatives to birth control that have high rates of failure, what many doctors are anecdotally, I have to say that, anecdotally saying, telling reporters that they're seeing is a lot of young women coming in with unwanted pregnancies. We don't have the numbers yet about upticks because this is a pretty new phenomenon. But many of the doctors that are being interviewed for some of this coverage are saying that Their patients are telling them that social media influencers are fueling their choices to get off of birth control and that their reasoning is very often due to things that the doctors are then having to counter. because they are not evidence-based.

'''S:''' Should we call them TikTok babies? Is it too early to do that?

'''C:''' It's probably going to have to start happening, sadly. What do you think is motivating this misinformation? Where do you think the bulk of the commentation... The commentation? That's not a word.

'''S:''' The wellness.

'''E:''' Write that down, too.

'''C:''' Right. And when we think of wellness influencers, what do we think of? usually is the political alignment of that? We usually think of that as like a kind of a like Libby left wingy kind of a thing, right?

'''S:''' I think it's both.

'''C:''' Sadly, this is this is coming out as a very conservative movement. Yeah. So it's a whole new wilderness out there. We're seeing more and more conservative commentators and influencers. There are a few names that are specifically being cited here. There's someone named, let me find her first name. Her last name is Bendayan. She's actually a Spanish commentator. She's 29 years old. Nicole Bendayan, who has a million followers across Instagram and TikTok. She's a holistic health coach. She is not a licensed medical specialist at all. She calls herself a cycle-sinking nutritionist.

'''S:''' Oh. Yeah. Okay.

'''C:''' Uh-huh. That's – She herself stopped using hormonal birth control because she was concerned about weight gain, low libido, and intermittent bleeding, which she claims were side effects of her birth control. after going to several doctors who she says dismissed her symptoms. She stopped using birth control. She says her symptoms went away. She told her followers that birth control – and again, none of this is clearly medical advice nor backed up by any legitimate research. She told her followers that birth control depletes magnesium, vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc levels. She charges money for virtual programs that include analyses of blood panels.

'''S:''' See, why isn't that practicing medicine without a license? Why isn't she in jail?

'''C:''' I do not know because she's in Spain possibly because she puts a disclaimer. She makes it clear. She says, quote, I always make it clear in a disclaimer that I'm not a medical professional and I would happily work with their health care team.

'''S:''' If you're taking money to give health advice, that's not enough.

'''E:''' So is reading a blood panel like what? Taking some blood, putting it on one of those glass things, putting it under a microscope?

'''C:''' No, I think she's probably just getting the readout. The lab has already analyzed it.

'''E:''' Oh, I see. Right. So they come back with the numbers and the figures.

'''C:''' And then she gives them a regimen. Exactly.

'''E:''' And recommend a course.

'''C:''' She's actually had, I think, some of her videos removed. Yeah, TikTok recently removed five videos linking birth control to mental health issues after the Washington Post reached out to TikTok specifically and saying, hey, TikTok, how are you preventing the spread of misinformation?

'''S:''' They're not. Mm-hmm.

'''C:''' They're not.

'''E:''' They're waiting for the Washington Post to contact them.

'''J:''' And then they'll react.

'''C:''' So TikTok took down the video saying that they violated company policies, quote, prohibiting inaccurate, misleading, or false content that may cause significant harm to individuals or society. And then, of course, Ben Dayen's statement was that she, quote, fully supports the removal of any content that may inadvertently perpetuate misinformation. Yeah. And then said, quote, as I often remind my audience, it's essential for individuals to conduct their own research and see comprehensive understanding, especially considering the limitations of short form content. I mean, this is so dangerous. And what we're seeing also, we've got Brett Cooper, who is a commentator for The Daily Wire, which is a conservative publication, who is claiming this has been debunked time and time again, that birth control impacts fertility. Right. We know that this isn't true. This has been debunked over and over. We've got Candace Owens denouncing birth control, both pills and IUDs as unnatural and impacting fertility. And of course, Ben Shapiro talking about birth control side effects, claiming that birth control pills, that women on birth control pills are attracted to men who are less traditionally masculine. Okay, so here is something that... Here's a really, really interesting one. So there's a woman named Brittany Martinez who founded a magazine called Evie. And her magazine has been questioning birth control quite a lot. And she actually has started another company. She co-founded an app, like a tech company called 28. And that is backed by Peter Thiel. I don't know if you guys remember Peter Thiel, but he was one of PayPal's original founders. So 28 is a menstrual cycle tracking app. And it's really kind of pushing to stop using hormonal birth control and start kind of using the rhythm method basically to prevent pregnancy. And there are interviews in this WAPO article with a sociologist from the University of Colorado, Amanda Stevenson. And it's pretty interesting the sort of connection between these sort of conservative pushes, these anti-abortion activists and legislative pushes to restrict birth control and these appeals on social media to sort of Right. Right. They fail if somebody is peri or premenopausal. They fail if their basal body temperature is off. They fail if somebody has recently had an abortion. They fail if somebody's hormones are not easily measured.

'''E:''' So they're recommending one solution for all of it. basically? Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah, they're basically recommending no hormones and also no medical insertions like IUDs. And they're saying that all of those medical options cause side effects. And now what we do need to be clear about is that some of these side effects are real. There is a very, very, very low risk of blood clots in hormonal birth control. And it's the estrogen, not the progesterone that causes these blood clots. There will be a new birth control that's over the counter that's going to be on the market soon, but it's progesterone only. So that risk of blood clots won't be involved in the over-the-counter pill. Mm-hmm. Most of the hormonal birth controls that are available now are combined estrogen, progesterone, and they do have a risk of blood clots. It's very low. I think it's something like three to nine women out of 10,000 women who are on the pill. So that's still lower than the risk of developing a blood clot during pregnancy. So if you got pregnant, you have a higher risk of getting a blood clot. than if you're on the pill, right? So it's like risk management. We have to think about these things.

'''S:''' Risk versus benefit, right?

'''C:''' Exactly, yeah.

'''S:''' Probably all things considered, you're at lower risk than the risk of an unwanted pregnancy and everything that goes along with that.

'''C:''' Totally. And there are other side effects. There are side effects of some women have nausea, some women have breast tenderness, but usually those side effects can be mitigated by switching forms of birth control. For me, for example, this is purely anecdotal. I had, as listeners know who have been following the show, I had a hysterectomy in 2021. Is that 2021? 2022. Yes, 2022. I no longer need birth control. I cannot get pregnant. I do not have a uterus. But I still take the ring because when I went off of it, I had just like acne explode. And so for me, the side effects of not being on birth control are higher. So I worked with my gynecologist and we decided I'm going to stay on birth control because I would prefer the positive side effects of birth control. And for a lot of young women, that's also the case. I got on birth control long before I was sexually active because it made my periods lighter and less intense. And I felt less ill when I was on birth control than off. And so there are a lot of different reasons that women take hormonal birth control. When you look at some of this misinformation, that it can affect your fertility, that it— Yeah, non-doctors basically scaring people with no right to do so. Totally, that it's affecting, yeah, your different vitamin loads, these things that they're just— making up or they're pulling, they're cherry picking from poorly controlled studies or from debunked studies, you know, just from bad research. And that's really, really dangerous because very often not only are these individuals who are not licensed medical professionals, they're individuals who don't have any scientific training. Right. So they don't know how to read these studies.

'''E:''' They're about as unqualified as you can get.

'''C:''' But what ends up happening, which is very dangerous that we don't often think about, is that the algorithms in these social media platforms work to the advantage of the videos. You watch one video that says birth control is dangerous and then you go, well, that's interesting. That worries me. And then it links to another one. And then it links to another one. And before you know it, that's all you're being fed. So of Of course, now you have this bias. So then when you go to your doctor, you're like, I want to get off my birth control. And they go, why? And it's like, well, because clearly it's bad for me. And they go, why do you say that? Well, because every video on TikTok is telling me that. Even if every video on TikTok doesn't say that, every video you see on TikTok says that.

'''E:''' TikTok clinic. Great. Just what we need.

'''C:''' It's really dangerous. And it's not just a TikTok problem. It's an Instagram problem. It's a YouTube problem. And for some people, that is the news. That is the internet. That is reality.

'''E:''' Right. Younger generation of people.

'''C:''' Terrible. That's who's on birth control. You know what I mean? It's people who are menstruating.

'''E:''' They're the people who are going to be impacted by this.

'''C:''' And we also – I think we have to remember as well that just like we were talking about before because I think sometimes it's really easy to sort of blame the victim. Yeah. We in the health care profession, we kind of as a whole in sort of the institution also share a lot of the blame. Like individuals have good reason to be distrustful, especially women, especially people of color. who don't always have good relationships with the healthcare system, who haven't always been listened to, believed, treated well. And so now is the time that we need to be bridging these gaps that we need to be building trust. You know, when people are coming in, we don't need to be talking down to these women, making them feel stupid, you know, rolling our eyes when they come in and they say, but TikTok told me. This is the time to be listening, to be spending time with them, to be educating in a real kind of respectful way because we don't want to make this rift grow. We could be doing real kind of lasting damage to vulnerable young women by not listening and by furthering their distrust.

'''S:''' Well, as a clinician, you are supposed to give information to your patients in a nonjudgmental manner, right? Of course. You should never come off as being negative or judgmental towards your patient because this is why.

'''C:''' There's a big difference between theory and practice. Yeah.

'''S:''' I know. I know that. I know that. But that is the standard. And you are correct in that we do need to be reminded of that frequently. And physicians today have to be aware of what's going on out there on social media. They have to be aware of it. It's part of the profession now. You can't just ignore it.

'''C:''' Absolutely.

=== Iridology (54:47) ===
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'''S:''' All right, Evan, tell us about iridology.

'''E:''' Yeah, iridology. Something that doesn't come up all that much. And there are a lot of pseudoscience topics that we have covered over the year, but some of them come up more frequently than others. And some remain either, I don't know, untouched, lightly discussed by us. And I think it has to do with the fact that some notions, some of those pseudosciences, they're so steeped in antiquity. Yeah, it's just extra stupid.

'''J:''' Right.

'''E:''' And they've kind of even lost their luster over time, but somehow they still kind of can pop up. even in the year 2024. One of those pseudosciences is iridology. That's the belief that looking at the features of a person's iris can yield information on what might be ailing that person. And this is a type of homunculus theory of medicine, which we've talked about before. Homunculus means little man. In other words, there's a little entire you to be observed within a certain part of your body, or in some cases, a bodily fluid. which I've read about as well. Now, reflexology, the homunculus that exists on the sole of a person's foot. Palmistry suggests a homunculus within the palm of a person's hand. And iridology, the homunculus in a person's iris. And yeah, the subject doesn't pop up a lot these days. It's an anti-scientific way of thinking about diagnosing the health of a person. A total throwback to a time when, what, other health theories like chiropractic and animal magnetism were getting started. All 19th century kind of stuff that was coming along, really before we got a better grasp on scientific approach to medicine. Who was it? Ingatz von Prexley? Hungarian physician? He was the one who came up with this? You know the story, Steve.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. The owl.

'''E:''' Yeah, 11-year-old boy. He noticed – this was in 1861. There's an 11-year-old boy. He noticed an owl in a tree in his backyard. He tried to catch the owl and the owl had a broken leg or he broke one of its legs accidentally. And there was – and he looked into its eye. There was a dark stripe that had developed in the lower part of the owl's iris. But then he healed – he tended to the owl, to the injury, nursed it back to health. The owl became kind of, I don't know, like a – A pet, in a sense. But he later noticed that the appearance of white and crooked lines in the part of the iris where the dark stripe had been had taken over. And there you have it. An entire pseudoscience born in the mind of an 11-year-old child in the middle of the 19th century. So it's in the news. And here was the headline I read. Using alternative medicine to unlock genetic clues through the eye. Yep. The article is a puff piece. And if you think about it, that's a very clever pun. It's a puff piece from an Orlando, Florida news outlet. You know, when they puff the eyeball with treatments, right? Yeah. Orlando, Florida, news outlet featuring holistic iridologist Jessica Halpern. Now, she had learned about iridology about 20 years ago when she went to see actual doctors about a condition which she was experiencing, and she was clearly unsatisfied with the result. So a friend suggested, hey, go see this iridologist instead. And she was so impressed by that iridologist, she became an iridologist. And to become an iridologist, you don't have to have any formal medical training, which, you know, would frankly only get in the way with things like double-blinded clinical trials, you know, that annoying kind of stuff. But Jessica says iridology can help see if someone has an increased likelihood to develop a particular disease based on their genetic makeup. Here's a quote. I can see predispositions. I can tell someone I see a genetic predisposition. Everything going on in the body registers through the brain and the brain sends the signal to the eye. So through the iris of the eye, which is the colored part, we can see the health of the body's systems. Steve and Cara, did you know this?

'''S:''' Oh, yeah.

'''E:''' I mean, right. They taught you this in medical school care. I'm sure you learned about this during your study of neurology. I mean, yeah. And there's a whole bunch of well-designed research to support it. Right. Yeah. So, of course, the vast majority of doctors in general reject these claims. But Halpern has an answer to that. when she was confronted in the interview. She said, well, a lot of them, a lot of doctors don't want to interfere with what they're doing. Don't forget they make a lot of money prescribing medications.

'''S:''' That's so lazy.

'''E:''' I mean – That is lazy conspiracy nonsense.

'''S:''' Like you don't spend two seconds even thinking about that. You know what I mean? That's like such a hand-waving defense.

'''E:''' My gosh, it is so base and the excuse. And so everybody uses that excuse.

'''S:''' Insulting.

'''E:''' Doctors like, oh, big money. Yeah, you're only in it for the medication. Making money off. Right. They also interviewed a patient. His name is Roland Pankowicz. He's gone to iridologists for years, and he uses this as an assessment tool to gauge his overall health. He says it has helped him manage his family's mental health history, Cara. He says, I have some mental health issues going on in my family, so I feel iridology can help predetermine if I may have to deal with something like that down the road. For me, it's been scary accurate to the point where I've had pain on one side of my body. And it's been obvious in my eye without me telling the practitioner that there was something going on. Yeah. It's a form of fortune telling. Yeah, probably.

'''C:''' He's like, it's so obvious because I'm limping. Right. But I didn't have to tell him.

'''S:''' It's a cold reading.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly.

'''S:''' The iridology diagnosis basically is doing a cold reading.

'''E:''' But people going to see an iridologist for mental health reasons, that struck me as kind of new. I don't usually come across that when I'm reading stories about this.

'''C:''' That's true, actually. It's never come across my desk.

'''E:''' Iridology does have – obviously, there have been studies done. The ones that have the tightest controls obviously show no effect whatsoever. It absolutely does not predict anything and there's tons of horrible results. studies out there in which obviously the proponents of iridology cling on to as a possible threat of legitimacy as to what they are doing. And then also be careful because in the modern age now with iridology, it's about utilizing modern technology in the practice. And I read, this was published in, this was December of 2023. So only a few months ago, the Journal of Engineering Proceedings They posted a study titled A Methodological Review of Iridology-Based Computer-Aided Organ Status Assessment Techniques. So what they're basically talking about here is that – I'll read it from the abstract. Define patterns that are connected to particular medical conditions. Computerized iris analysis software – may need to examine thousands of iris images. A method of iridology known as computer-aided iridology, or CAI, uses software to study the iris. Oh my gosh, so they're obviously taking advantage of modern ideas, modern software, programs, technology. Who knows if they'll try to incorporate AI at some point. into all of this to try to help further substantiate what they're trying to do. However, this paper obviously came to the conclusion that iridology is a pseudoscience. It makes unsubstantiated claims that can identify medical disorders by examining the iris, and it does not provide any reliable means of diagnosis. There is no scientific proof to back up its claims, even with this technology.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's like using sensitive EM detectors to detect ghosts. It's still pseudoscience. Right. I don't care how much gadgetry you have. But again, it makes it seem superficially more plausible to people with, as we like to say, more money than sense.

'''E:''' But you don't – and something like phrenology, that's not something that is widely – I don't think accepted by people these days. and even if there are a few fringe people out there who might – it doesn't have it.

'''S:''' A few fringe people is a good way to say it.

'''E:''' But hey, look. With TikTok and something, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some phrenologist out there who has half a million people listening to what he has to say on a social media platform. Yeah.

'''S:''' TikTok is a cesspool of misinformation.

'''E:''' Unfortunately.

'''J:''' It seems like it's getting worse.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's getting worse. All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

{{anchor|wtn}}{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? (1:03:30) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 976
|answer = melting snow sliding off vinyl carport
|}}


'''J:''' All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy. Well, I got a lot of guesses. This was an odd one for sure. This answer was sent in by a listener named Colin Von Huring. He said, hello, Jay. I think I recognize this week's noisy and it would be really nice if I could win something today. He was saying he's having a bad day. Okay, well, let's see what happens here. That sounds to me like the marble digital clock that a maniac on YouTube built. so I looked it up and I found it and I agree I agree with Colin the guy's a maniac. he made this machine that made a hell of a racket. it was like lifting up all of these different black and white marbles and kind of sorting them And then it would shoot them down these like alleyways and it would spell out the time. Oh, neat. Like with different colored marbles. Very complicated. I don't know where people find the time or the money to do stuff like this. But yeah. But that's not it. But it was a very cool guess. So I have a listener named Rich who wrote in and said, Hi, Jay. That sounds like the Phalanx Weapon System, better known as CIWS, or he says CIWS, in the Navy and CRAM, CRAM, in the Army. I mispronounced it right there. How about that? It is not those weapon systems, but I totally understand why you picked that because there is a sound of things kind of launching in there, which I agree. So I think that was also a good guess. Michael Blaney wrote in and said, hi, Jay, it's coming in waves, which makes me think it's actual waves as in the beach. So I'm guessing it's waves flowing into some kind of electricity generator. I thought this one was interesting as well because I totally did not hear like a water type effect here. And then when I re-listened to it, I kind of could see where that's coming from. Someone named Scuba Steve wrote in, said, hey, guys, and Cara, this is Steven. His last name is Borsi, like horsey. I think everyone gives me like phonetics to help.

'''C:''' I love that.

'''J:''' He's from Petal, Mississippi, and he's going to guess the Noisy is a plasma cutter with a conveyor belt running material under it. That is not correct. And Simon Michaelmore said, Hi Jay, this week's noisy sounds like a vent or some sort of high pressure system. Like an air compressor that makes a loud hiss and vents excess air. That is also not correct. There was no winner this week. And I'm not surprised. I picked this noisy because I just thought it was a very interesting sound. But what you're actually hearing here, have you guys ever seen one of those vinyl or plastic carports that some people have out in their driveways, right?

'''E:''' Okay, yeah.

'''J:''' It's kind of like a tent that has a semicircular top to it, like a curve to it that a car can fit into. And what this noisy is, is somebody put a heater in one of those and there was snow on top of it. And the snow is melting and then all of it is kind of sliding off this vinyl, right? So it's snow sliding on vinyl.

'''E:''' Oh, boy.

'''J:''' That makes that noise. Just thought it was a cool sound. Sometimes I'll just include a noisy that I think, you know, you should hear because it's just an interesting sound. I have a new noisy this week. And this one was sent in by a listener named Austin Vosier. Thank you. All right. So if you think you know this week's noisy or you heard something cool, email me at wtn at theskepticsguide.org.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (1:06:57) ===
[deep musical warbling and pulsating, with light background percussion ]

{{wtnAnswer|978|this week's Noisy}}

== Announcements (1:07:37) ==

'''J:''' So Steve, if you happen to go to theskepticsguide.org homepage, there are lots of buttons on there, all of them leading to shows that are coming up. Now, as you hear this, this show is going to come out on today. We're recording this on the 27th. It's going to Come out on the 30th. Most of you are going to be hearing this early next week, the 1st, 2nd of April. It's not too late to buy tickets. We have tickets left for the extravaganza that's happening in Dallas on the weekend, Friday the 5th. Then we have the sixth is the extravaganza. And then we have the seventh, which is the two private shows. So there is a noon private show that also has seats available that you can get tickets for. And then we have two shows happening in Chicago in August. And we are going to be doing an extravaganza. And then we will be doing our 1,000th SGU episode.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh.

'''J:''' That is the recording of the 1,000th episode. It will actually come out the following Saturday. Mm-hmm. But that is indeed the 1,000th SGU episode. The only person that recorded every single one of those episodes was Steve, of course. Steve has never missed an episode. I probably missed – I don't know. I don't even know. We have to figure it out. Yeah. We all have missed a handful. Yeah.

'''E:''' I've missed probably one a year on average.

'''J:''' But it's all going to happen. So if you're interested in seeing the SGU live, please go to our website and check it out. We have the Dallas and then we have Chicago. Just so you guys know, we will all be appearing at PsyCon in October. That's going to be in Las Vegas. And we are even talking about maybe doing yet another live performance maybe in November, December, January.

'''S:''' Early December, yeah, I think.

'''E:''' We're looking. TBD, right? To be announced. Yeah, it's coming up.

'''J:''' We've got lots of talking to do, but we're still... Our dance card's pretty full, guys.

'''E:''' Yeah, we're getting around.

'''J:''' So do me a favor, guys. If you're enjoying this show, there's a couple of things that you can do. One is really easy. Just give us a review anywhere. You can go on iTunes, whatever. It just helps people find us. Just be honest and let other people know what you think about the show. And another thing you could do, if you really want to help us, you could become a patron. You can go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide. We have a wonderful group of patrons. We have an awesome Discord channel. The patrons have gotten to know each other, and that's why we started Notacon, to give them all a place to go and congregate. Lots of friendships are being made. It's really awesome, and I'm very proud of it. I feel very lucky that we have such a wonderful group of people. If you'd like to join this wonderful group of people, just go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide and help support this podcast.

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== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups ==
=== Email #1: Mel's Mystery Hole (1:10:19) ===
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'''S:''' Thank you, Jay. All right, we have a couple of emails. The first one's actually a TikTok video that was tagged to us. Have you guys ever heard of Mel's Mystery Hole? What?

'''C:''' Do I want to have heard of that? No, you can't. I didn't think so.

'''S:''' What do you think it is? Ugh.

'''E:''' What, one of these bottomless pits?

'''S:''' Yes, one of these bottomless pits.

'''E:''' One of the many bottomless pits that are not bottomless.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's supposed to be near Ellensburg, Washington. First popularized by the radio show, Evan...

'''E:''' Oh, it would be Coast to Coast, Art Bell.

'''S:''' Coast to Coast in 1997. There you go. The guest calling himself Mel Waters, you know, talked about the hole. That's how it became known as Mel's Hole. And it's supposed to be this bottomless sinkhole, you know. Or at least it's extremely, extremely deep. The caller claimed that... It was at least 80,000 feet deep, which ain't possible. You know, just stuff would not hold itself open to that depth. You know, dirt, rocks would just collapse in on itself. But that was the claim. And this spawned a lot of local modern legends, right? Just urban legends in the area. Here's the thing. There are sinkholes around the world. That's not that unusual. Right. And it is common for there to be, you know, urban legends surrounding it. But I don't know that this one even exists because in 2002, a group of 30 investigators led by one Gerald Osborne went on an expedition to investigate the hole and they couldn't even find it. Yeah. They couldn't find the thing. So I don't know that it exists. So the TikTok video in question, which we will link to, is just – it's ridiculous. It's just ridiculous because it's saying like what scientists found at the bottom of this hole will shock the world. It's like the most – shameless sensationalism you can imagine. and then meanwhile it's showing in. you know it's this is the voiceover. it's showing pictures of these of like 20 different sinkholes right like pick one. you know it's Because it doesn't exist. They don't have a picture of actual Mel's holes. They just show different sinkholes. Of course, you wouldn't do that if you had a picture of Mel's hole, right? You wouldn't need to do that. But yeah, it's just complete nonsense. All right.

'''E:''' Oh, gosh.

=== Email #2: Positive Thinking (1:13:07) ===
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'''S:''' That's a fun one. Next, we have an email that comes from Kai, and Kai writes, to me it seems akin to the so-called power of prayer you can't pray cancer away. so why should I believe that a positive attitude will make a difference? in recent years I knew a woman who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. no one had a more positive outlook than this woman and she took on the challenge with a strong I can do this attitude. she died six months later. so my question again is what's the mode of efficacy exactly? how is it that a positive attitude helps and has it been scientifically tested? Well, thank you so much for writing in. I am so sorry to hear about your husband. Of course, we wish him the best. And it sounds like you're doing the right thing, standard medical care, which I would heartily endorse. And listen, there's nothing wrong with keeping positive, trying to find the silver lining and not give up, et cetera. But there's no wrong way to have cancer. Whatever your emotional reaction is to having cancer, that's fine. That's there's. no one could tell you that it's right or wrong. And Carrie, you and I have talked about this, I think, several times on the show. The whole problem with the positive attitude thing is that it basically puts the blame on the patient. And if things don't go well, it's like, well, you clearly didn't have the right attitude. Because if your attitude can cure you, a bad attitude can kill you. And that's not fair and it's not true. Has it been researched? Yes. You know what the effect of a positive attitude is on cancer survival? Nothing.

'''C:''' Nothing.

'''S:''' It has no effect on survival, right?

'''C:''' It has effect on some things but not on survival.

'''S:''' Yeah, whatever. Your mood, your experience of the thing or whatever. But does it affect your survival? No. Cancer is cancer and your attitude does not affect the cancer.

'''C:''' No, it doesn't. And you're 100% right. What it can affect is your quality of life during your experience of cancer treatment, because it puts inordinate pressure on somebody who's already trying to juggle so much. Work with people on is the burden that they feel trying to kind of calibrate their mood for other people.

'''S:''' Sure.

'''E:''' Not upset their family members to try and keep them because they're – yeah.

'''C:''' They feel so much pressure to stay positive or to stay happy or to put on a brave face because they feel like that's what they're supposed to do. And it's exhausting. It's soul crushing. And so I try to stay away from the word positive and move towards the word authentic. You know, I often ask them, you know, how do you want to be right now? What are you feeling? What's true to you in this moment? And try to work towards that. A great book that I would recommend to the listener, if she's interested in reading it, would be Bright Sighted by Barbara Ehrenreich. How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Sure. Yeah. It talks about lots of different examples, but she does specifically talk about cancer and how difficult it is on cancer patients and how it can actually undermine their experience. One of the first things I do when I sit down with the patients that I work with is I ask them, How do you identify? Like, are you a fighter? Are you a survivor? Are you a, you know, excuse my French, but a cancer kind of a person? Are you? And everybody has a different view of their relationship to cancer. Some people don't want to even think of themselves as cancer patients. Mm-hmm.

'''S:''' It's not their identity.

'''C:''' It's not their identity. For some people, it's their whole life. And there's no right way to be in it. And that's what's really important, I think, more than anything else, is to be true to your own experience.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah. You know, my wife had breast cancer and she did very, very well, luckily. But she so we went through that together. And one of the things that she experienced was like as soon as you get the diagnosis, it's like you're on the other side of this wall from everybody else. Like there's you and then there's everybody else who doesn't have cancer. You know, I mean, it's not staring this in the face. It can be isolating and it just alters your perspective of everything, of reality, of your life. You can't understand it unless you're there. If you're somebody who is like the loved one of somebody with cancer, don't assume you know what they're going through. Don't assume you know what it feels like and certainly don't put any pressure on them to be a certain way or to have a positive attitude. It's like if you want to cry cry whatever you want to do. it's like you're going.

'''C:''' you want to scream scream. you want to not feel anything. today you don't have to feel that's fine yeah that. but that whole thing of like you just you gotta. you gotta keep hope alive you gotta stay as if somehow if you stop hoping your body like your cells will be like well no more hope just let the cancer win like it's the weirdest mentality for

'''E:''' people who have a uh a predisposition say to that attitude religious or otherwise. I mean if they may not know any other coping strategy and if that works for you that's great.

'''C:''' the problem is it doesn't. your thoughts don't translate to your like white cells And I think that's the thing that we have to remember because really all you're setting yourself up for is a lot of guilt and shame.

'''S:''' Yeah, and I think the religious version of it is even worse. When you tell people you could pray your cancer away and then they don't – well, you didn't pray hard enough. God doesn't love you. I mean the whole didn't pray hard enough is just – what else are you going to say?

'''J:''' What does that actually mean? Like that you're not praying long enough?

'''S:''' You're not really deep and mean it or whatever. It's just silly. But here's the thing, Carrie. Tell me what you think about this. My sense is – and I know because I've been there a million times, right? It's like when you're the person who doesn't have the terminal illness or the horrible diagnosis and you're facing somebody who does. It's hard to know what to say. Oh, 100%. It's very difficult to be in a situation where you can't think of anything genuinely positive to say because it's just horrible.

'''C:''' It's because there isn't anything you can say.

'''S:''' Because there isn't anything positive. So I think most people say that because they're desperate to find something not horribly negative to say. So they say, well, be positive.

'''C:''' But it's okay to say something like, this sucks.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's okay.

'''C:''' That's an okay to say thing.

'''S:''' Just say it. This sucks. I'm here for you. Totally.

'''C:''' And I think one of the things that I've found that is really frustrating for a lot of the patients that I've worked with, one of the most annoying things, one of the things that they say is the most annoying to hear is when people go, I don't know how you do it. They say that that is by far the most irritating. They're like, I don't know how you get up every day. And they go, what is the alternative?

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' I do it because they're like, that's just what you do.

'''S:''' There's no alternative.

'''C:''' There is no alternative. They're like, because they always go, I don't know. I would just, it's like, the alternative is not to roll over and die. Because let me let you in on a little secret. When you roll over, you don't just die. Yeah, right.

'''S:''' Right. You just lie there. You still got to face the day.

'''C:''' And eventually you got to pee and eventually you get hungry. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, you don't, it doesn't, you're still alive and you still have to take your meds and drink your water and that's just how life is.

'''S:''' But I think it's probably a good idea to think about what you should say in situations like that. so you have something ready to go because otherwise you're going to panic and say something stupid that makes it worse because that's what most people do.

'''C:''' Yeah, and I think that's a good idea in life. In life in general. It's a good idea with your partner, with your friends. It's a good idea when somebody's going through a breakup or when somebody's depressed. It's a good idea to ask them, do you want me to help you solve your problem or do you just want to sit here? Or do you want me to help validate what you're going through? All of these are great ways to address somebody who's going through some shit. You know, it's not about solving their problem. It's not about giving them platitudes. It's about reminding them that they're awesome and you love them and you are a person in their life. Yeah. Who's there.

'''S:''' That's it. Yeah. That's a good default. Start there. Totally. Don't think you have to say something positive or you have to fix the problem or whatever because that's usually counterproductive.

'''C:''' And really all that is reflective of is your own anxiety. Yes.

'''S:''' Right. Exactly. Yeah.

'''C:''' A little bit of your narcissism if I'm being 100% honest.

'''S:''' It's your discomfort with not knowing what to say.

'''C:''' It is. It's your discomfort. Yeah, absolutely.

'''S:''' Sure. All right. Let's move on. It's time for Science or Fiction.

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:22:41) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
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{{SOFinfo
|theme = Power & Energy News Items

|item1 = Researchers have developed an implantable battery that is powered by oxygen in the body and capable of producing continuous electricity at 1.3 V.
|link1web = https://www.cell.com/chem/fulltext/S2451-9294(24)00074-3
|link1title = Implantable and bio-compatible Na-O2 battery
|link1pub = Chem

|item2 = Toyota reports its latest hydrogen fuel cell car will average 845 miles on a single tank of hydrogen.
|link2web = https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1133827_toyota-mirai-hydrogen-fuel-cell-car-goes-845-miles-between-fills-driven-very-slowly
|link2title = Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel-cell car goes 845 miles between fills—driven very slowly
|link2pub = Green Car Reports

|item3 = Engineers have created flexible perovskite solar cells with a power conversion efficiency of 25%, and maintaining 90% of this efficiency after 10,000 bending cycles.
|link3web = https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10478316
|link3title = 25% - Efficiency flexible perovskite solar cells via controllable growth of SnO2
|link3pub = IEEE Xplore

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = FCEV 845mi on a single tank
|science1 = implantable battery
|science2 = flexible perovskite solar cells

|rogue1 =evan
|answer1 =implantable battery

|rogue2 =cara
|answer2 =flexible perovskite solar cells

|rogue3 =jay
|answer3 =flexible perovskite solar cells

|host =steve 

|sweep =y 
|clever = 
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''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Cara has a lot to prove. This week is bouncing back from a double solo failure. No pressure. All right.

'''C:''' None whatsoever.

'''S:''' But I should point out a very rare... True.

'''C:''' This is why it's so novel.

'''S:''' First time that's ever happened. All right. So these are three news items, but there is a theme to the news items. They are all about power, right? These are about energy and...

'''C:''' Oh, great.

'''S:''' There's happened to be a lot of energy news, so I just clustered them. Okay, here we go. Item number one. Researchers have developed an implantable battery that is powered by oxygen in the body and capable of producing continuous electricity at 1.3 volts. Item number two. Toyota reports its latest hydrogen fuel cell car will average 845 miles on a single tank of hydrogen. And item number three, engineers have created flexible perovskite solar cells with a power conversion efficiency of 25% and maintaining 90% of this efficiency after 10,000 bending cycles. Ooh, I heard a little groan from Evan there. I think Evan wants to go first.

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''E:''' I think it was Cara.

'''S:''' Cara, your voice just dropped a few octaves. This third one, the flexible purpose-guided solar cells.

'''E:''' I mean, can't you express this in like – Words. Okay. For example – maintaining 90% of this efficiency after 10,000 bending cycles. I mean, can I have that in like a calendar or something, like years or something? I mean, what's a bending cycle?

'''S:''' Well, that's obviously an engineering term. I'm assuming they had some kind of standardized bending of the material. Okay. And then they did that 10,000 times, probably had a machine do it.

'''E:''' Bending the material.

'''S:''' And then they tested it again and it worked. It had 90% of its original efficiency. Okay. Because it's supposed to be flexible, right? Flexible, right. So if it breaks down, then it's not flexible, right?

'''E:''' Gee whiz. Okay. Bending cycles. Fine. All right. Power conversion efficiency of 25%, which is what? See, I'm relying on information I have in my head and I have no idea if it's correct or current. Are we at like 18, 20 percent, 22 percent?

'''S:''' About for silicon-rigid solar cells.

'''E:''' OK. All right. Commercial. Thank you. I appreciate you giving me that at least. OK. So higher efficiency plus this maintaining most of its integrity. even after 10,000 bending cycles. That's impressive. Now, these tend to, I don't know. Don't we overstate the whole power thing when it comes to efficiency increases and these kinds of things? So that one has markers of it being fiction. I'll say that. I have no idea. I'll go backwards. Then Toyota reporting its latest hydrogen fuel cell car will average 845 miles an on a single tank of hydrogen. I read something not too recently, but kind of recently. Was it Toyota? And was it about this specifically? But I don't remember the 845 miles on a single tank of hydrogen, but I knew that they were doing something with the hydrogen fuel cell car. Or was it Honda? I think that one's science. And then the first one... Oh, an implantable battery powered by oxygen in the body... Oxygen is delivered through the blood all over the body, so it's blood-based, capable of producing continuous electricity at 1.3 volts. Maybe that's the trick there, is that this continuous electricity, how does it maintain that? Powered by oxygen in the body, but producing continuous electricity at 1.3? All right. I'll say that that one is the fiction. And I think the part that's wrong here is that continuous electricity part.

'''S:''' Okay, Cara.

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' No.

'''S:''' You went last last week.

'''C:''' Where's Bob?

'''S:''' It's almost as if I designed this for Bob not being here.

'''C:''' I know. Yeah, right? I do think the hydrogen fuel cell one is science. 845 miles, though it seems bananas, is reasonable given that we're pushing 300, 400 miles on electric charges right now. So, you know, double that for hydrogen fuel cell. That's OK, because hydrogen fuel cell is significantly more efficient. We know that we're just still struggling with transport, storage, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I think that that, you know, we've always known. that's, I do think, a more efficient source. So go Toyota. Yeah. Flexible perovskite? I don't know. Okay, power conversion efficiency of 25% and maintaining 90% of it after 10,000 bending cycles. I feel like this is high. I don't know, though. But this feels high to me, like very high. Maintaining 90% efficiency after 10,000 cycles. Yeah. That feels very high to me. 1.3 volts, though, also feels high. Is that like supposed to be millivolts?

'''E:''' Milli-vanilli volts.

'''C:''' So this, okay. Okay, so implantable battery, that works for me. Implantable battery, I'm not mad at. Powered by oxygen, I'm not mad at. Because like you said, so long as it's someplace that's bathed in blood, which is like the whole body. It's going to be able to get that fuel, that power that it needs. And continuous electricity. I don't think that voltage is making me too mad. So I kind of think that one is going to be science. I think the solar cells are too high. So I'm sorry, Evan.

'''E:''' No, that's okay. I was close, Cara.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's true. Because you were still questioning that. So I think I'm going to say that the solar cells are the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay. And Jay?

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' Well, yeah, I mean, to cut to the chase, I just don't – I agree with Cara. I don't see how – Thank God.

'''S:''' I'm the Lone Ranger this week.

'''J:''' I don't think anything would maintain 90% after that many cycles. I mean, it just sounds way too good. It's just too good of a scenario.

'''C:''' I wonder if it's even 25% at the beginning.

'''J:''' I hope it's legit, but I think that one is probably. I mean, the oxygen-powered battery, like, okay. I mean, sure. I mean, I don't think if somebody got there with this, it's probably like in super early stages. It's not like they're doing it. And then Toyota, I see no reason why anybody would have a problem getting 845 miles out of a hydrogen-based car. Wow.

'''E:''' If that one turns out to be the fiction, Steve really pulled a fast one on us.

'''C:''' Yeah, I'm 100% with Cara.

'''E:''' I'm going with that.

'''C:''' Thank you.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' All right. So you guys are divided between the first and third one. So we'll start with the second one. Toyota reports its latest hydrogen fuel. So car will average 845 miles on a single tank of hydrogen. You guys all think that one is science. And that one is the fiction.

'''E:''' You got us. What? You got us? good, Steve.

'''S:''' What?

'''E:''' We were so convinced that that – oh, that's wrong.

'''S:''' That one's right. Sure. So now what is true – and I didn't know if I was going to get somebody on being familiar with this. Toyota was able a couple of years ago to get one of their cars, their hydrogen fuel cell cars to go 845 miles on a single tank of hydrogen. But it was completely fake because they like overinflated the tires. They turned off all the electrical stuff in the car and they drove very slowly the whole way. Right.

'''E:''' A scenario in which

'''J:''' nobody would ever

'''S:''' actually use this vehicle. That's about twice what you would actually get with average driving. The hydrogen fuel cell cars are running 350, like 250 So just like electric cars. Yeah, pretty much right in the same range with electric cars. I thought they were more efficient. They're not. They're one-third as efficient. Battery electric vehicles are three times as efficient as hydrogen.

'''C:''' Then why are we even talking about hydrogen fuel cell cars?

'''S:''' That's right. That's exactly why are we. And they will always be lower efficiency because you have to – first of all, you have to make the hydrogen and you have to – Hydrogen. You have to compress the hydrogen, which takes a lot of energy.

'''C:''' Yeah, and then you have to store it someplace where it's not going to blow up.

'''S:''' Right, which limits how much you can carry around. And freezing it, not freezing it, but liquefying it also takes a lot of energy, but it only gets you so far. You know what I mean? That's basically the maximum density of hydrogen you're going to get, and that's even less than gasoline. The most efficient BEVs that we will get to will be more efficient than that, will be more energy dense than that. So I just don't think that hydrogen is a good fuel for cars, maybe for trains or maybe even trucks or something. But there's too many advantages to the battery. electric vehicles and the batteries are just advancing too quickly. And it's just it's too late. You know, maybe if they were 10 years ahead of where they are now. Keep in mind, less than 1% of the hydrogen we make in the world is green. Less than 1%. Most of it is made from fossil fuels.

'''E:''' That's not going to work.

'''S:''' Until we get to the point where we're mass-producing green hydrogen, it's all nonsense anyway, right?

'''E:''' Extracted from the ocean.

'''S:''' Yeah, this one is fiction. But if you had just read the headline, you might have been fooled. Without reading the detail, but the word average in there makes it 100% fiction.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' All right. Let's go back to number one. Researchers have developed an implantable battery that is powered by oxygen in the body and capable of producing continuous electricity at 1.3 volts. That one is science. I did leave out a little detail, though. So the 1.3 volts is correct. But it only produces 2.6 microwatts per centimeter squared. So that's too little to even run like a pacemaker. So it just doesn't produce enough current.

'''C:''' So what do they think it could be helpful for?

'''S:''' Right now, it's just a proof of concept. Oh, okay. So it basically combines sodium and oxygen to produce the current. And so it's a viable proof of concept. The question will be is can you get it efficient enough so that something that's biocompatible that you can implant in a human would produce enough electricity to power something useful like a pacemaker, right? So I don't know if we'll get to that point. It would be a great option if you could because you're just running off of an energy source in the body. You don't have to recharge it or replace it or whatever. That would be nice. But this one isn't going to get us there. This one doesn't have the energy density.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' All right, and that also means that engineers have created flexible perovskite solar cells with a power conversion efficiency of 25% and maintaining 90% of this efficiency after 10,000 bending cycles is science. And this is a nice little breakthrough. This is a good incremental advance. That 25% is about where the best silicon solar cells are right now, where the rigid, you know, crystalline solar cells are. The average one that you would get commercially would be 20%, 22%. So it's actually a little bit above that. I don't know what the upper limit is. The perovskite are supposed to have a higher ceiling than silicon. And so one of the big problems, of course, with perovskite is getting it to be stable. And so this seems like it's – this formulation, this flexible formulation is very, very stable. Again, I don't know if we're quite to a commercial product yet, but we're getting very, very close. And, you know, in the next certainly five years or so, we should be seeing not just these incremental improvements in the silicon solar cells, but a nice shift to a new technology, either organic or perovskite or some combination. Yeah. And with flexible solar cells that can really, you know, accomplish a couple of things. One is just make it easier to install it in a lot of places. And two, to bring the cost per kilowatt hour down. It's already very, very cheap, but we want to make it cheaper than fossil fuel, cheaper than any other facility. than any other option. Let me ask you guys a question. If every residential home in the United States had solar panels on the roofs, what percentage of the country's energy demand, I should say electricity demand, not to confuse it with cars or whatever, of electricity demand would be met by that rooftop? residential solar?

'''C:''' Every single family home?

'''S:''' If every single one did it, we maximized residential solar. 100%.

'''C:''' Oh, no. 100% of the single family.

'''S:''' Half would have it. 100% of residential.

'''C:''' Of residential would be met.

'''S:''' Of homes, not apartment buildings, not business, obviously, not industry. I think we'd hit almost 100%.

'''J:''' No, it'd be about 30%, 35%.

'''S:''' Right. 35%, that's what I said.

'''C:''' Well, yeah, because to be clear, like, All of those homes' energy demand would be met, but all of the other...

'''S:''' Yes. So that's about the same amount that residential electricity demand is. Exactly, yeah. Which is good. That would be great. That, in my opinion, is one of the low-hanging fruit in terms of the transition to zero-carbon electricity because it's green energy, right? You're producing it from sunshine, and it's local. It doesn't have to go anywhere but your house, right?

'''C:''' Especially because we could also put them on commercial buildings and apartment buildings.

'''S:''' You could do that too. Right. But if we just did the residential ones, especially if you pair it with a battery, even a small battery, one that you could use to peak shape and to basically use the electricity you generate during the day to give you some electricity at night. If you're just shifting it even by just a few hours, that combination, if that were ubiquitous, That would take us a long way to decarbonizing the grid. Plus, it takes a lot of stress off the grid because that electricity is all used locally. And here's the other thing. Currently, if you have solar panels without a battery, you send about 20% to 40% of the electricity that you generate to the grid. You're basically using the grid like a battery. Right. But most of that goes to your neighbors. So it doesn't travel far. So it's still a pretty good deal. But if you had a battery, it's even way better. It's much, much better because then you're using it all in the location where it's being generated or most of it. And there might be some seasonal shifting that you'd have to use the grid for. But here's the other thing. Most electricity is used for heating and cooling. In Connecticut, most of my electricity is used for air conditioning, which is over the summer, which is when I produce most of my energy for my solar panels. It matches up nicely. That is, I think, the lowest hanging fruit of our low-carbon energy production is residential solar with battery backup. That's one place where we need to subsidize the hell out of it. That should happen as fast as possible. And if that gets us even just 30% of our energy, then you get another 10, 20% from wind, you know, grid wind power. And then the rest is nuclear, hydrothermal, and geothermal, hydroelectric and geothermal. And that's one plausible path. And if we could get even more like some grid solar going or whatever, that's great too. But whatever. But that's kind of, I think, what we're going to have to do. And that's going to be the quickest, shortest path to get there.

'''E:''' Yeah, and making use of available current technology.

'''S:''' That's all with current technology. It's only going to get better.

'''E:''' Improvements, right? It doesn't even account for the improvements.

'''S:''' But it is only going to get better. The solar and battery options are so steadily improving. It's only going to get better. It's just silly that some people have decided to resist that really good option. And it's totally affordable. because here's the thing. If you have money, you should just buy them outright. Your payback period is like 8 to 12 years depending on variables, like where you live, et cetera. But that's not bad. 8 to 12 years and then you get free electricity. But if you can't afford the upfront costs, you could do what I did, which is just contract. I had zero money upfront. The only financial impact on me was that my electricity bills dropped by 20%. That was it. That was the only effect.

'''C:''' What would you do if you were in my position? I'm super curious. I had somebody come out to look at my – because I live in a small lot house, right? So it's like skinny and tall. And because my roof – has a roof deck on it half of my roof is living space. the other half of my roof is like industrial space where like my air conditioner is and stuff and they looked and they looked at my ac bills and things like that my house is very very efficient. so my bills for you know I live alone I pay about 250 every two months for my energy bills they're quite low. they basically said, it is not worth it for us to put solar panels on your roof.

'''S:''' It's not worth it for them to do it. Right.

'''C:''' No, for anybody to do it. They were like, for you, it is not worth it. Your ROI is not good enough. You need to wait until we have higher efficiency panels.

'''S:''' Yeah, absolutely. Because if you wait a couple of years, they're going to be even better. They'll be cheaper. They'll be more efficient.

'''C:''' They were basically like, you're going to pay for panels that will not offset your bills enough. Because the amount of space that we need to put in these panels, like they're not efficient enough.

'''S:''' Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But I would get a second opinion because I don't know if they just think it's not really worth it for them. So they're saying it's not worth it for you. Yeah. Especially if you can afford to buy them yourself, however much electricity you make. Even if it's only 20% of your bill, it's 20% of your electricity.

'''C:''' Right. It's still offsetting something.

'''S:''' It's still offsetting something. So that's what I was curious about. The payback period is still the same. So I don't know. I don't know about that. And you get a lot of sunshine, right?

'''C:''' We do get a lot of sunshine. I'll give you that.

'''S:''' You're all sunshine and air conditioning. So that's like a perfect scenario for solar panels. So I don't know. I'd get a second opinion on that.

'''C:''' Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

'''S:''' But yeah, I generate 100% of my electricity on my roof, and I live in Connecticut. It's just all about- You should have more roof. I know. I have a lot of roof, and I have no trees shading my roof. Right.

'''E:''' Yeah, I do as well. Yeah. It was a no-brainer for me.

'''S:''' Right. Yeah.

'''C:''' Right.

'''S:''' Right. Okay. Evan, give us a quote.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:43:07) ==

{{qow
|text = The shameful thing is not ignorance — on the contrary, that is the natural thing. The really shameful thing is not to want to know, to resist finding out when the occasion offers. It is never the ignorant who offer that resistance, but the ones who think they know. That is the shameful thing — to think you know. He who thinks he knows something, but is in fact ignorant of it, closes the door of his mind through which authentic truth could enter.
|author = {{w|José Ortega y Gasset}}
|lived = 1883-1955
|desc = Spanish philosopher and essayist
}}


'''E:''' This week's quote was suggested by a listener, Andrew from Toronto. Thank you, Andrew. The shameful thing is not ignorance. On the contrary, that is the natural thing. The really shameful thing is not to want to know, to resist finding out when the occasion offers. It is never the ignorant who offers that resistance, but the one who thinks they know. That is the shameful thing, to think you know. He who thinks he knows something, but is in fact ignorant of it, closes the door of his mind through which authentic truth could enter. There's a quote from José Ortega y Gasset, who was a Spanish philosopher, born in 1883, died in 1955, worked in the first half of the 20th century as a philosopher. He's been characterized as having a philosophy of life that compromised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James. Some other things here, proto-extensionalism and some other things I don't know about in the world of philosophy, realist historicism. But it sounds like a very interesting person whom I've not been introduced to before this quote. So I appreciate that, Andrew. Thank you for introducing me to Gessé.

'''S:''' Yeah, I like the last line. He who thinks he knows something but is in fact ignorant of it closes the door of his mind through which authentic truth could enter. Yeah. Yeah. It's a flowery way of saying, yeah, yeah, be humble. Don't prematurely think you know something. Yeah, good quote. Thanks, Evan.

'''E:''' Thank you.

'''S:''' All right, guys. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''E:''' All right.

'''S:''' Thanks for sweeping us. We have one more show before we go.

'''J:''' I know. I know. It's happening. Eclipse is coming.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

{{Outro664}}{{top}} 
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SGU Episode 976

2024-05-03T09:48:00Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

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== Introduction, equinoxes, climate change ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, March 20th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Happy Equinox.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yesterday, the 19th, was the first day of spring. I always love the first day of spring. It was a day earlier than typical. You guys know why.

'''B:''' Yes.

'''C:''' I know.

'''E:''' I know why now.

'''B:''' It's a leap year.

'''S:''' It's a leap year. Exactly. And it was the earliest spring equinox since 1896. Why? Because, interesting, I had to look it up, because the year 2000 was also a leap year. Normally, the years divisible by 100 are not leap years unless they're divisible by 400. And 2000, therefore, was a leap year. And that just also introduced, you know, adjusted the calendar so that the date, you And basically every four years between now and 2103 will be the earliest spring equinox. You know what I mean? It'll just keep getting slightly earlier, like by a few minutes, you know, like earlier, earlier, earlier over the next century.

'''E:''' Like a Y2K ripple that is still occurring through space and time.

'''S:''' Not for nothing, but I'm pretty attuned to when things start to bloom in the spring. Usually by week by week, I know like, oh, this is the week that the forsythia blooms. And things are about two weeks early than they usually are.

'''J:''' Global warming, Steve? Yeah, totally.

'''E:''' Interesting.

'''S:''' Yeah, absolutely.

'''J:''' We're so screwed. It's really happening. I know we had some cold days this winter, which was really nice.

'''S:''' Well, every month for the last nine months was the warmest month on record, meaning like the November was the warmest November on record and December was the warmest December on record. February was the warmest February on record.

'''J:''' Snazzberries taste like snazzberries.

'''E:''' Well, we're losing our winter. Yeah, right. We're losing our winter seasons at least in this part of the country.

'''S:''' Yeah, the last five winters have been very mild.

'''E:''' Very mild. What did we have this year?

'''S:''' Maybe two snow events for the whole winter? And nothing that stuck. There was very little time where there was actually snow on the ground. Whereas you go back 10 years – and obviously this is all short-term trends that we're talking about here. But – Like this would not really have been possible 30 years ago.

'''J:''' Yeah, but our climate right now in this part of the world is partially affected by the volcano eruption though, which puts seawater up into the upper, upper atmosphere, which is – it's going to be gone in a few more years I think. But that is factoring in as well.

'''E:''' I was also chatting with someone in Canada, of all places, yesterday, and we brought up the subject of the fires that occurred last summer, and they said that they're already starting to issue some warnings that it's going to happen again this coming summer.

'''S:''' Oh, boy.

'''E:''' Yeah, that was nasty.

'''J:''' They need to – not that I'm a forestry person, but I did read that they can cut swaths into the tree lines so that – Yeah, you make like a grid basically among the trees.

'''E:''' So it contains – it burns out one square at a time instead of the whole thing going.

'''J:''' I don't know how hard that would be. I'd imagine it would be ridiculously hard with the real estate that they have up there.

'''E:''' There's a lot of forestry up there.

'''S:''' Oh, my gosh. But they do logging and it is common to do forest management. I know in Connecticut, for example, because I looked into this because we partly buy some of our firewood, right? Yeah. Although, again, I haven't had to burn that much firewood this winter. But typically I would get a cord of firewood for the winter and I did way more research than I needed to because I just got interested in stuff like that. You go down a rabbit hole. So essentially the state does forest management. It cuts down a lot of trees and then you can get a license to basically – to cut up those trees for firewood and then – You could sell it. Essentially, the forest management does this. They can cut down tons and tons of trees. That's not really as big a deal as it may sound. You have to have it. You have to do forest management. You have to have forest management. Talking about the Canadian forest fires, it was a complicated situation because yes, of course, it was global warming that sets the conditions for those kind of fires to happen. But also there's a lot of criticism that they weren't doing adequate forest management and that also creates a problem. It sets up – there's too much fuel on the forest floor. It makes it a setup as well. Same thing with California. It was partly forest management, partly weather conditions, partly mismanagement of – old electric electrical lines. you know that that were sparked you know and caused the fire. so we just don't have the luxury anymore to like to be negligent about that sort of thing because the result will be massive forest catastrophic. yeah it was.

'''E:''' yes it was bad yeah and you know it all it all goes into the air that we all breathe. so nobody's uh immune from those impacts.

{{anchor|quickie}} 
== Quickie with Steve: Treating HIV with CRISPR (5:42) ==
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|redirect_title = Treating HIV with CRISPR (976 Q)
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'''S:''' All right. We have a great interview coming up later, so I want to get right to the news items. I'm going to start with a quickie. This just dropped, so I'm not going to go into too much detail on it. There isn't actually that much detail to give. But have you guys heard of this proof-of-concept study where they use CRISPR to potentially remove HIV from cells, from infected cells? Cool. Huh?

'''C:''' I know because it's a virus. This is so cool.

'''S:''' So here's the problem. Yeah, this is awesome. So here's the problem with HIV is that it's a retrovirus. So it inserts its DNA into the host cells, in this case immune cells, and they can lie dormant there. So even if you get rid of all of the circulating HIV and all of the actively infected cells that are producing HIV, there's still these dormant cells with HIV in them. Some of the treatments involve actually like coaxing the HIV out of the cells that you could then get rid of it, trying to like activate it. But still, if you have HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, you're on lifetime medications because the infection is chronic. It's there. You're not going to get rid of it. So here the idea is use CRISPR to go in there and snip it out, just snip it out of the cells where it's laying dormant. Now, the trick with CRISPR, of course, is getting it to the cells, right, all the cells that are infected. And so the researchers are very clear about saying this is a proof of concept. This is not a ready-for-the-clinic treatment. And there are a lot of challenges ahead, a lot of work ahead to turn this proof of concept into an actual functional treatment. So this is probably going to be years. But what they basically demonstrated is that it could theoretically work, that CRISPR can eliminate HIV from an infected cell. But now the trick is going to be turning that into an actual treatment strategy, like getting it to all the cells. Also, the study that we have so far, there was three volunteers, right, three people with HIV. After 48 weeks of treatment, they showed no serious side effects, so that's good. Of course, the biggest concern with CRISPR when you're trying to use it in an organism, like you're not using it in cells in a petri dish, you're using it in a living organism, is the off-target effects, that it also will snip other things out of cells or target cells that you don't want it to. I hate when that happens. But that's why they have to monitor for the long-term side effects. But so far, you know, after 48 weeks, you know, nothing in those three volunteers, you know, nothing cropped up. Obviously, a lot of research ahead. This is just like the earliest sort of clinical step. But yeah, this is another way for CRISPR to be used clinically to remove viruses which have managed to insert their way into the DNA of their hosts. I hope it works out because it could be awesome.

'''B:''' Man, I love CRISPR.

'''J:''' And Steve, I mean is it too much to ask that like it would be – if it works with HIV, it would work with other viruses?

'''S:''' No. That's the idea, right? If it works, it could work potentially with any retrovirus or any virus that inserts its genetic material into the host cells potentially. It depends on the cells that are the target. It's all about getting the CRISPR to the cells, right? That's the tricky part. CRISPR is good at targeting the DNA, but then you need a vector to get the CRISPR to the cells you need to get it to. And that's actually a trickier problem is the vector. We're making strides there as well, but that's the challenge for specific clinical applications. That's why, if you remember, some of the low-hanging fruit in terms of using CRISPR therapeutically is like in sickle cell disease because then you could take the bone marrow out of somebody, do the CRISPR, and put it back. So that's how you target the cells as opposed to having to target cells that are circulating within a person or targeting a specific organ or something, right? Yeah.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 

=== Starship's Third Launch (9:27) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-third-test-flight-faa-investigation
|article_title = FAA to oversee investigation of SpaceX Starship's 3rd test flight
|publication = Space.com
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Jay, some other good news. I think this is good news. Tell us how Starship's third launch went.

'''J:''' Yeah, as you guys know, we need this technology to work in order to do the Artemis missions. So what was it? It was on March 14th that SpaceX had its third test flight of the 400-foot-tall – that's 122 meters – Starship, right? This is the spacecraft vehicle that they have. that's all silver. It looks pretty bulletproof. So Flight 3 was known as Flight 3. That's what they called it.

'''S:''' Smart.

'''J:''' So it involved ship number 28 and booster 10, right? So the components that they used to build the ship are all numbered and they've pre-built. I think they have four other sets that are ready to go as well. So this is the world's most powerful rocket. Just to remind you, it achieved an altitude on flight three of 230 kilometers or 143 miles. And it launched from Boca Chica, Texas. You know where that is, Cara?

'''S:''' Nope. Nope.

'''J:''' Texas is huge, so I'm not surprised.

'''C:''' It's very big, yes.

'''J:''' So this last flight test did demonstrate some legitimate progress from Flight 2. It achieved most of its predefined objectives. that include things like engine operation, right, because all the engines fired and they were all working optimally. First and second stage, clean separation, controlled partial return. You know, unfortunately, the mission did conclude with the destruction of both, you know, the booster and the shifter. But, you know, it's okay. It's all right. These things explode. They learn stuff.

'''S:''' Well, they're designed to explode if something goes wrong.

'''J:''' Yeah, but, I mean, it went farther and did better.

'''S:''' Yeah, it made it to orbit.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's great. I mean, it is a success. But still, you know, part of SpaceX's methodology is that they're okay with these types of things happening. Like, they push it to its limits. They want to see what it can do. And then they make modifications on the next test flight. So real quick, prior to Flight 3, I want to tell you guys about the first and second missions just so you get an idea of what they've been working on and what they've fixed. So SpaceX initial test flights, they had a lot of big challenges. The first test flight dealt with engine failures. Remember the massive damage to the launch pad?

'''B:''' Oh, my God.

'''J:''' Yeah. That was intense. But putting those issues aside, that test flight provided the valuable data that they needed to make improvements, both to the launch infrastructure and the vehicle design. The second test flight, they introduced several upgrades that were aimed at enhancing the vehicle reliability standards. They improved the engine shielding and they had more powerful fire suppression system. Remember, because of the first launch, they had to beef up that fire suppression system to help save the launch platform. And despite these super expensive improvements, the flight ended in the loss of the booster again and the ship due to the engine explosion and all the onboard fires. So now we get to Flight 3. They incorporated everything they learned from the previous two flights. They included a change in the landing zone to the Indian Ocean, which was put in place to help mitigate environmental impacts, which I thought was a really good choice. The flight featured advancements like the opening and closing of the payload door, which they did successfully test successfully. They also experimented with transferring fuel between two different tanks that are on the Starship. Now this was – they did this because it mocks up or mimics spacecraft to spacecraft refueling, which is – Only going to – that's the way that this ship is going to get to the moon and back, right? It has to be refueled once it's in orbit around Earth. So that was a success. They also made structural enhancements.

'''S:''' Can we pause there for a second? You're saying that the Starship can't go from the surface of the Earth to the moon in one go without being refueled?

'''J:''' Yeah, that's what I understand. It has to be refueled. How come?

'''S:''' If the Apollo could do it, I mean, the Saturn V, this is a bigger rocket.

'''J:''' This thing is gigantic, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah. This thing is massive. Shouldn't it be able to go farther?

'''J:''' I'm sure. I don't know. Honestly, I just don't know, Steve. I mean, I don't know how much it's burning to get into orbit.

'''S:''' Is that with much more payload than what the Saturn V could carry?

'''J:''' I would imagine that they're testing it to where it would be once they know exactly what's going to be on it. So the weight is probably going to be what it would be with full payload. I agree with that. I read it like it has to be refueled in orbit to then go to the moon.

'''S:''' All right. Yeah, we'll have to take a look deeper into that because that just strikes me as a little odd. Yeah. I can see with a smaller rocket, like you're trying to get to the moon with a smaller rocket, you'd need to refuel.

'''J:''' No, it says here it's critical for it to do this for space refueling, which is essential for missions extended beyond Earth's orbit. So, yeah, it has to be refueled. So they also made structural enhancements to the vehicle, which is good. They beefed it up, though it did fail to achieve the soft water landing and they lost a ship during reentry. The test completed several key objectives, which is good. This is really good progress. We needed to have a nice success here. So they made updates to the launch pad and vehicles were made to improve safety and performance. They changed the tank farm, which is the tanks that hold the fuel before they fuel up the ship itself. They modified engine designs. They modified the heat shield. The flight was trying to achieve specific test objectives, such as conducting a payload bay door. And like I said, the cryogenic fluid transfer test, all these things. It checked out. Everything went really well up until when things started to return back to Earth. There was also another idea that they were going to reignite the Raptor engines in space for the first time. And I guess this was part of the controlled reentry process. It was going at about 27,000 kilometers or 16,700 miles per hour. But the engine reignition wasn't attempted. And that led eventually to the loss of the vehicle. Flight 3's outcome, it's an indication of the ongoing efforts that we're going to see with SpaceX trying to refine the Starship program. Of course, they have to do it. They have to get a certain amount of the critical things, 100%. And as you guys may or may not know, the FAA is heavily involved in everything that's going on with the Starship testing. And they're. They basically help them determine what needs to be fixed for the next test flight. And then the FAA also analyzes everything that happens during the flight. So they're a part of the whole process here. They help implement the required corrective actions. So in the end, we did take a step closer to Artemis being able to happen. I think we're going to see another test flight in a couple of months. And onward, man. I'm just excited. I want to see this stuff kick ass.

'''S:''' All right, so my preliminary findings are that the main difference is between Saturn V and Starship. What? Saturn V had a bunch of different stages. So they would throw the stages away in order to save fuel as you go, but Starship is designed for reusability. It's only two stages, and the first stage has to land again to be reused. So it's just a different set of tradeoffs. So it gets into orbit with basically no fuel. In fact, it takes five to ten other starships to refuel one starship to get to the moon. Oh, wow. Apparently. Wow. I'll look into that more deeply, but that seems to be the short answer. Obviously, it's designed to function this way, but the tradeoff was no stages, so it's more reusable, which is interesting.

{{anchor|news2}}
=== Extinct Flu Virus (17:45) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.livescience.com/health/flu/a-branch-of-the-flu-family-tree-has-died-and-wont-be-included-in-future-us-vaccines
|article_title = A branch of the flu family tree has died and won't be included in future US vaccines
|publication = ls
|redirect_title = Extinct Flu Virus (976) 
}}

'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Jay. Cara, do viruses ever go extinct?

'''C:''' They do. And one flu virus may have gone extinct. At least that is what experts are urging virus manufacturers to keep in mind as they produce the new flu vaccine for next year. So The World Health Organization and now the CDC are saying, hey, as you produce the new flu vaccine for the next season, let's not make the quadrivalent anymore. Let's make it only protect against three different strains because one of those four, the B. Yamagata strain, we think might be extinct. We haven't seen it in several years. So this is really interesting. Apparently, COVID has helped us cause the B. yamagata strain to go extinct. There have historically been four strains of the flu that have been covered by the quadrivalent vaccine. So if you got the flu vaccine this past year or for many years in the past, you probably got a quadrivalent vaccine. It protected against two influenza A and two influenza B types. One of those types was part of the Yamagata lineage. And that lineage over the past, I'd say decade or so, has been doing something really interesting as it evolved. From how I'm reading this, the clades, the sort of evolutionary changes to the vaccine have been getting further further and further apart. And in doing so, it's been one of the main reasons that sometimes when we get a flu vaccine, it hasn't been very effective. Because as we know, we're often sort of predicting how the flu is going to mutate over the years and having to estimate what the flu is going to look like in advance of the coming flu season. And when we do that, sometimes our predictive powers are not very good. And what ends up happening is that we will be predicting based on one subtype of one of these four types within the – so a subtype of a subtype within the flu vaccine. The Yamagata subtype, the B. Yamagata, has historically – had its own subtypes or the clades within it becoming like more and more distinct, more and more different. And because of that, sometimes the vaccine has not been providing very good coverage. But because of that, something really cool seems to have happened. And that's that during COVID, as it became more and more disparate, It actually just went extinct. People weren't transmitting it to one another. And, you know, we just weren't going out in public. We were maintaining social distancing. People were getting their vaccines. They were getting their COVID shots and their flu shots. And we weren't spreading viruses nearly as well. And so we first in 2021 started to notice that people weren't testing positive for this subtype of the flu. And since then, there have been no cases that anybody could detect. And because there have been no detected cases since then, kind of across the globe, experts have said, hey, we think that we can sort of reasonably say that we don't think that this subtype of the flu is in existence anymore. And we feel pretty reasonably comfortable no longer protecting ourselves. for it within our vaccine formulations. And so, yeah, it looks like the guidance now for next year, and manufacturers are kind of moving pretty quickly, is that it won't be within our new flu shots. Our new flu shots next year will be trivalent, not quadrivalent.

'''E:''' No quad. No more quad. Yeah.

'''C:''' Pretty interesting.

'''E:''' OK, let's get that down to bivalent, you know.

'''C:''' Right. I mean, nice. Less complicated means less money means, you know, I think more accessibility, more accessible. Yeah. I mean, across the board, the fewer. obviously more is better if necessary, but less is better if it makes it easier to manufacture the vaccine. A hundred percent, right? We want to be as protective as possible, but not if it's unnecessary.

'''S:''' Plus, making the vaccine cover that strain means that there has to be that strain in the lab. So it's safer to not cover the strain.

'''C:''' It's safer, yeah. So now we're talking two influenza A's and only one influenza B strain.

'''S:''' Yeah. I always wondered like what would it take for – because like a virus is just sort of moving around the population. But what would it take for just at one point it just doesn't infect anybody? If at any point no one is infected, the virus is gone, right? Because there's no non-human reservoir, right? Or is there a non-human reservoir for it? There is.

'''C:''' That's the thing. I was looking into where these viruses live because I was kind of confused. Apparently, there are four types of influenza viruses. There's an A, B, C, and D. A and B cause the seasonal epidemics, and that's why they're in our shots. So A and B cause flu seasons in the U.S A are the only ones that also cause pandemics. So A is where you see H1N1 and H3N2. And then the B lineages are B Victoria and B Yamagata. So again, now B Yamagata seems to be extinct. And then C generally causes such mild illness. That it doesn't even cause epidemics, so we don't even vaccinate against it. And then D only affects cattle. And there does seem to be spillover, but it doesn't infect people. So I'm trying to look here between Victoria and Yamagata. what they actually infect. Okay, so bee only infects humans, ferrets, pigs, and seals. That's interesting. I'd have to do a little bit more digging to see if Yamagata is extinct only in people or if it's all the way extinct because all of the coverage that I'm reading says that it is extinct extinct. Yeah. But also, maybe we just don't know. How do we know if it's fully extinct in every seal, ferret, and pig? Right.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' Yeah. But yeah, pretty interesting. Or maybe those are only in Victoria, not in Yamagata. So I would have to do a little bit more digging. But yeah, A is where we see all of those.

'''S:''' Along those lines, I always had this crazy idea, starting where my kids had lice. Couldn't we just agree that everyone is going to shave all their hair at the same time in the world and we'll just eliminate lice? Right. We'll be the generation for the rest of humanity to just get rid of lice.

'''C:''' Right?

'''E:''' Lice on – wait, but lice would go somewhere.

'''S:''' Well, there's human lice. There's human lice that only infect humans. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and they need hair follicles.

'''C:''' But would they all like – would there be – because of the environmental pressure is so heavy in that moment – Would you be bottlenecking them into mutating into dogs or something? It would be an interesting global experiment. That's for sure.

'''S:''' Very hard to get compliance. One person doesn't do it. Social engineering.

'''C:''' That's what we're basically doing with like polio. That's what we're doing. I mean it is – and we've been relatively successful with some of these eradication efforts. But as we've talked about before, it only works when there is no non-human reservoir.

'''S:''' Right. For eradication. Yes. That's right.

'''C:''' For eradication.

'''E:''' Remember in World War Z, the North Koreans, they pulled the teeth out of everybody in the country so nobody could bite each other.

'''S:''' Oh, that's interesting.

'''E:''' That's how they dealt with that one.

=== Keeping ''Voyager 1'' Going (26:09) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/finally-engineers-have-a-clue-that-could-help-them-save-voyager-1/
|article_title = Finally, engineers have a clue that could help them save ''Voyager 1''
|publication = ars
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' Wow. Well, it's extreme, but so was the zombie apocalypse. All right, Bob, how is Voyager 1 doing after all these years? Hey.

'''B:''' So is Voyager 1 fracked? What? I used that word instead of what I wanted to go with, but it still works. Oh, I see. The oldest and most distant probe ever launched, Voyager 1, has been transmitting gibberish for months now. No data has been transmitted at all. What happened? Can it be fixed? Or is this the swan song of Voyager 1 destined to drift dead in space until it becomes the all-powerful V'ger in 249 years? As prophesied by Star Trek. Now, if you're pounding your desk right now correcting me about V'ger, then kudos to you and your Star Trek geekiness.

'''E:''' Voyager 6, right?

'''B:''' Yes. All good fans know that it was fictional Voyager 6 that became V'ger in Star Trek The Motion Picture. Okay. So – but we all remember the real Voyager 1, right? Launched in the year Star Wars. I mean everything has got a science fiction milestone tied to it in my mind. Released – when Star Wars was first released in 1977, the mission took advantage of a once in 175-year alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to use gravitational assists. As a slingshot, Voyager went throughout the solar system. So after the glorious missions to Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 used Saturn to arc up and out of the plane of the solar system towards the next destiny in 2012 when it went through the heliopause where the solar system – in a sense, ended where it ends because the sun's solar wind and magnetic field give way to the true interstellar medium. So that was the last really big milestone for Voyager 1. Now it's just kind of been cruising along in the interstellar medium. It's 15 billion miles away, 24 billion kilometers from Earth. It's been running for an amazing 47 years. That's so cool. What a feat. What a feat. And it has had its share of technical difficulties all along, which have been fixed basically or worked around. But this latest glitch is the worst. November of 2023, it started babbling in binary. Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist at NASA's JPL, said, we'd gone from having a conversation with Voyager with the ones and zeros containing science data to just a dial tone. She described it as a dial tone now. Now, engineers think the culprit here is corrupted memory inside one of the three onboard computer systems that Voyager 1 has. The system that they're really focused in on is the flight data subsystem, FDS subsystem. Now, FDS collects science and engineering data from the sensors, from Voyager's sensors, and then gets that ultimately to the high-gain antenna, which sends back all this wonderful information as radio waves, which it has been doing for decades up until last November. Now, I troubleshoot often errant computers. All the time in my mild-mannered persona as Bob the IT guy. Sometimes I even have to get on a server running Windows 2003, which is galling for me. It's like, are you kidding? 2003, how is this possible? OS still alive. But I can't even imagine troubleshooting an ancient half a century old computer system where all the true original experts are basically dead. But not only that, this computer is also so far away, billions of kilometers. How far away is it? Yes.

'''S:''' Too late. I'll fix it in editing.

'''B:''' The response to me hitting the enter key takes 45 hours to get back to me, 45 hours to see what the result is of my latest command or if I was troubleshooting this damn thing. For 45 hours, I don't know if I'm going to get back nothing. Or good information or maybe the fact that I actually killed the entire computer because it's like so fragile. They have to be so careful interacting with it. So what caused this glitch? The theory is that a high-energy cosmic ray flipped a bit in the system's memory. That's what they think. So now that's happened before. It has happened before, but it's even more likely since 2012. Why do you think it's more likely now?

'''E:''' Because it no longer has the protection of the solar system.

'''B:''' Right. Now that it's in the interstellar medium, there's more charged cosmic rays that normally wouldn't make it past the heliosphere. Now, when that happened before, they would get a memory readout, right? And then that would reveal where the bad bit was. So Susan Dodd, a Voyager project manager at JPL, said, we've recovered from bit flips before. The problem this time is we don't know where the bit flip is because we can't see what the memory is. It's the most serious issue we've had. So yeah, so it looked bad because they just couldn't find out. They couldn't pinpoint where the problem is assuming it even was this bit flip in the memory. But there was a breakthrough of sorts March 1st, 2024, just earlier this month. They sent a different type of troubleshooting command to Voyager and the result was a binary stream that for the first time was different. than they've been getting for months, but it wasn't in the usual format that you would expect if everything was okay working again. Regarding this, NASA said in a recent update, but an engineer with the agency's Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found out that it contains a readout of the entire. So they got the memory dump. Now kudos to this unnamed engineer. I will call him Miles O'Brien. Now this seems to be great news to me in my mind. Now what they can do is they can now look through this memory dump, which they essentially have from this subsystem, this computer system. This computer subsystem. And they have the memory dump and they can then compare it to the most previous memory dump from the before time, right? Before it was sending gibberish. And hopefully when they do that comparison, they can then identify the bit that flipped and then correct it. And in the future – and then it will hopefully continue as it was until it does ultimately keel over. I mean I heard this thing is losing a few – like four watts every year. It's just getting less and less powerful. Those nuclear batteries do not last forever. But I'd much rather have it die a death of old age rather than just some corrupted memory, which would be a little frustrating. But hopefully we'll have, you know, at least a handful, five or ten years. I'm not sure what the life expectancy is at this point. But hopefully we'll get some more time out of Voyager 1 because it has been an amazing mission. Oh, my God. 77. this thing launched. And now it's outside of the sun's influence, the heliosphere, outside our solar system in a sense. Amazing. I want it to keep going for a while.

'''S:''' It is amazing. I never would have guessed it would be still going this much longer.

'''E:''' And there was an excellent documentary on Voyager produced by PBS called The Farthest.

'''S:''' Yeah, very nice.

'''E:''' Yep, 15 billion miles and counting. And it's even further than that because this was back in 2017. But it's excellent. I highly recommend it.

=== Death by Exorcism (33:33) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.nbcnews.com/video/hearing-begins-in-alleged-california-exorcism-death-206991429705
|article_title = Hearing begins in alleged California exorcism death
|publication = NBC News
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Evan, you are going to give us another installment in our series on death by pseudoscience, The Exorcism Edition.

'''E:''' Yeah, it's sad that I even have to bring these up regularly, in fact. But this is the case when it comes to exorcisms. They persist. People continue this belief system. And it results in horrible, horrible consequences. So yeah, most religions claim that humans can be possessed by demonic spirits and other entities. And they'll offer exorcisms to remedy the threat. But believing in nonsense can cause a great deal of harm, including death. And there is a true body count that accompanies belief in exorcisms. There always has been and there always will be. But the latest tragic news is about the death of a three-year-old girl at the hands of their family as she was forced to undergo an exorcism. Yeah, this is in California. Renee Hueso was arrested in May 2022 for For the September 24th, 2021 killing of three-year-old Arlie Naomi Proctor. Hueso is the leader of a, well, it's described as a backyard Pentecostal church in San Jose. The name is in Spanish. I'll embarrass myself if I try to say it, so I'll move on. Hueso is the grandfather of young Arlie. And she died at his hands after she was delivered by Arlie's mother. Her name is Claudia Hernandez, along with her uncle, Rene Santos. So the news is, though, this past Monday, all three family members, they're in court. They're having their court date now. It's a probable cause hearing where prosecutors are laying out evidence against each of these three defendants, and the judge is going to decide if there's enough evidence now to go to trial, which we should know about by the end of this week. All three are charged with felony child abuse resulting in death. Arlie's mother was first arrested in early 2022, and then a few months later, upon further investigation, they made the arrest of the other two people involved. And according to the early reports from the investigators in the case... The reason the mother brought her daughter to him in the first place was that she thought she was being possessed because she woke up from sleeping multiple times in one night and the little girl was screaming and crying.

'''S:''' There you go.

'''E:''' So she was having nightmares? Right. Or night terrors. I don't even know. Can three-year-olds have night terrors? I'm not even sure. Maybe. Maybe. But regardless, they brought her to the grandfather's church, and then they tried to force her to vomit up the demons inside her by gagging, squeezing, and choking her. There was a coroner's report that was released that determined that Arlie died by asphyxiation, and authorities alleged she was subjected to more than 12 hours of physical abuse that included being strangled multiple times to the point of unconsciousness. Had fingers shoved down her throat to the point she had multiple injuries in her mouth and to her tongue. And there was pressure placed on her body, her torso from front to back. So much force applied that she lost consciousness several times. She was also not given any food and hardly any water in the 24 hours leading up to that death. This little girl... And after she died, the family took their time notifying the authorities. It was several hours afterwards before somebody decided to call somebody to try to help the girl who was not coming back from unconsciousness. So I don't know. I mean, shame and woe to those institutions and belief systems who really kind of turn a blight to these kinds of senseless deaths. They help prop it up. And I read so little about them coming out and kind of – they should be the ones to lead the way to say stop this, the churches.

'''C:''' This sounds like it's so far beyond that. This is neglect and abuse beyond some sort of religious bullshit, don't you think? I mean, like they didn't get help. Yeah. Like you said, they didn't call for help even after. Right.

'''E:''' It's almost hard to categorize exactly what this is.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's two things. First of all, it is obviously contributed to by the religious belief in demonic possession, which is barbaric medieval, right? But also even in that context, there was abuse. There was neglect and abuse because there's always – obviously there's a duty to take care of a helpless child, not to be the agent of direct harm. Even if you think they need an exorcism, the number one priority should be to protect the child. So it was absolutely neglect and abuse. They tortured and killed that girl.

'''C:''' Even if in the moment they thought they were helping, when they realized she's not breathing, they didn't call for medical attention. That's a problem.

'''E:''' Yeah, you're right. It's a symptom of something deeper, perhaps, than solely the religious aspects.

'''S:''' And I'm sure that they're claiming religious freedom in terms of their defense. Or did they plead not guilty or guilty? That's awful.

'''E:''' Again, this was a probable cause hearing where a judge is deciding if there's enough evidence to go to trial. So I don't know if there is a plea involved at this stage of this part of the case. Defense attorney says that the cross-examination has only begun. They were attempting to establish that defendants had no homicidal intent and were only trying to help the girl via exorcism because this is what they know.

'''S:''' It's still manslaughter.

'''E:''' This is their culture. This is right there.

'''S:''' Doesn't matter.

'''E:''' This would have been their reaction to anyone. similar in in a similar situation. this is exactly how they would have reacted no matter who it was.

'''C:''' of course that's going to be the defense strategy but I it's it's good to hear that this is being fully prosecuted. you know what I mean that like the state is bringing charges against these parents and it sounds like pretty strong charges. what do you know? what they're actually? you said this is like a hearing to determine what charges should be brought.

'''E:''' Felony child abuse resulting in death.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a child abuse. It's not murder. Good.

'''C:''' Yeah, but I mean that's good to hear that they're coming out, you know, kicking.

'''S:''' Yeah, good for them.

'''C:''' Yeah, like setting those kinds of precedences.

'''E:''' And it also picked up national attention. It's not just a local San Jose story. This is picked up by NBC and all the national outlets have been carrying this.

'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Evan. I know it's a terrible thing to have to report, but, you know.

'''E:''' Yeah, I know.

'''S:''' I do think it's important to talk about it. It continues to happen. Yeah.

=== Energy Demand Increasing (42:00) ===
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'''S:''' All right, guys, are you aware that there's been a recent spike in demand for electricity in the United States?

'''B:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''C:''' This is for AI.

'''S:''' Are you aware – we're going to get to that in a second. Are you aware that for like the last 20 years, electricity demand has been relatively flat?

'''E:''' I wouldn't have guessed that.

'''S:''' Yeah, you wouldn't have guessed that, right? But it has been. I mean it bounces up and down, but it really hasn't changed much for 20 years. And the reason for that is that even though we're doing more stuff with electricity and population is growing – It's been offset by efficiency. LED bulbs were huge, right, going from the last 20 years.

'''E:''' Yeah, I love my LED bulbs.

'''S:''' I love them. The more energy-efficient appliances. And we basically went from homes not being weatherized to being more energy-efficient, going to double-pane glass and better insulation, better standards. So all of those things have contributed to a dramatic decrease in energy waste and And that has pretty much offset the increase in demand for electricity, for doing stuff with electricity. But in the last year or two, there has been a spike. When you look at the graph, your first reaction is, really? Are they really extrapolating from that tiny little upturn? Isn't it too early to tell? But when you read deeper, you find that they're not just extrapolating the trend over the last year. They're taking into account things that have already – that are already underway. You know what I mean? Like they know like these factories are being built and this is happening and that's happening. And therefore, they're projecting demand into the future not just – it's not numerology, right? They're not just extending a graph out. They're analyzing industries to determine what the likely future demand for electricity is. So there are four things that are the main drivers of this increase in electricity demand and this increase in the future projections of demand. What do you think those are?

'''E:''' Digital currencies.

'''S:''' Crypto. We'll combine those into data centers, right? So AI, crypto, just increasing everything digital. So data centers are cropping up. They're proliferating, and they use a ton of electricity. They're also a lot faster to build than the power to power them is to build, right?

'''J:''' Right.

'''S:''' All right, that's one. What else?

'''C:''' Electric cars?

'''S:''' Electric vehicles, right? Okay. Right now, the United States, we're only at about 1% of cars on the road being all electric. Really? Yeah. But 9%. last year, in 2023, 9% of new car sales were all electric. And in the last quarter, it was 17%. So obviously- There's a trend. Yeah, so that's trending up fairly quickly. And prices for EVs are plummeting. plummeted. they're really coming down almost to parity with similar ice vehicles you know internal combustion engine vehicles. so there's every expectation now that like we're over the pandemic and the supply lane what the supply line crunch and all that stuff the prices are coming down. demand is going to you know go back up again. so this is again they're projecting out the fairly you know dramatic increase in evs going forward. that's it. And as we've been saying, we have to account for that when we're figuring out like how much electricity we're going to need. Two other things.

'''J:''' I would maybe think like grow farms for marijuana.

'''S:''' No, that was not mentioned as one of the factors. That may be a factor, but it's not enough to be on the radar here.

'''E:''' Not top four.

'''C:''' Not top four. What about like other battery products?

'''S:''' So we'll broaden that out to just industry. So we are onshoring a lot of industry. that was previously – that was being done elsewhere in the world. So as we bring back industry, we have to power those industries like manufacturing. So we're onshoring a lot of manufacturing. So that's a huge one. And the fourth one I'll just tell you is increasing use of air conditioning because of global warming.

'''B:''' Oh, that makes sense.

'''C:''' Which sucks. because then there's this like – It's a feedback.

'''S:''' That's a feedback.

'''C:''' Because it's one of the biggest contributors to global warming.

'''S:''' Right, right. And yeah, I think most residential electricity is used for air conditioning, heating and air conditioning. Yeah. So the people who do this sort of analysis have had to revise their projections over the next five to ten years as to what our likely increase in electricity demand will be. And they've essentially doubled the projected increase in demand based upon these recent –. Of course, things can change. We don't know if this is going to be the case, but it seems like it's going to be worse than we thought in terms of future energy demand. Now, this is a huge problem for a number of reasons, right? We're talking about what's the best strategy for converting our energy infrastructure over to low carbon, right? So we're talking about wind. solar, geothermal, nuclear, and hydroelectric, right? We want to get as much of our energy production over to those low-carbon sources as possible. We want to shut down coal as fast as possible and then eventually natural gas and oil and burn as little fossil fuel as possible, right? This is now massively frustrating, that plan, because... As this demand is really taking states and utilities by surprise a little bit, it's like they're now sort of struggling to keep up with demand. So what's the quickest new power plants they could bring online? It's the ones that are easy to build or proven technology. It's coal, right? It's coal. Well, natural gas. Oh, okay. But because you're not going to build new coal-fired plants. It's not in the U.S.

'''C:''' Do they have to frack for that?

'''S:''' Yeah, they probably do to keep up with demand. But natural gas is now – so now a lot of utility companies are building natural gas in order to meet this immediate spike in demand. Oh, my god. But not only that, they are delaying the closing of coal-fired plants. So they may not be building new ones, but they're delaying their closing.

'''B:''' Yeah, we're so screwed.

'''S:''' Oh, boy.

'''C:''' So we're just not hitting any targets.

'''E:''' That changes the calculus.

'''S:''' We're so far off our targets. Remember, we talked about the fact that 2023 had the biggest fossil fuel use in history, right? Despite the fact that we're dramatically increasing our renewable energy profile, that's just meeting the new demand, right? That's not eating into existing demand. And now this is going to be even more true. or, in fact, we'll have to grow our fossil fuel repertoire in order to grow the supply fast enough to meet this spike in demand.

'''C:''' Increasing renewable energies is not good in and of itself. It's only good if we're decreasing fossil fuel. We're just using more energy. It's not a good thing.

'''E:''' Burn more coal so we can make more solar panels.

'''S:''' The real goal is decreasing our fossil fuel use, but we're not doing that. We're just making more energy. It's better than not having the new energy be renewable, but it's still not decreasing our fossil fuel use. So what are the roadblocks? What's the holdup in terms of expanding renewables fast enough to meet this increasing demand?

'''B:''' People who don't believe in climate change?

'''S:''' Well, I mean that may be contributing to it. But there are real technical limitations. Big one, probably the biggest one is the grid. It takes a long time to build grid expansion projects. And they're slowed by a lot of red tape. And there's no federal agency that has the power to make it happen. And so utility companies in different states basically fight with each other over who's going to pay for what. You know what I mean? So it really slows the process down. And we essentially can't do it fast enough, both technically and because of the regulations. So, of course, that means on the flip side that we could dramatically accelerate building more electricity grid if we funded more of it. So there is funding for it in the infrastructure bill, and that's good, but it's not enough, right? But we also need federal regulation that basically streamlines the process of applying for new grid installments and also new connections to the grid. I mentioned on a previous episode that applications for new connections to the grid can be delayed for five to ten years. So even if you can stand up like a wind turbine project or a grid solar project, you might be waiting ten years to get it hooked up to the grid or to have the grid installed so that the lines put in place so that you could send that energy to the city that you're hoping to sell power to. Yeah. So it's just really slow.

'''B:''' So is cutting this red tape a priority for anybody who could actually make a difference?

'''S:''' I mean I hear a little bit of noise being made about it but I haven't heard like any major legislative initiative to – oh, we need to like radically change the regulations. The same is true for nuclear. So nuclear power, the construction time is five to six years and probably could be a lot less, especially as the industry moves to small modular reactors. The whole idea is to bring down the startup cost in time. But the regulations can take a decade, a decade of just applications and pre-applications or more and cost millions of dollars. I saw for one particular nuclear power plant, the application was two million pages. That's how long the application was. Oh, my God.

'''E:''' Page one.

'''S:''' Enter your name here. I've read a lot of articles about this, a lot of people who are outlining the fact that there's a lot of efficiency to be gained without sacrificing safety. So the American nuclear power apparently is like among the safest in the world. But if the tradeoff is that it takes a decade to get through the regulations – So we need to find that compromise. And we probably don't have to compromise on safety. I liken it to Operation Warp Speed, right, where you took a five-year approval process and we did it in nine months. And how did that happen? It was not because of funding, because companies that didn't even accept government funding were able to do it too. It's because the FDA said, this is how we could make this happen fast. We do all these things concurrently. So you don't have to wait to start phase two until you get phase one approval. You can do all these things at the same time. Like, for example. But also it might require funding for more people to do the process, right? So you're not, like, just waiting for somebody whose time to be freed up for three years, you know, while you're on the stack of, you know, applications that somebody needs to go through. So I do wonder how short we could get that time down to. Like, could we really stand up small modular reactors as fast as we stand up new data centers to basically power them, right? Yeah, yeah. And the same is true for hydroelectric. It's also a huge environmental – studies have to be done. There's a huge delay because of red tape. So it's not just nuclear. Even given all the good that the Inflation Reduction Act did in terms of investment and industry incentives for zero carbon energy, this spike in demand is a problem. And we're not going to really be able to stick to our timeline of decarbonization by 2050 without some massive legislative overhaul and a lot more investment in infrastructure. And so we're moving backwards right now. We're building more fossil fuel and keeping our coal-fired plants open to meet the spike in demand, and that's bad. Very. Yeah. All right. Sorry to end on a bummer, but there it is. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time.

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== Who's That Noisy? (54:24) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 975
|answer = {{w|Scientific pitch notation|Very low musical note}} '''A−1''' [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWQADWh3D8s on Subcontrabassoon (13.75Hz)] 
Vice article: [https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3p5by/the-mythical-32-pound-subcontrabassoon-is-now-a-real-musical-instrument The Mythical 32-Pound "Subcontrabassoon" Is Now a Real Musical Instrument]
|}}


'''J:''' All right, guys. Last week I played this noisy. Any of you guys like to guess?

'''C:''' Fan?

'''J:''' All right. Well, we had a listener named Joe Jennings write in and said, first time trying, but this week's noisy reminds me of a sound of a particular ventilator we had in our ICU for a couple of patients in the early 2000s. The device's use was with adult patients, soon to be found to be not efficacious, so it is no longer used in our ICU. The machine was a high-frequency oscillator ventilator. So I tried to find this, but I couldn't find it. I wanted to hear what that sounded like, but that is definitely not it. But that's an interesting guess. A listener named Selena Goubert said, hello, is this the sound of a paper jogger? Love the segment and the show. All right, so what is a paper jogger? Well, I didn't know when I looked it up. Do any of you guys know what it is? Mm-mm.

'''DL:''' No.

'''J:''' So there are machines where you could put in reams of paper that are kind of, you know, not lined up with each other. You know, like if you have sheets of paper that are stacked.

'''C:''' Almost like a card. Yeah.

'''J:''' And it shakes them and it lines them up. It takes a little while, but it lines them up. These machines come in all different shapes and sizes. I did listen to a couple of them. And they're basically like a vibrating table. That's basically it. So... But that was a good guess, but that is not correct. John Pedraza wrote in and said, greetings from Kosovo. My guest is a paint mixer shaking a can of paint. Keep up the great work.

'''E:''' Yeah, that's a good one. I bet.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's not that, and I've heard that many, many, many times. I would think that the oscillation in a paint mixer is much faster than this sound, but that is not correct. I have another listener here that wrote in and said, this is Michael Blaney, and he said, Hi, Jay, it sounds to me like a very poorly tuned motorcycle. Sounds almost identical to our neighbor's grunter that he liked to warm up and go for rides on about 6 a.m. on Saturday morning. Oh, my God.

'''C:''' That's annoying.

'''J:''' That is not correct. So nobody guessed it. I'm not surprised. This is a tough one. So the person who sent this in, Brett Newton, said, I look forward to seeing you in a crew in Dallas. So we're going to see this guy in Dallas. He said, this is a video I took a couple of years ago documenting my friend Richard Bobo's first ever day where his prototype subcontra bassoon was playable. The note in question is A minus one, negative one. I don't know what any of this means. Being the lowest note on the majority of pianos. The negative indicates that it is a full octave lower. This means that the subcontra bassoon shown here is the lowest woodwind instrument ever created. And this is one of the lowest notes capable. Okay, so let's just hear it again. So this is a wind instrument. The guy's blowing into this. And you can hear it. I left the sound of him breathing in the beginning to give you a little, you know, help. I'm not sure why you would need an instrument.

'''E:''' I would never guess that.

'''J:''' Me neither. I know.

'''E:''' No chance.

'''C:''' That is not very musical.

'''J:''' I know. It's more of a percussion instrument than anything. But thank you so much. I thought that was interesting. There's people out there making musical instruments all the time. There's so many musical instruments that you don't know about. And this was one of them. So I got a new noisy this week. This was sent in by a listener named Gordon Dempsey. Check this out. This is a tough one. If you think you know what this is, or if you heard a cool noise. this week, you got to email me at WTN at the skeptics guide.org.

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=== New Noisy (58:04) ===
[zippy whooshings]

'''J:'''... {{wtnAnswer|977|what this is}}

== Announcements (58:39) ==

'''J:''' Steve, we have lots of stuff happening and I'm going to tell you all about it. All right? So we have two private shows happening in Dallas. They're both happening on April 7th. Okay? This is in the heart of Dallas in a hotel. One of those two shows still has tickets available and that is the 12 noon show. And you can go to theskepticsguide.org to find more information about how to buy tickets for that. Now, on April 6th – I know it's the day before and I didn't go in order, but I'm just – I'm getting through this. Give me a break. April 6th, we have an extravaganza. If you don't know what this show is, this is our stage show. This show is about how your brain can fool you, how you can't trust your own perception on reality, and we prove it to you throughout the show.

'''S:''' Basically by humiliating each other.

'''J:''' Yeah, we humiliate each other.

'''E:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''J:''' There's a lot of improv bits that we do where George is basically making us do funny stuff. And then we teach you about things and then more funny and weird stuff. There is a lot of great moments in this show. We've refined the hell out of this show over the last six or seven years. So if you're available, this is in Dallas. It's on April 6th. And you can find information for tickets on theskepticsguide.org. All right, now we also have a show, two shows actually, that are going to be happening in August and they're going to be in Chicago. So we're going to have an extravaganza and we're going to have an SGU private show. Now this SGU private show, it's very likely that that show will be on August 18th. I mean, there's a slight possibility that we might move the date to earlier in the day on the 17th, but there's plenty of time to work all the details out. We are shooting for the 18th. This will be our 1,000th episode. Ooh, we made it. Yep. So this is a five-hour show.

'''B:''' Not yet.

'''C:''' Five hours.

'''J:''' Yes. Five hours. It's five hours.

'''E:''' What are we going to talk about for five hours?

'''J:''' Well, there's lots of things that are going to be happening during this show.

'''E:''' 200 episodes an hour.

'''J:''' We're going to be definitely talking about our experience doing this show for the last 20 years. We're going to be talking about some of the best moments, some of the funniest moments. We're going to talk about – George is going to be interviewing us. He's going to be asking us personal questions. He's going to ask the audience to ask us questions. There's going to be trivia. There's going to be tons of interviews of people that have been on the show. Like frequent guests, friends, and just interesting interviews that we've had. I'm starting to line those up right now. It is a gigantic celebration of the fact that we reached this incredible round number milestone. I think 1,000 is just an incredible number of episodes. Like the amount of time that we put in each week to pull this show off multiplied by 1,000. You know what I mean? It's just unreal that we've been doing this for 20 years. Anyway, we would really love for you to join us. It's all going to be happening in Chicago. This is a city that we've never been to for the SGU. We're really excited to go. So please do go to our website. You can find a link on there again where all the other buttons are to find more information about this show. The extravaganza tickets are also selling right now, and I think there are still some VIP tickets left, but they might be sold out.

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== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:01:56) ==
=== Follow up #1: Fighting lions ===
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'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Jay. One quick email from last week. So we had a lot of fun talking about that survey where 8% of men said they could beat a lion in unarmed combat.

'''C:''' I like how you said men because I don't think that was specified.

'''S:''' No, it was. The survey did specify it was men.

'''C:''' I was going to say that's a safe assumption.

'''E:''' Not just men, but manly men.

'''S:''' Manly men. We had a lot of feedback on that. A lot of people, I think, enjoyed that segment. But two of note. One guy linked us to a video of an interview with an MMA expert who also apparently has expertise in animal fighting. Mainly animals fighting other animals. But it was funny to listen to him talk, basically reiterating a lot of the stuff that we said. He basically said a gorilla can weigh 400 pounds. It could lift 2,000 pounds. And you could take the strongest man and the best fighter to have ever lived, and he would just rip him to shreds, like with no effort. It's so not a contest, it's unbelievable. All right. But the other one that was interesting is that we got an email to a – this is a 2019 news story about a man who beat a mountain lion in unarmed combat.

'''C:''' This does not surprise me. Mountain lions are not African lions.

'''S:''' Yeah, but it gets even better, Cara. It was a juvenile mountain lion. They think that weighed between 20 and 60 pounds.

'''E:''' Oh, my God. That's like a big dog.

'''C:''' I mean, they're not. They're still brutal. I would not want to.

'''S:''' It probably weighed 40 pounds.

'''C:''' I still think it could kill me. Oh, totally.

'''S:''' Now, this guy fought it for 10 minutes. It scratched him up. It did a lot of damage, but he eventually was able to choke it out. And that's how he killed it. But yeah, so yeah, that's like an edge case, right? A 40-pound juvenile mountain lion. That's not a 200, 300-pound African lion. Yeah.

'''C:''' And that's the thing. Just because they both have the word lion in their name, they're not the same species.

'''E:''' Like dandelion.

'''S:''' A fully adult mountain lion, I think most people would be hard-pressed to survive an encounter with that.

'''C:''' But that's not what they were asking in the survey.

'''E:''' I'm afraid of the bobcat that roams around in the neighborhood. I don't want to go near that thing.

'''S:''' These things are predators.

'''C:''' You probably could take it, but don't.

'''S:''' They evolved, and their life experience is killing other things. Right.

'''E:''' You are in their environment.

'''C:''' I'm afraid of some of my friends' house cats. I wouldn't want to mess with them.

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== Interview with Dante Lauretta (1:04:47) ==
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* {{w|Dante Lauretta}}, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cybp21DcWPg The Asteroid Hunter], and principal investigator on NASA's {{w| OSIRIS-REx|OSIRIS-REx mission}}.


'''S:''' So I thought that was funny. But anyway. All right, guys. Well, we have a great interview, so let's go to that interview now. We are joined now by Dr. Dante Loretta. Dante, welcome to the Skeptic's Guide.

'''E:''' Thank you.

'''DL:''' It's great to be here.

'''S:''' And you are the principal investigator on NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission and a professor in the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona. So we're excited to talk to you about OSIRIS-REx and your other work. So tell us first, just give us an overview of the mission and how did the sample return go?

'''DL:''' OSIRIS-REx is a NASA mission which visited near-Earth asteroid Bennu. We arrived there in December of 2018, sent the spacecraft down to collect a sample in October of 2020, and successfully delivered that material to the surface of the Earth last September in 2023. It's been an amazing adventure. And I can tell you the science is just getting started because we've cracked into that sample capsule and we've delivered material to laboratories all around the world.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's really exciting. But I have to ask, though, as somebody who's obviously intimately involved with this, how certain was it that the material was going to come back? Or was that basically a coin flip? How anxious were you that you were going to actually get stuff back?

'''DL:''' Well, you have to ask as a function of time, right? Because when we first started it, it seemed like magic when we were designing the mission. I couldn't believe such a thing was even possible. And then as we got into the design and we reduced the risk and we really got rigorous about how we're going to approach this challenge. Technically, we launched with a 99 percent chance of mission success. That's an engineering term. I was, of course, biting my nails the entire way, especially during collection of the sample, because we didn't know how the asteroid surface was going to respond. And then those critical moments last September when that parachute system had to deploy because we could have lost the whole program in those final minutes.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's hard. You know, for any NASA mission, it's hard to say 99 percent. I mean, I don't think their history matches that confidence. That's right. It's hard. It's hard. You know, they've crashed stuff on Mars. Well, it's something like half the probes to Mars have crashed. I mean, they do fantastic things. But wow, 99 percent. That was pretty confident.

'''DL:''' Like I said, that's an engineering requirement. We have to show 99% probability of meeting our requirements. What you can't do is put those requirements on the asteroid. And we, in fact, did that. And the asteroid threw a ton of curveballs at us. In some cases, literally threw curveballs at us. Particles were flying off the surface.

'''J:''' Yeah, I was reading about – correct me where I get this wrong. But the vehicle kind of barely touched down and then it shot like some type of gas to lift up the regolith so it could be captured, right?

'''DL:''' Yeah, I like to compare it to a leaf blower basically. We blew down gas into the surface and kicked up a bunch of dust and gravel. We had a – cylindrical sample collector, basically an air filter, and we just shoved as many rocks and pebbles into that as the gas would allow.

'''S:''' Now, was there a particular reason why you targeted Bennu? Was it because you thought the asteroid itself was a good target, or just because it was opportunistic, you were able to get to it?

'''DL:''' It was a combination of both. We were limited in where we could go in the solar system based on the capabilities of the spacecraft. We knew we were going to have to target a near-Earth asteroid. That's a smaller population compared to what's in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And those objects are generally a lot more accessible. And particularly Bennu has a very Earth-like orbit. It's on a low inclination, relatively small eccentricity, and in fact crosses the orbit of the Earth. But science got to play a role here, too. And the mission for me especially is driven by the origins investigation. We really want to understand how asteroids like Bennu may have contributed to Earth being a habitable world in terms of delivering the water that's in our oceans and the air that we breathe, and maybe even the organic molecules that trigger the origin of life on this planet. Bennu is one of the few dark carbon rich asteroids in the near Earth population.

'''S:''' All right, so it did have features that made it a good target, plus it was also one of the accessible ones.

'''DL:''' Correct.

'''S:''' Yeah, it had both those features. And yeah, so this gets to. my next question is, is it the thinking that Bennu is a good frozen sample of the very early solar system? And also, you kind of answered this question already, but can you talk more about the fact that it's the kind of asteroid that probably contributed a lot of material to the early Earth?

'''DL:''' Yeah, Bennu stands out in the asteroid population because its surface is really dark. It reflects on average about four and a half percent of the sunlight. It's like coal or asphalt. And that was one of our first clues that it might be really rich in carbon. When we look in the main asteroid belt, which is between Mars and Jupiter, we see those dark asteroids are a lot more abundant the farther out you go. And so we think Bennu may have originated from a much larger asteroid, possibly accreted out beyond Jupiter, in which case in the early solar system, four and a half billion years ago, it would have picked up not only the rocks and dust and metal that's in the inner solar system, but ices and TARS that would be stable that far out. And somehow that material had to migrate into the inner solar system, delivering those critical compounds to the terrestrial planets pretty early in the process of planet formation.

'''S:''' So why would that kind of material be more common in the outer solar system than the inner solar system?

'''DL:''' It's a temperature gradient. So in the early solar system, we were a protoplanetary disk. There was material falling and collapsing from a giant molecular cloud that was spinning due to conservation of angular momentum. Most of the material went in to form the sun at the center, but a lot of material was spread out orbiting around that center of gravity. It's really hot close to the sun. And as you get farther away, it gets colder and colder. And that's when ices will become stable and also the organic material. And when it's just like a comet, when it comes into the inner solar system, it starts to sublimate and out gas. And eventually, if it sticks around, it just disappears.

'''S:''' So why is Bennu still around? Do you think it fairly recently migrated to the inner solar system?

'''DL:''' We do. We estimate Bennu migrated into the inner solar system about 1.75 million years ago. And that's based on tiny craters that we saw shot throughout the boulders on its surface. And we know the population of dust in the inner solar system. And we can use those little micro craters to estimate how long at least those boulder surfaces have been exposed in near Earth space. But Bennu's able to hang on to the water because it's no longer in the form of ice. That ice melted and reacted with the rocky material forming clays. And clays lock water right into their crystal structure, and they're stable at much higher temperatures than water ice is. So it's a natural way to deliver water that had to condense as icy material in the outer solar system. That object melted, clay minerals formed, and the clays are capable of surviving even in the intense heat of the inner solar system.

'''S:''' Now, is that something you knew before you had the sample return? Is that something you learned because of the sample return?

'''DL:''' It's what we hoped based on the selection of Bennu and comparison to very rare types of meteorites that show these clay minerals as well. So that was the goal, that we were targeting an object with that kind of mineralogy. And I'm very happy to report that we were right and we got exactly the kind of sample we were hoping for.

'''S:''' So let's talk about that. You said the science of the sample examination is just starting, but what have you learned so far?

'''DL:''' We've got a pretty good sense of the major mineralogy. In addition to those clays, we're seeing iron sulfides, iron oxides, calcium carbonates, and also phosphates. And the phosphates for me are one of the most exciting minerals or phases that we found because I'm an astrobiologist. I'm interested in the elements and the molecules that may have contributed to the origin of life. And I think a lot of information is in the phosphorus chemistry because it makes up, for example, the Backbone of our DNA. It's used as the major energy molecule in all life on Earth. It forms the cell membranes. And also, once you get to more advanced organisms, bones and teeth.

'''S:''' Is it possible that there are any amino acids in the sample returned from Bennu or on Bennu at all?

'''DL:''' Absolutely. And that's one of our key measurement objectives. We reported some early results just last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It does contain amino acids. They look really compelling. For the listeners, amino acids are the building blocks of our proteins. So we're really excited to recognize that these carbon rich asteroids are may have brought the exact kinds of molecules that are used extensively in biochemistry today. We call that the exogenous delivery hypothesis. And it gives us hope that not only did Earth get all that material, but everything else in the solar system did too. Venus, Mars, the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn.

'''S:''' Yeah, Europa.

'''DL:''' Yeah, and we don't know how the origin of life occurred, but we do now have some confidence that at least those other places had a shot at it, making the search for organisms on those locations really exciting.

'''S:''' Now, you're going to have to explain this, but what was the chirality of those amino acids?

'''DL:''' The chirality is still under investigation. So we don't have a definitive answer on that, but it is a really important measurement because when we look at the proteins in all life on Earth, they use what's called the left-handed version of an amino acid. If you form these chemicals through a non-biological process, they have two mirrored structures, a right-handed version and a left-handed version. Somehow life is only selecting the left-handed ones to build the proteins with. And we do have evidence of small left-handed excesses in the amino acids. But we're not confident enough in that result right now. We really need to go in with more sample mass, higher sensitivity to definitively answer that question. But it is one of our top science objectives.

'''S:''' Yeah. But it sounds like you would predict that they would be both right and left-handed amino acids, but maybe a little bit of an excess of left-handed. And that's why life ended up using left-handed amino acids.

'''DL:''' I would definitely predict that when you form amino acids through a geochemical process, maybe in the hot fluids that we think form these clay minerals, you should produce equal amounts of left and right-handed versions. And then the question is, how does nature select one over the other? One idea, and I mentioned the sulfide and oxide minerals earlier, is that those mineral surfaces can have some chiral properties of their own, and they may preferentially absorb the left-handed over the right-handed and allow you at least locally to concentrate one version over the other. And that's an area also of active investigation right now.

'''B:''' That reminds me of the matter-antimatter mystery in the universe. Like, why is there matter and so little antimatter?

'''DL:''' Yeah, right? It's kind of interesting when you start to break these symmetries, right? A lot of our laws of physics, chemistry rely on symmetry, but the universe wouldn't exist if everything was perfectly symmetrical, everything matter and antimatter to wipe itself out. Left and right-handed amino acids don't build peptides and protein chains. So something is driving the system to one version of that material.

'''J:''' Were you guys able to accurately predict what the regolith was going to contain?

'''DL:''' We were. Yeah, we have a nice sample analysis plan. I posted it several months ago on archive.org. If people are really interested, it's about 300 pages long. And we predicted clay minerals. We predicted iron oxide minerals. We predicted sulfide minerals, carbonates. We did not predict the phosphorus bearing phase. That's one of the biggest surprises so far.

'''S:''' Getting back to the amino acids, because it's interesting that you say that there's a lot of clays there, like water-containing clays. Isn't there a hypothesis that one of the potential pathways to the origin of the first biological molecules on Earth was that clays formed a template that allowed either amino acids or RNAs to form? Are you familiar with that?

'''DL:''' Absolutely. And even if all of that had happened on Earth, we still are going to gain a lot of knowledge from these Bennu samples because the environments where these clay minerals form terrestrially are at these hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, particularly the white smokers or what we call the alkaline hydrothermal vents. That heated water is being driven by formation of clay minerals, a process we call serpentinization. It's an exothermic chemical reaction. So it releases heat, heats that water up. It's the carbonate minerals that are white, which is why they look like white smokers. We try to understand even today where these environments exist. Could this have been a site for the origin of life? Well, we can't answer that question on Earth because there's all kinds of organisms that live down there. So if you find amino acids, well, you're like, yeah, probably came from that bacteria. Right. So, yeah. But now if Bennu had that same geologic environment, presumably without life present, so we could see exactly what you were talking about. How do these clay minerals catalyze formation of these interesting molecules, maybe isolate them in voids and pockets, leading to some kind of catalytic system, which we think is one of the hallmarks of life.

'''S:''' Yeah, some kind of prebiotic chemistry going on there.

'''DL:''' Exactly. And we don't have to worry about all this pesky terrestrial life contaminating us.

'''B:''' Contaminating it, right.

'''S:''' Right. So you mentioned that the amount of phosphates was a bit of a surprise. Any other big surprises so far? Or is there potential for any surprises for analyses you haven't completed yet?

'''DL:''' Potential. There's always potential for surprises. And I think the organic molecular diversity is turning out to be pretty astonishing. We're seeing tens of thousands of different molecules as we go through kind of sweeping on a mass spectrometer and just looking at all the different total masses that are there. And you start to say, how are we ever going to sort all that out? And the good news is we don't have to do all that because these samples are going to be around for decades. We'll kind of start the process, but in just a few short months, any qualified researcher around the world is going to be able to request this material for analysis in their laboratories and maybe focus on a subset of that amazing organic diversity.

'''J:''' I would think that there wouldn't be so much organic diversity on something that doesn't have an atmosphere and flowing water. Where is it coming from?

'''DL:''' Good question. Now, I think one area of that question that's interesting to focus on is there probably was liquid water on Bennu's parent body. And that's an important concept to get across. So Bennu's a pretty small asteroid, about 500 meters in diameter. That would not sustain liquid water. There's simply not enough pressure inside of it. But it's a fragment or a series of fragments, what we call a rubble pile, from a much larger body that was catastrophically shattered in maybe a billion years ago in the main asteroid belt. And Bennu is just one of thousands of fragments from that collision. And so that body may in fact have had liquid water, kind of the hydrothermal system like we see at the bottom of the ocean today.

'''S:''' Do you think Bennu is the fragment that is? Bennu was a superficial fragment or a deep fragment and does it matter?

'''DL:''' I think it was probably both because you mix that whole object up when you shattered it. Think about breaking a pool rack. The balls go everywhere and you don't know which one's going to end up next to the other. When we simulate these collisions, you can easily mix surface material with deep interior material. And the boulders on Bennu kind of give us a clue that that might be the case because we have several different populations. Some are really, really dark, like less than 3%. Some of them are much brighter, 5, 6, 7, 8%. Some rare phases up to 30%. And we see layering like sedimentary strata in those boulders that look like maybe you had slow deposition of material at the bottom of a liquid water setting.

'''B:''' Well, how are the pieces sticking together? If the bigger chunk was destroyed – I mean it's not – I mean Ben, it was what, 500 meters you said? I mean there's no gravity really going on there. So did it just – just the impact had such velocity that it just kind of glommed together into different chunks or – There's just enough gravity to pull all that and hold it together.

'''DL:''' There's just five micro G's. is the acceleration of the surface. Wow. And what really surprised us was we thought that we had the same question. How is this thing being held together? And we assumed there must be some sort of chemical cohesion. between the grains. even a van der waals force would be strong yeah right like a gecko exactly. and then we made contact with the asteroid and there was no resistance to the downward motion of the spacecraft. we sunk in over 50 centimeters deep astonishingly deep compared to all of the tests and most of the simulations we had run and I honestly believe if we hadn't fired the back away engines we would have lost it. it would have disappeared like into a pool of quicksand.

'''S:''' So with the success of OSIRIS-REx, are there plans for further asteroid material return?

'''DL:''' There are a couple missions in the works right now. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, which has flown two successful asteroid sample return missions, is currently working on the Martian Moon Explorer or MMX mission, which is targeting Phobos, the small moon of Mars, which may be a captured asteroid. I'm working with some colleagues on a concept to try to deliver material from the surface of a comet, which I think is the next most challenging target. Small body, much more rich in ice even than Bennu's precursor, we think, and would contain additional clues to these important elements and chemical compounds. But there is no asteroid sample return mission currently in development, at least that I'm aware of.

'''S:''' Okay. But as you say, you're going to be investigating this material for the next 40 years probably.

'''DL:''' That's right. And beyond, I think it's going to be a treasure for generations to come.

'''B:''' Well, how much material was brought back?

'''DL:''' We brought back 121.6 grams, which is more than twice what we promised NASA. Our mission requirement was 60 grams. So we're incredibly proud of that feat.

'''S:''' Which doesn't sound like a lot, but most of the experiments you're doing require just probably a very tiny amount of material, right?

'''DL:''' Yeah, we have electron microscopes. We can literally characterize things down to the atomic scale. We did kind of a bottom-up estimate when we said, how much material do we need? And the scientists said, we need 15 grams to do all of the science that we're laying out on this program. Nice. And NASA's requirement is we can't consume more than 25% of the sample. 75% has to be held for future researchers. So that's how we got to the 60.

'''B:''' Nice.

'''J:''' Dante, so you wrote a book that in part covers this, right?

'''DL:''' Just this week, we released The Asteroid Hunter, which is really my personal journey on this mission. It starts out when I'm an undergraduate looking for a path in life. I get an amazing undergraduate opportunity to work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And that just fires me up. Most of the book focuses on the 20-year journey I've been on to conceive, design, build, test, launch, fly. return and now analyze these amazing samples from the asteroid.

'''J:''' Where can people get your book?

'''DL:''' The book is available everywhere. Fine books are sold. You can get it on Amazon. You can get it at Barnes and Noble. Lots of local bookstores are carrying it. That's awesome. Yeah, I should also say the audiobook version, I read most of it, but I worked with a good friend of mine, Sir Brian May from Queen, who does what we call the interludes underlying the grand Osiris-Rex adventure. is a cosmic journey where two carbon atoms are trying to reconnect after getting separated in the early solar system. One of those is in my genetic code and one of them is in Bennu.

'''J:''' Love it. Did you learn anything cool about Queen?

'''DL:''' Oh, my goodness. I've learned so much. Brian and I did a second book. We released it last summer called Bennu 3D. Brian is a member of my science team, and he's an expert in stereo imaging where he takes two images that are slightly offset in angle. And with a stereoscope, you can see the surface pop out in 3D. That was a joint venture between his London stereoscopic company and the University of Arizona Press. But I got to hang out with him. We did a bunch of autograph signing. We started working on a little music together. And I've seen him play live now five different times. It's been an amazing partnership.

'''S:''' Oh, wow.

'''DL:''' That's awesome. And I should say when he does his guitar solo, at least on the latest tour, he rises out of the stage riding Bennu into his cosmos.

'''E:''' Of course he is. Of course he is.

'''J:''' Oh, that is awesome.

'''S:''' That's awesome. Yeah.

'''J:''' Yeah, he's a profound guitarist. I mean, God, his writing for Queen was just epic.

'''DL:''' Yeah, he really is a polymath. He's a pleasure to work with. Writing that book was a complete joy. He was a great collaborator. And we're looking forward to some more adventures together. We'll both be at the Starmus, which is his space meets music festival that he holds every year. This year, it's going to be in Bratislava.

'''J:''' Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. And it was, again, like we covered this two or three months ago. And then when I found out that I can get you on an interview, I'm like, yes, this is the exact person that we want to talk to about this because you're like, you know, you're ankle deep in the regular.

'''DL:''' That's right. Literally some days.

'''B:''' 50 centimeters deep.

'''DL:''' That's right. 50 centimeters deep. We have a really cool animation of that that the Goddard Science Visualization Studio put out if you want to see what actually happened to the spacecraft. It's frightening. I still shudder when I watch it.

'''B:''' I want to check that out.

'''S:''' Well, Dante, thank you so much for joining us. This was fascinating.

'''DL:''' Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate it.

[https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/20360/ _DL_mentions_osiris_animations_]

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:27:03) ==

{{SOFinfo
|item1 = Researchers have developed a universal exoskeleton control system that can work for any user without the need for extensive calibration or training.
|link1web = https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adi8852
|link1title = Estimating human joint moments unifies exoskeleton control, reducing user effort
|link1pub = Science Robotics

|item2 = Scientists created a new method for using classic computers to error-correct quantum computers, resulting in a 60 qubit quantum computer with an accuracy rate of 91%.
|link2web = https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.07914.pdf
|link2title = Benchmarking highly entangled states on a 60-atom analog quantum simulator
|link2pub = n

|item3 = New material design allows for structural wood to create buildings as high as 18 stories.
|link3web = https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0298379
|link3title = The potential use of mass timber in mid-to high-rise construction and the associated carbon benefits in the United States
|link3pub = PLoS ONE

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = quantum computer accuracy
|science1 = universal exoskeleton system
|science2 = new structural wood design

|rogue1 = jay
|answer1 = quantum computer accuracy

|rogue2 =Evan
|answer2 =quantum computer accuracy

|rogue3 =bob
|answer3 =quantum computer accuracy

|rogue4 =cara
|answer4 =new structural wood design

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win =y 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and then one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We just have three regular news items this week. Are you guys ready? Okay, here we go. Item number one. Researchers have developed a universal exoskeleton control system that can work for any user without the need for extensive calibration or training. Item number two. Scientists created a new method for using classic computers to error-correct quantum computers, resulting in a 60-qubit quantum computer with an accuracy rate of 91%. And number three, new material design allows for structural wood to create buildings as high as 18 stories. Jay, go first.

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' Researchers have developed a universal exoskeleton control system that can work for any user without the need for extensive calibration or training. I mean, I would think that we're about time for something like that. Extensive calibration, I mean, they'd have to fit it to some degree, but I bet you that it could be very intuitive. I would say that one is science. Second one, scientists created a new method for using classic computers to error correct quantum computers resulting in a 60 qubit quantum computer with an accuracy rate of 91%. I can't possibly see how scientists could use classic computers to error correct quantum computers. That goes against everything that I think I understand about quantum computing. All right, so that one is a definite maybe. The last one, new material design allows for structural wood to create buildings as high as 18 stories. Okay, I'm definitely going with number two, the quantum computer as the fake. That is definitely the fake.

'''S:''' Okay, Evan.

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''E:''' Well, I'm probably going to wind up agreeing with Jay on this. The exoskeleton control system. Did anyone else think of Ripley jumping in the yellow thing and just saying the loading thing, walking around with no training basically and just learning it in two seconds?

'''B:''' No, she actually used one for her job before she went on that mission.

'''E:''' Oh, so maybe I will change my – based on that, I'll change my answer. Yeah, I mean, I don't know about quantum computers. I'm very ignorant. 60-qubit quantum computer. I read something about it. Was it going to be 1,000 qubit coming or they did it?

'''B:''' Well, that's the plan. I think IBM was planning 1,000.

'''E:''' This year, I think they were hoping to, I think. But this accuracy rate of 91%, I don't know if that's high, medium, low, where. I just don't know enough about this. This is why I think I'm going to call that one the fiction as well. And the last one about a new material design, structural wood to go as high as 18 stories. I suppose so. In theory, I'm not really sure why you would want to build an 18-story wood structure in itself. So I'll agree with Jay. Jay, you and I are together.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' All right. The exoskeleton, I can buy that. I mean at least there's some calibration training. It's just not extensive. I mean it incorporates some AI in the control system and it seems reasonable. The quantum computer one though, 91% – I haven't – track this lately, but I know 91% is very good. It's – I mean it's all – for quantum computers, it's all about error correction. It really is. You could have a low qubit system. But if it were say very close to 100% error corrected, that would – achieve amazing results. Even if it's a low qubit, you don't need crazy qubits. As long as you have really, really good error correction, it could be dramatic. So 91 seems really high and it'd be a hell of a breakthrough. I really hope that's true. The third one, structure wood 18, that's still pretty damn high. What, 180 feet? All wood for the structure? Wow. I wouldn't be surprised if They had some freaky quantum breakthrough, and this one is the fiction. That sounds quite high for Wood. But in terms of just like the odds, I'm going to have to go with quantum and say that that is probably going to be fiction, and it's not quite as high as 91%. Okay, and Cara?

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' So everyone is going with quantum computers?

'''E:''' So far. Okay.

'''C:''' I don't know anything about quantum computers. So you're saying that something about the qubits and the 91% is too high. The too many qubits and the too many percents.

'''E:''' You know more than I do, Cara.

'''B:''' The accuracy of 91% is really good.

'''C:''' The accuracy is too high. I don't... Part of me wants to like... Keep going on my crazy streak and like go out on a limb because I don't want Steve to sweep us. I don't know. I just want to play the odds here. Like the poker player in me is coming out. The exoskeleton one seems tough. like too easy but I felt a few people hesitate on the structural wood so I don't know if I want to play the odds on that or not.

'''E:''' okay okay especially after last week's defeat.

'''C:''' I know I'm definitely and and I'm going last now. it's like carob. don't be stupid don't be stupid. I wish I could see Steve's face. This is the one thing about this being audio only.

'''E:''' Oh, right. You need to tell. You're a poker player and a good poker player.

'''C:''' I'm better at playing poker live than like computer poker. Steve, give me something.

'''E:''' Steve, turn on your camera.

'''C:''' I think I'm going to do, I'm feeling reckless right now. I'm going to, I'm going out on a limb. I'm going to say structural wood. You know, I know nothing about quantum computers and I know nothing about material science. So I'm literally rolling the dice and saying structural wood. That's crazy. 18 stories. There's no way. It's only eight stories or something. Or you made that up or something.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' The last one being the fiction. All right. Cara going out on a limb. I love it. All right. So you all agree on one. We'll start there. Researchers have developed a universal exoskeleton control system that can work for any user without the need for extensive calibration or training. You all think this one is science, and this one is science. And of course, Evan, all the reporting mentions Ripley and aliens with the exoskeleton. Yes. So the idea is that you build a robotic exoskeleton that can help somebody who's paralyzed walk, for example. And the problem is that these systems all need extensive calibration and training.

'''B:''' Not to mention the batteries.

'''S:''' Yeah, but I'm just in time to just get it to work for a person. But this new system is basically like off the shelf. It works right away. It doesn't need any calibration or training. And Bob, you hit on it. It's AI. Of course it's AI. Of course. Yeah. So AI basically trains itself as you use it. And then that's it. That's great.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' How much energy is it going to take?

'''S:''' Well, I mean, this is not an improvement in the design of the robot itself, just the control system. But it's a huge – this was a huge impediment to getting this to people who need to use it clinically, right? Is that, yeah, after months of training, you'll be able to walk sort of with it. Now it reduces that time and could work right off the shelf. So that's – it's a huge advance actually.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' All right, I guess we'll take these in order. Scientists have created a new method for using classic computers to error-correct quantum computers, resulting in a 60-qubit quantum computer with an accuracy rate of 91%. So you guys threw out a lot of comments there, some of which are kind of correct. So, Jay, this is what happens now all the time. Classic computers are used to error-correct quantum computers. That's how they work, right? Again, it's in our book. Yeah. But, yeah. So the problem is, the problem is that classic, you know, the whole point of quantum computers is that there are certain calculations that they could do orders of magnitude faster than classic computers. So you rapidly get beyond what a classic computer can do, right? You know, except for like the smallest, you know, qubit quantum computers. So improving – Bob is correct. Error correction is the game at this point. That's like the big limiting factor with quantum computers. So any advance in the ability to error correct them would be huge. But did they do it? And are the numbers accurate? Well, this one is the fiction. Because – Too bad.

'''B:''' I'm bummed. I'm kind of bummed even though I got it right.

'''S:''' The – Yeah, in a way you want it to be true. So first of all, it wasn't really a quantum computer. It was a quantum simulator, which is a type of quantum computer, but whatever. It's a little different.

'''B:''' No, but that's cool, though. That's a whole thing, man.

'''S:''' And the accuracy was 9%. The error rate was 91%.

'''E:''' Inversion.

'''S:''' But 9% is awesome because the previous benchmark was like 1%. Like 1% accuracy rate is considered very high for a quantum computer. So getting it up to 9% is huge. Yeah. Look at that. But yeah, 91 is crazy. That's obviously an order of magnitude greater than where we are. So how did they do it? What was the new method? The new method was using classic computers in series. So they liken it to like doing a painting with increasingly smaller brushes, adding increasingly smaller details. Yeah. So you're not relying on one classic computer to give you the same amount of detail as a quantum computer. Once you get beyond a certain point with quantum computers, you can't. Again, that's the whole idea. So you just use a series of classic computers to try to – But each one subsequently adding a little bit more detail to the answer and then eventually you get an answer that's detailed enough that you can error correct the quantum computer to see. did the quantum computer get the correct answer basically. And so they were able to get a 60-qubit system up to 9% accuracy, which is huge. So, okay. It's actually an incremental advance in quantum computing, but fairly solid.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' All this means, that new material design allows for structural wood to create buildings as high as 18 stories is science. Sorry, Cara.

'''C:''' Yeah, I tried.

'''S:''' Two weeks in a row. That's like even more rare for you. I'm keeping things interesting. I appreciate that. I really do.

'''E:''' It was a clearly stated gamble. Yes.

'''S:''' Evan, you asked the question, why would you want to build an 18-story building out of wood? Well, there's a very good reason, and that is because of the carbon footprint of the building. So steel and concrete are huge carbon emitters, whereas if you build it out of wood, it's a carbon sink, right? You are locking that carbon in the wood. And for whatever, that building is going to survive for 100 years. You're tying up that carbon for 100 years rather than releasing carbon because of – through steel and concrete. So that's why. That's why you would do it.

'''E:''' So these 18-story buildings would be of equal quality and structural integrity and everything else?

'''S:''' Well, so what happened was that the international standards were altered to basically now allow for wooden structures up to 18 stories because prior to that, you couldn't do it. You couldn't get approval. for that design because but they were outdated. they were based upon the timber that we had at the time but there's recent material science advances in timber basically using like cross grain laminates I think is a big one where you essentially yeah you sort of have laminated wood with it where you're deliberately making the grain go in different directions so it adds a lot of strength. yeah Well, it's just – these are not totally new. The point is they're getting really good and they finally updated the international standards to account for these more recent advances in what's called mass timber. And they basically said, yeah, the mass timber we have today, you can build it. You could safely build an 18-story structure out of them. Okay. Also, they can apparently be beautiful. Aesthetically, it gives architects a lot of options. Oh, sure. Yeah, they could be very, very pretty.

'''E:''' It'll look like, yeah, the Elven kingdoms from Lord of the Rings, basically.

'''S:''' I've seen some of them. They are beautiful. So, yeah, just build a bunch of stuff out of wood, and it actually becomes a huge carbon sink rather than a carbon release. You know, like anything, it's always a drop. Everything's a drop in the bucket, but you've got to add them all together. Sure. It moves the ball forward a little bit. All right. Well, good job, guys. Thank you. Evan, you got a quote for this week?

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:41:16) ==

{{qow
|text = One takes comfort from the fact there is no {{w|Gresham's law}} in science. In the long run, good science drives out bad.
|author = {{w|American Gardner}}
|lived = 1914-2010
|desc = American popular mathematics and popular science writer
}}


'''E:''' I do. One takes comfort from the fact that there is no Gresham's Law in science. In the long run, good science drives out bad. Martin Gardner.

'''C:''' Oh, I know him. I mean, I don't know him.

'''E:''' You should know him. Every good skeptic should know Martin Gardner.

'''S:''' So what's Gresham's Law?

'''E:''' Gresham's Law. Bad money drives out good. Perhaps you've heard that expression before. In other words, if I have a $100 bill and I have a little piece of gold that would be today's value worth $100, a person will tend to pay for something, assuming the vendor will take it, using that $100 paper bill, which is considered the bad money. because gold has more properties to it intrinsically in its value, and it can go up in its value, whereas the $100 bill you hand over is considered not as good as the gold. So the bad money will be spent first, and a person will hoard what they feel is the good stuff. So bad money drives out the good money.

'''S:''' But he says good science drives out bad science.

'''E:''' Right. Yep. So you can't have Gresham. No Gresham's law in science.

'''S:''' I agree that is in the long run. But that could take time. It does take a lot of time for that process to play itself out. In the meantime, people will spread the bad science if it's profitable. In medicine, it can take 15 to 20 years to really know the answer to a complicated clinical question. In the meantime, you got to practice medicine with the preliminary, you know, sometimes bad information. And even worse, there are snake oil salesmen who will be more than happy to sell you the bad science during the preliminary phase. And then when it eventually gets driven out by good science, they move on to the next thing because there's always something in that preliminary part of the process, you know.

'''E:''' Yeah. So unscrupulous people will take advantage of those gaps. Absolutely. Absolutely.

'''S:''' Right. So it does work in the long run, but it doesn't mean we don't have to deal with a lot of bad science or pseudoscience in the short run. All right, guys. Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Sure, man.

'''C:''' Thanks, Steve.

'''J:''' Thank you, Steve.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

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SGU Episode 974

2024-05-03T09:30:26Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

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|episodeIcon = File:974 Sinking Cities.jpg
|caption = "Sinking ground and rising sea levels will put more than half a million people at risk of repeated flooding across 32 U.S. coastal cities, new research shows." <ref name = sinking>[https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/32-us-cities-including-new-york-and-san-francisco-are-sinking-into-the-ocean-and-face-major-flood-risks-by-2050-new-study-reveals Live Science: 32 U.S. cities, including New York and San Francisco, are sinking into the ocean and face major flood risks by 2050, new study reveals]</ref> Click for image details<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" id="mw-customcollapsible-myDivision">''Flooding in the neighborhood of Freeport, Long Island, on Jan. 13, 2024. (Image credit: Getty Images)''</div>

|bob =y
|cara =y
|jay =y
|Evan =y
|qowText = Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.
|qowAuthor = {{w|Frank Herbert}}, American sci-fi author
|downloadLink = {{900s|974|download}} 

|forumLinktopic = 55338.0 
|}}

== Introduction, food delivery problems ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, March 6th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening, everyone.

'''S:''' So it's March, which means this is the month in the Northern Hemisphere where spring comes in. Yay! Yes, yes.

'''J:''' Which means in New England, it's nonstop raining.

'''E:''' But it also means daylight saving ends.

'''S:''' And it gets muddy and slippery everywhere.

'''J:''' Yeah, talking about that, oh my God, guys. So my wife is at work and she's away. Like, I'm not going to see her for two weeks, right? Aww. So I'm prepping for the show, and Steve and I are in the studio on Wednesday, so I get home, and I'm always scrambling on Wednesday. So I'm like, all right, I'm not making dinner tonight. I'm going to order the kids some hamburgers. So, you know, I do door dash. It's raining. Guy pulls up on the street and parks his car on the road right in front of my house, and he gets out, and he's coming straight to my door, and my front yard has a slope in it. And the guy took a header and slid down my front yard on his ass.

'''S:''' You're just coming down the grass. You don't do that.

'''J:''' Oh, he was running. I'm like, don't do it. Don't do it. And then

'''S:''' when his ass

'''E:''' hit the

'''J:''' ground, I

'''B:''' went, whoa!

'''E:''' You know, I was like... Like a sound effect from a movie almost.

'''C:''' So you're like standing at the window just watching this?

'''J:''' I have the door open because I usually wave to those guys to let them know I'm here. You know, like, come here, you know?

'''E:''' Oh, boy.

'''J:''' So he, like a champ, this guy had the bag of hamburgers above his head the whole way down. Yes.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''J:''' And as soon as he gets to the door, I'm like, two things. I wanted to grab those hamburgers out of his hand quick because it's raining. And two, I didn't want interaction with the guy. I'm just like, dude, are you okay? And I'm like, wait a second. Just wait there, right? I go and I get him a roll of paper towels and a garbage bag so he could dry himself off and he could sit on the garbage bag in his car, not get his seat wet. But I'm like – Oh, my gosh. So I go upstairs. I give the kids their hamburgers. I go upstairs. I'm prepping. About 10 minutes later, I look out the window. He's still parked in front of my house.

'''B:''' Oh. Oh, what's – He's drying off.

'''J:''' Yeah. He's just like drying – and like. I saw him like in the car and I could see his face. The guy looked very shaken, you know, like – He was a young teenager. He was like 17 years old.

'''C:''' Don't run down wet lawns.

'''E:''' Don't dash down wet lawns for DoorDash.

'''J:''' I tipped him an extra $2. I felt bad for him.

'''S:''' $2? That reminds me of the movie Young Frankenstein when he knees the guy in the balls during the demonstration and he whispers to his guy, give him an extra dollar. Yeah.

'''E:''' Pain and suffering.

'''S:''' You went to two, Jay.

'''J:''' I would have tipped him more, but no exaggeration. If you guys have ever done this, five guys, it was going to cost over $60 to get two hamburgers and two fries.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh.

'''C:''' This is the story of my life living in L.A.

'''J:''' because – I order in too much so but I ordered from way back and it was only 40. so hey 20 bucks a kid for a hamburger and fries like I'm like sitting there like am I doing this? am I doing this like?

'''C:''' yeah because they it's like you've got the fees you've got the the service fee the gas fee the everything and all of the prices on the menus are like whatever percent higher on the delivery apps.

'''S:''' yeah otherwise they lose money from what I understand.

'''E:''' yeah they can't make money otherwise and it's marginal anyways.

'''C:''' And so when you say you tipped him too, you meant on top of the tip you already gave him in the app.

'''J:''' On top of like the extra. Yeah. Like eight or nine bucks.

'''S:''' Wow, Jay. So I had a food delivery snafu recently as well. We were ordering.

'''J:''' Oh, boy.

'''S:''' I can't remember which one of the food delivery things it was. So we ordered from a local restaurant that we've been going to for 20 years. And the guy comes to the house to deliver the food. And so we looked at it, and it was the wrong order. So we called the guy and told him, you have to go back to the restaurant. So we had to come back, get the food that he gave to us, and bring that to the restaurant, then get our food and bring it back to us.

'''C:''' did it, that would never fly here.

'''E:''' Why did you have to call?

'''S:''' So he grabbed the food to bring it back. He dropped off the food. Meanwhile, so we're waiting for our food. We know exactly how long it takes to get to this restaurant, right? It's like six minutes down the road. It's not coming. So we call the restaurant and they said, all right, so the guy came and dropped off the food that he incorrectly picked up previously, but then he didn't pick up your food. He just left.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Yeah, he ditched.

'''S:''' So we called the delivery place. They said, well, they're not allowed to go to a house twice.

'''C:''' So you have to reorder it?

'''S:''' I had to go pick up. I had to get out of my own house, drive down. Can you imagine the horror I had to pick up my own food?

'''C:''' How terrible.

'''S:''' I hope that they refunded you.

'''E:''' I hope you're seeing someone for this, Steve, to talk about it.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was very traumatic. But here's the thing. The guy, he was pissed, but it was his problem, right? It's not our problem. But if he had no intention of bringing us our food... Tell us.

'''C:''' Right, yeah.

'''S:''' Because we wasted the 20 minutes that we were waiting for him to not bring our food back. And when he knew he had never had any intention of doing that, he just wasted time with our food sitting there. Just tell us. Listen, by the way, policy, we can't re-deliver the food, so you're going to have to get it yourself.

'''J:''' He doesn't want to deal with you saying that. He doesn't want to take the heat for that.

'''S:''' right yeah but now what do you? you know? whatever. we gave the worst possible review we can you know.

'''C:''' and yeah and also you guys live in a. I mean it's not a small town but like he may be your driver again at some point. so it's not like like here. things are just so different. like a that would never happen. like if you got the wrong food you would just go in the app and be like I got the wrong food and they would be like here's your money back. you just need to reorder. Like you're screwed. Like it is what it is. Eat that other person's food. All the time people misdeliver because they can't find my address. because for whatever reason in my development, we have three different streets and they decided to number all the houses the same. So people always drop it at the wrong house on the wrong street.

'''E:''' Get someone else's mail.

'''C:''' All the time. And so the problem is I'm deep in the development, but the main street, the one at the very front, is a very busy public street. And so delivery drivers will just drop it there because it's easier. They don't want to go into the development. They see the number and they drop it basically at the wrong house. And by the time you walk out to get it, it's been picked up by somebody who's unhoused.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Because where I live is just a very urban center. So it's like free food on the street. Right. It happens all the time. How? So you got to be on it. You got to be on it. And I'm always like Amazon's always delivering my mail to my neighbor and I have to go get it off her porch. And I always make a point to like wave to her ring camera so she knows I'm not a package thief. Like this is mine.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah, you have to name streets within developments intelligently, right?

'''C:''' It's so stupid. It's like we've got three different streets and they're named different things, but the numbers line up. Don't make number 800 right behind number 800.

'''E:''' And you're not allowed to put some number on your own house and say, hey, it's 80 now and come to 80.

'''C:''' No, you can't do that. But I did get a literal doormat printed. I paid money to get a doormat custom made that has the number and name of my street on it.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh.

'''C:''' Because they'll drop it off at another street with that number. And it says in every delivery app, I live on this street, not that street. You'll know you're at the right house because the doormats.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' They still don't get it.

'''S:''' Bob, didn't you live in a development that had like a Huntington Court and Huntington Drive or something in the same development?

'''C:''' So annoying.

'''B:''' Yeah, it was crazy. Then they actually changed the name of it.

'''C:''' Oh, really? That's nice.

'''B:''' But even better than that, there was a road, a series of roads, connected roads not far from my house that had, you know, I forget the name of it, but it had the same name, but Court Lane Street and I think one other one. And I was like, what? Who was on crack when they named these streets right next to each other? Can you imagine these poor people getting their mail and all the problems? Wait, 15 blah blah lane? But I'm on 15 blah blah street.

'''S:''' I'm like, come on.

'''C:''' That was actually – when I lived in New York, probably a lot of New Yorkers who are listening to this right now are like nodding feverishly. I lived on Queens Boulevard, but I lived by 67th Ave. And in New York City – or this is Queens – there's like a road, a street, and an ave for all those numbers. But they're miles away. So if they misdeliver, you can't even just walk over and go get your mail. Like you get off at the wrong subway stop or something, you're in the completely wrong neighborhood.

'''E:''' If I ever run a food delivery service, I'm going to call it Dine and Dash. Oh, wait. Maybe I shouldn't do that.

'''C:''' No, don't do that.

'''S:''' All right, Bob, you're going to start us off with a quickie.

{{anchor|quickie}} 
== Quickie with Bob: Colliding Neutron Stars (9:28) ==
{{shownotes 
|weblink = https://www.space.com/neutron-stars-collision-dark-matter-standard-model
|article_title = Colliding neutron stars hint at new physics that could explain dark matter
|publication = Space.com
|note =not
|redirect_title = 
}}


'''B:''' Thank you, Steve. This is your Quickie with Bob, people. All right. Can we find new physics in the debris from neutron star mergers? That is the topic for this Quickie with Bob. Yes, good guess there, Steve. Neutron star mergers may give us the clues we need to finally find out what the hell dark matter is. Now, that's the matter, if you've never listened to the show before, that's the matter that we can't detect at all except for gravitationally. Yet, there's six times as much of it as there is all the matter, all that immense amount of matter that we can see. Multiply that times six. That's how much dark matter we think there is. Now, when neutron stars collide, before becoming either – what do they become? Either a bigger neutron star or they become a black hole, right? Those are basically the two options. Right. Before that happens, there's a brief amount of time where it creates, they believe, a hot remnant, which is essentially like a huge physics experiment creating these exotic particles. The researchers think that the collision might create theoretical particles called axions, which have never been seen, but they're actually one of the more promising theoretical candidate particles for dark matter itself. So it's believed that these particles can move far enough away from the amazing collision that had just happened. They think they can go far enough away and have time enough to decay into particles that we know and can really easily detect, like photons, for example. So this new research shows that these electromagnetic signals caused by the decay should be detectable by gamma-ray telescopes, such as NASA's Fermilat telescope and future such telescopes. So in the future, when we detect neutron star collisions using gravitational wave astronomy, we may then quickly point our gamma ray telescopes at them and hopefully not only reveal brand new physics, but finally shed some light on mysterious dark matter at the same time. Cross your fingers. This has been your Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

'''E:''' I like how you said shedding light on dark matter.

'''B:''' Yes, thank you.

'''E:''' Very clever, Bob.

'''B:''' Thank you, Evan.

'''E:''' I noticed.

'''S:''' Jay, let me ask you a question. Yeah. What are you thinking of?

'''J:''' Exactly.

'''E:''' Guys, that's still funny.

'''S:''' It is still funny.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 

=== Sinking Cities (11:29) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/32-us-cities-including-new-york-and-san-francisco-are-sinking-into-the-ocean-and-face-major-flood-risks-by-2050-new-study-reveals
|article_title = 32 U.S. cities, including New York and San Francisco, are sinking into the ocean and face major flood risks by 2050, new study reveals
|publication = Live Science
|redirect_title = Sinking cities (974) 
|refname = sinking
}}

'''J:''' All right, guys. You know in The Expanse where – Yeah. If you remember the show, in New York City, they had to put a concrete barrier around the city to keep ocean water from flooding the city. Do you remember that visual?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, sure.

'''J:''' Well, that's what was hitting me when I'm reading about this. So there was a recent study that was published in Journal Nature, and this was done by Virginia Tech. So the study points out that rising sea levels and sinking land threatens 30 freaking two U.S. cities along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Coast. Now, they just studied those coastlines. This is happening globally, by the way, but this is just an idea of what's to come. So this includes highly populated cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and the cities that are the most at risk in the U.S. are Miami, New Orleans, Port Arthur, Texas, Foster City, California, Savannah, Georgia. I mean it's like just tons and tons of cities here are going to be at risk from what's going to happen. Yeah. From the measurements that they took, it seems like it's definitely going to happen. So these findings, they estimated with these findings that they put over half a million people at risk of recurrent flooding. And if nothing is done to basically remediate the situation, the damages could reach over $107 billion by 2050. Now, we throw around billion a lot and it's a number that people have gotten very used to. $107 billion is an unbelievable amount of money, right? We got to keep that in mind. Even though our governments around the world throw around money like it's nothing, it is a huge amount of money that taxpayers have to absorb. So there's several other increases that they estimated out. They were saying between 500 and 700 square miles of land will be flooded. There'll be up to 518,000 people affected and there'll be up to 288,000 more properties that were exposed. To the water, an estimated value of another $32 billion has to be taken seriously here because 30% of the US population lives where? In coastal cities, right? These are some of the first cities that – when settlers come, they make cities right near the ocean, right?

'''E:''' And places like Australia, I mean aren't they entirely coastal? For the most part, like 98% of their people live in the interior of the desert.

'''C:''' It's not that that's all. the land is not coastal.

'''E:''' No, no. But this is where the people are. They are on coasts.

'''J:''' So the study projected that the sea level will rise up to one foot or 0.3 meters by 2050. How much is a foot when it comes to where the ocean is? That is significant.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah. That's enough to decimate a city.

'''J:''' Yep. So previous forecasts, they didn't account for a few things here, which I think you guys will find interesting. There's a rapid rate in which these cities are actually sinking too, right? They're going down, like the ground is sinking down and compressing underneath them. The study used data from a radar system that was used to map sinking areas in these cities. Now, the data shows that coastal cities could sink by as much as 0.2 inches or 5 millimeters each year. So that's going to add up quick. So this significantly increases the relative sea level, right? So these flood risks are getting worse not just because ocean levels are rising but because the ground is sinking.

'''E:''' Two things are combining to make it a bigger problem than just – Just the rising water.

'''J:''' Absolutely. And what the hell? Why is the ground sinking, right? Well, there's a few factors here. The overall weight of cities increases as they build more buildings and everything. Hey, and it adds up. You might not think it, but when you put that much stone and cities use a lot of stone to build and everything and a lot of paving, a lot of concrete sidewalks and all that stuff, like the weight can become astronomical. Right. We also have post-ice age shifts in coastal land, right? So the land is shifting around. And the big one here is the extraction of gas, water, and other resources. So what they're basically doing is they're hollowing out huge parts of, you know, internally, they're hollowing out all this stuff. They're taking out oil. They're taking out gas. So the land has actually a place to go. Like it needs to go down, right? Because gravity is just going to continuously be pulling that land down, right? So we have a recipe for a real disaster here. So it's estimated that more than 90% of the ocean is also absorbing atmospheric greenhouse gases. And this expands the seawater. So like the volume of seawater is increasing as well. So we have all these different factors here that are leading to this inevitability that these coastal cities are going to get smacked with seawater. The sinking land and climate-driven melting of glaciers and ice sheets, that's where predominantly a lot of this water is coming from. This triples the change in relative sea levels around these areas. That's very significant. I mean I'm pretty worried about this. I mean my children's generation is going to be living – they're going to be in the middle of their lives in the 50s. How many years away are we from the 50s at this point? Almost 25 years, right?

'''C:''' 26, yeah.

'''J:''' Not that long. The researchers identified these regions that are most at risk and estimated the potential human and economic impacts of the future flooding. So they found that without taking any preventative actions, one in 50 people living in these 280,000 properties along the U.S. coast will likely be affected by this. And unfortunately, it says that minority and low-income groups will bear most of the damages. The study also suggested that limiting the extraction of natural gas and groundwater, you know, this will help reduce further landmass sinking. You know, how likely is that going to be? Not. You know, by the time the government gets around to slowing down or stopping natural gas extraction, there won't be any more gas, right? That's the way I look at it. The cost to mitigate these issues will be, of course, much less if we start dealing with them now. Like we need to bend money towards these problems, start figuring out how to protect these cities. I don't know. I mean is there ever a situation where they say, OK, forget it? Like we're going to abandon the city and just repopulate these people? I can't imagine.

'''E:''' Can we look to Europe to some of the models they've used to protect their cities? Because they've had to deal with this as well.

'''J:''' I mean I'm sure if anyone is doing anything about it, I'm sure that they're going to take all the information that they can get. But it's going to be expensive.

'''E:''' Absolutely. There's always cost.

'''J:''' Prevention is harder than dealing with something after the fact because a lot of people could just say, we don't need to do that right now. It's easy to put off. Like global warming, this is something that like, you know, we can't quickly solve these problems. Like we need to really start talking about it and getting the money lined up that we're going to need to solve these problems. And again, this is global. This is happening everywhere.

'''C:''' This is not theoretical. And we know on paper it's not theoretical, but we've lived it. Like, we know what happened in New Orleans. We know what happened in Houston. We should be learning from these experiences. And we're, I mean, we are to some extent, but not nearly as dramatically.

'''E:''' Slow to react. Slow. Too slow.

'''J:''' I agree.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, yeah. From what I've been reading, it's mainly on the east coast of the U.S., at least. It's mainly groundwater pumping, like we're pumping water for use. But also, I had one question because we've talked previously about the fact that the receding ice sheets from the glacial period actually is causing the ground to rebound a little bit, right? Yeah. The land was sinking down under all that ice and then the ice – Yeah, it's still coming up.

'''B:''' It's so cool after so long.

'''S:''' But New York City, for example, was just outside of the most recent ice sheet. Ah. So it actually increased. It was pushed up. Like the land next to it was pushed down. It was pushed up. And then when the ice melted, it's now sinking back down to where it was before.

'''E:''' Oh, I see.

'''B:''' Interesting.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Like a ridge formed and now it's going back to where it was before.

'''C:''' I also think this is such a problem, Steve, and I – Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, oh, on average, we've got, you know, temperatures and, you know, at 1.5 C or on average, we've got, you know, one foot or whatever. That means that there are places that have two and three and four times that.

'''S:''' Yeah, exactly. And so the difference between the worst and the best could be pretty extreme. And this is no difference. Like, yeah, the average sea levels may be rising like by centimeters, but that doesn't mean in some places it could be significant much earlier. Yeah.

=== Hypervaccination (20:42) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/hypervaccination/
|article_title = Hypervaccination
|publication = sbm
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, let me ask you guys a question. You know I like to start with questions. What do you think would happen to somebody if they got 217 COVID vaccinations over the last two years?

'''B:''' I know.

'''E:''' I call that acupuncture. 217 points on the body.

'''J:''' I read about this, Steve. I'm shocked. Yeah.

'''C:''' Was he called for a psych consult? Did that happen to him?

'''S:''' Yeah, so we don't have a lot of personal information about the guy or why he did it. That wasn't explored. There's an article in The Lancet recently. It's a case report. 62-year-old gentleman in Germany who decided for whatever personal reasons that he needed to get 217 COVID vaccines. God, it's just incredible. Yeah, mostly the mRNA ones. So this is an interesting opportunity to say, well, we would never deliberately do this, right? But in medicine, we often will gather safety information.

'''B:''' Take advantage of eccentric people, say?

'''S:''' From outlier cases. For example, sometimes people do weird things, right? Sometimes it's like a deliberate overdose, for example. Or it could have been an accidental overdose. Or it could have just been somebody really not listening to medical advice. Right.

'''C:''' A friend of mine got snake venom in his eye for a TV show and he ended up in a case study. Yeah.

'''E:''' There you go. But you don't want to be a case study.

'''C:''' No, you don't want to be a case study.

'''S:''' As I often tell students, you never want to be an interesting case. That's not what you want to be. But, you know, so this is just one of those cases where somebody did something weird, you know, and then we say, okay, well, let's at least take a look and see, you know, what happened to the guy. And so there's a number of questions that they had. One was, is there any toxicity with that many doses? Two was, what was his immune reaction like? You know, did he get, how much super immunity did he get? And the third was, and this is an interesting one, did this basically exhaust his immune system?

'''B:''' Yeah, that was a big question.

'''J:''' What does that mean, Steve?

'''C:''' Or did it induce any autoimmune issues or anything like that?

'''S:''' Well, yeah, it could have overstimulated the immune system. That's the thing I would most worry about. But the exhaustion is what if he doesn't respond to new immune challenges as robustly as a healthy person? because his immune system has just been depleted of whatever because it's been so stimulated. Like every two weeks he's getting another or whatever, every week he's getting another vaccine. He just doesn't have a chance to recover. So they said, all right, we'll take a look at all these things. So first, let's look at the safety issue. The short answer is the guy has apparently suffered no ill effects from getting 217 COVID vaccines. I got sick even after each vaccine.

'''C:''' Only for like a day. Do you know if he felt like crap?

'''S:''' They don't go into that. He probably had the normal sore arm and all that stuff, but he had no medical complications from doing this. No illness, no diseases happened. They also did, they said, 62 routine clinical chemistry parameters which showed no abnormalities. So that means they looked at his kidney function. His kidneys were fine. His liver function was fine. He wasn't breaking down muscle tissue. Didn't show any signs of autoimmunity. Wow. Because all that you would have seen in like a 62, that's a lot of blood parameters.

'''E:''' Could they measure this concentration of medicine in it?

'''S:''' Well, the medicine is just the mRNA, which would be gone by now, right?

'''E:''' Oh, okay. So, yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' But what they can measure is the second thing is looking at, well, how much immunity does the guy have, right?

'''C:''' How much immunity can you get? I mean, it's got a plateau at some point.

'''S:''' That's what you would think, right?

'''E:''' Well, have they done this to animals in prior studies? Not this much.

'''C:''' Nothing like this.

'''S:''' Why would they? It's like it's way beyond what you would ever do. So what they found was that his neutralizing antibodies was 5.4 times the control group. They had a control group of people who were – they call vaccinees, right? So these are people – who had the normal vaccine schedule, right? So he had 5.4 times like the antibody capacity against the spike proteins for the wild type and 11.5 times for the Omicron B1.1.529 spike proteins. So that's because most of the vaccines probably were targeting Omicron. those proteins. So yeah, five to 10 times, 11 times the amount of neutralizing capacity as people who just got the normal vaccine schedule.

'''B:''' Oh, my God.

'''C:''' But not 650 times.

'''S:''' No, no. But that's still a lot.

'''C:''' It is. It is.

'''S:''' Now, here's an interesting thing. During the period where they were evaluating this guy for the study, he continued to get more vaccines.

'''J:''' Shocker. Shocker. Oh, God.

'''C:''' I hope they got him a cycle.

'''B:''' Of course he did.

'''C:''' Because there's got to be something going on there. It's expensive.

'''E:''' We were just talking about the price of vaccines.

'''S:''' Who knows?

'''E:''' This is not cheap either.

'''C:''' Well, I don't know what the German health care system is like.

'''E:''' No, they're not going to give a person 200 free vaccinations.

'''C:''' Yeah, they're like, your card is real full, my friend.

'''E:''' I mean, unless the German health system is willing to do something.

'''S:''' I don't know how he evaded any tracking system that they have going on there, but he did. Yeah. But it probably evolved a lot of cash payments, would be my guess.

'''E:''' Oh, I see.

'''S:''' His T-cell immunity was also higher, by the way, than the standard vaccine people. Yeah. And the control group. So then for the vaccine to receive during the evaluation period, he continued to have a bump in his antibodies. But it was muted, right? Because he already was so high. Like, again, you get diminishing returns at some point. But he did have an increase when he got vaccinated. But then the third thing they wanted to know is he never had COVID, by the way. That's the other thing. He didn't have the kind of antibodies you would expect to have if you've ever been infected. Wow. So he was never infected, which doesn't mean this is why because you can't know from a single case. Right.

'''C:''' He might never leave his house other than to go back.

'''S:''' He's an isolated person. He may be a germaphobe. Who knows? Yeah.

'''B:''' But he also – it may be directly because of this.

'''S:''' It could be. We just can't know.

'''E:''' How many different facilities did he visit to get this done?

'''S:''' It makes you wonder.

'''J:''' Steve, what would the medical profession expect someone – what would they expect the outcome of this to be?

'''S:''' Like wouldn't they – I would imagine that – This is all pretty much in line with what I would expect to be honest with you. Right.

'''C:''' Like improved immunity to a point.

'''S:''' That's not – 200 times, that's about the safety margins we build in. I wouldn't expect the vaccine itself would have caused a problem. Again, the one thing I would worry about is that it triggered an autoimmune reaction.

'''C:''' I guess I'm not surprised, but it's interesting because you think about those rare cases where people get Guillain-Barre or they get some sort of... And he's really pushing the...

'''S:''' Yeah, but that's literally a million to one, Cara.

'''C:''' It is, but he's at 650,000. But there's no way to know if he was like – 217. Genetically predisposed or something like that.

'''B:''' Don't forget the upside here, the real upside. This is showing that these vaccines are ridiculously safe. Ridiculously. That is a key takeaway here.

'''S:''' There is not any necessary toxicity that kicks in with higher doses, right? So here's the other thing is the exhaustion question, right? So this is probably the most interesting question. Did his ability to respond to further antigenic challenges, were that intact? Or has he just wiped out his immune system because he's constantly overstimulating?

'''E:''' Yeah, let's expose him to a bunch of stuff.

'''S:''' So what that found is that his ability to respond to stimuli was intact. No apparent exhaustion at all in the ways that they measured it.

'''E:''' Yeah, chalk one up to the human immune system.

'''S:''' We've actually been writing about this for quite some time, this kind of question, because this blows a pretty big hole in some of the anti-vaccine rhetoric, the whole too many too soon kind of thing. They've been saying this kind of thing for years, not based on evidence, just based upon – they're just trying to think of anything negative. they can say about vaccines that, oh, you're basically using up the immune system. They're going to be vulnerable for other things. The immunity isn't good, all these things. Nope. Part of our response was, you know, the antigenic stimulation that you get from a vaccine is pretty much insignificant compared to your daily antigenic stimulation.

'''C:''' Just from exposure to life.

'''S:''' Yeah, life is exposing you to hundreds of antigens a day. And we're just adding one more or a few at a time. It's nothing. It's nothing compared to what your immune system goes through on a regular basis. So there really wasn't a good reason to think that this would be a problem, right? So this kind of reinforces what we had said. suspected was that vaccines – it's not that vaccines are like massively stimulating your immune system. It's that they're targeting it against something very specific. But still you're getting tons of antigenic stimulation just by going through life.

'''C:''' I remember the first time I discovered because this is me being – how do you put this? Not terribly organized is that I get a flu. shot every year like everybody does, right? Or like we hopefully do. I'm not always great. I have a yellow card that has like my hepatitis vaccines and my yellow fever vaccines and typhoid and all those good things that I've had over the years from all my travels. I don't usually document when I get my flu shot unless I'm doing it through work. And so there have been multiple years where I was like Did I get one already? And I remember having to ask the pharmacist or call my doctor or look it up and be like, is it dangerous to get? And they're like, no, you can just get another one.

'''S:''' Yeah, right. What's going to happen?

'''C:''' Better safe than sorry.

'''S:''' The other thing I was thinking about with this is that, again, if there is anything to be worried about, it would be the adjuvants. that's part of the vaccine, not the vaccine itself, but the other stuff that they give to help stimulate your immune system. What did you call it? Adjuvants.

'''C:''' Adjuvants.

'''B:''' Gesundheit.

'''S:''' Yeah. And so there you might think, all right, that's a lot of these other things that they put in the vaccine, you know, two times 217. But apparently that wasn't a problem either because it didn't show any – this is a pretty extensive evaluation that they did of this guy and he didn't seem to be any worse for wear.

'''E:''' And did he give a reason why he did this? Yeah. To prove the point?

'''S:''' Not discussed in the article. We need to find him and interview him. They respected his privacy. No, it's H-I-M. That's all we know about him. Just those initials. So yeah, fascinating little case report there. I'm not sure how generalizable this information is, but... If anything, it's reassuring that somebody can do this and with no ill effects. It doesn't mean that everybody can do it or that this is a good idea. We should do it. Yeah, we should do it. And to be clear, we're not recommending this. Just get the vaccines that are recommended, no more, no less.

'''C:''' Also, I wonder when – like I wonder if this ramped up later in the pandemic or if early on he was like – because like that means he was taking vaccines away from people who needed them.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''C:''' Like do you remember how hard it was early on? There was like waiting lists and phases.

'''S:''' No, apparently this was early on.

'''E:''' But then there was – That's what I mean.

'''S:''' This was the whole time. This was not just all recently. Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah. So early on, like he's like, get out of the way, old man. I'm getting my 17th vaccine. That's terrible.

'''S:''' Hopefully when the study was over, they had a serious talking to.

'''C:''' That's when they had the psych consult.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's when they had the psych consult.

'''C:''' I hope so.

=== Conspiracy Theorists and Disease X (32:53) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.sciencealert.com/conspiracy-theorists-are-profiting-off-a-disease-that-doesnt-exist-yet
|article_title = Conspiracy Theorists Are Profiting Off a Disease That Doesn't Exist Yet
|publication = Agence France-Presse
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right. Cara, tell us about conspiracy theories about diseases that, you know, may or may not exist.

'''C:''' So I love this. Every week I send Steve multiple articles that I think are interesting. And I'm like, which one will fit best in the show? And he picks the one, you know, based on what other people are doing. And he goes, you had me at conspiracy theories. That's his response this week.

'''E:''' Thanks.

'''C:''' So how many of you have heard of Disease X?

'''E:''' Is that a musical artist?

'''B:''' I know Chemical X that created the Powerpuff Girls.

'''E:''' I've heard of Planet X.

'''S:''' I've heard of Malcolm X.

'''C:''' Anybody? Yes. But Disease X. I mean, this is some scary stuff, guys. Like, are you prepared for Disease X? Have you?

'''B:''' Oh, yeah, yeah.

'''E:''' I got my X shot, so I'm good.

'''S:''' Is there a vaccine X?

'''C:''' Yeah, right? So the World Health Organization at the World Economic Forum earlier this year decided to speak about disease X. And this was – a fake or a theoretical pandemic, right? So this is not a real disease. This is just a what if something happened, wherein this disease, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they talked about disease X in a panel, I think, at the World Economic Forum. And people took that and ran with it. So what do you think that they – what do you think that happened after this fake disease? Oh, it was a panel in January.

'''E:''' They started selling fake cures for disease X.

'''C:''' Mm-hmm.

'''S:''' Yeah, they claimed it was real. It's a conspiracy. The usual conspiracy is they want to either make people dumb so they're easier to control or they want to depopulate the earth. Man, these conspiracy theorists must be terrible because they are doing an awful job of depopulating the earth.

'''C:''' Right, yeah. So, yeah, it's going to depopulate the earth. It's going to make us docile. It's going to make us easier to control. And AFP, which is one of the big three news organizations, there's AP, Reuters, and AFP. They're like the big wire services. AFP did a deep dive on this, and their fact checkers believe that the conspiracies started in the United States. Thank you very much. But quickly spread over the globe and have become quite popular in Asia in a lot of different local languages. One of the big pushers of this conspiracy, can you guys guess who it would be? Alex Jones. Alex Jones. I'm surprised he's still doing this. Isn't he like – Why? No. He cannot be muzzled.

'''E:''' Well, he has to work to pay his bills, doesn't he?

'''C:''' Yeah, I know. I just didn't know how much they – I don't know, all these lawsuits. Anyway, so – He is pushing this as a, quote, genocidal kill weapon. That's what – so Disease X is going to be deployed globally. I'm not sure by whom, by the powers that be, as a genocidal – The Illuminati. Yeah, the Illuminati. They. We don't need to know who that is.

'''E:''' They.

'''C:''' We've also got some, as it got to China, then we start seeing a lot of conspiracies around the Chinese government opening up mobile cremation ovens to cope with the mass deaths from disease X, which, by the way, again, does not exist. And there were photos that were often linked to these posts shared on TikTok and Twitter. Turns out they were all fake. Pet cremation services. Those were the photos that were being used. But of course, we're no longer in a situation where you even have to misattribute a vague photo to push your conspiracy. Now we can just AI them, right? We can make them.

'''E:''' And it can be even more convincing than rehashing some old photo from five years ago.

'''C:''' Yeah, it can have a sign on it that says disease X cremations this way. I mean, it's ridiculous, right? So we're seeing that, yeah, people are pushing calls for taking vaccines for disease X. Disease X does not exist. So the vaccine for disease X does not exist. These things being engineered in a bio lab. Oh, and then we've got basically people, as you would expect, selling vaccines. Cures.

'''E:''' Yeah, there you go. That's there it is. Ching ching.

'''C:''' Yep. So these medical emergency kits, often including ivermectin, often including drugs that we already have debunked against COVID-19.

'''E:''' I'm sure some herbal remedies are in there too.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah. All the things you would expect for the low, low price of however much they're asking. Yeah, we've got – let's see. There's a right-wing website called The Gateway Pundit, which is promoting these kits and sponsored posts. So if you are online and you're seeing sponsored posts that are targeted to you, if you've looked up this kind of content before, the titles are Disease X, Are the Globalists Planning Another Pandemic? Don't Be Caught Unprepared. Yeah. And so obviously we see that this is a huge problem. The AFP, again, who did most of the reporting on this is showing that these conspiracies do in this situation at least tend to be somewhat partisan. We tend to see them on the severe right wing, like the most kind of extreme side of the right wing, obviously not anywhere in the kind of moderate partisan politics area. And that sadly, over the past several months to years, we've seen mass cuts to content moderation across social media platforms, especially things like – I know I keep saying Twitter because I just refuse to call it X, but X is not moderating the content the way that they used to. And we're seeing that these conspiracy theories are just being pushed, pushed, pushed. The disinformation then, of course, as we know – starts to get hyped and hyped and hyped. And then before you know it, somebody heard something about a thing, about a thing, about a thing. And it becomes part of the mainstream rhetoric. You know, it doesn't always stay siloed in the extreme conspiracy theory world. The little chatters, the little niblets of misinformation get sort of washed over and After enough exposure and after enough kind of games of telephone, what ends up happening is, oh, yeah, I've heard of disease. Yeah, that's a worrisome one. That's the next one, right? It's like, no, this isn't even – this was a panel basically urging world leaders to make sure that their pandemic readiness was where it needs to be. It was a placeholder. Yeah.

'''E:''' It's it's it's crazy. It's a hijacking. And it's and once and kind of once it's out of the barn, you can't chase it down with the truth or with the evidence.

'''C:''' Yeah, the genie is out of the bottle. Yeah, you can't you can't recork it. And I think the hard thing I mean, here's a good quote from Chunai Chi, who's a professor at Oregon State. And I so apologize if I pronounce that name wrong. So that's the other really scary thing. This important exercise in urging world leaders to be prepared for what's next. Saying, you know, what did we learn from COVID and how can we be better prepared next time? The people who take that information, who run with it in a pseudoscientific way, are actually undoing the good work, right? They're actually negatively impacting the important proactive, preparative work and preventive work. For these global pandemics, because the thing is, it will happen. Disease X will happen. It'll be called something else. We don't know what type of virus it'll be. It might be a coronavirus. It might be a fungus. It might be, you know, a type of influenza or something else. It will happen. And if just like in the movie, which one was it? Was it Contagion? I remember rewatching that during COVID. Was it Jude Law's character in Contagion? Yeah. Yeah. He's such a perfect example of this conspiracy. I mean they did such a great job kind of showing what happens. This conspiracy theorist walking around and basically undoing the good public health work that's being done because people look at those very loud voices as somehow equal and opposite to legitimate evidence-based public health.

'''E:''' And history bears this out. This is not – certainly by no means the first time this has happened. It's just more amplified now with internet coverage.

'''S:''' But this is what the conspiracy theorists do. They take the normal functioning of whatever government institutions would have you and then partly out of ignorance, partly out of just the desire to see the conspiracy, they interpret anything in a sinister way. Cell phone, right? Cell phone, 5G and all that. It's like, yeah, see those crematoria over there? That's for the mass murdering that they're going to do.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's not a pet crematoria.

'''S:''' Or like FEMA preparing for disasters. They're preparing for the culling, you know, whatever. You just turn anything sinister. And I'm not making those up, by the way. These are things I've heard from actual human beings who believe this. Anyway, it's – yeah, that's the world we're living in. And Evan, it's even – here we go.

'''E:''' It gets worse, folks.

=== Celebrities and Flat Earth (41:29) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://fandomwire.com/a-planet-in-the-sky-gave-a-rats-a-about-anything-in-your-life-even-neil-degrasse-tyson-lost-it-after-amber-roses-dumb-pseudoscience-question/
|article_title = "A planet in the sky gave a rat’s a** about anything in your life": Even Neil deGrasse Tyson Lost it after Amber Rose's Dumb Pseudoscience Question
|publication =Fandom Wire
|weblink2 =https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10111148-nfl-draft-prospect-tyler-owens-says-he-doesnt-believe-in-space-and-other-planets
|article_title2 = NFL Draft Prospect Tyler Owens Says He Doesn't 'Believe in Space' and 'Other Planets'
|publication2 =Bleacher Report
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' It gets worse. Tell us about how celebrities contribute to this sort of thing.

'''E:''' All right. Well, OK. Maybe not worse. I don't want to – I really don't want to equate this to health directly. But we do have to address this. I saw two headlines this week that offer a peek into celebrity culture intersecting with pseudoscience. And I don't know, maybe this headline hit your news feed catchers today because it came out today. I saw it at the website Fandom Wire. And here's the headline. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson lost it after Amber Rose's dumb pseudoscience question. Neil deGrasse Tyson's criticism has angered many supporters of astrology and star-related sciences worldwide. What? Oh, my gosh. All right. So first thing, I will admit, perhaps the biggest news in this to me is that there's a person named Amber Rose. Oh, you don't know Amber Rose? No. Shame on me, I guess. But I'm just not into celebrity culture really that much these days. So apologies for that. According to Wikipedia, she's an American model, rapper, and television personality. She initially rose to fame by having a business relationship with Kanye West, I guess, the two of them, and they were hooked up for a little while. But then she got her own show on a channel here, a music channel called VH1. I think people around the world might know of that. That was in 2016. But now she has a podcast, and it's called I Hope They're Not Listening, which is kind of a clever title. So she's a celebrity, yeah, of some note. And about a month ago, and I'm not really sure why it's only making a headline today, literally today, but that aside, about a month ago, the special guest on her podcast was Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I don't think I have to explain to this audience who he is. It was an hour-long interview. And here is – one part of the interview had to come – came to the topic of astrology and specifically Mercury in retrograde. All right. And here is what Amber said. Depending on where the planets are, can that affect us physically? Like mercury and retrograde. Everyone says it's mercury and retrograde. You're going to have arguments with your significant other or it will affect your body or it will give you pain. Is that a real thing and do you believe in that? That's what she asked Neil.

'''C:''' So she was asking it like genuinely and just curiously.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''E:''' Yes, but there's more. Neil answers, the good thing about science is when it's true, it's not a matter of whether you believe in it. It's true at all times. And he goes on to explain why the apparent motion of the planet Mercury appears to move backwards in the sky and was not understood at a time when people thought the Earth was the center of everything. Right. And then she replies to that. So you're saying there's no truth to that. It's just made-up astrology? And Neil answers, it's complete BS. Left over from a time when people's egos were so large that they actually believed that a planet in the sky gave a rat's ass about anything in your life. Which is a very funny line, but that's the line that I guess made everyone in the world of astrology not too happy. But Amber Rose then laughs and says, I just want to say that question was from Wiz Khalifa, I believe. And that's a name I have heard of, another musical artist. She said, not me. And then she said – she acknowledged that she's a Libra. And they go on to talk about the horoscope a little bit. So are horoscopes for just entertainment purposes, she asks. And he basically says, Neil confirms that, and she says, yeah, I'm with you on that. All right. So by this interview, at least this segment, because it's an hour-long interview, this is about an eight-minute segment I watched of the interview, it would seem to say, like, okay, she seems, you know, kind of reasonable approach, asking questions about it, right? And basically saying, I'm with you, you know, I don't understand. But guess what happened a week later? Amber Rose has another guest on her show. Tarot card reader Ryan Liu. Yeah. One week later, she has a tarot card reader on the show and apparently learned nothing from the Neil deGrasse Tyson interview on the show. Because in this interview with Ryan Liu, she reveals that she goes to psychics and has been going for years. She's had tarot card readings done in the past. And she might be a little bit more familiar with astrology than she probably let on in that Neil deGrasse Tyson interview. So she says, let's talk about Mercury in retrograde with – with uh ryan liu and she says I have no idea what that is okay. why? so this came after the neil degrasse tyson interview. why she said she has no idea what this is is a bit of a disconnect at least for me. she okay. so maybe she said it to stir up conversation but oh my gosh come on. a week ago you had just spoken to one of the premier science communicators on the planet and now you're asking a tarot card reader to explain mercury and retrograde jesus. I mean, this would have been a better question. She should have said to him, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show last week. He gave the explanation of Mercury in retrograde. He says all astrology is BS. What is your thoughts on that? That would have been an infinitely better way of striking up that particular conversation. So come on. The takeaway here is that, look, any glimmer of real science that tried to penetrate this particular celebrity bubble in which Amber Rose and her fans exist in, that was washed away seven days later when the tarot card reader came on to spell gobbledygook and nonsense for the better part of an hour. Now, in conjunction with that, there was another article that came out this week. And this news was shared with me by one of our longtime listeners. And he's a good friend of the show, Adam Russell. You may know him as the bass player for the band Story of the Year. And if you haven't listened to their music, I highly recommend it. Adam shared this with me. NFL draft prospect. That's the National Football League. National Football League draft prospect. His name's Tyler Owens. Says he doesn't believe in space and other planets. That's how that headline read. So Tyler Owens is considered one of the fastest prospects in the 2024 NFL draft class. So he's going to be a rookie this year coming up. He's highly, highly touted. Brilliant athlete. But he was speaking to reporters at what's called the NFL Combine. And that's a place where you go basically to show off your skills so that the teams kind of get an idea of where they want to draft you in their draft. that comes up every April. And he revealed that he doesn't believe in space or other planets and he subscribes to flat earth theories that he believes are interesting and have valid points. And by the way, he has five years of college that he attended. Yeah. So here's the exact thing. It was like a 30-second clip. I'll give it to you. Here's exactly what he said. I don't believe in space. You know, I'm religious, so I think like we're on our own right now. I don't think there's other planets and stuff like that. I used to believe in the heliocentric thing. Like we used to revolve around the sun and stuff. But then I started seeing flat Earth stuff. And I was like, that's kind of interesting. They started bringing up some valid points. I mean, I don't know. It could be real. It could be bull. I just don't know. And I'll give you this to chew on before we talk about it a little bit. There's another football player, Travis Kelsey, and maybe you've heard of him from the Kansas City Chiefs. He's with – Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. The two of them are popular together, whatever. So maybe that's – and he has a brother who also played in the NFL, Jason Kelsey. Yeah. who in a recent interview, I guess they have a podcast as well. Everybody's got a podcast. So on the Kelsey's podcast, Jason said this. He said he came out saying that people would not believe the number of NFL players who believe that the earth is flat. Here's what he said. I was once on the practice field last year. This is last year, 2023. One of our coaches was walking by saying, And I said to him, man, how many people do you think on this field believe the earth is flat? And his coach said to him, I don't think anybody out here believes that. And he corrected him and said, you'd be surprised. If you start polling, you would be totally surprised. And before I even finished that, somebody else, another player, said right next to me, I mean, how do you know that it isn't flat? A conversation struck up. And this is something that I've been assuming for quite a while. is that because there have been incidents of other athletes coming out and speaking specifically about Flat Earth comes up. Shaquille O'Neal is probably a popular name. you've heard that has talked about it before and that got covered. Another basketball player named Kylie Irving also came out and said this a couple of years ago. I think we may have even talked about it on the show. But for some reason, Flat Earth has a bit of a grip on the professional athlete community to a deeper degree than even the media is probably aware of. So, you know, celebrity culture, athlete culture, I kind of, in a way, lump them together, you know, because of the popularity and, you know, exposure that they all get to so many people. But, oh, my gosh. It's just – it just is remarkable that these things have – He gave you a pause, too. Thank you. Yeah. But that it's – there's a cultural aspect to it. I mean, in the culture of these businesses almost, that these are accepted ideas that roam around these circles. Certainly, we know this. We've experienced this ourselves and have done some research certainly into this. And we get some glimpses through the media of it. But it's probably more pervasive than we even realize.

'''C:''' Why do you think that is? What do you think it is about professional athletics that has that draw? Or do you think it's the same as in the general population from a percentage perspective?

'''E:''' That's a fair point. And the other day, what was I looking up? I was looking up some recent polling on flat earth and how many people believe really that an earth is flat. I looked at two different polls. I found one that was taken last year. In which in that particular poll – and again, polls – an individual poll is an individual poll. So take it for what it is. But that 10 percent of people in that poll of U.S. people in the United States at least. believe that there's something to a flat Earth, that some aspect of flat Earth is correct. And then I also found one. This was back in 2019, so it's a little old. But only 66% of people in that survey stated that the Earth was round, right? Maybe some of them thought it was flat or a cube or a triangle or something else, but something other than that, right? Only two out of three people believe that the Earth is some roundish shape.

'''S:''' Those are the polls I'm seeing.

'''C:''' This was like a Gallup poll or was this like a flat Earth friends and family poll? These are – I mean if you – Like they were like – it was like a legitimate polling organization.

'''E:''' Carsey School of Public Policy had one of these polls. That's the 10 percent of respondents agreed with conspiracy claims that the Earth is flat. Oh, NASA also faked the moon landing. And then the other one – let's see if I can find the other one here. Why do some people believe – University of Melbourne. Apparently. Gosh, that's so scary. Out of that one. So, you know, universities and schools are conducting these. There's, you know, that gives it some weight, I think.

'''C:''' Yeah. I mean, it at least means they're not actively seeking out flat earthers for their poll. You know what I mean? Right. I don't know how random the sample is, but. That's right.

'''E:''' They didn't go to the flat earth convention to take this poll or something like that. But yeah, these things, even though they're probably more ingrained than we even realize. And I don't know how you get that out. It's so tough. It's so tough to change it.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's hard to even know what to make of that. So on the one hand, you've got to believe it's a pretty massive failure of our public educational system. But on the other hand, I think it's also just the misinformation on the internet. It's the combination, I think, of those two things primarily. That people – that 10% of people know so little about basic science that they cannot defend themselves from this sort of blatant childish misinformation on the internet, right? That has to be happening. I mean how ignorant of science do you have to be to say, well, who knows? How do we know that the earth isn't flat? I mean, well, because of stuff you should have learned when you were in third grade.

'''C:''' I mean – That's the thing that's so frustrating too is like these professional athletes generally, at least in the US, have college degrees.

'''E:''' Right.

'''C:''' Most professional athletes are expected and some required to go to universities. That's where they play. That's where they get recruited from.

'''B:''' Yeah, but the upper echelon, I mean how much do they really make sure that they're buckling down with their studies? I mean I know it's a – I get that.

'''E:''' I get that. But it's not like the environment that they're in is fostering some kind of pseudoscience culture to begin with, right? Yeah.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''E:''' So you would think there would be some – something working against them coming to these kinds of conclusions just because of their surroundings that they're steeped in for four or five years in some cases.

=== Superconducting Magnets and Fusion (57:09) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://news.mit.edu/2024/tests-show-high-temperature-superconducting-magnets-fusion-ready-0304
|article_title = Tests show high-temperature superconducting magnets are ready for fusion
|publication = MIT News
|redirect_title = Superconducting Magnets and Fusion (974) 
}}

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Evan. Yep. All right, Bob. Now, come on. You're really telling me now that the magnets are good enough for fusion reactors? What's going on here?

'''B:''' Okay. Sure, Steve. You may have missed a huge fusion milestone recently. Engineers have signed off on a revolutionary new superconducting magnet that created the most powerful high-temperature magnetic field ever created on Earth, 20 Teslas. Now, this magnet was created with the express purpose of bringing commercial fusion to the world. How did they do this? and could this actually get us real fusion before all of us on this podcast are dead? They released six peer-reviewed papers in a special edition of the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. So, okay, first Tesla in this context is obviously right, a measure of the strength of a magnetic field. One Tesla equals 10,000 gauss, a 20 Tesla magnetic field. It doesn't sound big, but it's pretty huge. Earth's entire magnetic field is about 50 microtesla. That's 0.0005 Tesla. Yeah. Let's start with the birth of this amazing magnet or perhaps its conception. It might be a better word. It was only as recent as 2015 when – this is a fun story. The MIT physicists were just thinking about – about fusion and superconductivity, and they ran some numbers on how powerful a magnetic field could be if it were created using the latest commercially available superconductors, right? And they were so impressed with the results, they looked at the numbers and said, wow, Look at what's now possible. that they then formed a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems to make it happen. Amazing story. Now, their goal was to create a commercial fusion reactor that they call a SPARC reactor. Now, ARC may sound familiar. ARC stands for – affordable, robust, and compact, but it's obviously a blatant homage to Iron Man, right? Tony Stark's, his arc reactor, and Tony did go to MIT after all, which is why I think they're so enamored. SPARC stands for Smallest Possible Arc Reactor. And that's what they're building here. So this is a Takamak. And Takamak mainly means that you're trying to create fusion energy using magnetic fields in a donut shape, a toroidal shape to contain this ridiculously hot burning plasma to create more energy than is put in, right? That's what fusion is trying to do. Now, you may have heard on this podcast and elsewhere, if you're into this at all, ITER, I-T-E-R, I believe that's how it's pronounced, International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. That's the biggest fusion project in the world. Thirty-five countries are involved, and that's a TACOMAC design as well. The other big design player in this field is inertial confinement as opposed to magnetic confinement, and that uses lasers to compress fuel pellets to initiate the fusion. We've talked about that on the podcast many times, and that's had some major successes recently, which we don't need to go into right now. This MIT approach, though, is the most exciting to me. This is using the latest technology to do what no other approach really may be able to do, and that is to be commercially viable and do it fairly quickly. The linchpin for this goal is making that all-important magnetic field. not only making it the most powerful ever, but also making it cheaper and simpler at the same time. And that sounds kind of silly, right? Usually those attributes are diametrically opposed, right? But I'm looking at all their results and their testing, and it really seems that they have achieved that goal. I mean, based on their papers and what I've read, it seems they obviously have achieved that goal. The question then becomes, of course, where can they go from here? But let's get back to some of these details. This magnetic field, this really is the hero of the story. What was the key to this field? And it really was this new material called – it's got a nickname. It's called REBCO. And that stands for – it's a rare earth barium copper oxide that was added to the design of these fusion magnets. So now this is what allows them to reach a working superconducting temperature of 20 kelvins. That's 20 degrees above absolute zero. Now that doesn't – that sounds pretty damn chilly, right? It's only – it's still 20 degrees away from absolute zero. So that's mighty cold. But before REBCO though, such a superconducting fusion magnet like ITER uses by the way would have to be cooled to 4 Kelvin. That's 16 degrees colder and it's only 4 degrees above absolute zero. So I mean you might say, well, so what? That's still very close. It's only 16 degrees hotter, right, in Kelvin, but that is what the major significance is because that difference, even though it's only 16 degrees, it allows them to call – what they call it is – they call it high-temperature superconducting. because it's such a dramatic change. That increase allows for all new material properties and practical engineering. The biggest thing that I could find that disallowed is that REBCO allows the engineers to remove all the insulation that the old superconducting wires needed, right? You're wrapping all these wires that are wrapped in insulation to prevent shorts. This new design allows them to remove all that insulation. And a lot of scientists said that can't possibly be a good idea. But that one change made a dramatic difference. Dennis White, professor of engineering, he's also the former director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center said, he said, eliminating the layers of insulation has the advantage of being a low voltage system. It greatly simplifies the fabrication processes and schedule. It also leaves more room for other elements such as more cooling and more structure for strength. Oh, and there's one other thing I wanted to mention that this power-up milestone that I'm talking about, that was not recent. That happened September 5th, 2021. So that was – that's a few years ago. That was the day of the big test when they booted up their new device. And did you know how long it takes? How long do you think it takes to get down to 20 Kelvin to run this thing at maximum?

'''J:''' Days probably.

'''E:''' A week. Two weeks.

'''B:''' Two weeks to get it. It's a very slow process. But they did it and it hit 20 Teslas. But that was in September 5th, 2021. Why is this in the news again? Because I actually forgot that it happened. It was so long ago. I forgot it happened. I had to reacquaint myself with what they were actually doing here. And you may say, hey, Bob, what the hell took them so long? That's a long time. Only now they're writing papers. Well, I went through what they actually have been doing all that time, and it kind of – Makes sense that it would take this long. First off, they had to wait until their hangovers were gone, right? Because they were celebrating big time because that was a major achievement. But after – once they were ready to get back to work, they actually tore the whole magnet assembly apart and inspected all the components. Then they analyzed the data from hundreds of instruments that recorded all of this stuff, probably petabytes of data. They put it back together and then they ran it really hard and then shut it down. They like turned off the switch. Boop. Turn off the power and that is a worst-case scenario for this type of magnet. It's called a quench. It could have literally destroyed all of their equipment. But they needed to – once they did all the previous tests, they needed to say, let's do worst-case scenario and then we'll study what happens. And it turns out that it didn't destroy the equipment. It only melted some of the magnet, a very tiny – like 5% of its volume was actually melted, which was pretty small. So then they looked at all of their models, and they had a bunch of models predicting what happens at each stage getting up to 20 Tesla. And all of their models agreed on what they found when they went to 20 Tesla. But when they quenched it and shut it down and created this catastrophic failure, they found that some of their models did not predict what would happen. So they threw those models away, and they kept only the models that correctly predicted the entire – the entire process from beginning to end. And they knew that these were the ones that were the most accurate. And then, of course, they documented everything in the form of these six reports that are online. I recommend you checking them out and also going through some of the more details. There's so much to this that I'm just not even covering. So the bottom line assessment of the engineers after all of this research is that their predictions and computer modeling were incredibly accurate. And they confirmed that the magnet's new design could absolutely serve as the foundation for for a future fusion power plant. And it really is quite an achievement. It's the first large scale, high temperature, high field superconducting magnet. And they brought it together with supply lines and efficiencies in mind. It's amazing what they accomplished. Professor White described this as the most significant thing, in my opinion, in the last 30 years of fusion research. Sure, okay, the guy is a little biased, but that's a powerful statement. He says that essentially – this was interesting. He says that – this isn't a direct quote. This is basically what he was saying was that previously, before this, the best fusion magnets of the world – He believes that they could have potentially achieved fusion energy but only as something like a showcase, like a one-off, if they even could have gotten that far. He thinks that using magnetic confinement with only a moderate field – and moderate density would never make practical sense or be reasonably economical. So he says that they could have done this. They could have actually said, look, we've achieved significant fusion and there's lots of ways you can characterize that. But he thinks they could have potentially have done that but it never would have been anything that would have been economical or practical to pull off. I think he would also include ITER by the way. I really feel sorry for Eder because when they designed this Takamak that they put billions of dollars into and all this research, they locked in the superconducting magnets. They locked in that design. And after these improvements, they could not change their design. And I think that they're looking and they're saying, oh my god, we should have waited a few years until we could have used this new superconducting technology to have these much smaller and much more intense magnetic fields, superconducting fields connected. magnetic fields because that's what would make it so much more less expensive and actually more simple. So White also says regarding that test from September 5th, he says, overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day. He said now fusion has a chance. That's kind of the – my assessment of what they did. But of course I got to end this and I got to – you got to keep in mind this is fusion research. It's ridiculously complex and just because MIT has had this major success, they still could be and probably will be – There probably will be major delays. I believe they're expecting a working test reactor like this decade and a full-scale commercial reactor like an arc reactor or spark reactor in the 2030s. I think that's probably still optimistic. But having this type of reactor and simplifying as they have done and creating these – basically, they've got these recipes where here's how you can create – These magnets and here's how – here's the supply lines and here's the efficiencies that we've achieved. They really have I think an amazing foundation for a new type of tokamak reactor using these high field superconducting magnetic fields that could really make a difference. Whenever the time does come, I think this could give it a really good shot at being really commercially viable.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's still really hard. I mean, this makes it slightly more likely, I think, to happen, but I don't know. You said reduce the cost by 40 times, but aren't we like orders of magnitude away from producing enough energy that the whole thing works? We reached that point where in the moment that we're creating fusion, it's putting out more energy than went into it. But it's still only 1% of the total energy that got to that point. We have to generate 100 times more energy to get to net energy.

'''B:''' Yeah, but don't confuse the inertial confinement with the magnetic confinement. The inertial confinement that – was it the slack? That they had done a couple of years ago was an amazing milestone. They've reached – what were some of the things that they've reached? Like ignition and one of the types of ignition. They really made some great milestones and you're right. The energy that they created was far in excess of what they actually put on that – That pellet, that hulkrum. So yeah. And they're very slick. They're very sly because they characterize it in a way that you don't know. You don't really realize that, oh, no way. They created so much. Their lasers were so powerful and only a tiny fraction of it ever got onto that hulkrum. So they're a different beast. I want to see – I want to see a Takamak, a serious Takamak like this one actually working before. I'm really as pessimistic as I am with the inertial confinement fusion. And this looks like a wonderful foundation. And if it's going to happen, I think you clearly need – A reactor like this one that is – the more powerful it is, the less power you need for everything else and the cheaper everything is. If it's going to work, this is going to do it. This is the only one that even has a shot because I think – I don't think any other technique – especially other tokamaks like ITER and inertial confinement. I don't think they really have a shot to be commercially viable. They may create a test bed. Oh, look, it works, but there's no way we're going to make this commercial and create plants all over the world. That's not going to happen, I don't think, with these other technologies. This one's got a shot. Like White says, now fusion has a chance. It didn't have a chance before this. Now it does. I hope he's right.

'''S:''' All right, thanks, Bob. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

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== Who's That Noisy? (1:11:37) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 973
|answer = Balloon popping in sound-enhancing room then one popping in a sound-dampening room: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq07ZFMvo-c "Balloon pop: reverb room vs. anechoic chamber"]
|}}


'''J:''' Okay, guys, last week I played this noisy. All right.

'''E:''' Remember they used to have those little toy cannons on the desk or something? You'd pull the string back and fire the cannon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little pellet or something would come out. All right, so I had a lot of people. Little cannon and pellet.

'''J:''' Yeah, I remember that. I remember that thing. All right, so I had a lot of guesses. A lot of people were in the right place, but I did get one correct answer on this one. So let's get through these. So a listener named Chris said, Hi, Jay. This week, I think the noisy is first the sound of an explosion. Then the second part is the shockwave reaching the camera and knocking it over. That's interesting. I mean, I absolutely think that if the shockwave hit the camera, it probably would be more of a noise. But I get what you're aiming at there. Jim Kelly said, Hi, Jay. I think the answer to this week's noisy is the following. Sound one, a potato gun being fired. Sound two, the potato hitting its target off in the distance. For some reason, that one made me laugh. It is not a potato gun.

'''S:''' It's because potatoes are funny.

'''J:''' Yes. I had two close guesses. Well, I had many close guesses, but these were the first two I got in. This is from Tim Welsh. He said, Hey, Jay, I think I know what this one is. I think it's someone doing a single hard clap first in an echo chamber, second in an anechoic chamber. I'm definitely confident. if it's not a clap, it's at least two of those scenarios. And the second guesser said, his name is Eddie Anthony, and he said, Hi, Jay, I bet you get a lot of correct guesses on this one. Thank you for watching. Okay, so these two were on track here. The winning answer came in from Harley Hunt. And Harley said, g'day, my guess for who's that noisy is a balloon. Specifically, a balloon being popped in a sound enhancing room for the first time and then a sound dampening room for the second time around. So this is correct. So what I saw was a video of someone popping a balloon and they popped it in basically a room that has a lot of acoustic surfaces. So there was a lot of reverb. And the second one was popped in a sound reinforced room where if you've seen them, basically there's an incredibly large, like it looks like foam, but there's these really long like pyramid-like shapes in there that absorb most of the sound. And that same exact sound was made in these two different rooms. I mean, what the hell with that second one? So there's no reverberation, which means the sound waves that are being created are not bouncing off of anything, which significantly lowers the volume and the length of the reverb or the decay of the sound. Just a super interesting idea when you think that those are the exact two same sounds with the same distance from the camera and everything. Just amazing. I think that those rooms must be – first off, I'm sure they cost an incredible amount of money to make. But I've heard people say that when they go in that it's actually uncomfortable to be in there because – We're so trained to – we're used to hearing the sounds that we make and sounds around us like bouncing off the surfaces and there's like room noise. We're just acquainted with that. But when you're in a room where there isn't any of that, people report that they can hear their heartbeat inside those rooms. Very strange. Anyway, that was a great. Who's That Noisy? I really thought that was cool. I have a new one for this week, guys, and this one was sent in by a listener named Nat.

'''S:''' Thank you.

'''J:''' You get the idea.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah.

'''J:''' So if you think you know what this noisy is or you heard something cool this week, you can email me at WTN at TheSkepticSky.org. Steve, we have a few shows planned right now. So the private show in Dallas is sold out. The extravaganza in Dallas is still available. And if you're interested, if you're going to be down there to see the eclipse, try to join us at that extravaganza. You can go to TheSkepticSky.org to buy tickets for that. Now, we're also making plans for shows in Chicago in August. We're going to have an extravaganza, which tickets are available now for. We're going to have a private show, which tickets will be available very soon, maybe by the time that this recording comes up. I'm just crunching a few more details. But those tickets, if not this week, will probably be available next week. All of this can be found on the skepticsguide.org website.

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=== New Noisy (1:15:32) ===
[Warbly, old-time recording of a piano tune interlaced with kazoo-like instrument]

{{wtnAnswer|975|what this Noisy is}}

== Announcements (1:16:14) ==

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== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups ==
=== Correction #1: IVF details (1:17:02) ===
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'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Jay. Just a little bit of feedback from last week's show. We talked, remember, about in vitro fertilization and frozen fertilized eggs being considered a child based upon Alabama Supreme Court precedents now. And we talked a little bit about IVF itself in the process. And a few people pointed out, and I looked into this, that as IVF procedures have gotten better, they are able to implant a single fertilized embryo. rather than doing multiple.

'''C:''' Wow, so even more goes to waste.

'''S:''' This is what they do. So they'll try to get like 10 to 20 eggs donated. Then they do the in vitro fertilization. And then the eggs, well, it's either successful or it's not successful. And then the successful ones are either like high quality or medium quality. So then they implant one high quality fertilized egg. So they've just gotten a lot better at the technology and the success rates a lot higher even with an individual egg because, again, they're picking the high-quality one. But it still gives you the same situation. In order to do that, you need to waste all of the not high-quality embryos, right? Like there's no way to do that without there being embryos that are going to be discarded at some point. We predicted that the Alabama legislature would carve out an exception for IVF, and they're in the process of doing that, pretty much exactly as predicted. They're not reversing any aspect of the Supreme Court decision. that child means unborn child, which means embryo, which means frozen embryo. They're just saying, yeah, once you're fertilized, you're a person, you're a child, no matter where you are or what the situation is. So they're not reversing that or undoing that or softening that. They're just saying, yeah, this doesn't apply to IVF. That's it. Just carving out an exception for IVF. Because they just don't want to deal with that. But even if that was controversial within the Republicans in Alabama – Oh, boy. Well, there was an interview that I saw today with one of them that was saying, well, they just shouldn't make any more than they use, right? Oh, come on. They should just make a single one and plant a single one and that's it. And he's like, I know it's expensive.

'''C:''' Did he say, I'm not a scientist, but before saying that...

'''S:''' But of course that doesn't work. It's not how the process works. You need to make a bunch of them because they're not all successful and they're not all high quality. And what if you want to have multiple pregnancies and blah, blah, blah? It's just a terrible idea all around.

'''B:''' It's a terrible idea. Oh, sorry.

'''E:''' All together now.

=== Follow-up #1: Moon's orbit (1:19:50) ===
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'''S:''' All together now. Another email comes from Hugh Phillip, and Hugh writes, I believe you said the moon's path around the sun is always concave. I think this implies a very particular condition that the moon-Earth distance is approximately 1 13th the distance to the sun, which it clearly is not. The velocity of the moon in Earth's reference frame never comes close to velocity of the Earth-moon system around the sun. So the path of the moon around the sun must be like a distorted sine wave, meaning there are concave and convex parts of the orbit with redirect to the sun. Maybe I misheard, but I'm busy and it's only in the middle of the night when I wake up that I remember these things from my community podcast.

'''E:''' I've done that. Yeah.

'''S:''' So, all right. So, you know, I... I knew this was absolutely correct and I also found some references, some recent references, astronomy.com. Everyone has these. All the astronomy places have this. So what I said was correct. If you map out the orbit of the moon around the sun, it never is concave away from the sun. It's always concave towards the sun. It's hard to imagine because it's hard to get the scale in your head. You know what I mean? But if you do the math or if you actually map out the orbit, we'll have links to sites that go over it in detail. That's true. The moon is always – you know what I mean by concave to the sun? It's always sort of bending towards the sun. Its orbital pathway never curves away from the sun. So that's objectively non-controversially true. And I sent him the links and he agrees with that. He just said he just wasn't thinking about it mathematically correctly. But there's another interesting – I brought this up as just kind of – I was being funny because Bob was talking about the orbit of the moon. And I said, yeah, but does the moon orbit around the earth or does it orbit around the sun? It's an interesting question, and this is only one piece of information that is relevant to that question. The answer actually sounds like circular logic, but it isn't. The answer is the moon revolves around the earth because the moon revolves around the earth. Let me explain that. There is something called the Hill Limit or the Hill Sphere. So that is the zone within which something is captured by the gravitational pull of an object, right? So within the Earth's Hill Sphere, something is in the orbit around the Earth. The thing is, if it weren't within the Hill Sphere, it would drift away into its own orbit around the sun, right? So the fact that it is in orbit around the Earth means that it's within the Hill Sphere, and therefore it's within orbit around the Earth. It sounds circular, but it means if it wasn't orbiting the Earth, it would not be a consistent distance from the Earth and captured by the Earth. It would drift off and just orbit the sun. Does that make sense? Right. Yeah. Which is why Venus and Mercury don't have moons. Because they don't have basically any hill sphere. No moon could be captured.

'''E:''' Can't overcome it.

'''S:''' Yeah, they could over...

'''E:''' Can't overcome the sun. Exactly.

'''S:''' Those that are too close to the sun to overcome the gravity of the sun.

'''E:''' Wow, we're even more Goldilocks zone than we thought.

'''S:''' So that was an interesting little follow-up. All right, guys, it's time for Science or Fiction.

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== Science or Fiction (1:23:20) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
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{{SOFinfo
|theme = Daylight Saving Time

|item1 = A study of over 200 thousand malpractice claims finds that daylight saving time is associated with worse severity of incidents and higher average payments than standard time.
|link1web = https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.11038
|link1title = Medical malpractice litigation and daylight saving time
|link1pub = Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine

|item2 = Credit for the first serious proposal of daylight saving time goes to entomologist, George Vernon Hudson, who presented the idea in 1895 because he wanted more time in the evening for bug collection.
|link2web = https://www.huffpost.com/entry/daylight-savings-time-history-george-vernon-hudson_n_1333378
|link2title = Daylight Savings Time Invented By George Vernon Hudson, 19th-Century Entomologist
|link2pub = HuffPost

|item3 = Among its many detrimental effects, daylight saving time is associated with an increase in overall crime compared to standard time.
|link3web = https://www.brookings.edu/articles/fighting-crime-with-daylight-saving-time/
|link3title = Fighting crime with Daylight Saving Time
|link3pub = Brookings

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = DST increases crime
|science1 = DST = worse malpractice
|science2 = credited to entomologist

|rogue1 =bob
|answer1 = credited to entomologist

|rogue2 =Evan
|answer2 = DST increases crime

|rogue3 =cara
|answer3 = DST increases crime

|rogue4 =jay
|answer4 = DST increases crime

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win =y 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I'll challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is relevant because it is almost daylight saving time.

'''E:''' Ooh, Bob. You and I. Uh-oh. We love our long summer days, don't we?

'''C:''' Who doesn't? Yeah.

'''S:''' You guys ready? Yep. Three items related to daylight savings time. Sure. Item number one, a study of over 200,000 malpractice claims finds that daylight saving time is associated with worse severity of incidents and higher average payments than standard time. Item number two, credit for the first serious proposal of daylight saving time goes to entomologist George Vernon Hudson, who presented the idea in 1895 because he wanted more time in the evening for bug collection. And item number three, among its many detrimental effects, daylight saving time is associated with an increase in overall crime compared to standard time. And yes, it is daylight saving time, singular, not daylight savings time.

'''C:''' Yeah, there's no S.

'''S:''' But that's a very common...

'''C:''' But we still say savings.

'''E:''' Yeah, daylight saving.

'''S:''' A lot of people say savings. When I was doing research, a lot of people write daylight savings time, but it's saving time.

'''C:''' Okay, I know this is a – so are we on daylight saving right now or are we on standard?

'''S:''' No, we're about to.

'''E:''' No, we're about to go on it.

'''C:''' Okay, so daylight saving is when you're – yeah, it's when you save daylight.

'''S:''' We're on standard time now.

'''C:''' There's more sun.

'''S:''' Okay. Yeah, daylight saving time is over the summer, the way I think about it. Bob, go first.

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' All right. So going through malpractice claims, daylight saving is associated with worse severity of incidents and higher average payment – wait, payment?

'''S:''' Yeah, the award for the payment of how much you get paid for losing your malpractice suit.

'''B:''' Okay. Wow. Standard time. Who knows? Nobody knows the answer to this stuff. Something about this entomologist. Sounds wacky. I'm going to say that's fiction. That's all I got. I can't think right now.

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''S:''' Okay, Evan.

'''E:''' I get to go second. All right. In a way, I think I may agree with Bob here even though he didn't really give us some – really any insight as to his decision. All right. The first one, about 200,000 malpractice claims. Wow. They found that daylight savings time associated with – is associated. with worse severity of incidents, severity of incidents. Well, maybe not. And higher average payments than standard time. It has to meet both those criteria. So, I mean, this kind of gives it some wiggle room for it to be the fiction. There's several components here that could knock it out from being science. But in a way, it kind of makes sense because more daylight, more human activity, more incidents... happen overall and therefore more malpractice results due to the heightened activity that goes hand in hand with the extra time. Maybe. I'm going to jump to the third one. Detrimental effects. There are apparently many. Daylight savings time is associated with an increase in overall crime compared to standard time. Overall crime. Okay. So – I mean we kind of think of crime as more of a nighttime activity, right? The cloak of night as opposed to the broad daylight. You would think that that would be the opposite then, right? But the second one about the first serious proposal of daylight saving time. Okay, serious proposal. I mean, how do you quantify that? And George Vernon Hudson presented the idea. I know Ben Franklin at some point had an idea about daylight savings time or something close to it. But was it considered a serious proposal? That I don't know. And that's why I was leaning towards that one being the fiction proposal. Now that I've had a chance to talk it through, and thank you all for listening to me talk it through, I think I'll go ahead and change my answer. I think it's going to be the increase in overall crime compared to standard time. I think the opposite is correct there.

'''S:''' Okay, Cara.

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' Yeah, so I agree with Evan about some things. I disagree with him about others. Bob, you didn't give me a lot to agree with or disagree with.

'''E:''' Kind of like real life.

'''C:''' So the malpractice claims one I think is probably science. I don't think it has anything to do with there being more daylight. I think it's because when we shift – Our circadian clocks are screwy. Like, we know that people get in more car wrecks. We know that, you know, we just were... We have more accidents when our sleep is messed with. And daylight saving messes with our sleep in both directions. So anytime there's a clock shift, I think that you're going to see a change. I do agree with you, Evan, about the crime. I think you're going to...

'''E:''' You think that one's the fiction?

'''C:''' I think it's opposite. Yeah, I think probably... daylight the standard time is probably associated with or you just made this one up but I would think that maybe standard time would be associated with more crime because same thing because more crime especially violent crimes um car car theft things like that are going to occur in the dark. And then I had the exact same thought about Ben Franklin. I 100% remember that Ben Franklin did muse about daylight saving, but maybe that's the thing. Maybe it was – he was a muser. You read a lot of his old stuff. There's lots of musings, lots of the almanac. What was it? The Poor Richard's Almanac. He wrote a lot of things like that. Yeah, so I bet you he did riff on the idea, but I bet you it wasn't a serious proposal, and that's the kicker there. So I'm going to go with what Evan said and say the crime one is the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, and Jay?

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' Yeah, out of all these, I mean, when I read the third one, I felt like, you know, the one about the crime, I just feel like it would, I don't know, there doesn't seem to be a reason for that to happen. So I think I agree with what Evan said. I think that's the opposite.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' So you all agree with the first one, so we'll start there. A study of over 200,000 malpractice claims finds that daylight saving time is associated with worse severity of incidents and higher average payments than standard time. We'll all think that one is science, and that one is science. Science. That one is correct. So the two hypotheses they were testing is, one, will people make worse mistakes, leading to more and more severe malpractice suits? And the other one was, are jurors cranky? And so are they going to get more money even for the same crimes?

'''E:''' I didn't even think of that. I didn't even think of juries.

'''S:''' Interestingly, if you look at just the week following the changeover, The severity of incidents are not worse, but the awards are still higher. And so they think that's the cranky juror effect because everyone's sleep deprived.

'''E:''' So don't have your decision day. come down on the opposite side.

'''S:''' Yeah, after you switch the clocks.

'''E:''' I'm switching clocks.

'''S:''' Oh, my gosh. But the whole – like the many months of daylight saving time had more malpractice than the –. Again, the cause and effect there is a little bit hard to sort out, but that was interesting. That's what they found. All right, let's go to number two. credit for the first serious proposal of daylight saving time goes to entomologist George Vernon Hudson, who presented the idea in 1895 because he wanted more time in the evening for bug collection. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. Sorry, Bob.

'''B:''' I knew it. I knew it.

'''S:''' So, yeah, this guy presented it to the Royal Society of New Zealand and was initially mocked for the idea. But his ideas, that was in 1895. But by 1927, they were starting to become massively adopted in many nations.

'''C:''' Did New Zealand adopt first?

'''E:''' Well, that's interesting.

'''S:''' No, not necessarily. No.

'''C:''' That's so interesting because I think a lot of people kind of mistake this for like an American invention.

'''E:''' A World War I artifact. An outcrumbing of World War I.

'''S:''' Germany was the first country. Germany was the first country.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' And Evan, you're correct. Benjamin Franklin did have some musings about it, but he was joking. He sent a letter to France where he joked about maybe you could get up earlier in order to burn less candles or something. Like it was not a serious proposal. But it was the first time somebody said anything about like getting up earlier or whatever, like changing the relationship to the circadian rhythm. But it wasn't like – I'm formally proposing that we move the clock. He didn't do that. That was this guy to the Royal Society in New Zealand. So that's why I threw serious in there because – yeah. There it is. Ben doesn't get credit because it was only joking.

'''E:''' Oh, Ben, you rascal.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' All right. This means that among as many detrimental effects, daylight saving time is associated with an increase in overall crime compared to standard time. Is the fiction? Because you're right. It goes down. Why does it go down? Because there's more light in the evening. But specifically, they think that the reason why there's a significant effect here is It's because it makes the difference between being light or dark when people are going back home from work. Which means when you're going out into the parking lot and getting into your car, it's either dark or it's light out. And if it's in the dark, that creates a huge opportunity for crime. Whereas if it's light out, that is a huge disincentive. Obviously, nobody wants to commit crimes in broad daylight. So at least it goes down, right? Obviously, it still happens. So that's the thinking there, whether it's light or dark out when people are driving, getting into their cars and driving home from work or traveling on the subway or the trains or whatever, it reduces. And it's a significant effect that pretty much lasts for the entire duration of daylight saving time. So that's one good thing that happens from daylight saving time. I personally think they should make daylight saving time permanent, right? Right, yes. The time that is – yeah, that should just be – don't switch the clock twice a year, but don't have it. be permanent standard time, be permanent daylight saving time.

'''E:''' We talked about this, I think. Didn't we talk about this last year? And Bob, you and I were on the side arguing that if you're going to lock it in, lock it into savings time, daylight savings time.

'''S:''' Saving singular.

'''E:''' Oh, shoot. Did I do that? Oh, my gosh.

'''C:''' We all do.

'''E:''' Daylight saving time.

'''J:''' Why can't we just say it the way? we've been always saying it our whole lives? Yeah, right.

'''S:''' Because it's not correct, Jay. No, because I agree with you. I don't care about that. It's just one of the things I came across when I was doing research on it. I think people say it that way because it just rolls off the tongue a little bit easier. It's like why do people say whole nother? It's easier to say. Shut up. Because it's the infix. Yeah. Yeah.

'''C:''' There's a whole grammatical thing. But I hate it and it makes me crazy and I actively say a whole other.

'''E:''' A whole nother.

'''C:''' Or I say another. Because I do think it makes us sound a bit dense. A whole nother.

'''S:''' A whole nother. I think I said that for years and wasn't even aware of it.

'''C:''' Most people aren't.

'''S:''' Yeah. Just because it rolls off the tongue.

'''C:''' A friend of mine who is not from the U.S. pointed it out to me. And was like, you guys sound like yokels. And then I was like, damn it. Now that's all I can hear.

'''S:''' You're right. Once it's pointed out to you, though, then it's like it gets great. You have to retrain yourself to ignore it.

'''E:''' Y'all is not a word either, really.

'''C:''' But it should be because every other language has a plural second person.

'''E:''' You all, y'all.

'''C:''' Yeah, there's first person singular, first person plural, second person singular, second person plural, and third person singular, third person plural.

'''S:''' Oh, it's interesting.

'''C:''' For some reason in English, we don't have a second person plural.

'''S:''' So y'all initially was second person plural, but then it started to get used as just singular. So then they had to add all. So now it's all y'all if it's more than one person.

'''C:''' Yeah, but that's regional.

'''B:''' Oh, my God.

'''E:''' That's right. In New York, it's use.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's super regional. I still say y'all for more than one. I would never say y'all for one person. That's you.

'''S:''' But some people do.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' No, I don't think they say y'all for one person. I think it's that y'all is a small group and all y'all is a big group.

'''S:''' Oh, really?

'''E:''' Degrees. Yeah.

'''C:''' So let's say there's like, let's say you're teaching a full classroom. There's like 30 kids in your class and you point, okay, y'all are going to work on this, but all y'all together are going to make sure that you work on that.

'''B:''' I totally get it.

'''C:''' Yeah, it makes sense.

'''E:''' I told you so bad.

'''J:''' I didn't even perceive the difference.

'''C:''' That's right. Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, stupid northerners we are.

'''C:''' You yanks. You have no idea.

'''J:''' Cara, so what does –?

'''B:''' well, what does that mean?

'''C:''' That is an indication that we're about to switch tasks. Or that you have been here for too long and it's time for you to get up.

'''E:''' Jay, do you remember where Wilt originated from and why we picked it up and haven't been able to drop it?

'''J:''' I don't know. I mean, something tells me I made it up along the way. I mean, I must have heard it somewhere, right? I mean, somebody said that before me.

'''C:''' I'm sure you heard it. I'm sure you heard somebody say, well.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's an affectation.

'''C:''' And when we're there, when we're in Dallas, you guys are going to hear Fixin' 2. Oh, yes. So get ready for it.

'''E:''' Oh, I haven't been to Texas in so long.

'''J:''' Cara, how good is the barbecue?

'''C:''' Oh, it's the best in the country. Don't write me in. You're right.

'''E:''' Here we go.

'''C:''' Unless you agree with me and then you can write all you want. There's something about Texas barbecue. It's smoky. It's a little sweet. It's spicy. It's sticky. It's my favorite. I mean, granted, I was born in it. I'm biased, but it's my favorite. But I will tell you, it's not just the barbecue. It's the Tex-Mex. It's the queso. You guys, we're going to eat like champs.

'''J:''' I can't wait.

'''E:''' Here I am trying to lose weight for it. All of it.

'''C:''' Yeah, and in that weekend, nothing counts. Just look at it that way.

'''E:''' Yeah, I know.

'''C:''' I'm just going to go crazy.

'''E:''' Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us a quote.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:38:11) ==

{{qow
|text = Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.
|author = {{w|Frank Herbert}}
|lived = 1920-1986
|desc = American science-fiction author, best known for his 1965 novel ''{{w|Dune (novel)|Dune}}'' and its five sequels
}}


'''E:''' This week's quote was suggested by a listener, Corey from Diggins, Missouri. I didn't know there was a Diggins, Missouri.

'''C:''' Love it.

'''E:''' He wrote in the subject, Frank Herbert quote. Cool. Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions. And that's from The Children of Dune, of course, written by Frank Herbert. Dune! Did anyone seen Dune 2?

'''S:''' Not yet. It was awesome.

'''E:''' So no spoilers, right? Because all of us have not seen it yet.

'''J:''' No spoilers. Definitely not. Definitely not.

'''E:''' Thank you, Jay. Hear, hear.

'''S:''' I mean, what do you want to not get spoiled? The plot of a 50-year-old book or a movie that came out 30 years ago? Don't you dare, Steve.

'''E:''' Don't go there.

'''C:''' Don't piss people off on a technicality, Steve.

'''E:''' Some of us have never read the books or seen the original.

'''J:''' You're going to love it, Ev.

'''B:''' Yeah, I can't wait.

'''S:''' All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''B:''' Sure, man.

'''E:''' It was nice to be joined, too.

'''J:''' My pleasure, sir.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

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SGU Episode 973

2024-05-02T08:25:16Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

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|episodeIcon = File:973 Odysseus.jpg

|caption = "An American company has made history by becoming the first commercial outfit to put a spacecraft on the Moon." <ref>[https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68377730 BBC: Moon landing: US firm Intuitive Machines makes historic touchdown]</ref> "The Odysseus mission is funded by NASA as part of their program to develop private industry to send instruments and supplies to the Moon." <ref name=odysseus>[https://theness.com/neurologicablog/odysseus-lands-on-the-moon/ Neurologica: Odysseus Lands on the Moon]</ref>

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|qowText = The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
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== Introduction, Leap year, AI Willy Wonka party ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, February 28th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Hey, guys. Hey, happy Leap Year Day tomorrow.

'''S:''' Eve.

'''E:''' Two days ago.

'''S:''' Leap Year Day Eve. Yeah. Yeah, this is a leap year, so we have a February 29th tomorrow, March 1st.

'''C:''' Happy birthday to all of you who are one-fourth the age of the rest of us.

'''S:''' Yeah. I do like when we get into March because that's the month that spring comes and then we're in the upper half for the analemma and it's good. It's all good.

'''C:''' Ooh, and daylight saving. Yeah.

'''S:''' Daylight saving.

'''C:''' It's reversed, I guess.

'''J:''' Evan always says this, a minute a day, right? Every year you say that, Evan.

'''E:''' I think I do. Maybe Bob does, but yes.

'''B:''' Yes, I see that quite often. I'm most happy for this day, for the 29th, because it puts us, Halloween, it puts it a day closer to the awesome, most awesome Saturday Halloween, which will happen in a couple more years. Wow.

'''S:''' Bob, you going to do a Halloween party this year? F yeah. You have to make sure it's better than Willie's chocolate experience.

'''B:''' Nice segue. What's Willy's chocolate experience? I sent an email to these guys. This is all over Twitter. So this was some company in Scotland created this Willy Wonka experience.

'''S:''' The House of Illuminati is the company.

'''B:''' Yes, that's the company. Oh, that's a reputable name. They essentially – and you could probably extrapolate after this next sentence. They sent an AI-generated image of the event. Multiple.

'''S:''' The whole thing was AI-generated.

'''B:''' Yeah, I'm looking at one right now. that is just this magical wonderland of lollipops and beautiful images and lots of edible things. It's Willy Wonka. It's a beautiful image of a Willy Wonka room that you would expect in this extravagant, well-designed and created and expensive Willy Wonka attraction. The problem is, is that it was AI generated. And when people went there, they paid like $40. This was in Glasgow, $40 a person. When they went there, it was... Oh, my God. Imagine a warehouse that is sparsely decorated with mostly really crappy decorations.

'''S:''' Yeah, like a lollipop, like a – and singular lollipop.

'''E:''' Wow, what an immersive experience. You look at it.

'''B:''' It was – Some of the printouts were even – they hung these things on the wall like they were like maybe printouts of some of the AI images and props here and there. Some of the props actually – somebody said, oh, this is like a college student party. And I'm like, no. Some of these props are actually – they look quite expensive. But they were so few and far between. It looks like so nothing compared to what was the AI imagined. People actually call the cops here.

'''E:''' It was so bad.

'''B:''' They called the cops. And of course, they did mass refunds.

'''S:''' Well, they claimed they're going to, but haven't been able to confirm that they've actually given a refund yet. None of the people who went there said, yes, I got a refund. Yeah, I mean it looks like – looking at the images, it looks like the event is over and they've 90 percent cleaned up and this is the dregs that was left behind.

'''E:''' Yeah. You know? It was – yeah.

'''B:''' It was – I would have raised hell.

'''S:''' Total fail.

'''B:''' I would have raised hell. I think one of the takeaways is that if you're going to an event like this, first off, be on the lookout for promotional material that looks AI-generated. Even with spelling errors that you would totally expect from an AI-generated image. Absolutely. Spelling errors were all over the place. But I would say wait for reviews. Get some reviews before you pony up some good money for something like this that could – I think we're going to be seeing more of this. And there was one comment though. I read a bunch of comments online. One of the comments was the best. Apparently, kids were crying, right? And some people described it. They had a woman, this poor woman dressed as an Oompa Loompa, I guess, with this like laboratory equipment, like a – Yeah. Weird laboratory equipment next to her. And people said it looked like a meth lab. So you see the words meth lab in a lot of these articles. But one guy had a response. One guy's reaction to this whole thing was he's like, of course, one could argue that a Willy Wonka inspired event that ended with angry parents and crying children is more authentic to Dahl's novel than any of the recent Wonka movies.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Totally made me laugh.

'''J:''' Looking at the images. Oh my God. It's so bad. Like the, the candied up, super awesome AI generated images, like look just cool enough. And they could almost be real. Like it looks like that, you know, when they project like artwork onto the wall or a ceiling, like it has like a projection kind of look to it. But then you see the picture next to it. where like, there's this super cheesy, like fake rainbow arch that they had. That looks like somebody made it out of paper mache. It's terrible.

'''S:''' Also, the actors who were hired, there were some hired actors. The night before, they get like a 15-page AI-generated incomprehensible script.

'''B:''' That they had to memorize in heaven cold.

'''S:''' Clearly, this was an organizational epic failure. The backstory may be interesting as to how it came to this. The company is described as dodgy and apparently has only one full-time employee. You know how those companies are, right? Nice, Steve.

'''B:''' Good one.

'''S:''' I think underestimated by an order of magnitude what would have been necessary to pull off the event as advertised. The expectation that was generated was way off the reality.

'''E:''' This is like Fyre Fest.

'''S:''' Yeah. Worse. But of course, it's entertaining for all of us on the internet.

'''B:''' Yeah. Ball pit levels.

'''J:''' Oh, my God.

'''B:''' This is terrible.

'''J:''' Looking at more pictures, it's like pathetic.

'''B:''' Steve, I read that the guy – maybe it's this one full-time guy you're talking about. I heard this one guy has a history of similar things of like using AI to generate revenue in this – But he took it analog though.

'''S:''' He thought he could use AI to gin up this, you know, warehouse with props scattered about. I mean, it was, anyway.

'''C:''' It's so weird when people don't think, like, obviously they're actually going to show up and I'm going to have to pull this off at some point.

'''S:''' That guy sounds like he's probably a scam artist. Right. Either he's a scam artist or he is just grossly incompetent and unaware of how it works.

'''E:''' Do you guys remember – when you said $40 to attend this thing, this kind of lit up something in my brain. Joe Nickel used to talk about the scam artists that would travel around and do these drawings of dead people and stuff. And they would charge something around $40 and they would do it purposefully because apparently the laws are different and less severe. Right. if you charge kind of less money at a certain point. Oh, interesting.

'''S:''' Is there a break point?

'''E:''' There's a calculation in there somewhere in which they know what they're doing is wrong, yet they'll suffer the minimum kind of penalties if they're either caught or arrested or prosecuted.

'''C:''' They're like, I'm a misdemeanor thief, not a felony thief.

'''E:''' Right, right. I wouldn't be surprised if that's part of this calculus.

{{anchor|alabama}} 
== Special Discussion: Alabama SC Decision (7:28) ==
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'''S:'''...ineluctably<ref group=v>[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ineluctable#Adjective Wiktionary: ineluctable]; impossible to avoid or escape</ref>...

'''S:''' The other controversy that happened over the last week was the Alabama State Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, which, you know, is ridiculous on its face. But there's, you know, I've been engaged. I wrote about this on my blog. And so, of course, I've been engaged with debates with a lot of people about it. So apparently the fact that life begins at conception is basically already established within Alabama law.

'''C:''' Oh, so there's precedent for that.

'''S:''' So that's the starting point, right? The question at stake in this case was whether extra uterine fertilized eggs also count as children, right? Does the fact that they're not implanted in a uterus mean they're not a child? And they said, no, they could be frozen in a vat. They're still a child.

'''C:''' Well, and didn't it come? because somebody – I mean it was a tragedy. Like somebody accidentally destroyed a lot of – I think that's where all of this started, right?

'''S:''' A patient wandered into the area where they were – the vats were – the embryos were stored, decided I guess to take a look, pulled out a tray of frozen embryos, got freezer burnt because he didn't realize you can't touch things that cold. Yeah. dropped it, they shattered and basically destroyed three families' frozen embryos. So then they were sued for negligence, which fair enough. I think that was like, yes, they were negligent. But then they also said they also sued them for basically wrongful death under an Alabama law, like death of a minor law. Yeah, so this case basically said that this law applies because this law says just children, minor children – And it doesn't exclude extra uterine children, so we're going to include them. And, of course, they're assuming that child starts at fertilization. Like that's the assumption in Alabama legally. That's insane. So it's not just this one case coming out of the blue. This has been building in Alabama state law for a while. But it's still ridiculous.

'''E:''' Yeah, it sounds like they were just waiting for an opportunity for this to come up.

'''S:''' Frozen embryos. Yeah, this is of course the big anti-abortion debate. If life – if its personhood begins at conception, of course that makes all abortion murder, right? But even also some kinds of birth control becomes murder as well. Yeah. Again, where do you – the implications – first of all, it would end IVF. You can't do IVF if – It's murder for a fertilized egg to be destroyed or to be discarded or to just not implant. You know what I mean?

'''C:''' Right. You don't implant every single one. The process necessarily destroys.

'''B:''' Really? It's necessary?

'''S:''' Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's no way because you have to make more eggs than you can, than will be successfully implanted. There's no 100% implantation rate.

'''B:''' Right, but if you try to – I'm aware that sometimes they just put three, four, five eggs and hopefully one will fertilize. And sometimes more than that do. Like some people have had like six tuplets or whatever from this method. But if you put them in and they don't implant, then that's just nature. That's just nature taking its course, right? You're not like – you're not purposely destroying them.

'''C:''' No, but Bob, I don't think it's a function of just implanting every single embryo that you make. I think that a lot of embryos have to be made to find the ones that are going to be viable for implantation. Does that make sense? So there would be all of these other ones that you're discarding because they're not up to quality to even be implanted to begin with.

'''S:''' Yes, because you have to go through a whole process in order to produce eggs and then fertilize them in vitro. So they don't like make an egg and implant it, make an egg and implant it. They make a bunch of eggs, then they implant, implant, implant until one takes.

'''C:''' And they don't even implant all the ones they make because they're not all good.

'''S:''' That's what I'm saying. They'll implant a subset. Here's three or four. If none of them stick, we'll do another batch. So by necessity, they create more eggs than you're going to use. Plus also some parents may want multiple pregnancies, right? So they just make one batch. You could freeze them for decades. Right. Steve, what do you think about their claim though?

'''J:''' I mean scientifically, where does this land?

'''S:''' So it's not a scientific question. That's the problem. They're trying to frame it as one. A lot of the defenders of it's a person, it's life, whatever. The thing is there's no question that it's a living organism, right? And it is human life. That's not the question. The question is, is it legal, morally and ethically a person? And there's no objective scientific answer to that. It's like, is Pluto a planet? First of all, there's a continuum from a single cell to a baby that gets born. The question is, what criteria are you going to use? It doesn't have a brain. It doesn't have organs. It's not viable on its own. It doesn't have anatomy.

'''E:''' It's a host.

'''S:''' It's not viable on its own. It's not implanted. And so you could use any of these criteria to decide whether or not it's a person. And they're choosing, so they're kind of rigging the game up front without stating their major premise. They're saying, well, it is a human life. It's like, yeah, but that's not the question we're asking. You're framing it that way because, of course, there's only one answer to that question. But the question is not, is it a human life? It's, is it a person? And they're just arbitrarily – again, Alabama in law decided that they were going to define person as a fertilized egg. And that's a choice. It's not a scientific decision. And of course, most medical organization, institutions, professionals, whatever, do not agree that that's a reasonable definition. Right. Again, it's not totally objective, but I agree. I think it's not a reasonable definition. You have cells. That's it. The potential to become a person doesn't mean you're a person.

'''C:''' And I think the larger context that we often don't talk about is that what we're focusing on are the quote unquote inalienable rights of this clump of cells and wildly ignoring the rights of the host of these clump of cells. And I think this IVF question is even more – it gives even more sort of ammunition for these arguments because it kind of takes the quote mother out of it because we're talking about a Petri dish and we're talking – you know what I mean? Like these were in a freezer and that's where this conversation is happening. We're not talking about the rights of the mother at all. And oftentimes that's where we get held up in these sort of moral, ethical, legal debates because, of course, the sort of pro-choice movement there is about the rights of the mother. But is there even a mother involved when the cells have not yet been implanted?

'''S:''' But the other thing is the question of where is their decision coming from? Where is this notion that a fertilized egg is a person come from? It certainly doesn't derive naturally – or ineluctably from any kind of scientific principle. It comes from this religious belief, the religious belief that the soul is implanted in the fertilized egg. That's it. And it's no coincidence that God was mentioned whatever, like 30 times in the decision, something like that. Wow. It's explicitly theocracy. This is a theocratic decision, and trying to defend it as scientific is complete nonsense.

'''E:''' And this is not a court's job to do this, to come up with this kind of interpretation on their own like this. They're supposed to be defending the laws that are passed.

'''C:''' Well, they didn't.

'''S:''' Well, they're claiming that they're doing that.

'''C:''' Yeah, because they're responding to a suit, right? Yeah.

'''S:''' But – well, the law is already on the books. They're just saying does the law on the books apply to an extra uterine baby? Exactly. Child. That's what they're deciding.

'''C:''' This is how we interpret this law.

'''S:''' That is what judges – But, Evan, what they're doing though is they're choosing to decide that because the law doesn't exclude frozen embryos, it therefore includes them. But that's an arbitrary choice too.

'''E:''' Right. It's arbitrary. It's arbitrary.

'''S:''' Because you could decide that because it doesn't explicitly include them, it does not extend to them. You could flip the logic on its head and often that's what the originalists do, right? If the law didn't explicitly at the time refer to this thing, then you can't apply it to that. They're just turning it on its head. It's like, well, it doesn't exclude it, so we're going to say it's included. So it's legally dubious as well as being scientifically dubious.

'''J:''' Doesn't this though add – A huge level of complexity to all of the existing embryos that are in these deep freeze warehouses. According to these people, every single one of them is a person. Is a child. So what happens if – I don't know how long they last. Decades. Okay, but still. Okay, you put them in there. If they're going to be held for decades, which I doubt they are, but if they were even going to be held for decades, when it's time for them to, I don't know, essentially be disposed of – That's going to freak these people out.

'''S:''' That's murder, I guess, in Alabama. Yeah.

'''J:''' So a family goes in. They're trying to get pregnant. They have four or five embryos that they put on the deep freeze and they pick one of them.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' What happens to the other three?

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean it's more than that because they usually implant multiple at once. But yeah, they are saved in case they want another pregnancy. At some point, they say, all right, we're done and then they dispose of them. or they could donate them for research or they could donate them for people who want to have a donated baby. But it's up to them. Like the parents own those embryos, right?

'''J:''' Clearly, there's a problem here, right?

'''S:''' Because again, IVF cannot function under this legal scheme, right? It's not functional.

'''C:''' Which is why everybody is pausing, right? Like everybody is like, what do we do at work?

'''S:''' Yeah, the IVF – yeah, institutions that are doing IVF in Alabama are on pause until this gets sorted out. And it's possible the Alabama legislature might come in and say, you can do IVF regardless of any other laws. You know what I mean? So they may just rescue IVF from this decision. But that won't really deal with the underlying problem. It will just carve out an exception for IVF to minimize the political fallout of their decision. Right.

'''C:''' Which doesn't really make sense because the decision is based on IVF.

'''S:''' Yeah. It doesn't make internal logic. It doesn't make internal logic. Yeah. It's like I likened it to Vermont's anti-GMO law that carves out an exception for cheese. Why? There's no internal logical reason to do so. It's because they didn't want to devastate the cheese industry, right? And Hawaii's – Hawaii's draconian anti-GMO laws carve out an exception for GMO papaya. Why? Because they can't live without the papaya industry. That's it. They just started insulating their ideological decision from the worst political ramifications of it. And that's what they're likely to do here is to insulate this decision politically from the whole fact that IVF is extremely popular even among conservatives, even among people who live in Alabama. A lot of the conservative politicians that have been asked about this over the last week had kids by IVF like Nikki Haley, right? And Mike Pence have had kids by IVF. What are they going to say? I got mine. Everyone else is screwed now. That's why they're just scrambling. They don't know what to say. So I suspect the Alabama legislature will sort of rescue the political disaster that this decision has created but without really correcting or addressing the underlying problem here, right?

'''B:''' That's absolutely what's going to happen. There's too much unanticipated political fallout for the conservatives.

'''S:''' I think the damage is done though. I think the damage is done. But we'll see. All right. Let's go on to our news items. Jay, you're going to start by telling us about a moon landing that happened recently.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 

{{anchor|news1}}
=== First Private Landing on the Moon (19:39) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theness.com/neurologicablog/odysseus-lands-on-the-moon/
|article_title = Odysseus Lands on the Moon
|publication = nn
|refname = odysseus
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''J:''' Before I start my news item, let me ask you a very important question. Yes. Do you believe the moon exists?

'''E:''' Which moon?

'''B:''' Yes. Unlike Earth. Exactly, Evan. Thank you.

'''S:''' There you go. The moon.

'''J:''' Well, I read an article. This is a side note, but I have to bring this up because it's interesting. I read an article where they were saying that the Earth has more than one moon.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''B:''' I didn't – It depends how you describe it.

'''E:''' There are certain – Define moon.

'''J:''' Exactly. Comet? Comet?

'''E:''' Well, there are objects that are very large orbit around Earth, but they're like very small by comparison.

'''B:''' It's not just a very large orbit. It's a complicated orbit.

'''S:''' It's a complicated orbit.

'''B:''' You could argue that it's kind of orbiting the sun more than the Earth, but it seems to be orbiting Earth from one point of view.

'''S:''' You know, Bob, have you ever read, though, that you could argue from one point of view that the moon orbits the sun and not the earth? Because at no point, if you map out the moon's orbit, it's always concave towards the sun. It's never coming back the other way. Oh, interesting. You know what I'm saying?

'''J:''' If you believe in the moon, then listen to what I got to say here. All right. So a Houston, Texas-based company called Intuitive Machines, they created a lunar lander for NASA and they called it Nova C. Now, Nova C is the name of what the company called it. But when NASA uses the lander, when they deployed the lander, it's called Odysseus. So don't get confused because the names are interchangeable. Usually C, it's a Nova C Odysseus. But I would just prefer calling it Odysseus because it's a cooler name. So this is the name of the lander for a specific mission. So when they use the Nova Sea model again for yet another mission, NASA will give a different name to it, right? It's just going to be different every time they go.

'''S:''' Yeah, that was like a monopoly. They did that too. Every lander had its own name. Yep.

'''J:''' So Intuitive Machines, they specialize in autonomous systems, space exploration, and robotics. And this is one of the companies that NASA partnered with. So NASA's mission is actually called IM-1, and this launched on February 15th of this year on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The basic mission objective here was to land on the moon near the moon's south pole because this is probably the place where astronauts are actually going to go, so they want to get as much information about the south pole as possible. They're bringing scientific instruments to study the lunar regolith. And according to NASA, Odysseus successfully landed on February 22nd near the South Pole, about 190 miles from Malapert A Crater, which you could look up on the internet if you want to take a look at what that is. But, you know, did you guys hear... Everything didn't go exactly as planned. So what happened was they were having some problems with the laser guiding systems on the lander. And, you know, like the lunar regolith is not level. It's not like a field.

'''C:''' You know, it's like – Yeah, there's no landing strips there.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' You're lucky if you find a flat enough area. So what happened was it came down and the lander tipped over. And when it tipped over, it landed on some of the equipment. This stuff isn't protected. If you see these landers and all the instruments that are hanging off of it, any lander that NASA has deployed – You know, it could easily get damaged. And it did. So, yeah, so a bunch of things happened. So, like, the remote camera that was on there, it's not working. They had a complete failure of the laser range finders, right? I guess this was going to scan the surface and probably look for better landing sites. Also, several of the antennas were crushed, and one of the antennas was the main data transfer antenna, and it significantly slowed down the data transfer, I guess, because it wasn't exposed. It wasn't pointing at Earth or just wasn't at the right trajectory or whatever. So they had some problems. It wasn't a complete failure. Just to think, again, I'll remind everyone how unbelievable it is to get this little craft from Earth all the way to the moon and land in a specific area on the moon. It's not easy. It really isn't. This is a testament to how hard this is. So there was 12 payloads on the lander. Six of them were provided by NASA. It's basically, to summarize them... They're preparing to put astronauts on the moon and there's lots of things that we need to test on the moon and we need to know more information about the moon, the moon's surface. Lots of different stuff. We want to measure like even measuring like spacecraft propellant levels in low gravity conditions, like all sorts of different tests that they want to conduct. So they have a really, really, really good understanding of what it's going to be like when we land modern ships that have people on them on the moon. And then we need to know where they're going to go, where they should go, you know, what the exact temperatures are going to be and everything. So, you know, there's a lot of details in all of these different modules that they have on here, but there's a few that stand out and I'll tell you the ones that I really liked. So there was an art installation on this lander by Jeff Koons, which is up on the moon now, which is really cool. They also had a disaster-proof data archive that was sent up by Lone Star Data Holdings. I tried to find out exactly what data they put up there. I couldn't find a very concise list or whatever, but it's pretty interesting. Let's put a whole bunch of important data up on the moon and just have it be there in cold storage or hot storage, depending on where it is and if it's hitting direct sunlight. Here's something that blew my mind. They said the lander's operational life is expected to be around seven days. This has got to be – yeah, I think it's because the solar panels were not in the right place. I was trying to get clarity on whether the solar panels were directly affected. It wasn't in the list of things that were said were affected, but I bet you the angle is off, right? Or they're in a crater that wasn't getting enough sunlight. So they're only going to have seven days of power. That sucks. Yeah.

'''E:''' What did the mission originally call for?

'''J:''' It could have just kept going. You know what I mean? Like they build these things and they don't know exactly how long they're going to last.

'''E:''' But I think – They have an expected lifespan for some of these things.

'''J:''' Yeah, they do. And this one was definitely not seven days. Like there was lots of activity that was supposed to happen with this lander. This particular mission is part of a $2.6 billion commercial lunar paid load services program, CLPS. And of course, this is all about getting the private sector and collaboration between different countries to all work on the effort to get people up on the moon. NASA is reassessing the CLPS contract with Astrobotic due to the previous mission failure, and now they have another mission failure. These are from private companies, and they don't have the experience that NASA does. It sucks to say this, but it's pretty much true. We learn an incredible amount from the mistakes that are made, and they're super expensive mistakes. But this is what it's going to take. We're trying to go to other celestial bodies. We're going to have failures, mistakes. Look, when we put people up in outer space, people are going to die up in outer space. We're going to have an accident or something that we didn't anticipate. And it's going to happen. So anyway, I am looking forward to more of these Nova Sea landers that are going to be going up. They're going to be putting up many more. This is like the beginning of a series of missions that are – they just keep doing it, right? We're seeing like these missions happen very frequently now. Every few months, it seems like something else is happening. There's a huge brushstroke here of finally getting people up to the moon and putting up a semi or permanent base on the moon.

'''S:''' Jay, I've read that one of the main experiments they're doing – I don't think I heard you say this – is they're going to measure how much blast the Regolith has from the landing and takeoff, right? Because one of the differences between Artemis and Apollo, Apollo landed – each landing was a one-off thing, right? But if we're going to have a permanent base where we're going to have landers landing and taking off over time, Oh, from the same place. Yeah, the same place. There's going to be other stuff around. And on the moon, there's no atmosphere. So the regolith is like traveling because of the blowback from the rocket. It's going like three times the speed of a bullet. And they keep going. They don't slow down. So it will sandblast everything in the area. So they need to know how far do we need to be away and what countermeasures will work. Do we build a wall? Do we put a net up there? They need to figure that out. That's a major problem that did not exist really for Apollo.

'''J:''' They need, I don't know, what do you call it, Steve? A landing pad. They need a landing pad.

'''S:''' They might need a landing pad. Yeah, exactly.

'''J:''' They've got to do it. And that's all part of Alpha Base 1, man.

'''B:''' Set off a nuke. That'll make a nice, flat, glassy surface for you.

'''S:''' That might be a little bit of overkill, but yeah. Yeah, probably.

'''B:''' I suppose it would.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Jay. So guys, have you seen this study? I think a couple of people emailed this to us. Study claiming to be the first one to show biological differences in the brain between men and women.

=== Sex Difference in the Brain (28:40) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://news.yahoo.com/men-womens-brains-differently-scientists-204332939.html?guccounter=2
|article_title = Men and women's brains do work differently, scientists discover for first time
|publication = Yahoo News
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''C:''' Which is not true.

'''S:''' Well, let's take a look at the evidence that they're presenting.

'''C:''' I mean, it's not true that it's the first time they've ever shown it.

'''S:''' Well, I think there is one thing that I think is due care. We'll get to that. I know they always oversell it in the headlines. Always. All right. So to quickly review all the evidence to date, if you look at male brains and female brains, You see statistical differences. But what no one's been able to do in the past is to look at a brain and say if it's male or female, right?

'''C:''' Right, because the tails of the normal curve overlap so much.

'''S:''' Not just the tails. There's a massive overlap.

'''C:''' I just mean like if you're not looking at the first – like once you get to like the one degree out. You're right. Not the tails. But there is just massive overlap. But you can say statistically they're distinct.

'''S:''' They are distinct. They overlap so much. A great. I think analogy is height, right? Men and women are statistically have different height curves. But you can't know if someone is a male or a female just by knowing their height, right?

'''B:''' Of course not. Right. That's a great analogy.

'''S:''' And the answer was basically no, that there isn't. Yeah, again, there's statistical differences. There's a little clumpiness here and there. But there really isn't like a typical male brain or a typical female brain. There's just differences that are statistical but not definitive.

'''C:''' And to clarify, you're talking about structure, not function, right?

'''S:''' Well, yes, but they can – it could also be functional because like if you're using a functional MRI scan in the study, then you are looking at function. But yeah, it's mostly looking at anatomy, but it could be also correlating that with like functional MRI scan. All right. So this is what they did in the new study. They looked at the same kind of data, functional MRI scans looking at male and female brains, how they function in certain standardized situations. And then they threw in artificial intelligence, right? They used AI. Oh. And they trained the AI on the male and female brains. Like, here's a male brain. Here's a female brain. Right?

'''C:''' And everything you can about it. Yeah.

'''S:''' And then they tested to see if the AI... could tell the difference, could tell if a brain was male or female. And it was able to do so 90% of the time.

'''B:''' 90%? 90%.

'''S:''' And that's the new bit, Cara.

'''C:''' That's really good. It shows, though, that there's still a big tail there of overlap.

'''B:''' Yeah, 100%, but damn.

'''S:''' Well, no, but again, this is looking at multiple features. Like each feature may only have a little bit of variance, but together you could tease out. Again, this is what AI is good at, looking at pattern recognition. But there's an important caveat here, and that is this study is agnostic to the question of whether or not these differences are genetic or cultural.

'''C:''' Of course, because these were adult brains.

'''S:''' These were adult brains. And sometimes that's framed as, are these sex differences or gender differences? And I know that relationship is complicated too, but is this because of the hormonal effects on the development of the brain? Or is this due to 40 years of socialization? And the answer is probably both. That's, I think, always a good first blush when you're talking about nature versus nurture kind of questions. And again, there's a complex dynamic interaction between the two things, between sex and gender, between nature and nurture. The brain is an organ that evolved to interact with the environment and to be plastic to respond and adapt instantly. at cultural level. You know what I mean? It's how we adapt faster than evolution can adapt us. That's what the brain is for in a way. And so you can't cleanly tease apart genetic and environmental factors. And this study wasn't even attempting to do that. It was just asking the question, if we train an AI on male and female brains, will it be able to tell them apart? And it could.

'''C:''' And the interesting thing is it can 90% of the time. 90% of the time, yeah. And that 10% to me is like, I want to go there. I want to get interested in the follow-ups. I want to see those 10% of people, what was their biological sex assigned at birth? What is their gender identity now? Totally. What's going on in their brains? That's fascinating to me.

'''S:''' And I would like to see this kind of study done explicitly on heterosexuals versus homosexuals versus bisexuals and on trans versus cis individuals. So people who are trans, how are they going to be? – is the AI going to think a trans woman is a woman or a man, right? Oh, gosh. That would be fascinating too, wouldn't it? Yeah. Definitely. There's a lot of further study that this study provokes, which is always a good sign.

'''C:''' Because the brain is, there is something happening in the brain. We know this. It can't not be. The brain is the embodiment. Yeah, the brain is you. And whether, like we talked about, whether that's genetically predisposed or whether that is developed through experience and learning, the brain of a trans man is going to be wildly different than the brain of a cis man.

'''S:''' But there's another layer here, Cara, and that is where were the differences between Exactly. And the differences were in certain hotspots, they say, and those hotspots include the limbic system, which is where things like sexual attraction would be, you know, or whatever. So like a lot basically in the parts of the brain where we would kind of expect there to be a lot of gender sex differences. Right. So anyway, so that's also fascinating. And as we get more and more resolution in terms of like what the differences are, like how is the AI telling the difference between the two? That's fascinating as well. So we're just getting started, I think, with this. Right. This new layer of research into, you know, male-female brain differences and other kinds of brain differences too. Like we could do this on neurotypical versus autistic brains as well, you know, same kind of thing. Or ADHD versus non-ADHD, people who have schizophrenia or don't have schizophrenia, whatever. There's a lot of potential here to really see like. the differences in how brains are functioning in people with different conditions.

'''C:''' And also how they respond to medication will be really interesting. Like schizophrenia, I think of like, OK, we have a lot of good information about how different a brain of somebody with schizophrenia is than a brain of somebody without schizophrenia. But like depression is so hard because different people have different responses to different medications. It's likely there are multiple neurotransmitters involved. Some of it might be more situational. Some of it might be deeply functional. So yeah, that's – I would love to see that.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that.

'''B:''' Steve, you said they got up to 90%. What could the best human expert typically do?

'''S:''' Zero. You can't tell the difference. Previous research has been unable to – even though we see statistical differences, you can't look at a brain and say if it's male or female. This is the first time anything has been able to do that. Wow.

'''B:''' Yeah, but I mean – but you couldn't get an expert to get it like – 55%, right?

'''S:''' No previous study has shown that, Bob.

'''B:''' It was pure chance.

'''C:''' That's a coin flip anyway.

'''B:''' It's always a coin flip with a human expert.

'''J:''' Steve, how significant is this though? Like is this an important finding?

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. I think it definitely will – it's a new window into this very interesting question that is going to take us in the direction of a lot of follow-up research.

'''C:''' Yeah, and it almost like – it's super interesting for sex and gender research, but it's almost like more interesting just for discriminatory research in general with AI. Yeah.

'''S:''' And as you say, Cara, like women and men like statistically are different in terms of their susceptibility to depression and anxiety and addiction and whatnot. So this will bleed into psychiatry and mental health significantly, right? Yeah. Cool. All right, Evan, tell us about bee venom therapy for breast cancer.

{{anchor|news3}}
=== Bee Venom for Breast Cancer (37:29) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.cureus.com/articles/181839-bee-sting-venom-as-a-viable-therapy-for-breast-cancer-a-review-article#!/
|article_title = Bee Sting Venom as a Viable Therapy for Breast Cancer: A Review Article
|publication = DMIHER Center for Advanced Physiotherapy Education & Research
|redirect_title = Bee Venom for Breast Cancer (973) 
}}

'''E:'''...Hey, I'm noticing a pattern: every three years, I bring up bee venom therapy. ''(Cara laughs)'' I don't know what it is. I don't know. I have to scratch this itch every three years. I did this last [[SGU Episode NNN|in 2021]]; before that I had talked about it [[SGU Episode NNN|in 2018]]. So I don't know.

'''E:''' Yes, right. Read about that this week. Hey, I'm noticing a pattern. Every three years, I bring up bee venom therapy. I don't know. I have to scratch this itch every three years. I did this last in 2021. Before that, I talked about it in 2018. So, I don't know. But, hey, this article was released just a few days ago. It's from DMIHER, the Data Mega Institute of Higher Education and Research. That's in India. And it was published by their Center for Advanced Physiotherapy Education and Research. And the title says, yeah, bee sting venom as a viable therapy for breast cancer. Yep. The authors were Abash Bindlish and Anupama Sawal. Here are a few highlights from the abstract and their conclusion. The potential impact of bee venom on breast cancer is the main subject of this analysis of the research article. Bee venom has drawn the attention of the world with the help of its constituent ingredients, namely the bioactive compounds, enzymes, and complex blend of proteins. They have a particularly varied chemical makeup and proven anti-cancer capabilities, which we'll talk about.

'''C:''' Can I ask you, Evan, was that a direct quote from the study or did you say namely? That's so funny because that's not what namely means. They didn't give us the names of any of those things.

'''E:''' So it's a translation. So I don't know how much is lost in translation here.

'''C:''' It just makes me laugh when you see this sort of like attempt to sound very scientific. and they're like, it's got these really important constituents, namely proteins. Right. And it's like, no, what are they, namely? I would love to know what those constituents actually are.

'''E:''' Yeah, right. That's very funny. And I'll mention one of them in just a little bit as soon as I get through what they're – I'm giving you what they're talking about first and then we can talk about the real details. B-Venom has given positive results in triggering apoptosis, preventing cell migration, inhibiting metastasis and invasion, and suppressing the existing breast cancer cells. it is found to have worked better along with the already existing chemotherapy treatments. I find that also interesting, right? How often do these things, alternative treatments, work in concert with proven treatments? And, of course, the alternative treatment gets credit for having the results. In any case, they said the results were also proved with the help of various animal studies that showed reduced tumor development, reduced metastases, and improve therapeutic effectiveness. I'll just jump to the end. Overall, in the end, we can say that B-venom might have some hidden potential as a therapeutic agent, but further study is required to understand its clinical utility and its real-life applications. which is a consistent footnote in about every study you'll ever, I think, see in the history of bee venom therapy. So yes, apitherapy, the use of substances from honeybees, you know, their honey, royal jelly, venom, whatever the bee is producing to treat various medical conditions. And it does take some different forms. The venom compounds can act as allergens. They cause the release of mast cell mediators, along with a spectrum of allergic reactions. You know, ones that can range from very mild, local swelling, to severe systemic reactions, anaphylactic shock, or even death. That's quite a range. So I guess it comes down to what? The melatonin. And that makes up half of the dry weight of bee venom. And it destroys blood cells by breaking up their membranes. at the same time lowering blood pressure and causing histamine release. Steve, you once described it in one of your articles as cytotoxic, cell-destroying.

'''S:''' It kills cells, yeah.

'''E:''' Yeah. So how it – but does it have some sort of special ability to destroy only the cells – targeting the cells you want it to destroy other than the good cells?

'''S:''' Not as far as I can see.

'''C:''' Even most chemos don't have that.

'''E:''' Right, right. You're destroying all kinds of things along with the bad stuff.

'''S:''' Yeah, usually chemotherapy targets rapidly reproducing cells. Yeah.

'''C:''' Which is why you like lose your hair and why you often have like – you might lose your fingerprints or have damaged your fingertips. Yeah. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah. So we're always trying to target things that are different about the cancer cells from non-cancer cells. But none of them are perfect, right?

'''C:''' No. I mean obviously the ones that have molecular markers are a godsend. Like that's cool.

'''S:''' Yeah. Some are better than others. Yeah. And now the targeted autoimmune therapy – targeted immune therapy is really great because then you basically train your own immune cells against the cancer. Right. So that gets even more specific. Yeah.

'''C:''' But there has to be something about the cancer that is able to be targeted.

'''S:''' The B venom is a toxic brew of enzymes and toxins and nasty stuff. That's what the whole point of it, right, is to be that. And so there's no reason a priori to think that it would have any special affinity for cancer cells.

'''C:''' Especially if it's not engineered in any way.

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' Yeah, but sure. I mean, it's like, yeah, the bees evolved a lot of toxic things. Maybe there's something in there that we could exploit and turn into a pharmaceutical, you know, absolutely. But just, you know, injecting bee venom into people is a pretty clumsy way to do it. And as you say, Evan, just to emphasize this point, the clinical trials are all small, open-label, adjunctive therapies. In other words, they're getting the bee venom, And chemotherapy. And it's not – these are like open label or case series or whatever, like the weakest form of evidence. The only thing you could say based upon these studies is that, all right, it's not completely unethical to do further research. But you can't make any conclusions about the effectiveness of B venom therapy from the data that we have.

'''C:''' Yeah. Yeah. Especially because the studies are, like you said, so small. Like imagine taking one person who has a particular form of breast cancer and then another person matching them for their age and all of those, all these factors who has a similar form of breast cancer, giving both of them chemotherapy and one of them B venom. And then if the person with the B venom gets better faster or gets less sick or whatever, being like, it's because of the B venom and not like the thousands of other variables that make cancer worse. a specific illness to the individual who has it.

'''S:''' Right. They haven't done that kind of randomized, you know, controlled trial that would control for the B venom as an isolated variable.

'''C:''' And even if they did, you almost can't unless you're working with cloned mice or something. It's very hard to do. You would need huge numbers.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's where the numbers and randomization come in. You can't get it with a small trial.

'''E:''' No, you can't get it. Right, right. And a lot of people, at least articles and things, are still pointing back to like a 2020 trial. Study that came out. Let's see. Researchers extracted venom from 312 honeybees and bumblebees, tested its effect on cancer cells, ultimately concluding that a specific concentration of honeybee venom can induce 100% cancer cell death. Yeah. Hey, look at this.

'''C:''' So does bleach. That's impressive.

'''E:''' Yeah. And guess what?

'''S:''' It probably causes 100% cell death.

'''E:''' And also, hey, it's in vitro. It's in glass.

'''C:''' Yeah, you can add a lot of things to cells in vitro and kill them.

'''S:''' Of course. There's that great XKCD cartoon with the guy standing over a petri dish with a gun. We could reliably kill cells in a petri dish. Doesn't mean it's an effective therapy. I mean seriously.

'''E:''' I mean if you go back, how many things have worked beautifully in glass that have never panned out? Most. When it comes to the – 99 percent.

'''S:''' The vast majority.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' The absolute vast majority of it. There are other institutions and scientists in India and elsewhere who are warning people, look, don't get overly excited about this, all the limitations, everything we've spoken about. Plus generally speaking, in a lot of cases – The risk outweighs the benefit here.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's all risk versus benefit.

'''E:''' You can have some horrible side effects as a result of all this.

'''S:''' That's the difference here. Like, again, if this were just, hey, we're studying some potentially toxic chemical to see if there's any cancer-specific activity we could leverage, that's all fine and good. But the difference here is that there's already a pre-existing infrastructure of using bee venom therapy as an alternative treatment, right? So this is not in a vacuum. And then this kind of research gets abused to feed into a snake oil industry, basically. So that's why you have to be very careful about how you do the studies and how you report them. And this write-up was very promotional. It was not the kind of responsible, careful, scientific verbiage that I would have wanted.

'''E:''' Definitely. Well, we'll come back in three years again and see if there's been any improvement.

'''S:''' See what they're up to. Yeah. I wrote about this, Evan, I know you know this, like in the 1990s, Be Venom Fair. You did. Wow.

'''E:''' Yes, and there's an article from, my gosh, from our old newsletter that is online still. Yeah.

'''S:''' So it's always like, yes, now it's 25 years later, and it's still in the preliminary research stage, right? I mean, real treatments would have emerged by now if there was something real going on there. We wouldn't be here 25 years later still talking about preliminary studies. Of course.

'''E:''' Yeah, that's – yeah. Oh, my gosh. And the real things that have advanced since then.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''E:''' Since then. And what? You're going to go back to this and try to look for some sort of magic, magical property in a sense in this when you should be concentrating on a hundred other things that have much more promise.

'''S:''' If there was something there, a pharmaceutical company would have purified it, tweaked it, patented it, and made billions on it, right? I agree. That's what would have happened by now. All right. All right, Cara, let me ask you a question. Is it possible for someone to learn empathy?

=== Learning Empathy (48:02) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://neurosciencenews.com/empathy-learning-psychology-25657/
|article_title = Shaping Empathy: Adult Brains Can Learn Compassion
|publication = nnn
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''C:''' A hundred percent. And I think that I chose a study to cover this week partially because it's one of those, well, duh, studies, like we already knew this, but also because I think it does kind of give us some important insights. So the study is called The Social Transmission of Empathy Relies on Observational Reinforcement Learning. There's a bit to unpack there, but it's, I think, a pretty accurate representation of what the researchers looked into. And so this was a group of, I think, four researchers from – it was sort of a hybrid group from Germany, China, and Switzerland. And when I say four, I mean five, five researchers. Okay. The lead author is a German woman from the Department of Psychiatry, Translational Social Neuroscience Unit at the University of Würzburg. Her name is Grit Hein. And What they wrote about is this idea of empathy as adults. And I think the new bit in this study that's kind of interesting is something that I think is really important, but I'm really bad about sometimes glossing over, which is the interplay between cognitive psychology and social psychology and neuroscience. Right. So I'm going to get a little bit meta for a second. But one of the things that I struggled with as a psychology and neuroscience student throughout my undergrad and my graduate training was the way that different fields model or exemplify different constructs. So like a cognitive psychologist might talk about something that's happening very different than like a neuroscientist might, very differently than a social psychologist might. But we know that all of these things have to play nice together. And I think that this study does a kind of interesting and good job of packaging those things. The big question here, can you learn empathy, is sort of a non-question. And I don't like how some of the outlets that did coverage on this study framed it like empathy, often considered a fixed trait, right? That's like the first line in the neuroscience news. And I'm like, it is? By whom?

'''S:''' It's very common to emphasize the opposite. Like, we knew nothing about this prior to this. They always try to make the study itself as surprising and whatever is possible.

'''C:''' And it's so funny because it's like empathy, often considered a fixed trait. And I'm like, wow, one of the foundational aspects of the way that I do psychotherapy is talking about how empathy is a practice and it's something that you have to learn. It's not something that you're just like bequeathed by birth. I often liken empathy unto the Eric Fromm view of love, that love is a behavior and it's a practice. It's not a feeling. It's not an emotion. It's actually something you do, not something you feel. And I think that empathy, when we construct it in that way, it encourages and fosters learning and practice. And so what these researchers did is they did four different kind of studies. And in it, they tried to understand what was going on with individuals when they died. did or did not learn empathy. So sort of the main paradigm is that they showed somebody like a video of somebody getting hurt. And then they showed videos of individuals reacting to that. And the individuals were divided into two groups. There were the ones who reacted in a pro empathic way. And there were the ones that were like not empathic. And then they asked the people who watched the videos how, what they felt, right? And they found that individuals who watched other individuals watch somebody else and have an empathetic response to them tended to feel more empathetic. Individuals who watched somebody not be empathetic tended to feel less empathetic. And this, again, feels like a duh thing, but this is how you do research. First, you have to establish this, and that's what they did. The important part here is is not just that A, you can learn empathy by watching other people utilize it or practice it or model it. But B, you can learn it from people that are not within your kinship group, not within your family group. We all know that kids learn empathy by observing empathy, right? But these people didn't know the people. So they were like random people and they learned empathy on the spot or they improved their empathic responses on the spot. But then the researchers went – Farther, further, and they said, I want to understand what's going on in the brain. And so they did a fair amount of fMRI studies to look at these regions to see if there was any sort of, if they were implicated. And really, they were following up on previous research. Previous research has shown a lot of different regions in the brain, like the mirror neuron system, which we can see in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the premotor cortex, the temporoparietal junction, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. But there's been some newer research that has implicated anterior insula. And so that's where they really wanted to target. And so they looked there and they saw that, yes, there was some good evidence that those who were practicing or learning, those who were showing plasticity in this region were also showing higher empathic responses. So they are trying to operationalize what they call social transmission of empathy? How does empathy spread within social groups? And if we have a pro-social stance within, let's say, an academic institution, a work institution, a governmental structure, are we going to see across the board or downstream effects where empathy breeds more empathy? And it's – that's sort of the big outcome of this study is that, yes, if we foster empathetic environments, it's very likely that empathy will be cultivated and it will be improved across individuals. And they're saying, look, we think we know the pathway to achieving that. That's not necessarily new because it's probably been happening for ages, right? But they're trying to say, what's the mechanism here? How do we define this? But I do think that there is a massive limitation in this study. And that is that every single participant of the study was a woman. They did that on purpose. Right. Right. We're trained it from a younger age. We carry the burden of it much more than men. And so is the magnitude of the – I'm not saying that this wouldn't translate. I do think that men can learn empathy. But I'm really curious. Would the magnitude be greater? Would it be lesser? I would hope to see that it would be even greater because the baseline is sometimes lower. And that's what I see oftentimes with at least psychotherapy is that people who are naive to psychotherapy, who go in with no tools in their tool belt, show massive improvements early on as opposed to those who have sort of been through it and done all the CBT stuff. And now they're still seeking like incremental improvements in their mental health. So my hope would be that if you studied this in men, that you might see more increase and improvement. But I don't know because they – That study hasn't been done. Luckily, the researchers do acknowledge that, and they say that subsequent studies that include mixed genders could be really, really interesting. They also didn't do a very big variance of ethnicities, but they did have, because this was done across those countries that I mentioned before, I think they had a large participant group that was both white and Asian, and a group that was both younger and older, and they saw no difference between those groups.

'''S:''' Yeah, this does make sense. And I think we've all experienced how the institutional culture, as you say, like a work culture or whatever, even like a group of friends totally affects your behavior in this sort of way. I recently thought of this as the Game of Thrones effect.

'''C:''' Okay, explain because I never saw Game of Thrones.

'''S:''' Yeah, so Game of Thrones, it's a brutal world where everyone is brutal and they keep saying, well, that's the way the world works. That's to justify their brutality. It's like, no, that's the way you work and you're part of the world. You are making it brutal, but it is self-reinforcing. There's a culture of brutality. And yeah, so I think I get to experience this at different institutions, at different social places where there's there is a culture, you know, and how empathetic people are to each other definitely stems from that. And it makes sense to again, the brain is adaptive. If you're living in a social group that is very empathetic, you're probably going to be more successful socially if you are similarly empathetic. And you might have to be more aggressive or whatever if you're trying to survive in a culture that is very confrontational, very not empathetic, whatever the opposite. Absolutely.

'''C:''' And I think that this has ramifications, like you said, from the individual to the communal to the societal and beyond. And I think – I can't not say that like when we look at lots of different examples of historical atrocities, a lot of these psychological – of like bystander effect or like learned helplessness or individuals who are sort of following the lead of other people's ideas or even the genocidal playbook, right? This idea like of dehumanizing the target of calling them things like animals of, you know, feeding this narrative that becomes normalized and other people. that is, that is by definition a manipulation of empathy.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah.

'''C:''' And I think that this directly relates to that.

'''S:''' And this doesn't mean that people don't differ in terms of their predisposition to empathy. And we know like psychopaths are very low on the empathy potential there. Right. Although they can sometimes learn to fake it. Mm-hmm.

'''C:''' Yeah, but I think that to think of it as like – I think it's done us a massive disservice to have this sort of Western ideology that either like you're just born with it or you're not. Like women are just better at it because that's how women are and like – It's not going to really help you in business, so you should probably work on not having it. I think that that's deeply, deeply detrimental.

'''S:''' It's counterproductive.

'''C:''' It's super counterproductive. It ends up being one of the biggest things that I work with people in therapy on is practicing empathy towards their partners, towards their colleagues, towards their children, and even towards themselves. very often because it is something they have to practice. It does not necessarily come natural to people, especially if it's never been modeled for them.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Cara. Yep. Bob, tell us about the new brightest thing.

{{anchor|news5}}
=== Brightest Object (59:45) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theconversation.com/the-brightest-object-ever-observed-in-the-night-sky-is-a-black-hole-thats-growing-by-the-equivalent-of-one-sun-a-day-224041
|article_title = {{tooltip|A mass of 17 billion suns: Growing black hole is the most luminous object ever observed by astronomers (Phys.org title)|original title: The brightest object ever observed in the night sky is a black hole that’s growing by the equivalent of one Sun a day}}
|publication = The Conversation
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}}

'''B:''' So it's been roughly 185,000 minutes {{tnote|approximately 128 days}} since I've had my last black hole news item{{link needed}}.

'''B:''' So it's been roughly 185,000 minutes since I've had my last black hole news item. So I think we're a little bit overdue here.

'''C:''' Did you actually calculate that, Bob?

'''B:''' Of course I did. Of course he does. I love it.

'''E:''' He designed an app that tracks it.

'''B:''' Of course, I round it down a little, but yeah, it's about right. So researchers reveal the most luminous object ever found in the universe, and you're going to listen to me talk about it.

'''S:''' Please?

'''B:''' Okay. This is not a star, but a beast of a quasar weighing in at 19 billion times the mass of our sun and 12 billion light years away. If you want to check this out online, the study is published in Nature Astronomy called The Accretion of Solar Mass Per Day by a 17 Billion Solar Mass Black Hole. So if you haven't noticed by now, I love extremes and record breakers in astrophysics. And this one is for the books. So this story starts with a point of light, ostensibly a simple star in the Milky Way. And it's called J05294351. And it really seemed like a star in our galaxy. It was certainly bright enough to be one. If you see something bright in the sky, you got to assume that this is within our galaxy. And you would be right, you know. 99.999% of the time. But then astronomers took a really close look at it. They looked using the European Southern Observatory's very large telescope in Chile. And they found that it was not in our huge backyard, either, you know, say hundreds or thousands of light years away. It was more than 12 billion light years away. And that's a B. That's a B, as in Bob, for billion, billion, 12 billion light years away. So if it were bright enough that we thought it was nearby, how bright would it have to be to be more than a million times more distant? And what is it even? No star could be that bright. Well, I mean if you read a lot of astronomy, it really can be only one thing. It's a quasar. It's talked about on the show a bunch of times, a massive black hole at the center of a galaxy that's actively eating up chunks of the universe. But before it swallows anything, though, all that food has to gather into a thin, hot accretion disk that swirls around the black hole drain before the final plunge into infinity. We have no idea what happens inside there. Well, our math breaks down. Maybe someday we'll find out. But it plunges into the black hole. So now it's that accretion disk that we're seeing from far away. That's what's lit up because it essentially converts gravitational binding energy into so much energy in the form of heat and light with amazing efficiency too. Amazing to be able to tap into that someday. OK. So even with over – how many quasars do you think we've discovered so far?

'''S:''' Ten.

'''B:''' A million. This number shocked me. A million.

'''E:''' A million quasars. A couple orders of magnitude.

'''B:''' So even among the million quasars that we've discovered, this one stands out. Its accretion disk kind of blew me away. Get this. Its diameter is seven light years. A seven light year accretion disk around the supermassive black hole. Possibly the biggest accretion disk in existence. Probably pretty good that that's – if not the number one in the universe, it's damn close – It has such a big active disk. It creates radiative energy calculated at 2 times 10 to the 41 watts. 2 times 10 to the 41 watts. That's 100 duodecillion watts. What? Oh, come on. You knew a number like that was coming out, right? I can't just throw out – 100 duodecillion. Duodecillion. Duodecillion. That's to the 41. So that's why it's 500 trillion times brighter than our sun. Don't look at it. Other quasars were thought to be more luminous in the past. But it turns out – and I've even talked about one or two of them. But it turns out that they were – there was some gravitational lensing going on. So it was kind of like a false estimate. Yeah. Gravitational lensing happens if there's a galaxy between the Earth and the quasar. It could distort the quasar's light and amplify it like a lens, making it seem much brighter. This quasar, though, has had that possibility ruled out. They're pretty certain that there is no gravitational lensing happening here.

'''C:''' Bob, I have a question, and I feel like you mentioned it, but you might have mentioned it like. I should know it, and I just don't. So you said it's like seven light years wide. So is the brightness of a quasar directly proportional to the amount of like crap it's eating?

'''B:''' Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, all right. Absolutely. It's that accretion disk that is most of the radiation that's hitting us. There could be some other effects, but it's that disk that's really throwing out all that light that we can see from 12 billion light years away.

'''C:''' So that means like the density of stars and planets and dust and just all the stuff that's going into that black hole is just high. There's just a super high density of actual atmospheric – not atmospheric, cosmic stuff.

'''B:''' Yeah, it's basically – Primarily superheated hydrogen and helium. Everything gets kind of like decomposed and heated up into this superheated hydrogen and helium. And that emits UV and X-rays and light that we can see. So that's what's really shiny. And that's the only way we can see it over – we would never see it at 12 billion light years if it wasn't for that. So similar to how waste measurement often directly relates to number of meatballs eaten, A quasar that has the highest luminosity likely means that it's consuming matter at the highest rate of any other known quasar, right? If you win one award, yeah, chances are you're winning this other award as well. You're just eating – you're just eating – you're sucking down matter at a rate far higher than anything else if you're the brightest. It's a pretty safe bet. I mean it's a little bit more complicated.

'''E:''' Quasars got to eat too, you know.

'''B:''' Yeah. Okay. In fact, this was interesting. These researchers think that the supermassive black hole is accreting matter close to the limit allowed by the laws of physics. So of course, I had to take a little bit deeper dive into that. What does that actually mean? What are those laws? So what they mean is that this quasar is near what's called the Eddington mass limit, which is named after the English astrophysicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, famous guy, English astronomer.

'''E:''' Solar eclipse.

'''B:''' Awesome. Yes, very good, very good. He was the first to kind of prove that Einstein was right. Although if you look in – the details are fun because he didn't really prove it but he thought he did. But it got – he inspired interest in it because his margins of error were way too big for him to make any of the conclusions that he made. So he didn't really technically prove Einstein right, but we all know Einstein was right anyway. Okay, so Eddington, English astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and popularizer of science. I didn't know this. He famously announced and explained general relativity to the English-speaking world. He was one of the first to announce it and describe it. Imagine when general relativity first came out. People were like, what? What are you talking about? What's happening right now?

'''E:''' What language are you speaking?

'''B:''' People are confused today. It's really mind-bending in a lot of ways. So he was the first to popularize it, which is awesome.

'''S:''' And Bob, his alleged proof of Einstein with the eclipse and popularizing it, that's what made Einstein a superstar, the first scientist rock star.

'''B:''' Yeah, that was critical. That was critical to him being accepted. So yeah, it's kind of weird. He wasn't technically correct in his conclusions, but it was actually good that it actually happened. So I was okay with that. So this was – all right, named in his honor, the Eddington Limit. So this limit describes the balance of radiation that's pushing outwards and the inward flow of accreting matter for this accretion disk in this supermassive black hole. And this also applies famously to a star itself, right? Because a star has this limit of balancing. It has to balance the outward flow of radiation with the inward pull of gravity. That's the star's life. And when one of those fails, you're like – When gravity wins and there's no more radiation being created, that's when you have like a – You know, an amazing explosion, one of the biggest explosions in the universe because that's what's happening because gravity won in that scenario, supernova. So, okay. So this limit would apply then to a quasar, for example, say if it swallowed a little bit more than what it's doing now because we think it's near the edge. So if it went over that edge by a little bit and ate a little bit more than this Eddington limit says that it should – Then it would create, of course, extra radiation, extra heat, extra energy would be created and that would be – that would just blow apart the accretion disk, right? Because it would just be too much and it wouldn't be able to handle it and it would just blow everything apart.

'''E:''' If it eats that wafer thin mint, it will – You'll have an explosion. Monty Python.

'''B:''' And the same thing – right. The same thing would apply to a star. If somehow it just – it fused more matter than it should, then it would create so much radiation that it would blow apart the star itself and then everything would stop. So that's kind of like a hard limit. OK. So one thing you may be thinking here that I was was that, all right, how does this quasar compare to others in terms of size and distance? Is there – what's closer and what's farther and what's more massive? So there are none brighter. As I've said, this is the brightest that we have found. But some quasars have an even bigger supermassive black hole. 18 billion solar masses is not the champ at all. There's some in the 30s, 35 and I think even in the 40s. There are some that are definitely more massive and they're actually more mysterious because they're actually older. They might be, say, what, 12 and a half or 13 billion light years away. So they're actually older and they're even more mysterious because we don't know yet how a supermassive black hole can get so big so soon after the birth of a universe. So in that sense, this supermassive black hole, this quasar is not as mysterious as some of these other ones. But Perhaps that is a topic for my next Black Hole Talk, hopefully before the next 185,000 minutes passes.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Bob. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time.

{{anchor|meatball}}

...{{meatball|s}}

{{anchor|wtn}}{{anchor|futureWTN}} 

== Who's That Noisy? (1:10:10) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 972
|answer = [https://www.iflscience.com/watch-coin-shiver-dry-ice-25682 Half dollar pushed into dry ice (video in article)]
|}}


'''J:''' All right, guys. Last week I played this noisy. Crazy.

'''E:''' It's a robot woodpecker.

'''J:''' It's a crazy sound.

'''E:''' Right? It's a mechanical woodpecker.

'''J:''' I got a lot of big variety of responses on this one. So a listener named Ian Mahuika said, Hi, Jay. Listener since 2018 and patron since 2020. My nine-year-old daughter, Millie, loves listening to Who's That Noisy every week. Her guest for this week is a chainsaw being started in slow motion. I thought that was cool. Not a bad guest.

'''B:''' I like it.

'''S:''' Very creative answer.

'''J:''' Ian guessed is that it's some sort of pneumatic hand tool being spun up and down, which I thought was a good answer. Not correct, but very good guess. Another listener named Daniel Schechter, he gave me the pronunciation. Thank you so much. He said, hi, Jay. This week's noisy sounds a bit like a treetle. This is a foot-powered sewing machine. Back in the 1980s, he had a Singer treetle sewing machine that he bought at a farm for $8. Anyway, he goes on to tell me more about that. But that's, you know, a treetle is a foot-powered sewing machine. It was a cool little story. All right. Anyway, next guest comes from a listener named Tyler Eves. And Tyler said, this sounds like an object on a line slash reel being launched and then starting to be reeled back in with some sort of ratcheting mechanism. He said, my simple guess would be something like a heavy-duty commercial fishing rod reel setup. I've used, like, the big-style fishing reels. I've been on fishing trips a couple of times. I don't remember hearing anything like that, but you probably know better than me. But anyway, that is not correct. Listener named Matt Angrave, he said, he's thinking the noisy this week is a Kohler wind-up chicken toy from around the 1950s. Yeah, see, mechanical bird.

'''E:''' That's what I said.

'''J:''' Yeah, I looked it up, and it's a wind-up little desk-hopping toy. You've seen them, but they used to make them out of solid metal, not plastic. And I listened to it, and it did kind of sound like that, so this was a very good guess, but that is not correct. Someone else named Keely Hill said they think it's a Stirling engine. You could go look up what a Stirling engine is, but it's a little desktop engine that you could operate. That's not correct. I have a winner. The winner's name is Adam Jermaine Jones, and he said, Hi, guys. Love the show. I've been listening from the beginning. I just absolutely love what you guys do. Don't stop. We don't plan on stopping. I heard this week's noisy, and I knew I had heard that sound before. It took me a couple of seconds, but I realized that it was the sound of a penny stood upright in dry ice. So he is correct about everything. It wasn't a penny. In this case, it was a half dollar, but it doesn't matter. So someone takes a piece of dry ice. Mm-hmm. Then you take a coin and you push the coin into the dry ice and sublimation happens, right? Which means that the dry ice turns directly into a gas. And then what happens is you leave the coin there and it's still kind of standing upright. And then as it continues to sublimate the dry ice, it's pushing the gas that's being released is pushing the coin from one side to the other. It's going like that, going flopping back and forth in the groove. Here's the sound again. See, that's the coin going back and forth. Pretty cool. You can look that one up. That was a tough guess, and I'm shocked that somebody got it. So good job on that one, Adam. I have a new noisy sent in by a listener named Jay Novella. That's me. I came up with this noisy.

'''E:''' Thanks for listening, Jay.

'''J:''' I thought this was really cool. Yes, I love the show. Been there from the beginning. See if I'm going to give you guys a... I will tell you that you're going to hear two sounds, and you have to guess what's making the sound, and it's the same thing as making the sound in both of these. Are you ready? Okay.

'''B:''' Yes.

'''J:''' Did you hear the second one?

'''E:''' Yes, there was kind of a thud.

'''J:''' Yeah. All right. So just to clarify, the same exact thing, doing the same exact thing, made both of those sounds. Tell me what it is and try to explain to me why and how. Right? Understand? Thank you.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''J:''' If you can guess what the hell is going on in that, or if you heard something cool, email me at WTN at theskepticsguide.org. Steve, I got a few things I'd like to say here.

'''S:''' Sure.

'''J:''' One is that I still like your haircut and I think you're a good guy.

'''S:''' Thank you.

'''J:''' So, okay.

'''B:''' See that coming.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (1:13:49) ===
[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

'''J:'''...If you think you know {{wtnAnswer|974|what it is}}...

== Announcements (1:14:58) ==

'''J:'''...[[SGU Episode 1000|1000th show]]...

'''J:''' So we recently added seats to our Dallas private show. Yes. This is a live recording of the SGU. I believe that right as we speak, there's about 40 seats left. I added 100 seats to the show. So you can go to theskepticsguide.org. You'll see a button on there that says Dallas Private Show. That is a live recording of the show. And then it's an extra hour of us doing some fun stuff with the audience and hanging out and socializing. And we also have a guest. Evan, who's our guest?

'''E:''' Special guest at our live show in Dallas is going to be Dustin Bates, lead singer of the band Star Set, who is a science enthusiast just like us. And he's coming on the show to join us.

'''J:''' Yeah, I'm really looking forward to getting a chance to talk to him. So that's The Private Show. There are still tickets left also for the extravaganza. I think there's like about 100 tickets left for the extravaganza. You can go to the SGU website as well, theskepticsguide.org, and there's a button on there that says Dallas Extravaganza. Now, we are also doing two shows in Chicago. We're doing an extravaganza and we're doing a private show. Now, guess what private show? Guess what numbered show that private show is going to be?

'''E:''' You mean for SGU?

'''J:''' Yes. It is our 1,000th show and we're going to do it live and we're going to do it in front of an audience. Wow. Wow. And it's going to be a very special, very extended show. I think we're all kind of agreeing right now. It's probably going to be a four to five hour thing that we do. We have a lot of internal talking to do. But I'm going to be – over the course of the next six months, I will be inviting special guests that are going to be – that we'll have virtually. They'll come in over the computer. Yeah. And we're going to do a show. We're going to talk about our show. We're going to talk about our experience on our show and give you some deep thoughts on everything that we think about the work that we've been doing here for the last almost 20 years. My God, guys. Anyway, it's going to be really awesome. However, you cannot buy tickets to that show yet because I need to do a little bit more work before I create those tickets. We have to basically figure out all the details before I'm going to decide on what it's going to cost and where we're going to have it and everything. But that should be happening soon. But you can buy the extravaganza tickets. And just so you know, the VIP tickets are already sold out. But please do go to the website. Join us. We're going to have a great year, guys. We have a lot of shows planned this year. We're also going to be in Vegas, Steve. You want to talk about that?

'''S:''' Yeah, we're going to be at PsyCon this fall.

'''J:''' October, correct?

'''S:''' We'll be there in a few years as a group. Yeah, that's in October.

'''J:''' So we will all be there.

'''S:''' Yeah, that'll be October 24th to 27th.

'''J:''' And George, by the way, is joining us for all of the shows that I told you in the last five minutes.

'''S:''' He's with us on all of them because George – Yeah, because he hosts the Extravaganza, so he's got to be with us.

'''J:''' Yeah, which is great because we always have a blast.

'''S:''' Yeah, absolutely.

'''J:''' And also, if you can't make it to any of these shows and you do appreciate the work that we do, please consider becoming a patron of the Skeptic's Guide. You can go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics. skeptics guide. you could become a member of our awesome community. we have people on discord they're having constant discussions all the time and you know I've come to know a lot of the people that are a part of our patron group and we just have a wonderful group of people. so it's a lot of fun and you can make friends. it's a great place to go. anyway Steve take it over man.

'''S:''' well Evan's going to take it over. Evan you're doing your quote game.

{{anchor|quotable}} 
== Potent Quotables (1:18:37) ==

'''E:''' we do have a quote game this week. This week's a little special. It's kind of a theme. I'm calling this week's game Misquotation Marks. I'm going to give you guys five quotes that are famous misquotes. Now, that is to say, they've been incorrectly attributed... Or the quotes themselves have been perverted from their original. Or both. Or both. In some cases. So a little bit of a different take on the quote game this week. And we've got five of them. So you've likely heard these before. Let's see if you can suss it out. All right. Here we go. First quote. Well-behaved women rarely make history. Who said that? I'll give you three choices, A, B, and C. Is it A, or was it A, Marilyn Monroe, movie star, the 1950s? Laurel Ulrich, a Harvard professor from the 1970s? Or Agatha Christie, author in the 1960s. And I'm going to give you the decade for all these going forward. So you kind of have a frame of reference, a time to sort of pin this to.

'''S:''' And Bob— Now, Evan, to clarify, we are just supposed to say who actually said it, not who it's misattributed to.

'''E:''' That's correct. We need the actual person— Who said the quote? And if there's a case in which the quote is misquoted, as part of the reveal, I'll give you the correct quote as part of that. Okay.

'''S:''' Do we get extra credit if we say that the quote has been misquoted? Sure, extra credit.

'''E:''' Absolutely. Double your victory points for this game. Hey, Bob.

'''B:''' Yes, sir?

'''E:''' You get to start. Do you need me to repeat the choices or the quotes?

'''B:''' No, this gives me a Marilyn Monroe vibe. I'm going with her.

'''E:''' Okay, Marilyn Monroe. We'll go next to Jay.

'''J:''' Well, first of all, I've seen this quote on the internet. It's a meme. I've seen it a million times. Oh, yeah. I just can't see. I don't remember hearing Marilyn Monroe say anything like this, so I don't think it was her. And who was the third one?

'''E:''' Agatha Christie. Agatha Christie.

'''J:''' I don't know. This doesn't feel like Agatha Christie to me either. All right, I'm going to go with the other one. I'm going to go with, yes, I'll go with Laurel Ulrich.

'''E:''' Harvard professor. Steve will go next.

'''S:''' Yeah, Bob, I had the same reaction that you did, thinking that, well, didn't I see that attributed to Marilyn Monroe? But I'm thinking about maybe that's the misattribution.

'''B:''' Yeah, could be.

'''S:''' I think that it sounds mainly like a political statement, so I'm going to say Laurel Ulrich.

'''E:''' Okay, and Cara.

'''C:''' I'm sure you can't answer this because I'm going last, but you said she's a Harvard professor. Yes. Of what?

'''E:''' Looks like – I don't have all my notes on it, but I believe it's history.

'''C:''' Okay. Well, then I'm going to go with Laurel Ulrich.

'''E:''' Okay. Laurel Ulrich. Okay. Bob said Marilyn Monroe. Everyone else guessed Laurel Ulrich. The correct answer is Laurel Ulrich. Yes. Yes, and yes, Marilyn Monroe is the person to whom this quote is misattributed. This is the correct quote, though. Laurel Urich, she coined it in a scholarly paper she wrote about eulogies for women in pre-Revolutionary War America. So there you have it. All right, moving on to the next one. Here's the quote. The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. Who said that? You may have heard that. Who said that? Was it A, Harlan Ellison, who's an author, wrote it in the 1980s? Was it B, Frank Zappa, musician, said it in the 1970s? Or was it C, Albert Einstein, a scientist, who said it or wrote it in the 1940s? And this time we're going to start with J.

'''J:''' I mean, I got to go with Frank Zappa. That is so him. I could totally see him saying that. That's got to be the answer.

'''E:''' Steve?

'''S:''' Yeah, I was going to say Harlan Ellison. Okay.

'''E:''' Cara?

'''S:''' Cara?

'''C:''' Probably not Einstein, but it sounds like something Einstein would say, so let's spread it out. I'll say it was Einstein. Okay.

'''E:''' And Bob, you get to break this tie.

'''B:''' Totally sounds like Harlan Ellison.

'''E:''' Bob thinks it's Harlan Ellison, as does Steve. Jay, you think Frank Zappa. Cara thinks Albert Einstein. It was Harlan Ellison. Oh, damn.

'''B:''' Yeah, baby.

'''S:''' Misattributed to Einstein.

'''E:''' Misattributed to Einstein. Einstein in the 1940s said this, two things are infinite as far as we know, the universe and human stupidity.

'''B:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Right? Okay. So it's similar.

'''E:''' So it's similar. Right. Frank Zappa said this, there are two things on earth that are universal, hydrogen and stupidity. Okay. He didn't say elements, right? Right. But it was Harlan Ellison in the 1980s. I think it was like a group of his writings from the early 80s. Apart from hydrogen, the most common element in the universe is stupidity. Tricky. Moving on. Third one. You've heard this one. A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. Who said that? or wrote that. Was it A, Ann Landers, columnist from the 1950s? B, Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister, set in the 1940s? Or Jonathan Swift, an author from the 1710s? And Steve, we're going to start with you.

'''S:''' I thought that was commonly misattributed to Mark Twain.

'''E:''' Everything is.

'''S:''' I thought that was going to be the fake one. But Winston Churchill, I mean, it sounds totally like Winston Churchill. I may have seen that attributed to him, but that's probably the false attribution. Okay. Swift was a satirist. So I'll go with Swift.

'''E:''' Okay. Cara? Cara?

'''C:''' Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. He probably said that really early and then Churchill probably used it or used some variation of it.

'''E:''' Bob?

'''B:''' Yeah, it sounds like Swift.

'''E:''' And Jay.

'''J:''' Damn. It does sound like Winston Churchill. Yeah, I'll go with him.

'''E:''' Winston?

'''C:''' Oh, you're going with Churchill?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Yeah, I almost did too.

'''E:''' The correct answer is, in fact, Jonathan Swift, author from the 1710s. The quote itself is also misquoted. He wrote, falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it. And it's been kind of twisted and bastardized since then. And yeah, Winston Churchill said something similar and Landers had written something similar also, but the original attribution is to Jonathan Swift. That's where this phrase first was born. Fourth one, here we go. Life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease. Who said or wrote that? Was it A, Margaret Atwood, author in the 1980s? Was it B, Posey Simmons, a graphic novelist from the 1980s? Or was it C, Marilyn Duckworth, a novelist and poet from the 1980s? And now we start with Cara.

'''B:''' I mean, who knows?

'''C:''' So was it one of three different women who wrote books in the 80s, two of whom I've never read?

'''E:''' Yes. Okay.

'''C:''' I don't think it was Atwood unless she was quoting somebody. Like it was a character of hers. It doesn't sound like her point of view. So who are the other two?

'''E:''' Posey Simmons. That's S-I-M-M-O-N-D-S. And Marilyn Duckworth.

'''C:''' I'll go with Duckworth.

'''E:''' Okay, Bob?

'''B:''' Duckworth, because I like that name. Okay.

'''E:''' And Jay?

'''J:''' I would go with Atwood.

'''E:''' Atwood. Steve?

'''S:''' That sounds like, you know, I have no idea who these people are, unfortunately. So I'm just going to go with The Poet, which is Duckworth.

'''E:''' Okay. And anyone who said Marilyn Duckworth is correct. And that is the correct quote from Marilyn Duckworth. Now, Posey Simmons and Margaret Atwood each had a quote similar to it, but not exactly.

'''C:''' Do you know what Atwood's was? Do you have it?

'''E:''' Atwood's was life is just another sexually transmitted social disease.

'''C:''' Yeah, that sounds more like Atwood.

'''E:''' And Posey Simmons wrote life is a sexually transmitted disease. But Marilyn Duckworth said life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease. The word terminal. Last one, guys. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. Oh, I'm sure we've heard this one before.

'''S:''' I've heard that one many times.

'''E:''' Was it A, Abraham Lincoln, B, Franz Kafka? Oh, I'm sorry. Abraham Lincoln, U.S. president, 1850s. B, Franz Kafka, novelist, 1920s. Or C, Maurice Switzer, author in the 1910s. We're going to start with Bob.

'''B:''' I'm going to go with Lincoln on this one.

'''E:''' Lincoln. Jay?

'''J:''' Wow, you went with Lincoln, huh, Bob? Yes, I did. All right, I'll go with Lincoln. All right.

'''S:''' Steve? Yeah, I think I've heard it attributed to Lincoln, but I'm going to assume that's the false attribution. I'll say Switzer.

'''E:''' Okay, and Cara?

'''C:''' Yeah, and that's funny because I was going to go the other way. I thought it sounded a little bit Kafkaesque, but I think Switzer predates him, so I'm going to go with Switzer. Okay.

'''E:''' And the correct answer is, in fact, Maurice Switzer. Of course it is. And it's a misquote as well. Maurice Switzer in 1907 from the book Mrs. Goose, her book, wrote, It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool than to talk and remove all doubt of it. So the popular quote is a truncated version.

'''S:''' Just tightened up a bit.

'''E:''' So we have Steve. I think you got them all. I did. Is what it looks like. So you are the misquotation marks champion this week. Very good.

'''S:''' Thank you.

'''E:''' But you all did very well as far as I'm concerned. It was not easy. It was a tough one. Bit of a twist.

'''S:''' I don't mind. All right. That was fun, Evan.

'''J:''' Thank you, Evan.

'''E:''' Thank you, guys.

'''J:''' Yes.

{{anchor|followup}}
{{anchor|correction}}
{{anchor|email}} 
== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:28:56) ==
=== Correction #1: Oats consumption math error ===

'''S:''' All right, we have a quick correction before we go on with science or fiction. So last week, I talked about the chloromiquat in oats. And remember we talked about how much you would have to eat every day?

'''E:''' Yes, 85,000, was it pounds or tons?

'''S:''' Yeah. So I made a boo-boo.

'''B:''' That was in error. Steve messed up.

'''E:''' It's more.

'''S:''' I did a math error. Oh. I think I must have – I don't even know what I did, but I must have gone the wrong direction with the units, translating units, because everything was in different units. You know what I mean? I think I just did it on the fly rather than converting them all first. Whatever. It was a dumb mistake. So the real answer is – you guys actually were very close in your guess. You would have to eat about 12 kilograms every day in order to get up to the lower limit. Yeah. Still a huge amount. What is that? 2.2. 25 pounds of oats every day. Yeah. You could never eat that much. And again, that's to get to the lower level of tolerance, which is probably one or two orders of magnitude below where actual stuff happens. Yeah. So it is still several orders of magnitude less than what people are likely to be exposed to.

'''E:''' And you'd have to eat that every day. for how long to have? – Well, just that.

'''S:''' that's the target to maintain that level, the dangerous level. You'd have to do it every day because it's rapidly removed by the kidneys. Yes. So you would pee it out and your levels would drop back down fairly quickly. It does not bioaccumulate, right? So some toxins, they think, oh, it's a very low dose, but it accumulates over time like you'd store it in your fat cells or whatever. But this one doesn't. You pee it out quickly. So it's like actually not a good target for this kind of fear.

'''E:''' And you would suffer other health problems even if you just ate that, right?

'''S:''' You can't eat 25 pounds of oats every day. You don't think you can eat 25 pounds of anything every day.

'''E:''' Yeah, I don't see how you could do it.

'''S:''' And the Genetic Literacy Project also wrote a good article about the same exact thing, characterizing it as essentially a media publicity stunt by the Environmental Working Group. Okay, let's move on with Science or Fiction.

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}}
== Science or Fiction (1:31:08) ==

{{SOFinfo
|item1 = A recent review finds that male psychopaths outnumber female psychopaths 10:1.
|link1web = https://www.aru.ac.uk/community-engagement/community-events-listing/cambridge-festival-2024/is-the-female-psychopath-more-hidden-than-the-male-in-person
|link1title = Is the female psychopath more hidden than the male? (In-person)
|link1pub = Anglia Ruskin University

|item2 = A new study finds that boiling tap water for 5 minutes removes up to 90% of nano and microplastics from the water.
|link2web = https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00081
|link2title = Drinking Boiled Tap Water Reduces Human Intake of Nanoplastics and Microplastics
|link2pub = Environmental Science & Technology Letters

|item3 = Using AI scientists have developed a method for atomic force microscopy of material surfaces with resolutions below the width of the microscope probe tip.
|link3web = https://phys.org/news/2024-02-ai-technique-decodes-microscope-images.html#google_vignette
|link3title = AI technique 'decodes' microscope images, overcoming fundamental limit
|link3pub = University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering
|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = male & female psychopaths
|science1 = boiling removes plastics
|science2 = atomic force microscopy

|rogue1 = Evan
|answer1 =male & female psychopaths

|rogue2 =jay
|answer2 =male & female psychopaths

|rogue3 =bob
|answer3 =boiling removes plastics

|rogue4 =cara
|answer4 =male & female psychopaths

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win =y 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

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

'''J:''' Ready.

'''S:''' Okay, item number one, a recent review finds that male psychopaths outnumber female psychopaths 10 to 1. Item number two, a new study finds that boiling tap water for five minutes removes up to 90% of nano and microplastics from the water. And item number three, using AI, scientists have developed a method for atomic force microscopy of material surfaces with resolutions below the width of the microscope probe tip. So obviously that is a form of very, very small detail analysis. Microscopy used to look at the nanostructure of surfaces to see how they're formed and if there's any imperfections or whatever.

'''C:''' We have nanomicroscopes?

'''S:''' The atomic force microscopy.

'''B:''' Atomic force.

'''C:''' Yeah. Is that nano? I guess. Okay.

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. All right. Evan, go first.

'''E:''' Okay, a recent review finding male psychopaths outnumber female psychopaths 10 to 1. Well, we just – I don't know if this relates to the brain issue we talked about earlier. I mean if there's a bunch – if there's overlap like we've discussed, then that would lead me to believe that the ratio here is off. It wouldn't be 10 to 1. It would be something else. But maybe there's – but again, the environmental considerations, exterior, external. considerations is is that what would force this ratio to become 10 to 1? or is psychopathy? is that a thing?

'''S:''' uh yep that's right psychopathy.

'''E:''' is it a purely a brain contained within the brain itself? and brain chemistry? I don't know enough about that. I'm I'm questioning that one. The second one, boiling tap water for five minutes removes up to 90% of nano and microplastics from the water.

'''S:''' So if it's – They call it NMP, NMP, nano microplastics.

'''E:''' So if it's removing it, it's boiling it out, I guess turning it into part of the steam that – I mean, is that how it would get out of the water? That's how it would have to leave the rest of the water? Can you get microplastics into steam, you know, to be part of the steam that carries it away? I suppose you could because you can have like dust particles and things. In steam. I don't see a reason why you couldn't. So I'm leaning towards that one maybe being science. And the last one about AI scientists. They've developed a method for atomic force microscopy. Material surfaces with resolutions below the width of the microscope probe tip. A method. So it's about the method they use, not the device itself. It's how they're using the device. That would be the method. So, sure, yeah, you know, you get better at any kind of tool. I suppose you can find different unexpected ways of going beyond what you think its capabilities are. So I have a feeling that one's actually going to be science as well. I'm left with the psychopaths one, leaving the most doubt in my mind. I'll say that one's the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Jay.

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' The one about boiling the water, if this one is true, if we have to boil tap water for five minutes, that's a long time to boil water with the quantity of water that we'd have to boil to do it. It's unfortunate that it would take that much energy to remove up to 90%, but Okay. I mean I could see that working somehow. Like I could see that maybe there's something happening in there chemically that would do that. The one here, AI scientists that developed the method for atomic force microscopy. Say it, Steve.

'''S:''' Microscopy. Microscopy.

'''J:''' Okay.

'''E:''' I love you, Jay.

'''S:''' I love you so much. Not my rhythm, Jay. Like two Ks.

'''J:''' Microscopy.

'''E:''' Microscopy.

'''S:''' Microscopy.

'''J:''' Microscopy.

'''E:''' Two hard Cs.

'''C:''' Yeah, there you go.

'''J:''' Yeah, I just feel like that one is science too because I could see – I'm expecting AI to do this exact thing. So when I go to the first one, it doesn't really make sense to me that men would tend to one – That doesn't make sense. I would think it would be much more evenly split. So I think that one is the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob. All right.

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' Atomic force microscopy. Yeah, this kind of makes sense to me. I mean, doesn't the AFM – doesn't it use quantum tunneling? I mean, and if I'm remembering that right, then what difference does it make, the width of the tip? So – Yeah, but I haven't looked through any of that in so long. Yeah, tap water, removing plastic. I'm not sure what the mechanism would be. I mean, transporting the bits to the surface and what, throwing them into the air to breathe in? That doesn't sound great. I mean, if it... does work. that would be kind of nice to be a way to because what did I read recently? they found microplastics in every in every um every living organism placenta every placenta that they tested every damn one. it's like oh my god enjoy your new life with microplastics. so I don't think we're lucky enough to have that work. so I'm going to say the microplastics is fiction And Cara.

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' Yeah, I can imagine that if you boiled it in a pot with the lid on, maybe that would undermine this. So I'd be interested in the details of that one. So that left for me between the psychopathy study and the AI atomic force microscopy, which I have no idea on the microscopy one. That one is surprising to me, but maybe. The psychopathy one I think is the one that bothers me the most because – I have been studying for my EPPP, which is the Licensing Exam in Psychology. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the conventional knowledge was that it was something like one to six, or sorry, six to one, male to female. But this is a recent study. So maybe it's trying to tell us that it moved in a different direction. But my guess would be that it It's more common in women than we assumed, not less. So I'm going to say it's going in the opposite direction, this study. I'm going to go with the rest of the guys other than Bob.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Okay, so the one you all agree on is number three. Using AI, scientists have developed a method for atomic force microscopy of material surfaces with resolutions below the width of the microscope probe tip. You all think this one is science, and this one is... Science.

'''B:''' Tell me about it.

'''S:''' It's all safe so far. So the limiting factor, Bob, was the probe tip itself, right? Really? Because that introduces an artifact into the images. Basically, you have the image of the probe tip screwing up the microscopy. So what they did is they trained AI to essentially systematically remove the probe tip from the images. So you get these much higher resolution, cleaner pictures that actually reflect the features at that scale. So you get to see detail that's smaller than the probe tip because without doing that process, the probe tip would obscure any features smaller than the probe tip.

'''B:''' Does that make sense? Yeah. So the extremely high resolution images are now even more – Yes. Resolute.

'''S:''' Extremely high resolution. Yeah, exactly. I got to tell you, you know I look through hundreds of news items in doing science or fiction and the ratio of AI news items is dramatically increasing.

'''B:''' Yeah. Oh, yeah.

'''S:''' It's so many.

'''E:''' So is your NVIDIA stock.

'''S:''' Yeah, right?

'''B:''' Oh, my God, man. I should have bought that crap. Me too.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

_rogue_mentions_scale_or_scaling_<ref group=v>[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scale#Related_terms Wiktionary: scale]; see etymology #2 and limescale, below</ref><ref group=v>[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/limescale#Noun Wiktionary: limescale]; A white, chalky deposit of calcium carbonate found in kettles, washing machines etc., especially in a hard water area</ref>

'''S:''' All right. Let's go. I guess we'll take this in reverse order. A new study finds that boiling tap water for five minutes removes up to 90% of nano and microplastics from the water. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is...

'''B:''' Say it.

'''S:''' Science. Sorry, Bob. But it does not remove them. It does not remove them by evaporating them, right? They don't go up in the steam. So would anybody have another hypothesis how it might be removing?

'''B:''' It goes into a sub-dimension.

'''S:''' So I'll tell you. I'll give you another piece of information.

'''C:''' Is there a layer on top that you can peel away or something?

'''S:''' I don't know. It sticks to the side of the – They're getting closer.

'''C:''' It's clumping together somehow.

'''E:''' Oh, it brings it all in into a ball.

'''S:''' It's clumping into what? What is clumping with it? Something else is clumping it.

'''C:''' The impurities in tap water.

'''S:''' Yes, the minerals in the tap water. So like specifically the calcium. So you form like this calcium scale, right, on the surface of whatever you're boiling the water in and the microplastics and nanoplastics. get – adhere to that. They get incorporated into this scale.

'''B:''' So I said up to – So you boil water and then you got to skim it like you're skimming fat off of something?

'''S:''' So most of it is adhering to the sides of the vessel, right? Oh, right.

'''C:''' But they said – When you have a teak, like – Yeah, if you use tap water in your tea kettle, you get scale in your tea kettle.

'''S:''' Yeah. So it would be basically in the scale.

'''J:''' Once that happens?

'''S:''' Yes. Yes, Jay. So they said you can also run it through like a coffee filter for any free floating bits. That's good. Smart.

'''C:''' But nobody's going to do this. No.

'''S:''' Embrace the machine.

'''B:''' Embrace the plastic. It is part of us.

'''S:''' This is more of a proof of concept than a practical solution. But the up to 90% is because it depends on how hard the water is. Hard water gets you 90%. Soft water, meaning less minerals, gets you as low as 30%. So it's between 30% and 90% depending on how hard the water is. Oh, my God. But most tap water is fairly hard if you're not pre-filtering it.

'''C:''' Because most of us don't boil our tap water before we drink it. if we live in the U.S. or other developed nations where it reaches certain safety levels and we don't have to because we won't get sick from drinking it. But a lot of people like myself, I have a filter unit on my tap. So I've got a hot unit that boils the water and it comes straight out of my tap. It's amazing. And then I've got the cold. Yeah, I have a hot and cold water tap.

'''B:''' Yeah, but it's actually close to boiling?

'''C:''' It is, yeah.

'''B:''' That's awesome. I would love that.

'''C:''' You can change the temperature. It's amazing. So I never have to boil water for tea. It's the best thing. No, it's got a safety mechanism so you can't burn your hands. Anyway, and then the other one is a room temperature one that's on a completely different system. That's just like a multi-phase water filter just to make it taste better. I wonder if any of that plastic is being filtered out or if I'm just drinking it all.

'''S:''' I don't know. But I'll tell you why. None of us would think, oh, I'm going to boil all my water. Oh, my God.

'''B:''' Screw that. I'd rather have the plastic.

'''S:''' But I remember when we were feeding our kids formula when they were babies, we would boil and filter the water. Okay. Well, that's good. So I could definitely see parents doing this. Like just do it for a full five minutes and then use some kind of like Brita filter or whatever before you use that water to make your formula. That absolutely can happen. And it's good to know that will remove the microplastic.

'''E:''' Put it in your plastic bottle.

'''C:''' Especially considering – We still don't know how much microplastics affect our health.

'''S:''' Yeah, we don't. That's an open question.

'''C:''' But it's probably likely that if they do affect our health negatively, they do it in a more severe way with a baby. You know, generally speaking, things affect babies more. So it's probably, you know, not a bad idea.

'''J:''' So this might be a stupid question, but is that happening like in my groundwater, like in my house?

'''S:''' You mean do you have microplastics in your groundwater? Absolutely.

'''E:''' They're in you right now.

'''C:''' They're in your blood.

'''B:''' Jake, they're in your uterus, in your placenta.

'''E:''' That's right.

'''J:''' I thought I felt that. So, hey.

'''B:''' In fact, they could be causing you to grow a uterus and placenta growth.

'''C:''' That's when we went from science to fiction.

'''S:''' All right.

'''B:''' Nobody knows what this is doing to us.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' Good cue to move on. Let's go back to item number one. A recent review finds that male psychopaths outnumber female psychopaths. 10 to 1 is the fiction. Cara, very well done. You were correct. The standard... answer was 6 to 1, 6 to 1 male to female. The recent study found it's actually 1.2 to 1. And interestingly, you hit upon the reason earlier in the show and I had to like remind myself not to say anything. Because psychopaths were defined as male psychopaths, right? They were using the male manifestation of psychopathy as the standard. So, of course, that's going to match up better with male psychopaths. But when they removed the sex-biased features and looked at just the core features that were not sex-biased, it's almost 1 to 1. It was 1.2 to 1. So basically, the female psychopaths were hidden by, was an artifact of the methods that they were using, which were biased towards male psychopaths.

'''C:''' Because psychopathy is – I think we're getting to a point now where we can see psychopathy in the brain. Like we have a pretty good template for what psychopathy looks like.

'''S:''' Yeah. The empathy circuit is not there basically.

'''C:''' Yeah. And so – but what's difficult is that doesn't always manifest the same way behaviorally.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' Right. And so some people commit crimes and do – but other people have fully normal functional lives and don't even realize they have psychopathy. Right.

'''S:''' Yeah, because they've learned the behaviors they need to survive and they don't know that they're just not feeling as much empathy as other people.

'''J:''' Steve, Cara, can you – if you're – I know that there's infinite shades of gray here. But can you learn to feel?

'''C:''' Oh, that's an interesting question.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's a good question.

'''C:''' And also what is feeling? What's the construct? How do we define it? But maybe – Specifically here – I mean everybody feels. I don't think there's any evidence that any human being on the planet can't feel. Even people with psychopathy feel. They just struggle with empathy. And so – but I've read some really interesting models of psychopathy that have to do with – so you've got this deeply genetic or deeply biological basis to psychopathy. Like the brain is very different. And then how people are raised – seems to have a massive impact on the behavior that comes later. So the criminality and the violence often happens when people are raised in such a way that there's not a lot of empathy in the home, that they're not cared for, that they don't trust adults, all those things. But people who are really fostered and loved, even though they still lack that circuit, tend to be less likely. to have those behaviors that we often relate to psychopathy but aren't necessary for a diagnosis.

'''J:''' So it's partially developmental.

'''C:''' Yeah, but the brains are still the same, like everything. But their brains actually do still look similar. It's just how do they act. And that's fascinating to me.

'''S:''' All right. Good job, guys. Evan, give us a quote.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:47:35) ==

{{qow
|text = The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
|author = {{w|Robert Coveyou}}
|lived = 1915-1996
|desc = American research mathematician who worked at the {{w|Oak Ridge National Laboratory}}
}}


'''E:'''... "Random number generation is too important to be left to chance {{tooltip|[sic]|this is a slight misquote}}." ...

'''E:''' This week's quote was suggested by listener Jeff from Reseda, California. Thank you, Jeff. Jeff wrote to us. He enjoys the show every week. He says here's one of his favorite quotes of all time because it's so witty. Cleverly makes a point that ought to bring a chuckle to anyone in the skeptical community. Let's see. Random number generation is too important to be left to chance. I chuckled.

'''S:''' That's very clever.

'''E:''' It is a clever quote. It's from Robert – And it's true.

'''S:''' Yeah. And it's kind of true in a weird way. It's what makes it so clever.

'''E:''' I know. I know. You have to pause and think about that, the wording, and you're like, oh, OK. Yeah. Robert Kovu. an American research mathematician who worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He also taught mathematics part-time for several years at Knoxville College and worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria. He was also active in the civil rights movement, helping lead an effort to establish Scarborough High School in the African-American neighborhood of Oak Ridge. This is back in 1950.

'''S:''' It reminds me of the Yogi Berra-isms where he says things that superficially sound self-contradictory but at a deeper level.

'''B:''' There's a kernel of coolness to it.

'''S:''' Yeah, they kind of make sense. One of my favorite ones I always remember is nobody goes there anymore. It's always too crowded. That's funny. He was giving directions and he said, when you get to the fork, take it. Because the thing is, it didn't matter because both of the roads then came back together again. Came back together. Yeah, I really like that. All right. Thank you, Evan. And thank all of you for joining me this week.

'''B:''' Sure, man.

'''S:''' Thanks, Steve. Absolutely.

== Signoff ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

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SGU Episode 970

2024-05-02T08:04:58Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

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{{900s|970|episodebox}}
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|episodeIcon = File:970 micrograph microbiome.jpg

|caption = "Obelisks comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized and gone unnoticed in human and global microbiomes." <ref name = obelisk>[https://www.sciencealert.com/obelisks-entirely-new-class-of-life-has-been-found-in-the-human-digestive-system bioRxiv: 'Obelisks': Entirely New Class of Life Has Been Found in The Human Digestive System]</ref>

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|jay =y
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|qowText = I don't wish to be without my brains, tho' they doubtless interfere with a blind faith, which would be very comfortable.
|qowAuthor = {{w|Ada Lovelace}}, English mathematician and writer
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== Introduction, Eclipse 2024 planning ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, February 7th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening folks!

'''S:''' So, guys, we're getting closer to the eclipse.

'''C:''' Yes, we are.

'''J:''' Very close. I know. I can feel the power.

'''S:''' I ordered the eclipse glasses for everyone, and I also got the solar binoculars.

'''C:''' Nice. I have a pair of solar binoculars and a solar telescope, so I'll make sure to pack those and bring them as well.

'''S:''' I checked it out already. Then I let Bob and Jay take a look through it as well. It's funny because if you're doing anything other than looking directly at the sun, it's just black.

'''E:''' Right. Yeah, it's like a muddy mess.

'''B:''' So you'll use them twice in your life.

'''J:''' It's very cool.

'''C:''' Well, you can look at the sun anytime, though.

'''S:''' Yeah, you can look at the sun anytime, Bob. So we actually looked at the sun, and you can see sunspots. It's cool.

'''C:''' Yeah, you actually don't want to use those during totality.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' You can just look up. You want to use them right before and right after totality.

'''J:''' So, Steve, I might just get myself a pair of, like, the plastic solar eclipse glasses.

'''S:''' That's what I got. I got 12 pairs of plastic solar eclipse glasses. Oh, the good ones.

'''J:''' You got the good ones. All right. Will those fit the kids or no? Yeah, a little gaffer's tape.

'''E:''' Yeah, we're good.

'''C:''' Yeah, we'll make them work.

'''E:''' Oh, and by the way, a little tip. If you think you're going to use – if you have those kinds of plastic glasses and you had them at the last eclipse like in 2017, don't use them because the material does degrade over time and doesn't offer the same protection that they do when they were manufactured.

'''J:''' That's good to know. A while ago.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''C:''' Really? All of them or just the cheapy ones?

'''E:''' It's the cheap ones, right?

'''J:''' Oh, okay.

'''S:''' Don't use expired cheap solar glasses.

'''B:''' Right.

'''C:''' Yeah. Good to know.

'''J:''' So is the main thing here that they need to be polarized? Is that it?

'''S:''' I don't think it's just polarized. It's like heavily filtered.

'''C:''' No, it's like they're the super... I mean, think about... They're basically the same as the binoculars you looked through. Yeah. It's exactly the same. It's the exact same thing.

'''S:''' Except the binoculars are magnified. Otherwise, it looks exactly the same.

'''C:''' It's just black.

'''J:''' So you know what I found out? So we've been looking for a location, right? And I called up a whole bunch of parks that were on the – what do you call it? The totality line, guys?

'''E:''' Yep. Centerline, totality.

'''J:''' Yeah, that centerline means like that'll be where the eclipse lasts the longest.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''J:''' And guess what? My God. So this one park I talked to that normally has like 100 parking spaces said that they are expecting 200,000 people. That's crazy.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' It's crazy. She said that the highway is going to be completely stopped. She said most people that attempt to go to the park won't reach it. That's how bad it's going to be. So two things here.

'''B:''' How do they know?

'''J:''' Because they have people that estimate these things.

'''C:''' They're city planners.

'''J:''' Yeah, city planners. Yeah. One thing is if you're going to be viewing it anywhere, wherever you are, I guess it's all happening along the United States.

'''S:''' Don't plan on driving anywhere.

'''J:''' Yeah. You got to be very careful of the location that you pick.

'''E:''' Get to your location at a time.

'''C:''' Or go the night before if you can. Yeah. Go camping or something.

'''S:''' Or super early in the morning. Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Yeah, and if you are coming to one of our shows or you live in that area and you have a place, a cool place to go to view and you wouldn't mind us joining you, let us know because we are looking for a location that's really like right on the center line. If not, we have a backup, but if anyone just happens to have a place.

'''S:''' Yeah, we're okay, but if somebody has a great property and wants to hang with us.

'''C:''' Yeah, to be clear, we don't mean like you know what bar you're going to hang out at. We mean like if you own land or if you've got wide open space in kind of the Dallas area, preferably southeast of Dallas.

'''E:''' And if you can tolerate us.

'''C:''' Right, yeah. If you want to hang out with us.

'''E:''' We're a bit insufferable.

'''S:''' We're kind of obnoxious, yeah.

'''C:''' And it's not just us either. It's us and our loved ones.

'''S:''' And our family. But it's still what? It's going to be like, whatever, 12 people.

'''J:''' Yeah. It's a crew.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's a crew.

'''J:''' George won't be with us because he's going to be playing music with Brian Brushwood, I believe.

'''C:''' Oh, really? Oh. He's going to be playing music during the eclipse?

'''J:''' I think so, yeah.

'''C:''' Huh. That's cool.

'''J:''' That's a very George thing.

'''E:''' I wonder what songs he'll be playing.

'''J:''' Yeah, that is a very George thing. Yeah, so while we're talking about it, so we have an extravaganza happening in Dallas on April 6th. And if you're interested, you can go to the SGU homepage. There's a button on there. Tickets are selling really fast on that. We're super excited. We have already had a sold out private show. So the only tickets that are available left are for the extravaganza. That's an hour and a half plus show. It's a stage show. There's a lot of improv comedy bits that we do. And it also has a very, very strong backbone of science where we teach you exactly why you cannot trust your senses.

'''S:''' Your brain.

'''J:''' Your brain. Your brain is a liar. Is a liar. It lies to you every day.

'''E:''' Oh, I still love it, though.

'''J:''' But it's a ton of fun.

'''S:''' And here's the other thing. So the private show plus is sold out, completely sold out. But we're getting a lot of people who missed it and are asking if there's other options. So we're exploring. No promises, but we are exploring options. But why don't we do this? If you will 100% buy a ticket to a private show, if we somehow make more seats available... Email us and let us know. Basically, you're agreeing to pre-buy the ticket. Because only if enough people do that? will we do what we need to do to make more seats available.

'''C:''' You know what I mean? And when would it be? Because a lot of people can't agree to something.

'''J:''' That's on the 7th.

'''S:''' Either way, whatever happens would be on that Sunday.

'''J:''' We have not picked a time yet because some parameters are in flux right now. But email us at info at theskepticsguide.org. The subject should be private show. That will make it easy for me to find it. Yeah, and email us. I mean if enough people do it, then I will ramp up my efforts to try to find a bigger venue.

'''E:''' Yeah. Yeah.

'''S:''' All right, Cara, you're going to start us off with what's the word?

{{anchor|wtw}} 
== What's the Word? (6:14) ==
{{Page categories
|What's the Word? = 
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*[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cardinal#Adjective Cardinal]<ref group="v">[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cardinal#Adjective Wiktionary: cardinal]</ref>


'''C:''' Yeah, so I got a request or a recommendation from William in Louisiana that he recommends the word cardinality. And then the next sentence, this word has nothing to do with birds. Sorry, but I did try to think of something in my field of database design and architecture. Cardinality has applicable definitions in database technology, mathematics, music, and all use the word to describe the number of unique values in a set. Also, some data engines have a process or feature called a cardinality estimator that quickly assesses the number of distinct values in data in order to properly join or query the data. The definitions of the words in Mathematica Music seem similar, but their vagaries are beyond me.". So, I will first and foremost say thank you for the recommendation. And also, William, you say that this has nothing to do with birds, but it actually sort of does, by way of the clergy, at least. So we want to start by looking at the root word, which is cardinal. And oftentimes when you look at the definition of the root word, the first definition is the ecclesiastical definition. So that's an official of the Roman Catholic Church, ranks below the Pope, and is appointed by him to assist him as a member of the College of Cardinals. Then you'll usually see... the cardinal number. And then from the color, you'll see the cardinal bird, which is a bird that we have in the US and Canada and also in Mexico down to Belize, which is like a red bird. Oh, I didn't realize it's only red in the male completely. They have black faces and red bills in both sexes, but it's nearly completely red in the male sex. A lot of other birds of the in South America and the West Indies that may be called cardinals as well. So you'll see sort of very often when you look at the order of definitions that there is a temporality to those orders. And almost across the board, every dictionary I looked at started with the Roman Catholic definition first and then moved on to the birds definition. So I was like, okay, before we get to the science, I want to get to the bottom of the etymology. And I realized that the word cardinal or actually starting with the word cardinality, which comes from cardinal because that was the recommendation. If we go back to the word cardinal, in early 12th century, 12th century is when we first saw it coined from medieval Latin. The North American songbird was named all the way in the 1670s and it was named for its red color resembling the cardinals in their red robes. So cardinality is related and it comes from that red color, but it was actually the religious term. So cardinal is a noun. You'll also see cardinal as an adjective, and that came in between the two. So the adjective, which comes from the Latin noun, is actually referring to something as chief or pivotal or principal or essential. And it does seem to come from an original term, cardo, which actually means pertaining to a hinge. So it's something on which something turns or depends. It hinges on it. And that's where we start to see all of these other definitions take place. So remember cardinal as a noun, cardinal as an adjective, and then cardinality as a noun comes much later. 1935 is the mathematical sense of, Prior to that in the 1520s is when we saw the condition of being a cardinal. So cardinality would only refer to the religious sense back then. But in 1935 is when we started seeing it in mathematics and after that in a religious sense. So what does it mean in mathematics? Well, as our friend William did mention, it refers to the number of values in a set. So from what we understand is that first we're seeing cardinal being used as an adjective. So first it's the noun referring to religion, and then we're seeing it used as an adjective, again, hinging things that things rotate around or rely upon. So cardinal numbers, cardinal directions, that was a term that we saw pretty early on. And that's because those were the fundamental numbers or the fundamental directions that. And then after that, we saw a mathematical term that refers to the number of different things in a set. So it's the measure of those different elements. And then you also see the same thing in music, right? The cardinality of a musical set is the number of pitch classes that are within that set. And then as you see it used in sort of computer science, data modeling, database design, it's all based on that fundamental definition of uniqueness or of something fundamental that other things hinge upon. And so the word did evolve as the different fields required the usage of it. But really, they do come back to not the bird, but to the robes for which the bird was named.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a neat pathway for that word. You wouldn't have guessed that that was the first thing.

'''C:''' Right. You would have thought the bird came first.

'''S:''' I don't know that I would have assumed that because then you have to think, well, where did that bird name come from? Unless it was a guy. Usually birds, they're named after the person who discovered them or named them or they're named after some feature of the bird themselves.

'''C:''' So they are named for the redness. But yeah, where did that red come from?

'''S:''' Where did that come from?

'''C:''' Yeah. Interesting.

{{shownotes email 
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== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 

=== New Class of Microbes Found (12:01) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.sciencealert.com/obelisks-entirely-new-class-of-life-has-been-found-in-the-human-digestive-system
|article_title = 'Obelisks': Entirely New Class of Life Has Been Found in The Human Digestive System
|publication = bioRxiv
|refname=obelisk
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''B:'''...could be {{anchor|meatball}}{{meatball|s}}...

'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Cara. Yep. All right, Bob. I understand that scientists have discovered an entirely new type of life, sort of.

'''B:''' Not really.

'''S:''' Not really.

'''B:''' But it's still fascinating. This is a new type of – let's put it this way. A new type of biological replicating agent has been found.

'''C:''' So like a virus?

'''B:''' A cousin to viruses, if you will. They're being called obelisks. And they've been found in people's mouths and guts.

'''E:''' Not mine.

'''B:''' How worried should you be? Not at all. And what are obelisks? So this paper is from a team at Stanford University. It's a preprint on the bioarchive server called Viroid-Like Colonists of Human Microbiomes.

'''J:''' Viroid? Viroid. Yes. Oh, yeah.

'''B:''' You're going to hear about vibroids. So this isn't the first time that they've been written about. Obelisks have been already widely written about, including in the two juggernaut journals, Nature and Science. So to understand obelisks better, we need to compare them to the other similar biological doodads out there. The first comparison doodad recently held the world hostage. For a few years, SARS-CoV-2. These are, of course, the mighty viruses. They're really awesome little buggers, really, from a dispassionate Vulcan-like perspective. Viruses are infectious acellular microbes, essentially. By acellular, I mean there's no cytoplasm or cellular organelles. There's no native metabolism there. They're just DNA or RNA surrounded by a protein coat called a capsid. No way! Yeah. Oh, nice use, Bob. One followed by 31 zeros. That's a little bit easier to get your head around, a million trillion trillion.

'''E:''' Here, Avogadro, hold my beer.

'''J:''' There's a lot.

'''B:''' Jay, I do this with numbers. You know it. You've been doing it for almost – Don't you love those? I love big numbers.

'''E:''' Oh, they're awesome.

'''B:''' All right. So those are viruses. Next are viroids, V-I-R-O-I-D-S, viroids. These are subviral. They're even tinier than viruses. A couple hundred base pairs, I think. Just little snippets of circular RNA. There's no protein shell. So because they don't have that shell, they don't have like the code, if you will, to break and enter a cell. It's a healthy cell. So they typically enter cells, plant cells generally but not exclusively, that are already damaged and typically already damaged by insects. That's how they get in and wreak some havoc. Also, huge point, viroids cannot make proteins. They cannot make proteins. That's a huge distinction right there. So then now we have the obelisks, these new obelisks that have been discovered. So these are like viroids. They have circular RNA but no protein shell. But like a virus – Obelisks can code for proteins. They only have a couple of genes, but they can code for proteins. So they're kind of like mysterious hybrids, right? Part virus, part viroid.

'''C:''' Can I ask you a quick question, Bob? Yeah. How is a viroid different than just free-floating RNA?

'''B:''' They can cleave and reattach their segments.

'''C:''' Oh, okay. So they have some control over the genetic material.

'''B:''' Yeah, like they're kind of – they have some capability.

'''C:''' Like some molecular scissor in there somewhere.

'''B:''' They can cleave themselves apart and put them back together, which I think is something that's fairly novel for just bare RNA. So what has this team discovered about these new obelisks? Well, they've used apparently very innovative computational biology techniques. They searched through 5.4 million datasets of these publicly published genetic sequences, and they identified 30,000 different types of obelisks. Now, 7% of the human gut data sets had these obelisks and a whopping 50% of the human mouth data sets had them. So essentially, flip a coin, you probably have some obelisks in your mouth right now. They show that a lot of these obelisks or really all of them, you could have them if you do have them for up to a year. They've identified people having them for up to a year at a time.

'''C:''' The same ones?

'''B:''' Yeah. Oh, wow. In addition, different areas of your body show different types of obelisks. So they're kind of all over. Here's a quote from the preprint. They said, obelisks comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized and gone unnoticed in human and global microbiomes. They were really just hiding kind of in plain sight, and it took these slick computational biology techniques to kind of pull them out of these data sets, and they weren't really noticed. So one type of obelisk that they identified using as a host a specific type of bacteria, it's a streptococcus sanguinus, and that's a host that's found in the mouth. But for the rest of these obelisk types, we have essentially no idea what the host is. It's probably bacterial, but it could also be archaeal. It could be fungal. It could be meatballs. We're not sure. We're not sure. But bacteria for sure because we already identified one probably, but they think that fungal hosts are also likely as well. Now, I said that obelisks code for a protein, and that protein is being called oblin, O-B-L-I-N. Now, this is a protein that is not homologous to any known protein, meaning it has no evolutionary similarity to them. It's like here's a brand new protein, never seen before, and not really related to any other protein that they've ever encountered. They don't know what it does. It's probably related to some kind of reproduction. But they really aren't sure. So yeah, so there's tons of unanswered questions about obelisks and future research. We'll certainly try to answer them. Apparently, this is really a hot topic. They're going to find out things or they're going to investigate things like what does this protein oblin do? And one of the big questions is, What effects do obelisks have on our health, if any, right? We have no idea. If it's detrimental, if it's helpful, I could imagine if it's actually – it helps us in a way or if it does absolutely nothing, just kind of like this stealth little RNA that's been around and is everywhere but just doesn't really do anything bad at all for us or anything at all.

'''E:''' Are there other examples of things like that that exist in our biome?

'''B:''' Not like obelisks. This is something that's discrete and like I said, it's kind of a hybrid between those two others that are near that scale, the viruses and the viroids. But it's different. It's got characteristics of both, which makes it really unusual. So most fascinating that I found is studying the obelisks could actually help elucidate the origins of life on Earth. This is really fascinating because if they could tease out this relationship, if any, between obelisks and viruses to these viroids, it could help confirm or refute what's called the RNA world hypothesis, which we haven't – I don't think we've discussed it too often at all on the show. The RNA world hypothesis describes the earliest – And the most mysterious part of evolution, right, the start of life, or as I like to refer to it, the transition from chemistry to biology. And if this hypothesis, this RNA world hypothesis, if it's correct, it started as self-replicating RNA, which is what a viral is, right? It's essentially… self-replicating RNA, and before DNA or proteins ever existed. So if that hypothesis is correct, potentially obelisks and their relationship to viruses and viroids especially could actually help us finally figure out one of the more likely ways that life could have started. Did it start with self-replicating RNA? Obelisks could actually help us determine if that was the case, if that would be Obviously, probably multiple Nobel Prizes right there if that happens. But I'll definitely be tracking this. Interesting stuff.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's neat. So it's neat to think about. like RNA, DNA, like genetic material is a thing unto itself. Like it doesn't – it isn't quite life but it is lifelike in that it can replicate – Little organic machines. Yeah.

'''B:''' It's understandable why it's difficult to determine if these things are alive because it has some qualities of life and some qualities that aren't alive. Clearly, we associate with life. So that's why it's not an easy thing. I think most – generally, they're most often considered to be not alive. But it's definitely in this gray zone and it depends on definitions, right? It depends how you want to define it. Steve, initially when you listed my topic, you described it as a new microbe. And even that's problematic because it depends how you define microbe. Microbe will mean things – will include things like having cells, which this doesn't have. Microbes are also infectious as well, which is why viruses – which aren't cell-based at all, are considered to be microbes. But obelisks aren't necessarily infectious at all either. But that's kind of undetermined. So even calling them microbes might not even be accurate.

'''S:''' Categories are fuzzy. And if we evolved – if, again, life evolved from non-life, chemistry into life, you would expect there to be things at the cusp that are – Fuzzy.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' That don't quite fit. That makes sense. All right. Thanks, Bob. All right, Jay, tell us about this new Slim Lunar Lander.

=== SLIM Lunar Tech (22:08) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.space.com/slim-lunar-lander-technology-technology-future-missions
|article_title = SLIM lander's precise 'moon sniper' tech will lend itself to future lunar missions
|publication = Space.com
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''J:''' This is a Japanese lander. This is a significant achievement. The system is called the Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon. So that's, you know, S-L-I-M. I like it. I, for some reason, thought it was actually like this slim-looking, kind of svelte-looking lander. That's not it. They successfully landed on the moon's surface on January 20th, 2024. So why is this significant? Well, first of all, they landed successfully on the moon. This is not an easy thing to do. They are the fifth country to achieve a lunar landing. That's a big deal. And this is also a technical milestone in space exploration. So despite encountering a power issue along the way with their solar cells, it did limit their operational time. SLIM's landing is considered a crucial step forward because it used an advanced precision landing technology. And boy, do we need that? because it's very tricky to land on the moon. What they'll end up doing is if the technology ends up being really useful, which it seems like it is, it's going to offer the potential for future spacecraft to basically land in challenging terrains on the moon and specifically targeting resource-rich areas in the lunar south pole, which could be very irregular and not level. Slim landed within a 100-meter zone that was selected ahead of time. So that's a big deal. It might sound like a huge space, and it is a big space, but it's much, much more narrow than all the other times anybody has ever landed on the moon. as far as them picking a landing site. Like you can't just pick a spot and get there very easily. It's very complicated.

'''B:''' It's often as big as – like it's measured in like kilometers, right, Jay? Yeah.

'''J:''' Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you look at the first moon landing, they were not even close. I mean, they were basically like freewheeling it at the very last seven seconds, but they had no idea where they were going to land.

'''E:''' That thing landed at all is half a miracle.

'''J:''' It is. I completely agree. So this is a significant improvement in landing accuracy over all the previous missions that have taken place. All previous landings required a much larger clearing. They pick a huge, relatively flat area, and they're like, anywhere in there would be great. Good luck. Let's try to land there. So this was achieved through a vision-based navigation system that they created. And what it did was it compared real-time images of the lunar surface with pre-existing lunar maps. And that was the way that it was able to know where it was, basically using legitimate satellite navigation, right, in essence, without the pinging. It was comparing the maps so it knew where it was at any given moment, comparing it to the existing maps, and they were able to bring it down later. Pretty accurately. It's very impressive. SLIM also deployed two small rovers, and both of these rovers were equipped with a lot of cool new technology for lunar exploration. So the first one, the Lunar Excursion Vehicle 1, this one has a camera. It has several scientific instruments on there built in. It also has a unique way to move on the moon. Guess what it does, guys? It hops.

'''S:''' Really?

'''J:''' It actually hops.

'''S:''' It's a hopper?

'''J:''' And it's pretty cool if you think about it because that was the way that the astronauts figured out is the most efficient way to move around on the moon. Not walking, but basically taking little hops. So this technology is particularly useful for navigating uneven and rocky terrain on the moon's regolith. I think it's genius. So this allows the vehicle to overcome obstacles that are in its way, perform in-depth investigations of specific lunar features, which is awesome. So Lunar Excursion Vehicle 1 also can do something called direct communication, right? So it can do direct communication with ground stations, including inter-robot test radio wave data transmission. I love that. So it can communicate with the other lander. The other lander is called the Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2. This lander is a collaborative effort among government, industry, and academia, and it showcases new mobility concepts by rolling on the surface. So if you're paying attention, they are experimenting with different new technologies, novel technologies, and experimenting with different ways of mobility on the moon. Why? Well, because we're all planning on going there, right? Right. And luckily, the United States has a wonderful relationship with Japan. And we will be working with them. The United States will be working closely with Japan. And they already are working with NASA. But it's just a great thing because we have different countries and companies, private companies. They're all building new technology and pushing, pushing, pushing to get it to where we could actually start really getting to the moon and putting infrastructure there. Yeah. Now, all these technologies, again, they're not tested. They will and are being tested on the moon, and that's where they're going to show if they have their metal to make it to more legitimate missions. So the success of SLIM is showing that Japan has similar level of technology as the other leading countries that are out there. It's also from a geopolitical perspective. It's important because we have a lot of countries now that are all trying to get to the moon. We've got the United States. We've got China. We've got India. We've got Japan. All sending missions to the moon, sending big missions into orbit. Now, my hope is that we join forces and just start to co-op with each other extensively. Later on down the road, you know, countries are working together now, but not to the degree that I think they should be in order to really get a full-time presence on the moon. There's been a series of lunar missions by various nations, countries, entities, whatever you want to call them, companies. including India's recent landing. It was a failed attempt by a U.S. company recently that I covered, and also unsuccessful efforts by Russia and iSpace in 2023. So there's a lot of missions going up. We're seeing failures. It's very complicated. Like Evan said, it's damn near miraculous when we could do this. The level of science and engineering and all sorts of – like textiles, everything. There's so much that goes into this stuff. The planning, all the safety measures that they put in, getting data back from the crafts that we send there. It's incredibly complicated. It's super expensive. So in partnership with the U.S., Japan's aerospace exploration agency called JAXA, or just J-A-X-A, it's contributing to the Artemis mission right now by developing a pressurized lunar rover. So pressurized meaning that astronauts would go into it and possibly take off their spacesuits while they're driving around on the surface of the moon. Very cool. So JAXA was established on October 1st, 2003, which surprised me. I thought that they would have had a space agency that predated that. But that's essentially when it started. It was pretty cool. It's a cool backstory. You should read about it. They combined three different companies. Basically, they turned that into their space effort, right? It's pretty cool. I'm really happy to hear that so many countries are doing this because once commerce really starts to happen, once humans basically make outer space be a common thing and industry will happen out there, there'll be a slow expansion of humans not living on Earth, right? And I think as odd as that is, Steve and I just talked today on TikTok about – or recently we talked on TikTok about like what's going to happen to humanity today. In the future, and how are we going to optimize people for space travel? We were saying like there could be bioengineering and stuff like that. I think it's inevitable that humans are going to have a permanent presence in outer space. Just seems to be in our nature. You know, we just aren't stopping. We never stop at borders. We just keep going. I love all this stuff. I think it's wonderful. I think human exploration is important. And I think, you know, it's money well spent.

'''S:''' And Jay, just to clarify, this lander is just for equipment and probes, right? It's not designed to have crew.

'''J:''' No, this is – yes, it's small. And absolutely, it's there to test technology, to get readings. Again, that landing technology is amazing. And they might be able to sharpen that and even make it more and more accurate. It's the beginning of this new landing technology. So very cool stuff on the way. So I got one other quick thing, guys. Have you heard of NASA's Plankton Aerosol Cloud Ocean Ecosystem? No.

'''E:''' Is that an acronym? What's the acronym?

'''J:''' It's PACE.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''J:''' Plankton Aerosol Cloud Ocean Ecosystem. So this is a spacecraft that's scheduled for launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on February 8th. PACE was created to enhance our understanding of the ocean's health. And they're doing this by mapping the color and light of the Earth's oceans. So it's positioned 420 miles above Earth, and PACE will use its three scientific instruments to study clouds, aerosols, and phytoplankton. These are key components that affect ocean color and the health of marine life. So the data we get from PACE will inform us on the ocean's overall biological activity. This is really important, and it's going to Probably give us a ton of information about global warming. Oh, boy. So the mission is expected to last at least three years. And NASA has been studying the world's oceans for over two decades. So this is the latest installment. And, you know, we're focusing on the ocean's biology, you know, air quality, climate indicators. Lots of important information is going to come from this project. And it costs almost a billion dollars. So, like I said, this stuff is not cheap.

'''C:''' Any idea how these new cuts are affecting all of these things? I mean, like today, JPL laid off 8% of its workforce.

'''J:''' Yeah. I haven't heard anything about what the actual outcome is going to be, like what it's going to do as far as like boots on the ground. But I'm sure it's going to have an impact somewhere.

'''C:''' Yeah, like the budget is, it looks like, slashed. Oh, boy.

=== Misinformation and Wellness Influencers (32:29) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-menace-of-wellness-influencers/
|article_title = The Menace of Wellness Influencers
|publication =nn
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' So, guys, are you familiar with wellness influencers?

'''J:''' Oh, yeah. I think I know what you're talking about. Those two words together, I hope.

'''S:''' I don't like those words individually, and they're worse when you put them.

'''C:''' It's sad, too, because I do like the word wellness, but it's been co-opted.

'''S:''' The word's gone, Cara. It has been totally co-opted. It's bullshit.

'''J:''' It's behind the words.

'''S:''' It superficially, yeah, it means anything dealing with being well, with health and not just treating disease but also enhancing health, et cetera. But it's been 100 percent co-opted by pseudoscience for the last – since like the 50s. I mean this is going way back. Yeah, it's a done deal. So I noticed a couple of recent articles where the mainstream media is catching on to the fact that wellness influencers are peddling pseudoscience and misinformation. And they're like shocked, shocked that there's so much misinformation coming from these popular wellness influencers. Whereas we know it's like this is completely 100% expected. Right. But what has been happening that got noticed was that wellness influencers are getting into climate change denial. Huh. Yeah, huh. Why would that happen? And again, superficially, it doesn't make sense because first of all, it has nothing to do with health care. And because usually wellness influencers, part of their narrative, their ideology is to be like a crunchy. nature is always good thing, right? To be pro nature. Yeah. In like a tree hugger sort of way. And this would seem to go against that. But as we understand, wellness influencers are really all about the pseudoscience, which involves being anti-authoritarian or anti-expertise, and utilizing conspiracy theories. And so this just demonstrates, again, what we've been saying for a long time. On science-based medicine, we call this crank magnetism, where if you promote one crank pseudoscientific conspiracy-mongering idea, the chances are pretty good that you are going to promote others. Because there's obviously something systematically wrong with how you evaluate evidence and also you're lacking in certain critical thinking skills, right? And that is going to make you vulnerable to believing and promoting all sorts of nonsense. But in this case, I don't think I'm sort of agnostic towards the gullibility versus cynicism of these people because who knows? They're somewhere along that spectrum. It doesn't really matter. What is happening either way is that the wellness space, right, is promoting a certain narrative. And that narrative isn't about health. It isn't about science. And it isn't really about being respectful of nature, right? What it is about is it is about being anti-authoritarian and conspiratorial in the guise of self-empowerment, right? So they tell people, you can do your own research. You can take control of your own health. Don't listen to what they tell you, right? So that's really the core ideology, the core narrative here. The appeal to nature thing is really incidental. It's not core to what makes them the gurus that they are. It's just one of the marketing ploys that they use. But they can flip it on a dime, right? They're not tied to that because it's not the essence of what they're doing. The essence of what they're doing is don't believe authorities. Don't believe experts. They are lying to you. Just believe us, right? Believe the gurus. We're the only ones that you could believe. And here we're going to empower you with these simplistic explanations for complex problems and buy our products, right?

'''E:''' Sadly effective.

'''S:''' Well, it's evolved to be effective, right? If the algorithm that's happening here is, well, what maximizes clicks? What maximizes revenue? What maximizes engagement? That's it. And if that's your only algorithm, that's the only feedback loop that you are operating under and you're not operating under. what does the science say? and is this ethical or is this –? have high standards of scholarship or academia or whatever. Does this make sense? If your only thing is do people engage with me and do they give me money, then this is the direction that you'll go in. This is where the evolutionary forces lead you. They lead you to a narrative which maximizes engagement. And what maximizes engagement? In a lot of contexts, it's outrage, right, making people mad and outraged.

'''E:''' Scaring people.

'''S:''' Making people scared, making them afraid of something. So you create a fear and a solution to that fear, right, at the same time.

'''C:''' Making them feel like they have some special power or information that other people are privy to.

'''S:''' Making them feel special. Making them feel like they've peeked behind the curtain and they have some special knowledge, some privileged knowledge that most people don't have. Making them feel self-empowered. These are the things that are driving the narrative. And that's really, that's 100% what the wellness phenomenon is about. Everything else is the skin, right? It's the packaging. It's the marketing glitz. But it's not the core of the phenomenon itself. So the fact that wellness influencers are now promoting climate change denial makes 100% sense. This is not off-brand at all.

'''E:''' It fits neatly into the template.

'''S:''' Of course they are. Of course they are. It's exactly what they do.

'''C:''' It's also so sad because it shows how historically, and when I say historically, I mean including up to this moment in time, the wellness industry has preyed on vulnerable people, ethnic minorities, women, people who have struggled to have political or socioeconomic power. It's like you see the, I don't know if anybody's seen that amazing documentary about the sort of pyramid scheme that is Herbalife, but they go into very low income communities and prey on individuals. You see Goop and all of these different, I mean, they prey on women specifically. And yeah, it's because these are people who oftentimes lack empowerment because of societal structures. It's so sad. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, you know, absolutely. And we also see it in professions that may historically did not get as much respect as they deserved. And then it becomes a way to like promote themselves, promote their profession. And, you know, like we see this a lot in nursing, for example, like with therapeutic touch. Therapeutic touch is like this is something that nurses do, that only nurses do. And you could do it without the physician. And there's a lot of feminism empowerment in it as well. Which, of course, you know, while everyone on the show, we're all pro-feminism, we're all pro-equality and all that stuff. But the point is they're being exploited. Like these past injustices are then being exploited to like sort of re-exploit the population. A hundred percent.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It's why it makes it so tragic and so frustrating. There's one, just one example I have to throw out there. So there's a wellness influencer called Truth Crunchy Mama. which is like, oh, like you couldn't make it up.

'''E:''' That's like an AI coming up with.

'''C:''' Well, yeah, that's what they call themselves now. They call themselves crunchy moms. It's a whole thing.

'''S:''' You got the speaking truth to power and they're like, don't believe what they say. You got the appeal to nature crunchiness thing and you got the mama, which is a backhanded swipe at authority and expertise, right? It's like being a mother is all the expertise I need.

'''E:''' Yeah, the mommy instinct, the Jenny McCarthy. Jenny McCarthy.

'''B:''' I remember that.

'''S:''' She definitely pushed that ball forward. So this is just like – just call it what it is. Truth Crunchy Mama. So she says – she was saying about the fires in Hawaii. Right? Oh, yeah, those. Remember that? Stop blaming things on nature that were actually caused by the government. Right? So the government started those fires for their own nefarious purposes. Mercola, who's infamous, you know, Oh, yeah.

'''E:''' Joseph McCullough.

'''S:''' Just asking questions. Could this be a land grab by the government? They're basically destroying this property so that they could build a smart city. Just going to throw that question out there. What? I'm not making any claims or anything. Yeah, it's the Jewish space laser kind of level of conspiracy mongering. It's like anything that happens, the government did it. It's deliberate. Don't believe anything that they tell you. It's all nefarious, evil cabal trying to take your power and take everything from you. But come to me. I'll buy my supplements and everything will be okay. I think, ironically, one of the people who are, I think, operating in this same space is Alex Jones. Oh, yeah. You may not think that at first. How is Alex Jones a wellness influencer? But he's doing the same thing, just emphasizing different aspects of it. So he's promoting conspiracy theories, outrage, distrust of authority and expertise. And he's selling supplements, right? He's just slightly differently branded. But the formula is identical. It's identical. It is the same thing. He's selling dubious products. He also sells prepper stuff.

'''C:''' Yeah, and gold. Yeah, but I mean it's kind of true. And I know that this is going to sound a bit reductive. But like Alex Jones is just like the white man's health influencer.

'''S:''' Yeah, right. Hugely. Appealing to a different segment of the population. But it's the same formula, just a slightly different spin on it.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's all the same. It's all like you've been – somebody's taken something from you. You're having to work harder to get the same results because of a shift in the economy. And this is how you can get your power back.

'''E:''' Yeah. And the reason they all do it is because, sadly, it works. It yields results.

'''S:''' Yeah, it works. And it's frustrating and good to see the mainstream media notice. I just wish they would not forget in two days when something else shiny distracts them. You know what I mean? Exactly. Because it's just – this is the story for today. But it's not – they don't consistently realize – because then they'll be promoting their nonsense tomorrow. You know what I mean? Without remembering that, oh, yeah, that's right. They're conspiracy theorists.

'''C:''' Well, and I think it also shows a mistake that is often made. And I think we've made that mistake in the past as skeptics and the skeptical community has sort of made it in the past is not seeing the forest for the trees. It's like, let's focus on miracle mineral solution or, you know, whatever. Like, it's just a new iteration of the same problem. Like, yes, it's important to debunk all of these individual things, but it's also important to do exactly what you're doing right now, which is saying you need to see the pattern.

'''E:''' We have to have the examples to point to.

'''C:''' We do. Of course we do. But like, I think part of the reason that the media moves on so quickly is because they're focusing on the trees and not the forest.

'''S:''' Totally. I agree. Yeah, and that's a pitfall we all can fall into.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' But, yeah, I mean, I do think we've made a specific effort to look at the big picture.

'''C:''' Yeah, we've got to constantly contextualize these things.

'''S:''' Yeah, absolutely.

'''E:''' Yeah, our 30 years of work has been this.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah. And it takes a long time. And we've spoken before. Again, I don't like to bring this up, you know, because I don't want to, like, make it sound like I'm ragging on people. But there have been pop-up skeptics in the past who— who have taken a very superficial approach to this. Like we're just going to debunk claim after claim without, without earning their bones, as they say, right. Without like putting the time into like really understand the phenomenon at, at a more sophisticated level. And again, not to squash any young skeptics or people trying to get involved, but again, like always you have to be a little bit humble and, Skepticism is not easy. It is a very highly developed academic discipline. There's a lot of literature involved. And it took us a long time to get to the point where we start to see these bigger pictures and these commonalities and how it all plays together and how to approach it. And it's all very nuanced. It's always more complicated than you think. So just again, just keep that in mind as you are trying to be activist and participate in this. It's not easy. Don't think because the pseudoscience is silly that you could just jump in there and do it. That's a recipe for getting burned. And we've seen that happen a whole lot.

'''E:''' Absolutely. And just because people are educated does not mean that they have those particular skills or subsets. And we see that all the time. I think one of the more recent examples – Is the congressional committee for the UAP phenomenon, the UFO phenomenon? I mean they brought in some really talented scientists in their own fields and stuff. But where are the skeptics? Where are the neurologists who speak about how the human brain is so fallible and tricks us all the time? There's no – those are the elements that are missing from those kinds of efforts.

'''S:''' Totally missing and that's why it was also frustrating because there's also, just like in other academic disciplines, there's institutional memory. It's like you need skeptics to say – and we did this talking to each other like in the skeptical literature but it didn't break through to the congressional level. It's like. these are the same claims they've been trotting out for decades, for decades. We've already debunked these 20 times. This is what they're doing. This is why they're wrong. This is why you should not pay attention to this. But we don't want to get into the backstory of those specific meetings because there was a political level to them that has nothing to do with anything we're talking about. So that's I think partly – that was designed to fail in the exact way that it failed in my opinion. But it did fail. And even when they're trying to get to the bottom of a complex issue like this, they get burned because they don't get – they don't recognize that this is a specialty, that understanding pseudoscience and conspiracy thinking is a specialty. As I like to say, we have a particular set of skills. And it is very narrow, you know, but it takes a long time to develop it to the point where you could hear like the test. Like this is why people email. So how do you what do you guys make of this? Like it sounds superficially right. Like, OK, this is how you break this down. It takes you a long time to get to that point.

'''C:''' Do you know what's interesting to me, Steve? And I'm curious about your take on this is that oftentimes there's this undercurrent of like anti-authority, right? Sort of like we have special knowledge or we are in like a chosen club. But over and over, they fall back on pseudo scientific sounding things. So like over and over when you start to really dig, dig, dig, who is the final source that everybody's listening to? It's like a Merkula who, yes, he's batshit, but he's a doctor. And I think that's the thing that's so funny to me is that there's always somebody who has authority. And yes, they've taken that authority and really done a disservice.

'''S:''' Yeah, they're not internally consistent. Right. Because, again, because the the core phenomenon is like what I've been describing and everything else is flash and sizzle. And right. So you would think, oh, this is all about doing things naturally. No, it isn't. It's about the conspiracy theory. The natural thing is just the brand. It's that's all it is. And they will swap that out for it's the latest science or it's ancient wisdom or this guy's a doctor. It doesn't matter. They just will swap these things out as needed around this core of. don't believe the experts, believe me, buy my supplements.

'''C:''' That's why it's so frustrating when you're having a discourse with somebody and then they start trying to cite science and you're like, you're not allowed to do that. You just told me that you're not operating from that framework.

'''S:''' Right, right, right.

'''J:''' Choose a lane.

=== Super Earth in Habitable Zone (50:10) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/story?id=106961506
|article_title = NASA announces new 'super-Earth': Exoplanet orbits in 'habitable zone,' is only 137 light-years away
|publication = ABC News
|redirect_title = 
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'''S:''' All right. Evan, tell us about this new super earth.

'''C:''' Super Earth!

'''E:''' That has nothing to do with Superman. But yeah, this is neat. TOI-715B. Yep, that's its designation. A super Earth exoplanet that orbits an M-type star, which is a red dwarf star. It has a mass of about three Earths. It only takes roughly 19 days to complete one orbit of its star, so it's pretty close.

'''S:''' Which means it's almost certainly tidally locked.

'''E:''' And tidally locked, yeah.

'''S:''' No, this is not Earth-like. Well, well. Habitable zone or habitable zone.

'''B:''' Habitable, habitable.

'''S:''' So, Evan, you said it's got three times Earth's mass. Yes. What do you think the surface gravity is? Because I calculated it. Because it's also about...

'''B:''' Depends on the diameter.

'''S:''' Yeah. So, the diameter... 1.5 of Earth.

'''E:''' It's about 1.5 Earth.

'''S:''' So, you have three times Earth's mass, 1.5 Earth's diameter. What does that calculate out for surface gravity? What do you think?

'''E:''' Is that a six times? Is that a... Is it three times 1.5? 4.5? five or is it?

'''S:''' i think you're all over the place? yeah well for the three times the gravity. so it can't be more than three right? um well it could if it was smaller. uh but so it depends on the radius and the mass. so the thing is it's heavier but it's also bigger. so they offset each other a little bit.

'''E:''' They aren't launching rockets into space anytime soon. They could.

'''S:''' They could. They're under the limit that you would need to be under in order to launch chemical rockets off the surface. Oh, they are under the limit. So I calculated the surface gravity at 12.29 meters per second squared, Earth being 9.8. So that's 1.25 G is the surface gravity. Whereas 1.5 is the limit for chemical rockets being able to get into orbit.

'''E:''' Okay. So it's not that big.

'''S:''' You think it's three times the mass, but it's only 1.255 G at the surface gravity.

'''B:''' Anyway.

'''E:''' Nice workout, dude. It's been time now. Yeah, it's in what's called, and this is a new, I must have read this before, but didn't recognize the significance of it. It is considered to be in the conservative habitable zone.

'''B:''' Habitable.

'''E:''' Habitable. We've talked about the Goldilocks zone or habitable zones of exoplanets and other planets going around their star where you could have, among other things, liquid water. on your surface, potentially an atmosphere among some other things, smaller-sized rocky planets. Okay. But there's also this – so there's this optimistic habitable zone, which is wider, but a conservative habitable zone is more narrow, potentially more – it gives you some more breadth as to the possibilities of there being liquid water among other things going on. But a lot of other things would have to line up for surface water to be present and, of course, having a suitable atmosphere among other things that you're going to look at. But really, it's the red dwarf stars and their planets. They've emerged as the prime targets in the search for habitable worlds. And the TESS, that's the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, made this discovery in 2023. And according to the authors of the paper in which they published this discovery, it's the first test discovery in the conservative habitable zone. So that's the significance of this particular discovery. And, of course, it was discovered – it's, oh, 137 light years away.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's pretty close.

'''E:''' Fairly close. Fairly close. And, of course, we discovered it, or TESS uses the transit method to detect. So they saw the dip in the light, and there it was, and they locked it in. Confirmed. Now, the other part of this is that there might be – it's unconfirmed – there might also be a second, smaller planet also detected. in the habitable zone and possibly in the conservative habitable zone. This is TOI-715C, as in Charlie, which is what? The radius size of that planet is 1, 1.066, so that's much closer to Earth's size. And takes about 25 and a half days to go around its red dwarf star. So I imagine that would also tidally lock you.

'''S:''' Probably.

'''E:''' At that distance. Yeah. So this was actually – the paper was published back in May of 2023. It didn't really make a big splash in the news, but NASA is promoting it this week. Among others, they're propelling it into a major space news story this week. I think what's going to happen is that they're going to turn eventually the James Webb Telescope around. to the planet to get some more details on this. Because it can look at, you know, it looks at the infrared light emitted by exoplanets and it will tell us, you know, is there water? Is there oxygen? Methylene? or perhaps molecules indicating the presence of life. And of course, you know, there's no guarantee that this planet is habitable. You know, it's all going to be, a lot of it's going to come down to the atmosphere, but the fact also that it's tidally locked, that narrows, you know, that makes it less likely.

'''S:''' But worse than that, because tidally locked, there could still be a habitable zone around the Terminus. A band. It could be actually pretty big given circulating atmosphere and water and everything. So that's not a deal killer, but the red dwarf is still a semi-deal killer. The thing is, red dwarfs are really active when they're younger, and that would have stripped any atmosphere off of a planet at that distance. So the question is then could it have reconstituted that atmosphere or could it have wandered in from outside the – from farther away after the star had settled down? And again, settled down is a relative term. It's still way more active than our sun is. But if you have like a strong magnetic field and a thick atmosphere – You can't rule out habitability at this point in time for red dwarfs, but it's not looking good, and it's quite possible that red dwarfs are not a good location for Earth-like planets or habitable planets.

'''B:''' Unless you consider subsurface habitability.

'''S:''' Yeah, but that's not Earth-like.

'''E:''' Right. Yeah, it falls into kind of a different category.

'''B:''' Right. Yeah, that's just our bias, but it still could be – you could have major ecosystems underground.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's one of the ways to rescue that there might be life on that planet. But this is something I've been following it every now and then. I just look. I check the database. I check with NASA and the lists. Are there any planets roughly the size of Earth in the habitable zone of a yellow star?

'''E:''' Mid-aged yellow star.

'''S:''' Yeah, and the answer is no. Right, not yet. We have not discovered an Earth twin yet. Not yet. With the thousands of exoplanets that we've discovered. But that's partly because the methods that we use are biased towards bigger planets, and they're biased towards planets closer to their parent star. And also, there's a lot of red dwarfs out there.

'''E:''' There are.

'''B:''' More than any.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''E:''' And we're also limited to the plane in which we can observe.

'''S:''' Yeah, but that should be random, right? That shouldn't bias it in one way or the other.

'''E:''' It shouldn't. No. But, you know, there have been over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets. We're north of 5,000 now, which is remarkable. I don't know. When was the first exoplanet confirmed? I don't know.

'''S:''' The late 90s, right?

'''E:''' Was it late 90s or first suspected detection occurred in 88, but the confirmation came in 1992. Nice. But 5,000 since then. Basically one generation worth of. This sort of space exploration, and we've already gotten to 5,000. We're just at the tip of the iceberg. We'll find it someday, but yeah. The search continues, and of course James Webb is amazing, and it will definitely help in that search.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Evan. Yep. So, Cara, I understand some scientists want the hurricane scale to go up to 11 or at least 6. Yeah.

=== Climate Change and Storms (58:32) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/hurricanes/we-may-need-a-new-category-6-hurricane-level-for-winds-over-192-mph-study-suggests
|article_title = We may need a new 'Category 6' hurricane level for winds over 192 mph, study suggests
|publication = Live Science
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''E:''' 11 might be right.

'''S:''' At least 6. Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah, so before I dive into that, this sort of inspiration for my story this week was the horrific storms that we have been dealing with on the west coast of the US. It finally is dry. I'm glad that I have power and internet to be able to record today because a lot of my neighbors do not. There was actually a double atmospheric river situation here in Southern California, actually kind of along the coast, but we got hit super hard in Southern California. I know, Evan, you had said that you have read up quite a bit on atmospheric rivers.

'''E:''' A little bit. Well, I don't know about quite a bit, but I've certainly followed the news stories and the phenomenon over the past couple of years because it has become – a very amazing and at the same time deadly phenomenon.

'''S:''' Evan, did you know then that an atmospheric river could move twice the water flow as flows through the Amazon River?

'''E:''' I did not know that specifically.

'''B:''' Over how much time?

'''E:''' But I knew it was a lot.

'''S:''' If you measure like how much water is moving over a certain distance over time, it's twice as much water is moving through an atmospheric river like what we're seeing in California.

'''C:''' Oh, okay. Because I've read that it can be up to 15 times as much water as the Mississippi. But that's like a really bad one. Yeah. A different river. Yeah.

'''E:''' Six trillion gallons of water, I heard.

'''S:''' It's a lot of water.

'''C:''' Yeah. I mean, the numbers are all over the place. There are different ways to measure them. They say on average, there are four or five active atmospheric rivers at any given time going on on Earth. Basically, an atmospheric river is exactly what it sounds like. It's kind of like a river in the sky. It's a section of the Earth's atmosphere that looks river-like. It's narrow and quite long, and it carries moisture from the tropics, so somewhere near the equator up towards the poles. For this storm, it seemed to have been carrying that atmospheric moisture from kind of the Hawaii region towards the west coast. And it dumped over seven inches of rain on Southern California. I think we were looking at, I have a number here, that's the third worst or wettest two-day span in the history of the city, or as long as we've been recording. So the first one was in the 30s, then the 50s. And then we saw this stretch from February 4th to the 5th. And in LA, at least downtown LA, we averaged 7.3, 7.03 inches of rain.

'''E:''' According to the San Diego County Weather Authority, the average coastal amount of rain they get in a year is 10 inches for the year.

'''C:''' Yeah, this is brutal. Yeah, this is really, really different. And I think in LA, the average is 14 inches of rain. So yeah, in downtown LA, it's 14. So there it's half and in some regions more than half of the average rain for the entire year. And part of the reason that it's so destructive is not because it was a really bad storm per se. Like I was out there, you know, I walk my dog in the rain, no problem. It's that it's sustained. It just sits and dumps and dumps and dumps and it's actually going to rain again today. And even though that's not a storm, it's not really an atmospheric river, the ground is saturated now and all of our watersheds are pretty full. And so there could be some more pretty bad flooding, mudslides, all the things that we see that are happening that cause damage. Billions of dollars in damage and actually several people died in these atmospheric rivers. So that sort of prompted me to want to see, you know, to bring back that conversation about climate change and that conversation about what's different now. You know, atmospheric rivers were only first coined in 94. That could be why... It's been interesting to follow, like Evan, you kind of said, you know, that the news has gotten kind of crazy about them. Well, we didn't, we knew that they existed, but we didn't really have a name for the phenomenon until then. And so, you know, it's a little bit hard to forensically say how much worse are things now than they were, especially when we're still trying to understand the climate. It's so complex. It's stochastic as hell. But we do know a lot. And one of the things that is really interesting to me is a study that was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science called The Growing Inadequacy of an Open-Ended Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale in a Warming World. So this was published two days ago as of this recording. And just in case you didn't know, the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale is the category scale that we use here in the United States how bad a hurricane is, but really it's not telling us how bad it is because it's not telling us about storm surges. It's not telling us about tornadoes. It's not telling us about flooding or potential loss of life. All it's telling us is what are the sustained winds, which is only one of several different variables that go into the severity of a hurricane. So we are used to this like category one storm, category three, four, five, five, Three, four, and five are considered major storms. As of right now, five is the worst category hurricane that one can be labeled. And that means 157 miles per hour, or that's 252 kilometers per hour or higher of sustained winds. And so at this level, according to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that means a high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed. I'm just reading this straight from the website. With total roof failure and wall collapse, fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. And most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks to months. So that's terrible. And this new study does, Basically, the researchers say, we've looked at models, we've looked at observations, and we've collected a lot of data to try and understand if the scale that we're using for sustained wins is actually adequate. And in looking across all of this previous data and modeling for the future, specifically due to the changes that have occurred to hurricane structure and function due to climate change, the researchers here argue that they don't argue for a change to add a sixth category, but they consider, as they word it, we investigate considering the extension to a sixth category of the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. basically as a means of public science and danger messaging. So here's what they argue is the problem. Category one is from 74 to 95 miles per hour sustained winds. So anything less than that is not a hurricane. Category two, 96 to 110, three, 110 to 129, four, 130 to 156, five, 157 or higher. So anything above that is still a Category 5. But what the researchers argue is that there have been enough examples of what would fall into this kind of arbitrary Category 6 grouping that maybe we should, as a public, as a, you know... the National Hurricane, is that what they're called? The National Hurricane Association Center. The National Hurricane Center, as a group of experts, maybe should start thinking about messaging and considering these things. So their cutoff that they, quote, suggest, I'm trying to be careful with my language here, is 192 miles per hour sustained winds. And they show examples of five or six days different storms, which would have exceeded that hypothetical Category 6 within the last nine to 10 years. Hurricane Patricia in Jalisco, Mexico, which was actually called a Category 4, but they say could be a new Category 6. And then other storms all within the Western Pacific and the Philippines, as well as Taiwan and eastern China. Here's the issue. The higher the wins, the increase exponentially in damage. And so if you have a top, an upper value, and you just say this plus or anything beyond this is category five, it really doesn't communicate to the public how bad it can be. And so that's why they say, is a Category 6 necessary here? Is this something to think about? Because 192 miles per hour is really different from 157 miles per hour. Yeah, big time. We're talking lots more damage, lots more loss of life. That's why they bring this up. They directly link this to climate change. They show pretty convincingly within their paper that this is a new phenomenon. If you look back at the records, historical hurricanes would not qualify as Category 6s. Only new storms seem to be falling within this category.

'''S:''' It sounds like we need to update the scale.

'''C:''' Yeah. It would be the easiest thing, I think, for messaging. We're all used to the one through five system. And people who live in hurricane zones, they operate with this kind of psychology. Oh, that's just a category three. I should be okay with my hurricane windows. I'll take my patio furniture inside, but I'm not going to board up my windows. Oh, that's going to be a category five. We're probably going to start seeing evacuation notices soon. But I think people... You know, they have, like you were saying before, like institutional, they have kind of human memory for these experiences. And when there's something new that doesn't quite fit the mold, just calling it five could be, I think, detrimental because people may really underestimate how bad it's going to be. Right.

'''S:''' It could be an order of magnitude worse than what they're expecting.

'''C:''' Yep.

'''S:''' Yeah. All right. Thanks, Cara. Yep. All right, Jay. It's Who's That Noisy time.

{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? (1:09:22) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 969
|answer = {{w|Pulsejet|Pulsejet engine}} ... [https://youtu.be/dSlDsup-aLI?si=H_zwsaiSp9WPCmMh&t=25 on an ice buggy]
|}}


'''J:''' All right, guys. Last week, I played This Noisy. I got a lot of guesses on this one. And, you know, when I heard this noisy for the first time, I actually knew another sound that sounds very, very similar to this, which I will explain to you guys. So a listener named Darcy Stevens wrote in and said, I think this noise is the sound of a high voltage arc from a breaker operation, perhaps a failed operation in a substation where the breaker does not open fully, leading to a prolonged period of arcing, creating the noise. I've actually used that noisy, if I'm thinking correctly. I remember we did one where there was like this massive release of energy.

'''S:''' Yeah, it sounds familiar.

'''J:''' Yeah, and it does have a little bit of an electrical arc noise to it, but that is not correct. Listener named Shane Hillier wrote in, Jay, this week I think the noise was an A-10 Warthog firing a machine gun. Love the show. Have a great week. So you guys know what an A-10 Warthog is?

'''S:''' I'm familiar with it.

'''C:''' Is it a plane?

'''S:''' It's a pretty

'''B:''' wicked military

'''E:''' –

'''J:''' It's a military craft. It has a unique profile.

'''S:''' I think it's like an anti-tank plane, right? It's meant to attack ground forces.

'''J:''' I think you're correct, and I think that it's shooting incredibly large rounds. That is not correct.

'''C:''' Sorry, Jay. I have to interrupt for a second because I can't. I can't not say this, but I've been watching Masters of the Air, and it's so freaking good. You guys have to watch it.

'''S:''' I'm watching it. It's okay. It's no Band of Brothers.

'''C:''' It is so good.

'''S:''' It's no Band of Brothers.

'''C:''' Watch the behind the scenes. Okay. I think it's just because we have such a place in our heart for Band of Brothers, and I've seen Band of Brothers like five times. I think this will compete. We're only three episodes in. Watch the behind the scenes. It's a way bigger production. It was way harder for them to make.

'''S:''' Wow.

'''J:''' I will look at it. I will do it.

'''C:''' It's really interesting. Anyway, go ahead.

'''J:''' Next listener, Joey Parker. He said, Love the podcast. I believe the noisy presented in episode 969 is the U.S. Navy Phalanx CIWS close-in weapon system turrets. All right, so I'm looking at a picture of this, the Phalanx CIWS. Oh, it's called CIWS, right? Phalanx CIWS. And my God, this is like a movable firing platform that looks like it has a giant container of rounds. Very, very impressive looking.

'''C:''' Is that also on a plane? A turret that goes on a plane?

'''J:''' It looks like it's on a boat.

'''C:''' Oh, a boat.

'''J:''' Pretty sure. Very, very big. Anyway, I haven't heard that. I couldn't find the sound of that. But boy, I get the intensity, right? Just a massive amount of bullets being fired in a short amount of time. Or would you even call them bullets at that point? It's probably a more accurate word for that. But that is not correct. We have a winner and this has never happened before. This is pretty cool. We haven't had winners before. This particular situation happened before. Somebody sent me the correct answer but didn't know that it was this week's Noisy.

'''S:''' What do you mean?

'''E:''' How did that happen?

'''J:''' Meaning that he sent me the noisy of this week.

'''C:''' No way. It was like, hey, you should use this.

'''J:''' Yeah, and you should use this one. But I'm thinking about it, and I'm like, all right, I didn't have a winner for this week, but this person sent in the correct one. So this person intuitively won the game.

'''E:''' All right.

'''J:''' That's the way I'm looking at it. Name is Matthew Bornfrund. B-O-R-N-F-R-E-U-N-D. I think I nailed it. So proud.

'''E:''' Born true.

'''J:''' Hi, Jay. Came across this great video on Instagram. It would be great if they actually took off for a test run, but the sound is fantastic. It is a fantastic sound. Thank you for not knowing that you played and winning. But the answer is this. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Marlo, and Marlo sent in this message. He said, Hi, Jay. This is my new favorite sound. According to the account, this is a pulse jet engine. It's what was on V1 rockets and now on these guys who created the ice buggy, right? These people created an ice buggy that has a pulse jet engine on it. So the jet engine fires a series of super fast pulses of energy instead of it being like one steady stream. I don't know why people would use engines like this. You know, I didn't read enough about it to really understand. Like from a physics perspective, why would you choose to have the engine go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah like that? But anyway, take a listen again now that you know what it is. So it's basically like a jet engine looking type mechanism that is on top of some type of ice buggy sled. Ready? Yeah. I mean, that thing is ramping up. That's one hell of a sound. You can imagine the percussion coming off of that sound, right? If you were within 100 yards of that, you'd feel that for sure. Anyway, cool sound. I have a new noisy for you this week. This noisy, right now, it's my favorite noisy of the year. This is a very, very cool noisy. This is sent in by a listener named Stefan Walker. Try and figure this one out.

'''S:''' I love it. I know what you're thinking, Steve. You do? I do. I know what... There's a video game in your mind right now, isn't there? Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's great.

'''J:''' It is Portal.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The turrets.

'''J:''' The little turrets that would talk. They'd say funny things after you shoot them over. They'd be like, why did you shoot me? Remember they'd say weird things? Anyway, what a cool noisy. I wasn't going to use it because it's a hard one. It's hard. There's something very particular going on here. But I would love it if you guys could send me in your guesses. You can send a guess or a cool noisy that you heard to WTN at theskepticsguide.org.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (1:15:09) ===
[Melodic beeping with robotic voice]

'''J:'''...{{wtnAnswer|971|There's something very particular going on here}}...

== Announcements (1:16:21) ==

...[[SGU Episode 1000|A thousand episodes]]...

'''J:''' Steve, I know I already said it, but we've got extravaganza tickets happening in Dallas. This is April 6th. You could go to the Skeptics Guide website and you can check out the details there. We really hope that you can join us. Tickets are selling fast, but there are seats left and it would be fantastic. Really cool if you could come and hang out with us for a little while. There's also a VIP if you want to get a little extra time with us, and we do give out some swag and whatnot for those people. It's a lot of fun. A couple more things. If you enjoy this show and you want to help a little bit, you can definitely tell a friend. You can definitely leave a review for us on iTunes or whatever your podcast player, if they accept reviews. That's always good. That helps people find us. And if you really want to help us, you could become a patron. You can go to www.patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide. You could join the SGU community. We have an awesome group of people that are on Discord on the SGU dedicated Discord talking every day about all sorts of different things. And, you know, by doing this, you could help support the work that we do and help us continue to doing it. And, you know, look, this is our year where we hit a thousand episodes.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. We have given away a free thousand episodes.

'''J:''' It's a lot of work. Yeah. So if you want to show some appreciation for this work that we do, because we really believe in the work that we do, and that's why we've been doing it for 19 years. 19 years ago, I was a completely different person. Right? Think about 19 years ago. I mean, I feel like if you compare that version of me to who I am today, I was like a baby 19 years ago. Aw. Pretty much.

'''S:''' Skeptically speaking. Skeptically speaking, yeah.

'''J:''' Yeah, that's funny because we really didn't know a goddamn thing about skepticism back then, right? We were doing okay.

'''E:''' Since the mid-90s, kind of.

'''J:''' We were okay. When we started the podcast, we had a very good understanding. We read a lot of books and everything. But after doing this show for 19 years, my God, we learned so much doing this show.

'''S:''' I hope we learned something over that period of time. Yeah.

'''J:''' Just so much, though. I mean, I can just see the world in a more refined way than I ever have in my life. And I give it to this podcast for teaching me so much. I learn a lot from you, Steve, and I learn a lot from everybody on the show. And I really appreciate it. I think it's awesome. It's just like the best thing I've done outside of start a family. This is the best thing I've ever done with my life, and I appreciate it.

'''S:''' It's the best way to learn is to have to teach something.

'''J:''' Definitely. Yeah.

'''B:''' It's the seventh best thing I've ever done.

'''J:''' And one last thing. My God, do I need my critical thinking skills today more than ever in my entire life? I mean the world is so freaking confusing and full of misinformation. Like Steve and I were just talking about this today on TikTok. Having a skeptical backbone and having those – the ability for those red flags to go up when I detect BS, you know, and it happens every day. Like I really use my critical thinking to my benefit every single day of my life.

'''B:''' Yeah, I'm so much more confident when I say these days, oh, yeah.

'''S:''' Oh, my God. You say it and give references.

'''E:''' That's right.

'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Jay.

'''J:''' Bye.

{{anchor|ntlf}} 
== Name That Logical Fallacy (1:19:51) ==
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|Name That Logical Fallacy = 
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* "Weaponized pedantry"

{{shownotes email 
|text = 
|sender =
|location = 
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'''S:''' All right, guys. We're going to do a Name That Logical Fallacy. This is based upon an email sent to us by listener Mike. And Mike writes... Thank you very much. But I have seen people use this reverse gish gallop used all the time. I think a good example of this is when debating anything regarding common sense gun control, a Second Amendment nut will point to the tiniest little mistake in your reference to any firearm and then say something like, since you don't know the difference between a swing arm lever and a coil spring lock on a 1964 or 1911 Smith & Wesson, then you are a moron and can't possibly comment on anything gun related. Just thought if this has never been discussed before, it would be a relevant segment on the show. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, so – Reverse Gish Gallop? Yeah, I don't know that I like that term. I'm not sure exactly how you get that. So the Gish Gallop is a debating technique where you throw out so many claims and misconceptions and whatever that the other side can't possibly deal with them all, right? Because it takes a lot more time to deconstruct and explain why something is wrong.

'''E:''' Like a denial of service attack on a website or something.

'''S:''' Than to make the claim itself. Yeah, just like overwhelming the enemy with flack. So that's the Gish Gallop. It comes from Dwayne Gish who was a creationist who made a career out of debating evolutionary biologists and this is his favorite technique. He would just make 50 false statements in his 20-minute segment and the scientists could never get to them all. Even if he adequately dealt with four or five of them, the audience is still left with, well, there's still a bunch of stuff he didn't address. And that was kind of the point. I think what Mike is describing here is more of what I would call weaponized pedantry, right? We have used this term in a number of contexts before, mainly on science-based medicine. And it's essentially when people are pedantic but not because they're trying to be accurate or nerdy or not because they're correcting a misconception that actually affects your conclusion, but they're doing it as a debating technique. They're doing it in a biased way to either discredit the other person or to say, well, your claim must be wrong because you made this tiny irrelevant mistake. And of course on any complex topic, obviously there's lots of things that are going to be either incomplete. or maybe you did make a tiny factual error or you didn't say things exactly the right way. I mean we do this all the time. It's hard. Even like when you're doing it in writing and you have the time to try to get it precisely correct, you still make mistakes or you still will be unclear or ambiguous or whatever. This is why like when you submit a paper for publication – It almost never gets published as is. They always publish it with revisions. They say, well, correct all these little things and then we'll publish it. That's like the best you're ever going to do. Or like when you're writing our book, I spent a lot of time trying to tweak a chapter to hell. And then the editor's like, you missed a bunch of stuff. They always find errors. So the question is, are you... Is your pedantry in good faith, right? Is it fair, not biased in a particular direction? And is it meaningful? Are you putting it into context? But this too, I think, is very nuanced and complicated because sometimes those details change. do matter. They do affect your bottom line conclusion. And so you always have to know, does that detail matter? Does it matter if you mentioned a swing arm lever or a coil spring lock? Or is that irrelevant to the issue at hand? I've experienced that in the same debate myself where I may have casually used the term clip when I meant magazines. Like, oh, clearly you don't know anything about guns. Right.

'''E:''' Disqualified. Disqualified.

'''C:''' Right, but like as a woman, when I hear male politicians like completely not understanding like women's reproduction, I don't think we're being pedantic when we're like, you probably shouldn't be making legislative decisions about that.

'''S:''' We do this all the time. Like anti-GMO people don't understand basic genetics. They don't understand that. Yeah, so it's like – Yeah, like no, like non-GMO food has DNA in it too. If that's the level that you're at, then absolutely. That's not being pedantic. That's like. this is a meaningful scientific concept. And if you don't know this, then you will miss a huge part of this debate. You'll come to conclusions based upon incorrect information. Or if you don't understand what climate sensitivity is, it's kind of hard to engage in a debate about the evidence for climate change, for anthropogenic climate change, for example. But also there's a lot of irrelevant details too, like just correcting – I always remember the guy who's like, it's not hieroglyphics, it's hieroglyphic writing. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Thank you for that. But he later apologized that I was being overly pedantic.

'''C:''' But there's also a difference between just correcting somebody and being like, we shall not talk about this anymore because you have proven to me that you don't know enough about the topic. Yeah.

'''E:''' It doesn't have to do with the substance, right?

'''S:''' Sometimes it's an ad hominem. Sometimes it's actually irrelevant. You were committing the fallacy fallacy, right? It's a version of that where you're trying to, rather than addressing the actual logic and evidence, you're trying to find a way to dismiss the other person's argument or position or even the right to have one based upon irrelevant details. Yeah, because – and this gets back to the bigger issue, which we talk about all the time. This is what happens when your goal is to win rather than to understand and improve your own arguments and come to common ground. If your goal is to win, then you start to do shady, dubious things.

'''C:''' You try to win on technicalities.

'''S:''' You try to win on technicalities or whatever.

'''E:''' Yeah, lawyer-y stuff.

'''S:''' Sorry, lawyers, but that's your – Well, but – It's part of the game. But yeah, lawyers, that is a – that's the way the system is set up. It's confrontational. And that's often we – and there's no insult really implied there. It's just that this is how lawyers operate. They are not making the arguments. And they even will tell you a lawyer doesn't necessarily have to make an argument that they believe in, right? They make an argument they think they could make for their client, right? That's their job. Yeah, something that will – It's to maximally defend the position that they're hired to defend, not to argue for the other side or not to come to some common ground. That's the judge's job or the jury, whatever. Their job is to find the truth. The lawyer's job is to make a lawyer's case for one side. And so when you're discussing a scientific topic, though, you shouldn't be trying to make a lawyer's case for one side. You should be trying to understand what's reality. You should understand what's valid, what's not valid, and you should turn that towards your own arguments especially, not just use it as a weapon against the other side. And so that's what this is falling under. But I do think – I do prefer the term weaponized pedantry over reverse gizgal, which I think is a little confusing.

'''C:''' Yeah, because there's no reverse there. I don't really get how that's a reverse Gish Gallop.

'''S:''' Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure how they get to that naming. All right, but thanks for writing in, Mike. That was fun. Okay, guys, it's time for Science or Fiction.

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:27:41) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
}}
{{SOFinfo
|theme = SGU Shark Week

|item1 = The age of most sharks can be accurately estimated by counting growth rings on their vertebrae.
|link1web = https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/welcome-new-era-shark-ageing
|link1title = Welcome to the New Era of Shark Ageing
|link1pub = NOAA Fisheries

|item2 = Sharks as a group have poor vision, relying instead on their sense of smell and special electroreceptor organs that can sense electromagnetic fields.
|link2web = https://www.aquarium.co.za/news/look-here-how-well-do-sharks-see
|link2title = Look here! how well do sharks see?
|link2pub = Two Oceans Aquarium

|item3 = Most sharks have to swim to get oxygen, but benthic sharks are able to pump water through their spiracles (small holes behind their eyes) and over their gills so they can breathe without swimming.
|link3web = https://cimi.org/blog/spiracles-the-secret-of-the-benthic-shark/
|link3title = Spiracles: The Secret of the Benthic Shark
|link3pub = Catalina Island Marine Institute

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = sharks have poor vision
|science1 = growth rings on vertebrae
|science2 = some breathe w/o swimming

|rogue1 =jay
|answer1 =some breathe w/o swimming

|rogue2 =Evan
|answer2 =growth rings on vertebrae

|rogue3 =cara
|answer3 =sharks have poor vision

|rogue4 =bob
|answer4 =growth rings on vertebrae

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever =y 
|win = 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of expert skeptics to put on their skeptical hats and tell me which one they think is the fake-a-roonie. This week, guys, on the SGU is Shark Week. All right. It's SGU Shark Week. We're going to have three questions about sharks. I don't know if I've done sharks before. Probably, but I don't remember.

'''E:''' Next week is jets.

'''C:''' Oh, jeez.

'''S:''' All right. Are you guys ready? Yeah, go ahead. Three shark-related questions. Let's take a bite. Okay, here we go. Item number one, the age of most sharks can be accurately estimated by counting growth rings on their vertebra. Item number two, sharks as a group have poor vision, relying instead on their sense of smell and special electroreceptor organs that can sense electromagnetic fields. And number three, most sharks have to swim to get oxygen, but benthic sharks are able to pump water through their spiracles, small holes behind their eyes, and over their gills so they can breathe without swimming.

'''J:''' You made that word up.

'''S:''' Which one? Benthic? Spiracle. Spiracle?

'''B:''' No, we didn't.

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''S:''' All right, Jay, go first, you smartass.

'''J:''' Sharks as a group have poor vision, relying instead on their sense of smell and special electroreceptor organs. I think that one is definitely science. I have kids. You guys know this, right? Mm-hmm.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah. We heard them earlier.

'''J:''' Yeah, right? And there's a lot of shark reading in books and activity and stuff. I've read lots of facts about sharks over the last six or seven years of my life. You know, you read things like sharks can smell a drop of blood and water and stuff like that. So I do think that sharks have senses that are more useful than their eyes. I'm not 100% sure how poor their vision is, but I definitely believe that sharks have other ways of detecting things in the ocean. The third one, most sharks have to swim to get oxygen. I think that's true as well. The benthic sharks are able to pump water through their spiracles.

'''S:''' Do you know what benthic means, Jay? Cara, did you ever do that as your word of the week? I did, yeah.

'''C:''' Benthic's the bottom.

'''S:''' The bottom, yeah.

'''J:''' Yeah, the ones that like sit there, right? The sharks lie on the bottom.

'''C:''' As opposed to open water.

'''S:''' As opposed to pelagic, which is the surface.

'''C:''' Yeah, which is open water.

'''J:''' Those are two words I am not going to remember. Yeah, I thought that sharks swam – I thought that when they did this thing where there's a group of them that they kind of like wagged their tails and kind of pushed water around so they were getting some – I don't know. But this is interesting. I'm not sure. I wouldn't be surprised if sharks could pump water through these weird holes in their eyes. Crazy. The age of most sharks can be accurately estimated by counting growth rings on their vertebrae. Damn. You know what? Something rings true to that. I don't know. I think that one is probably science. I think I read something.

'''C:''' You just said they're all science. Yep.

'''J:''' No, but this one about the shark being able to pump water through these holes around their eyes. I don't know. I've never heard anything about that. I don't think that's true. I think that's the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Evan.

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''E:''' Yeah, it's weird. You think you know some things about something, and then when you start to look a little deeper into it, you realize you know nothing about that thing you thought you knew.

'''S:''' There's still a lot more that you don't know.

'''E:''' Oh my gosh, it's like vast. And this is one of those moments. Because all of these, I think I've heard a little bit, a little piece of information about all of these.

'''J:''' Yeah, I agree.

'''E:''' Which all that does is cloud my judgment on which one I'm going to go with. But I think the one that is the – I think it's going to turn out to be the fiction is the age of the sharks and counting growth rings on their vertebrae. Although I can't really point as to the reason why that's inaccurate, unless you just made it up, which is possible. You know, I mean, it's not like you're cutting a tree down and counting its rings. I mean, I don't think that's how it works. Are there other vertebrates you can do that with? I mean, is this a technique? I've not heard this technique. So of the three, this has the most foreign features to my brain. So I'll say that one's the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Cara.

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' Okay, so you guys are saying the rings for Evan and the pumps for Jay, and I think I'm going to spread out and I'm going to go with the smell. I think that's a myth. Sorry, not the smell, the sight. I think sharks can smell, of course, but I think it's a myth that they have bad eyes. I think a lot of sharks can see fine and hunt fine.

'''E:''' Glass eyes, like a doll's eyes.

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''S:''' All right, Bob, no help from your fellow rogues. We're all over the place.

'''E:''' Two of us are wrong. Does that help?

'''B:''' Yeah. The one that really rubbed me the wrong way, though, is the growth rings on the vertebrae. I mean, aren't they – they're not bone, right? They're cartilage. I'm pretty sure. And it's only really what the jaws and teeth that really fossilize. I know that they have measured shark's ages. living shark ages. So what are they, putting it in some sort of imaging machine? No, I think there's another way to estimate age, a reliable way. I think it might involve the teeth. So based on that, I'm going to just say that number one is fiction.

'''S:''' The one about the growth rings.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''E:''' Oh, boy.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' So let's see. Why don't we start with number three then? Most sharks have to swim to get oxygen, but benthic sharks are able to pump water through their spiracles, small holes behind their eyes. and over their gills so they can breathe without swimming. Jay, you think this one is the fiction. Bob, Cara, and Evan think this one is science. And this one is science. This one is very cool science. So yeah, so the spiracles are actually like vestigial first gill, right? And it's right behind the eye. So some of the sharks, some of the benthic sharks actually use it as a separate gill system with its own blood supply to feed oxygen just to the eyes and brain.

'''C:''' Oh, cool.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's like a backup oxygen delivery for the eyes and brain.

'''C:''' Nice. I wonder why their eyes need so much oxygen.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah. Bony fish can pump water across their gills so they don't have to move in order to get oxygen from the water. to breathe the water, right? But sharks are all cartilaginous. They don't have the bony structure to do that. So they have to – Cartilage, huh? They have to swim in order to ram the water through their gills, right? Right. But some sharks live on the bottom. And if you want to lay still on the bottom of the ocean, you need some way to get the water flowing over your gills. And so they've adapted this otherwise vestigial spiracle. They can open and close it and sort of pump water over their gills. It's like through their mouth and through the gills in order to get some oxygen from the water. So, yeah, that's pretty cool. Science.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' We'll keep going backwards. Sharks as a group have poor vision relying instead on their sense of smell and special electroreceptor organs that can sense electromagnetic fields. Cara, you think this one is the fiction. The boys think this one is science. And this one is the fiction. Good job, Cara. You're right. It is a myth that sharks don't have good vision. They have excellent vision, not just like good vision. They have better vision than we do. They can see 10 times as good in clear water as humans can see in clear water. Yeah, they have excellent vision. They do also have a great sense of smell and they do also have these electro sensor doohickeys on them. But their vision is just fine. They are predators after all. You suck here. They could see well. Which means that the age of most sharks can be accurately estimated by counting growth rings on their vertebra is also science. Yeah, this is very interesting. Originally, when this was first discovered, it was thought that just like tree rings, it was basically one pair of rings per year, right? Like one light and one dark ring. Because they – there are like two different methods for depositing the cartilage in their vertebra and they're different colors. So you could – for every pair of these colored rings, that's one year of growth. But more recent research dating back to 2018 found that the ring deposits are not consistent. It's not one year for every shark or every stage of every shark's development. So they've essentially had to develop what they call a validating method in order to calibrate the ring system, right? So they could say, all right, so for this species of shark, we're going to use like other dating methods to age a bunch of different sharks. And we'll come up with a graph basically of how the rate at which those rings get deposited and how they change over the shark's lifetime. And then for that species, you could use that chart to see like, oh, they have this number of rings. This means they're this number of years old. But it's just not a one-to-one correlation all the time.

'''C:''' So the inconsistencies are species-specific, not individual.

'''S:''' They're species-specific and age-specific. They're not individual-specific. So you can estimate the age based upon the rings. It's just not as simple as one ring per one pair per one year.

'''B:''' So this is post-mortem. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah, but it doesn't mean they're fossilized.

'''S:''' No, they're not fossilized.

'''B:''' I know, but then how do you estimate an age for living sharks? I've seen estimates for living sharks, like the longest living – the oldest shark I think was like three centuries old. How did they determine that?

'''C:''' Is it based on size?

'''S:''' Probably, yeah, just size, I would guess.

'''C:''' Size and like quality of – Other morphological features, right. Their skin and stuff.

'''B:''' Well, got to be.

'''S:''' I had like only a vague memory of the growth rings for sharks. So that's why I thought it would be a good one. I didn't really, really remember it, but it did sound familiar.

'''C:''' That's how I felt about it. Like I didn't know all the stuff you just told me and I didn't know they were colorful.

'''S:''' Yeah. You can see them. You can see the rings because they're different colors. All right. But yeah, I think it was Evan or Jay. It's probably Jay because more than anyone else, like at times, you say like, I'm absolutely sure this is science. Right. But it is a – I liked this topic because I think everybody knows a lot about sharks. You know what I mean? It's like not a totally mysterious topic because of – it's in the culture in Shark Week and I know your kids read a lot about sharks. But I felt like I found – was able to find facts about them that even people who know a lot about sharks may not know. Yeah.

'''C:''' I think that the vertebrae one, like if we were surveying, you know, an audience, like when we do live shows, that one would get a lot of people.

'''S:''' I think so. Yeah, I think so. Because it sounds like something I could make up. Growth rings, you know, like tree rings. Yeah. But yeah, that one. I thought that was the one that I thought would get the most. And it did. Two of you went for that.

'''E:''' Bob, did that comfort us in defeat? Yeah.

'''B:''' I'm not talking about it.

'''C:''' It's probably a good thing you didn't do. a sharks can't get cancer one.

'''S:''' I know everyone knows about it. I know you guys know that. And the poor vision. The poor vision is another one. I think a lot of people think sharks have poor vision.

'''E:''' I even glossed over that part. I was concentrating more on the electromagnetic part of it.

 [[File:970 shark growth rings.jpg|right|400px|thumb|link=https://a-z-animals.com/blog/discover-what-great-white-shark-growth-rings-are-and-what-they-tell-about-them/|A shark's vertebral bands, or growth rings, show the shark's growth rate, similar to that of a tree. Click/tap image for article.<ref>[https://a-z-animals.com/blog/discover-what-great-white-shark-growth-rings-are-and-what-they-tell-about-them/ A-Z Animals: Discover What Great White Shark Growth Rings Are and What They Tell About Them]</ref>]] 

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:40:20) ==

{{qow
|text = I don't wish to be without my brains, tho' they doubtless interfere with a blind faith which would be very comfortable.
|author = {{w|Ada Lovelace}}
|lived = 1815-1852
|desc = English mathematician and writer
}}


'''S:''' It threw me. That was a dual one. All right, Evie, give us a quote.

'''E:''' I don't wish to be without my brains, though they doubtless interfere with a blind faith which would be very comfortable. Ada Lovelace.

'''S:''' Oh, yay. She was awesome.

'''E:''' She was amazing.

'''C:''' What a great quote.

'''E:''' Yeah, that's a nice quote and a nice admission sort of of one's own realization of That, look, I have feelings, I have biases, I have certain dispositions, and boy, would it be nice to embrace those as comfortable, but I would be doing a disservice to my better judgment on things, my better understanding. Yeah.

'''S:''' So, I mean, we shouldn't assume everybody knows who Ada Lovelace is.

'''E:''' Oh, sure. English mathematician, born in 1815, died in 1852. Wow, so young. An associate of Charles Bavage, for whose prototype of a digital computer she created a program. She's been called the first computer programmer.

'''S:''' Yep, I think correctly so. I like that quote, but it's very complicated. This is an interesting question that I don't think we should make assumptions about. Is faith comforting and are people of faith happier than people who don't have faith or whatever? We shouldn't just assume any particular features. go along with that. Here's a very, very quick summary of my recollection of the literature. is that when you do correlate, you can't correlate like being religious with certain positive outcomes like less depression, being generally having a bigger support structure, et cetera. But a lot of that does derive from the community aspect of it. It's not necessarily the belief aspect of that. So there's a lot of variables in there. And a belief, a community support structure is hugely valuable in terms of better health outcomes, better mental health outcomes, et cetera. And for me, anecdotally, personally, I am perfectly happy not having any faith. You know what I mean? I find that comforting to like to realize that the world is – makes sense in that way and there isn't like this arbitrary magic.

'''E:''' How would we feel about it in 1815 though? Yeah. Different world.

'''S:''' Oh, totally. Completely different world.

'''J:''' It's disappointing how short our lives are. Yeah. But – It is what it is. We all have to, on some level, face that, face our mortality. I don't know. I just think there's something important about acknowledging your death. In a way, it does make your life more meaningful. But man, would I like another 500 years. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, but just like believing in an afterlife, sure, that would be comforting, but that's not necessarily a good thing, right? Not necessarily in a good way. I know, Cara, you think this, like it's better to confront your mortality than to live in denial, whatever form that denial takes.

'''C:''' But I don't know if this quote, I mean, I think these are interesting philosophical musings, but I think that the quote, her brains doubtless interfere with a blind faith, which would be very comfortable. I do think that there's some, a lot of people have faith. A lot of my patients who I work with as they're dying have faith.

'''E:''' And I know skeptics who are.

'''C:''' And it helps them. And that doesn't mean that ultimately they're less depressed or ultimately whatever. But like from their own perspective, that's what's really important. From their own perspective, their faith carries them.

'''S:''' I agree. I'm not doubting that at all. There's a lot of evidence to back that up. And I understand – having been on both sides, I'm absolutely speaking from my own current perspective here. But I know that that does not say anything about other perspectives.

'''C:''' A hundred percent it doesn't. Yeah. So just because faith can be very comfortable for many, many people, it is not a panacea. And for people like myself and like my assumption is everybody here, it is not a comfort for us.

'''S:''' And I also understand – I've spoken with people on the other side. They can't understand like our lack of faith and like they couldn't imagine themselves without their faith. It's like, yeah, you can't until you don't have it and then you can. Right.

'''C:''' Well, I think anybody can if they engage in that kind of scholarship. It's a permission that you have to give yourself, but it's really scary to do so because you're giving yourself permission to be groundless for a while, which is really, really hard. But I also think, or I would be curious as a quote from Ada Lovelace, how much this quote is born of her. feminism as well and how much this is a response as a woman in a field where not only were there no women I mean it wasn't okay for a woman to do anything remotely close to what she was doing at the time how important it was for her to argue for logic and reason and say I know I might be like a lady and I just think with my feelings but the truth of the matter is I require logic and reason like every other living human being.

'''S:''' Yeah. You could totally see how feminism is coloring what she's saying there. Absolutely.

'''C:''' Yeah. Because I could see probably – Baked into that perspective. Constantly being confronted by men being like, you don't need to bother your brain with this. This is too much work for you. Oh, my gosh.

'''E:''' In the 1800s?

'''B:''' Oh, what a – I can't even imagine. It's just been horrible.

'''S:''' Try the 1950s. You don't have to go back. Exactly.

'''E:''' Yeah, I know.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's right. You don't have to go back 10 generations.

'''E:''' Go back two generations.

'''C:''' Or today.

'''B:''' Still see a lot today. Exactly.

'''S:''' But it is a – I mean, yes, but it would be a massive culture shock. It would be horrible. Go back 70 years ago and 200 years ago. Yeah. Somebody said – I can't remember who this quote is from, but it's so true. Like the past is a foreign country. It is.

'''J:''' Well, that's really an interesting way to think about it.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, that's next week's quote.

'''S:''' Yeah. All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''C:''' Thanks, Steve.

'''E:''' Thanks, Steve.

[[SGU Episode 501#wih|_Rogue_mentions_SGU_discussing_Lovelace_previously_]]

== Signoff (1:46:41) ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 


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SGU Episode 969

2024-05-02T07:46:27Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

{{Google speech|episode}}
{{900s|969|episodebox}}
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{{UseOutline}} 
{{InfoBox
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|episodeDate = {{900s|969|boxdate}} 

|verified = 

|episodeIcon = File:969 Earhart Sonar.jpg
|caption = A deep-sea exploration company has captured a sonar image of an anomaly on the ocean floor that resembles an aircraft. The team believes the object could be Amelia Earhart's Lockheed 10-E Electra that went missing nearly 87 years ago. Credit: Deep Sea Vision/PR Newswire <ref name = earhart>[https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/travel/amelia-earhart-missing-plane-pacific-ocean-scn/index.html CNN: Explorers say they think they’ve found Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane]</ref>

|bob =y
|cara =y
|jay =y
|Evan =y
|guest1 =DB: [https://starset.fandom.com/wiki/Dustin_Bates Dustin Bates], American rockstar

|qowText = If you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, "Wow, I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong."
|qowAuthor = {{w|Kathryn Schulz}}, American journalist
|downloadLink = {{900s|969|download}} 

|forumLinktopic = 55310.0 
|}}

== Introduction, time whiplash ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, January 31st, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening, everyone. Good evening.

'''S:''' You know, whenever I say the year when I'm introing the show, it gives me such like a time whiplash. You know what I mean? Like we've been doing this for so long. And we started out saying in 2005. Now it's like we're in the future. It's 2024. Yes. It's crazy. I feel so old.

'''E:''' It wasn't that long ago. I think we've talked about this recently. The 2000s were just not that long ago, but in a way they were that long ago.

'''C:''' There are all these memes that stress me out on like Instagram and stuff where it'll be like, if you recognize any of this, it's time to get a colonoscopy. Wow, that's awesome. Yeah, it's all just like stuff I grew up with. I'm like, oh no. Oh my gosh.

'''E:''' Yeah, when you can tie it to a fad or a device or a fashion or something. I don't know. It leaves an indelible mark sort of in your mind and then you're moving away from that constantly and you just realize, oh my god, I'm so far away from that.

'''C:''' Yeah, because it doesn't seem that long ago when you anchor it to something like – I think the last one I saw was like Lip Smackers, which is like the chapstick that we all use, the different flavored ones. Kaboodles, See-Through Phones. See-Through Phones. Yeah, and Limited Too, which was like a store that all people my age shopped in when they were young.

'''S:''' Yeah, Limited, yeah.

'''C:''' limited two is for kids. yeah yeah like.

'''E:''' oh no I always tie sgu. I think as far as products go to iphone because we came out before the first iphone.

'''S:''' just wow pretty much.

'''B:''' yeah that's nuts that's not a bad way to do it.

'''E:''' yeah that you know a seminal piece of technology like that. yeah that's that. that's a. that's a good way to measure it and a good way to feel old.

'''S:''' Do you think that was the most disruptive piece of technology in our lifetime? What? The iPhone. The smartphone.

'''E:''' Maybe.

'''C:''' For individuals, maybe.

'''B:''' Yeah, it's up there, man.

'''C:''' It's hard to point to like a single thing.

'''S:''' But there is our life before smartphones and after smartphones.

'''J:''' I wouldn't say smartphones. I'd say the internet.

'''C:''' I'd say the internet in your pocket.

'''B:''' For me, the web, like 92, around that time, the web is definitely a huge demarcation.

'''C:''' It is, but I also think that our lifestyles changed more because early in the web, I don't think we had really figured out how to use it. It was still kind of novel and there were different things. We were in that era that you always talk about, Steve, where when there's a new technology, we try to figure out how to just replicate old technology with new technology. So I think about going on to MapQuest and printing the driving directions and then still putting them on paper in the car. Whereas once you had a smartphone in your pocket and you could actually afford to be on the internet, because most of us couldn't at the beginning. True.

'''B:''' True.

'''C:''' And you could just navigate where you were going. That was game-changing.

'''S:''' Yeah, I agree. I think for a lot of people.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. It was huge. Absolutely.

'''S:''' Change in lifestyle was more abrupt and I think more profound with the smartphone. The internet, it was the World Wide Web was more of a slow burn. And you're right. It didn't really change how we were doing things. It just gave us sort of another resource. Eventually, it did. But it took a long time.

'''C:''' It took a while. Yeah. Yeah. Because it was slow. It was expensive. It was clunky. It wasn't very user-friendly, all that kind of stuff.

'''S:''' Yeah. That's a really good example, too, like printing directions off MacBook. Yeah. Printing directions. Yeah. Versus just having GPS in your phone.

'''E:''' There was an intermediary there, Garmin.

'''S:''' Garmin.

'''E:''' And those devices were the step bridging the two devices, a cellular phone and what ultimately became a smartphone with your – Were those technically online?

'''C:''' I know they were using GPS, but did they relay through the internet? They had to, right?

'''S:''' Not necessarily.

'''E:''' No, you had a Garmin device.

'''C:''' I had a Garmin device. Or like a TomTom.

'''J:''' That was talking, of course, but that had to be talking to the satellites.

'''C:''' I know it was talking to the satellites, but was the way that the sort of map continuously updating, did that use any intermediary? Like did it go through the internet? I guess not because you weren't – well, you were paying for a subscription.

'''B:''' You need Wi-Fi, right? But then you'd be driving and hopping from Wi-Fi connection to connection.

'''C:''' Yeah, and cars didn't have Wi-Fi back then.

'''S:''' I think you would have to like – Straight to the satellite. You would have to update it deliberately. It wasn't just like auto-update connected.

'''E:''' Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi.

'''B:''' Oh, right. Some of the cars that had it integrated, you had to have a CD with the maps on the CD.

'''E:''' Correct. Yeah, almost. You had to install it.

'''S:''' Remember installing software from CDs? Yeah.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. How about floppies, dude?

'''E:''' Oh, here we go. Oh, boy.

'''C:''' Do you remember saving those for a long time even after you never needed them before? Once drivers and software was online, there was that weird intermediate period where we're like, well, we can't get rid of the OS, the CD of the OS.

'''S:''' File and cam it full of backup CDs.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' Now, I don't care.

'''E:''' I still tease Steve a little bit when you told me you got your first jazz drive.

'''S:''' That was cool, the jazz drive.

'''B:''' They were big, man. I mean, that's... That was huge.

'''E:''' It was huge, and at the same time, it wasn't huge. Right?

'''C:''' Yeah, I never had one of those. I don't remember that at all.

'''E:''' And how long was it really a thing? Maybe a year or two? It was almost like a bridge device.

'''S:''' It was.

'''C:''' So the jazz drive was like the laser disk of computer drives. Okay. It just didn't really ever fully catch on.

'''S:''' It was also having a zip drive. Remember the zip drive?

'''B:''' Sure.

'''C:''' Our zip drives were big.

'''J:''' I still have my files. I still have my zip.

'''S:''' You do? No.

'''B:''' Oh my gosh.

'''J:''' Just in case I can read them someday because I need to have stuff on there.

'''S:''' I don't even know what's on there.

'''E:''' I only recently threw out the last of my, what were they? Three and a half inch floppies?

'''C:''' What?

'''E:''' Or the three and a quarter?

'''S:''' What were they? Three and a half?

'''E:''' Those hard shell discs?

'''S:''' The hard ones, yeah. We called them disquettes.

'''B:''' Disquettes.

'''C:''' Yeah, the little ones where you would slide the metal piece to be able to overwrite them.

'''E:''' Yeah, with what, 1.4 megs of information you can store on there?

'''B:''' 1.44. Oh, yeah.

'''C:''' That's the thing I mentioned the other day where I saw a video on Instagram or TikTok or something where the guy showed his kid a diskette. And the kid was like, oh, you 3D printed the save icon.

'''B:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' You said that before.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I had no idea what the origin of that was.

'''B:''' Wow. Yep.

'''C:''' That's a really good litmus test for like what somebody's generation is, is asking them, how do you pantomime that you're on the phone? Because you see a huge break. Like we still do the thing where it's like the hang loose symbol and we hold it up to our heads. But kids don't do that anymore. They either do a flat phone or they like they're holding an iPhone.

'''S:''' Right. Exactly.

'''B:''' Oh, my God. Yeah, that's awesome.

'''E:''' Put a dial phone in front of a bunch of kids and say, okay, here, make it work. Oh, what? Yeah.

'''S:''' Or Monty Burns, who has like the daffodil phone, right? You have the two things. Ahoy, ahoy.

'''B:''' Ahoy, ahoy.

'''E:''' Is this Bensonhurst 4215? Party lines. Oh, gosh, forget it. Forget it. You can go all the way back to the telegraph playing this game.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 

=== Neuralink Implants Chip in Human (7:51) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theness.com/neurologicablog/neuralink-implants-chip-in-human/
|article_title = Neuralink Implants Chip in Human
|publication = nn
|redirect_title = 
}}

[[SGU Episode 662#memoriam|_Rogue_mentions_Cara_meeting_Hawking_]]

'''S:''' All right, Bob, tell us about Neuralink's announcement. What's going on there?

'''B:''' Yeah, Neuralink has been all over the news a lot the past few days. Elon Musk said on January 29th in an ex-post or a tweet, if you want to be retro, I guess. I remember those, yeah. He said – The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well. Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.

'''S:''' And that's it.

'''B:''' That's all we know. Next news item. There's not a hell of a lot more than that except the backstory, which everybody really knows what's been leading up to this. So yeah, it's been like right now, this is like what, Wednesday night, 31st, and it's 48 hours since that tweet and there's really not a lot new in terms of that specific thing. But if you haven't heard of Neuralink, it's a tech startup, right, founded by Elon Musk in 2016 to create brain computer interfaces, BCIs or BMIs, brain machine interfaces, which which I guess that initialism is a little bit more common. So these are devices connected to the brain to allow people to interface with computers just by thinking. Neuralink's specific device is coin-sized. It's like a coin-sized chip designed to be implanted under the skull so that its myriad of tiny wires – could be inserted a little bit into the brain to read the nearby brain cell activity. So now having the chip under the skull and the wires in the brain, it's certainly invasive and more risky, right? But it allows for a much cleaner, easier to interpret signal than, say, the classic electrodes on the scalp scenario. Now Musk has said in the past that ultimately his computer's technology could allow people to form a sort of symbiosis with AI. That's kind of like to help avoid or to help deal with the transition with artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence and all that stuff. But they've already run trials in pigs and monkeys and just recently. apparently human trials have begun just very recently on a quadriplegic volunteer. Now, details about – as I said, the details are very sparse about this person and the operation and what happened. Even Neuralink hasn't had an official announcement yet. What we do know though comes from subsequent posts to that previous post about the chip. The chip that was implanted is called telepathy and Steve understandably isn't sure how he feels about that. But I kind of like it. I like that. it takes an iconic bullshit paranormal ability, telepathy. and shoves it into a completely scientific corner. It's like just making it about science and technology and not about something that's paranormal. So from that angle, I kind of like it, I think.

'''E:''' It's also a spell in Dungeons & Dragons.

'''B:''' Nice. So Musk also posted about telepathy. He said that it enables control of your phone or computer and through them almost any device. just by thinking initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal. So that's what he posted specifically about telepathy. Cara, that brought back memories of you relating once on a show a while back about actually meeting Hawking and describing telepathy. How time-consuming it was for him to put together even simple sentences, right? It was an ordeal. It took serious effort and time. So yeah, if this did come to fruition, then for anyone like Stephen Hawking who has really just can't really type – or interface with a computer in any realistic, normal way, this could be amazing. Now, of course, the whole Musk angle to this just really just muddies the water. He's totally polarizing, obviously. Most, though, I think would agree that at the very least, he is a hype machine. Among other things of course. But the bottom line, right? The bottom line here though is this. I'm not going to dwell on Musk himself on this. I want to see what is this technology and what do we know about it at this point. The bottom line I think though with this is where is Neuralink and the telepathy chip on the spectrum that has on one side the Tesla reusable rockets, right? And on the other end of the spectrum, Hyperloop, right? Where is it on that spectrum? And of course, we can't really answer that yet. The fact that this wireless chip has been implanted in someone's brain is not really especially noteworthy in and of itself. It's more of like, all right, Big deal kind of in terms of this is not breaking any new ground. The proof of the pudding in this case is in the tasting as they say or not. too many people say that whole expression. The next days or weeks are going to be the real answer here. It's going to answer the critical questions like how well does it function? How long is it going to last? Those are the things that are going to really be of interest. I mean there's other companies that are considered more cutting edge than Neuralink for sure. One example is BlackRock Neurotech. They've implanted more than 50 brain computer interface chips, more than 50 already. I think a lot of people consider that. They probably will have the first commercial device, right, Steve? Is that a fair statement?

'''S:''' They seem to be at the head of the pack right now.

'''B:''' Yeah, yeah. So the contribution that this telepathy chip and Neuralink in general will make to the whole BMI industry, it remains to be seen of course. But I'm hopeful a little bit if for no other reason that this is – it's focusing attention on this technology and perhaps even intensifying competition and accelerating research to a certain extent. So from that point of view, I think this is a good thing. But then of course the other side of that coin is there could potentially be a backlash of sorts coming. caused by incessant overhyping, right? I mean we've seen that with other products. Even we've seen it with artificial intelligence through the decades. It goes through a period of just overhyping. People invest money and then the results aren't there that were anticipated and then it goes into what they call it for AI like a winter, a dark winter or something where it's just like you don't hear about it for a while. and then of course there's another big innovation like And then people are talking about it again, especially with AI, with ChatGPT. That was one of the big, big, huge developments that really has everyone still speaking about it all over. It's all over the place. So regardless, I think BMIs, brain machine interfaces, they're – In my opinion, a no-brainer future technology, so to speak. Like that one, Evan? Yes. Like Fusion, it's just a matter of time. I think we'll have commercial products with this before we have working Fusion for sure. The BMI research of the past couple of decades – Thank you very much. Right? It's just like ridiculous.

'''E:''' They have nacelles and antimatter chambers and other things, but they have a yes-no beep machine.

'''B:''' Right? There's a disconnect there. It's so funny. I mean I guess in the 60s, even a forward thinker like Roddenberry was like, yeah, no, we're not going to get – how do you hack into the brain? It's such a black box and it was of course much more of a black box back then than it is now. And if you want to learn more about brain-computer interfaces in the future, check out Chapter 6 from The Skeptic's Guide to the Future. I just reread that for this talk, and this is such a good chapter. Yeah, I'm done with this.

'''S:''' So I actually think, though, Bob, that the most promising technology for the medium term, you know, for now, is the stentrode.

'''B:''' Yeah, that one's fascinating as well. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, that one is interesting.

'''E:''' Is that a portmanteau?

'''S:''' Because it is because it's a stent. that's an electrode, stentrode. So the idea here is that we want to maximize resolution, right? And that means to get the greatest number of electrodes distributed over the brain with the greatest fidelity. But the problem with that is that it's invasive, right? It's in the skull. It's inside the brain. The stent chart I think is probably the best compromise we have right now because – It's in a blood vessel? Yeah. They put it in your vein. They put it up in the vein inside the brain. So it's inside the skull. It's very close to brain tissue. But it's still invasive. But it's way less invasive than cracking open the skull and putting something next to brain tissue. Yeah. These probably will have a greater longevity. So they're probably safer and with more longevity than putting electrodes on the brain. And the resolution, I think, is fine. It'll probably be a while before. that's like not enough resolution. And the other thing about that – With AI.

'''B:''' That's what they do, man. They take a mass of information, static basically, and like, oh, here are the patterns. Yeah.

'''S:''' So we've kind of taken a little bit of a leap in the software end of BMI because of these large language model AIs, these transformers. And while the hardware is incrementally advancing – So if I were a betting man, like if I had to put my nickel down, I would say we're going to probably – the applications over the next 20, 30 years or so are probably going to be more – I think the stentrode approach has more promise. But then eventually when you really get mature technology where you have soft electrodes that are more biological – interfacing directly with brain tissue becomes a lot more safer, lasts a lot longer, then that technology may eventually take over. Anyway, we'll see what happens. It's been a fascinating story to watch it unfold. The Neuralink is just one little blip on the radar for this whole industry. As you say, Bob, it's not cutting edge. It's not pushing anything forward. It's just... Yeah, I mean it's a good entry into this very small group and hopefully it will push the whole industry forward.

'''B:''' Right. Another player in the game.

'''S:''' Yeah, just another player in the game. All right. Thanks, Bob. Jay, tell us the effects of being in love on the brain.

=== Love on the Brain (18:39) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = Science confirms it: Love leaves a mark on the brain
|article_title = https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/01/240112114712.htm
|publication = University of Colorado at Boulder
|redirect_title = 
}}

...{{tooltip|rando|random (or random person)}}...

'''B:''' I love this story.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's a little weird when you really think about it. Like everything that we are, all of our thoughts and everything, there's so much to do with just chemicals, right? Like we have the wiring in our brain and the ways that our brain communicates to different parts of itself at the same time. That's called parallel processing. But there's a lot of stuff that happens in our brains because of chemical releases and the detection of chemicals by other parts of the brain. So this groundbreaking research that was – this was recently conducted by CU Boulder neuroscientists and the team was led by Zoe Donaldson. They tested the neurobiological underpinnings of how relationships are formed and how they are maintained. So the study was published in the journal Current Biology, and they utilized these prairie voles, right? These are little mouse-like mammals, and they used them to investigate the role of dopamine in intimate relationships. The research studied the biological mechanisms behind our preference for certain individuals over others, right? So a lot of people, we're in a relationship with one person. It's very common. People get married. They fall deeply in love with someone. So there's a lot of stuff going on here. So their research focused on the role of dopamine, which is a key neurotransmitter associated with reward and pleasure. They pick prairie voles in particular because these mammals have a rare behavior. They're monogamous and similar to human beings, right? So, of course, we want to study what's happening in their brains because there's probably some commonality between their brains and our brains. Voles form long-term partnerships. They cohabitate. They raise their offspring together. There's lots of commonality between them and humans. They also show signs of grief if they lose their partner. And studying voles can give the researchers insights into human bonding and loss and what is happening in the human brain. The study found that dopamine plays a critical role in sustaining love and desire in relationships. That is pretty remarkable because it's not just like the initial feeling of falling in love with someone. It's there throughout the relationship, right? It's a pretty significant find that they came up with. The researchers used advanced neuroimaging technology, of course, to observe real-time brain activity in these voles. And the experiments were designed to mimic relationship dynamics. So this was an interesting part because they're trying to create circumstances where the voles are trying to find their mate or spending time with other voles that aren't their mates or the loss of a mate, right? So the study ran these different scenarios and the voles had to complete a task like pressing a lever or climbing over a barrier to reunite themselves with their partners. So the research showed significant increase in dopamine activity in the nucleus accumbens, right? I'll explain what that is in a second. When the voles were with their partners compared to when they were with strangers. This area of the brain is known to motivate people towards rewarding experiences, you know, and it's activated during pleasurable activities. I read up on it. It's actually a lot more complicated than that, but that's a good quick summary of what's happening in that part of the brain. The study found a stark contrast in dopamine responses when the voles interacted with their partners versus some rando vole. This points strongly to the concept that there is unique chemical imprinting going on left by specific individuals on our brains. Now, that right there, that sentence was the one that really caught my attention. So what they are saying is that the unique feeling or the feeling that you get with a particular person in a particular relationship, It has like a dopamine signature that they are saying you identify, you develop with that person, and it has an imprint. Like your brain wiring changes and the chemistry of that is specific to that person. I find that remarkable. So another interesting part of the research was when they tested an extended separation. Now, this was only for four weeks. But to, you know, the lifespan of a mouse, four weeks is much more significant to them than it is to us. So four weeks is a very long time for them to be separated. What happened was the voles dopamine response to their former partner had diminished over that time. This is like they described it as almost erasing the fingerprint of that specific desire, which is for that specific vole or partner. So this suggests a neurological mechanism enabling the formation of new bonds after a loss. So this, I guess, explains why you could develop a new relationship after one ends. I don't know what the parallel time would be, four weeks to a vole, what it would be to a human.

'''S:''' Mm-hmm.

'''J:''' And I guess some people get over these things quicker than others. But there are people that – There's a lot of human differences. Yeah, without a doubt.

'''S:''' There's a huge range.

'''J:''' Massive range. There are people that lose their partner and they deliberately never seek out another relationship. And then there are people that turn around and can get back into just a deep relationship as the previous one. Yeah. So the researchers said that, of course, more research is needed to narrow in on how these results apply to humans. They know not to say that this is a one-for-one, that this is just the beginning of understanding what's going on. The study offers hope for developing new treatments for individuals that struggle with forming close relationships or coping with prolonged grief disorder. The more they understand what healthy bonds look like in the brain, this could lead them to identify therapies for mental illness affecting social interactions. There's a lot to this and there's a lot of good things that can come out of it. A lot of science is done and you might hear about a study and go, why did they do that? And it's somewhat unpredictable. a lot of times like how that information or that study or the conclusions that they came to could be used in other studies or push something forward that turns into something that is very effective. I find this to be fascinating, right? Because when you think about the feelings that we have, it's not just love, but all of our feelings are wiring and chemicals. You know, when we feel those feelings, there is a release of chemicals that, you know, that do things in the brain. And I just think, you know, of course, you know, Steve thinks this is so fascinating. He became a doctor of neuroscience. But I just like reading about this because it really like it tells you, you know what, you know, as mysterious as love might be, you know, we are starting to understand what's happening chemically in the brain that makes it happen.

'''B:''' I have a question. You mentioned this dopamine signature. So what is the difference between the dopamine signature between two different people that you happen to love? What makes it a signature that's distinct? Even say you love two people very much, but would they still have a different signature?

'''J:''' What I gather is that there is – first of all, there's the initial attraction, right? Like they were saying – the researchers were asking questions like why would somebody be attracted to this person and to not that person, right? Like something that we don't have control over. It's there. So there clearly is a hardwired type of preferencing going on in our minds, right?

'''S:''' But you can't conclude from that research that you can't say it's hardwired or that you're born with it.

'''C:''' Yeah, it could be learned.

'''S:''' Yeah. It's there at the time, but you don't know how much of it is learned culturally.

'''J:''' It's very likely heavily learned. Yeah, I mean, you're right, Steve. You could be born with it. It could be a mixture of being born with it and exposure and whatever. But you do have that.

'''C:''' We know it's a heavily learned experience because different cultures have different versions of what they find beautiful.

'''J:''' But it's there, right? We have a preference, right? Like you could talk to – ask yourself the question like what kinds of people am I attracted to? Is there a pattern there? I certainly have one. So anyway, so that's in play. And then you find somebody. You have like this, oh, okay, I'm attracted to this person, right? That's going on. And then from there, you develop – a relationship with them. And from what I gather, your brain is basically strengthening whatever pathways are firing and however the dopamine is being released, it becomes stronger. And then if there's absence and you're away from that person for a long enough time, it could actually diminish and start to go away, kind of like when you use it or lose it. kind of idea, right? Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, not the first research to do that, but this is just adding one piece to the puzzle. There is research in humans where they look – they have the subject looking at photos of people and like their spouse is thrown in the mix. And you can absolutely measure differences in the response to people when they look at a picture of somebody that they're in love with. But the particular research that I'm thinking of, people fell into one of two categories. I think they called them doves and swans. where some people, even if they've been married for 30 years, still have the in-love dose of, I think it was oxytocin is what they were measuring, whereas other people don't. They just lose that after a couple of years or a few years.

'''C:''' But it would also be really interesting to compare amorous love to the love of your children and see if the differences are really all that different. I don't know if we have that level of resolution yet.

'''S:''' Yeah, so it's interesting, but it's also interesting how different people are, right? There is no one answer. Like all people don't react the same way. It's probably the same as probably true of all. Why would they all be the same? All right. Thank you, Jay. You're welcome. So, guys, we finally found Amelia Earhart's plane.

=== Amelia Earhart Plane May Be Discovered (28:54) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/travel/amelia-earhart-missing-plane-pacific-ocean-scn/index.html
|article_title = Explorers say they think they’ve found Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane
|publication = CNN
|refname = earhart
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''B:''' Did we really, though?

'''C:''' Or did we?

'''B:''' We definitely maybe did.

'''S:''' You guys are skeptical? I mean, come on.

'''B:''' Definitely maybe.

'''E:''' We have the fuselage and the wings and the tail.

'''S:''' This has been obviously a big missing person aviation mystery for decades, you know, since 1937, I think, when her plane went missing. Amelia Earhart was a beloved and famous explorer, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. And, you know, the whole world was sort of rooting for her as she was trying to make a solo flight around the world. She was the solo pilot. She also had a navigator, so Noonan was his name. He was on the plane as well. But on essentially the last leg of the trip, of her journey, the plane disappeared. And it was a really emotional thing, I think, for the world, and it's been a mystery ever since. And every now and then somebody claims that they have some clue that about what her fate was. Right. Often it involves her having survived, you know, a crash landing and she's like taken captive by the Japanese. or she was on this island or that island. But the evidence always evaporates when you get too close to it. And there have been, you know, several massive attempts to scour the ocean floor looking for the remains of her American Lockheed 10E Electra plane. And no one's ever found it. So now we have another effort to do that. And they're claiming that they have. they have found a potential sonar signature that could be her downed plane. So this is the researcher. here is Tony Romero, and he has been fascinated with the Amelia Earhart story for a while. And, you know, he's looking for something exciting to do in his sort of retirement phase of his life. He bought a $9 million underwater drone from a Norwegian company called the Hugen 6000, 6000 referring to its range down to 6,000 meters, 19,700 feet. Yeah, nice. Nice. He took a 16-person crew on a 100-day search mission from September 2023 to December 2023. They scanned 5,200 square miles of sea floor. And then at the time, while they were on the mission getting the data, they didn't notice anything. But in December, when they were going over all of the data, they found a sonar signature. So it was found about 100 miles away from the Howland Island. That was the island she was trying to find when she ran out of fuel, probably, and crashed into the ocean. So that's a pretty good location. So that location, I think, gives some credibility to the find. Now, have you guys seen the picture of the sonar image? Yeah, I did. Yes. It's pretty not impressive, right?

'''E:''' It's blobsquatch.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, so is it in a plane-like configuration? Sure. There's like a central fuselage, and there's two symmetrical wings, and there's something on the back.

'''J:''' Something on the back.

'''S:''' So could that be a plane? Sure. But the details aren't a good match for a couple of reasons. One is it's missing the engines, right? There's no signature on that radar signal. that would be the twin engines of the plane. Okay. And two, the Lockheed that she was flying had straight wings, and this one appears to have swept back wings. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the image has – the wings appear swept back in the image unequivocally. But does that mean it's not her plane? Case closed. Case closed. No, they say, well, because we don't know what damage the plane took in the crash and on the way down. The wings could have been broken off and then been pulled back as it went down through the water. And we also – the sonar is fuzzy and it distorts the image and it could be distorting it in just that way. So it's not definitive. We could say, number one, it could be a plane but it's not necessarily even a plane. Two, if it is a plane, it's not necessarily Amelia Earhart's plane, and we're not seeing specific signatures that would make us think that it is specifically her plane, except for the location. That's like the big thing, is that the location's pretty good for where her plane probably went down.

'''E:''' I wish they had a test case. In other words, a ship that they found that has been verified as a sunken ship. And let's see what that looks like on a sonar image like this, right? As sort of like a test or a baseline. Because what we're looking at here with the single image of the supposed possible aircraft, there's nothing to reference.

'''S:''' Well, you could find pictures, Evan, of like sonar images of the ocean floor where you see a smudge and it turns out it was a ship. So, I mean, that's not unusual. And some are better than others. Sometimes you could say like, oh, yeah, that's kind of a ship outline. Sometimes it's like there are features that are pretty specific where you could say, oh, yeah, this was definitely a ship. And other times it's like, I don't know what the hell that is. But, you know, okay, is that a ship? Okay. The thing is you can't say one way or the other, no matter how good the sonar image looks, until you have some either what we call forensic evidence or basically close-up pictures. So this is really – this is like a preliminary study. It's not a confirmatory study. It doesn't tell you it is a plane or it is her plane. It just tells you, oh, this is where you want to look, right? And so the next step will be to send down an uncrewed drone with cameras on it, right? Like they did with the Titanic, yeah. And then you want to basically close up well-lit video of whatever is down there. It's possible. I mean, some of the experts are saying, hey, that could be a geological formation for all we know. The thing is, keep in mind, I told you the size of the area they were looking at. They were looking at tons of sonar images looking for something that looks like a plane. The fact that they found something is not that surprising. This is like – this could be the Bigfoot on Mars thing, right? If you look for – if you're looking through a lot of images looking for something, you will find it. Although in this case, they're not looking for anything unusual. They're looking for specifically a plane. But the planeness of that image is – it's enough to say, yeah, it could be a plane, but it's not a home run.

'''E:''' You have to understand they're invested in finding it as well. So that plays into this.

'''S:''' But still, whatever. They did what they did, right? They got the best information they were ever going to get from this mission with sonar. And so this is just – they found a potential target. It wouldn't surprise me if it's nothing. It's like a face on Mars kind of illusion. Wouldn't surprise me. Wouldn't surprise me if it's just some other plane. A lot of planes go down in the ocean. You'd be surprised. They do.

'''E:''' But what materials were – whatever the material was made out of in 1937, whatever alloy – And what we're talking, 80, what, 90 years later almost.

'''C:''' Also, every plane that has ever gone down should be accounted for.

'''S:''' But they're not.

'''C:''' There should be documentation.

'''S:''' They're not all accounted for.

'''E:''' Well, they're listed as missing and unaccounted for.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''C:''' No, but that's what I'm saying. There shouldn't be a plane that was in the air that wasn't accounted for.

'''S:''' Yeah, but during World War II, Cara, a lot of stuff went down that we didn't necessarily specifically track. Secret missions and stuff like that. That's rough. Evan, to answer your question, they specifically said that at this depth in this location, the water is cold with a very low oxygen level. And so the plane could be very well preserved because of the conditions. Yeah. Yep. So if there is a plane down there, it could be – there could be like the call letters on it. There could be definitive information. That's the forensic information like that. Yep, that's not only a plane. That's her plane. So at this point, I would say everything is on the table. Anything is possible and plausible. But we don't know anything until we send a camera down there and take a direct look and see what it is.

'''B:''' When is that going to happen?

'''S:''' They're planning it. So I don't know, year or two. I don't know. Something like that.

'''E:''' You mean we don't have anything called Google Ocean yet? Yeah. They've sent a bunch of ships down there to take pictures.

'''B:''' They do, but it just shows the surface.

'''S:''' So then the question is, here's one final thing. Let's say they send a sub down there with cameras and it's her plane. It is her Lockheed plane. What do you do with it? So he's talking about maybe we could raise it and put it in a museum, right? And that would certainly be interesting. What would that cost? It would cost probably a couple of hundred million dollars to do that.

'''J:''' It's not worth it.

'''B:''' Whoa. Map it in fine detail and then 3D print it.

'''S:''' But international standard, though, is to leave it in place.

'''E:''' Right. It's arresting. It's a burial site, technically.

'''S:''' Not only for that, Evan. That aside, just scientifically, there's information that you could get from it being in situ, right? In place. And if you move it, you will destroy archaeological information.

'''E:''' That is true. Absolutely true.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' And who knows what future technology might have that we could use. And so what you should do is document it as best as you can in place and leave it there. That is the standard. But so then the question is, well, who gets to decide who owns the plane? And there's controversy about that. Okay. Yet Tony Romeo, he thinks that the Smithsonian owns it. However, Purdue University, I think because they funded something or whatever. But I think he wants them to because then he'll be able to go get it. But Purdue University says that they bought the plane for Amelia Earhart and she was always going to return it to them when she got back. And so they own it.

'''E:''' Yeah, the plane has a title of some kind.

'''S:''' They probably have the best claim to it.

'''B:''' That sounds like a good claim.

'''S:''' They're probably going to want to leave it there.

'''C:''' Does anybody have claim to that portion of the ocean?

'''S:''' No, it's international waters.

'''J:''' So wait, Steve, if I went and I somehow retrieved that, I'd have to give it to them?

'''S:''' Well, the question is you wouldn't really even have the rights to retrieve it. It's not yours. It's not salvaged, right? It's archaeological find.

'''C:''' Right. That's like going and just like digging up an old burial site and being like, I just did it because it was there. Like you didn't have permission to do that.

'''S:''' I was there. I found it. It's mine. Yeah. And I'm sure you all know the governments are getting really picky about that sort of thing. Yeah. recognizing the rights of indigenous people to their own artifacts. You know, museums are like returning all the stuff they've stolen over the last couple of hundred years and taking down displays of burial remains that they didn't have permission to put on display.

=== Hiding Sickness (41:43) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://neurosciencenews.com/social-behavior-contagious-sickness-25540/
|article_title = People Likely to Conceal Contagious Sickness for Social Commitments
|publication = nnn
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Cara, let me ask you a question. If you're sick, do you ever go to work and like pretend you're not sick?

'''C:''' This is an important question. Yeah. And apparently, according to some new research, of their very large sample, over 70% of people do that.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Whoa.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' For a lot of different reasons, I would imagine.

'''C:''' For different reasons, mostly social in nature. Surprisingly, yes, some of them have to do with like institutional pressure and stigma, but not as many. So there's this new study, I guess I should cite it first, called When and Why People Conceal Infectious Disease. I love psych papers. They have the most straightforward titles. Right. Yeah. So this was published by a PhD candidate who was interested in this very topic from the Department of Psychology in Ann Arbor at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, along with some colleagues. And they were, you know, curious, like, when and why do people conceal infectious disease? And they looked at the literature to try and paint a picture of what we already know about this. And then they did 10 different studies of And those 10 different studies looked at different things. We won't go through all of them. We'll kind of summarize them. But across the board, their sample size was 4,110, mostly university students, as is typical with psych departments. But they also looked at healthcare employees, and then they also crowdsourced different people with jobs online. And all of this is self-report. So we have to sort of, I don't want to say we have to take it with a grain of salt, but we have to know that's sort of an important context for how we talk about this. Everything that I'm going to say has to do with is self-reported. So what they found will do the big top lines first is that 75% of participants on average admitted to hiding or considering hiding an infectious illness. More than 61 percent of health care workers confess to concealing their illness. My assumption is that when you see these numbers, they're either accurate or low. They're probably not high. I don't think people are going to say, yeah, I've lied about that when they haven't.

'''S:''' Yeah, right.

'''C:''' But I do think people are going to say, no, I've never done that when they absolutely have. Much more likely, yeah. once they're sick versus the way that people say they act when they're actively sick. So in one of the studies, they didn't just interview people and say, hypothetically, what would you do? And they didn't just interview people and say, in the past, what did you do? They found sick people and said, what are you doing right now? And they found something really interesting in those different study paradigms that when people are well, they think that they are going to be less likely to conceal their illness. Right. They also found that there is a continuum. They are more likely to conceal mild illness and they think they're less likely to conceal severe illness. But these studies showed that people who are sick are just more likely to conceal their illness across the board. There's no discernible difference between mild or severe illness. And so there's something kind of interesting happening here. And I love talking about this phenomenon. And I don't know if there is an actual like coined construct for it. But I know we've talked about this on the show before, how like it's really hard to empathize with yourself when you feel a different way. Like it's very hard to empathize with your depression when you're not actively in a depressive episode. Yeah. Or it's very hard to empathize with what you felt like when you were sick. Like you can kind of remember it, but it's really hard to go there in your mind. And so I think this shows that in some ways that people are like, oh, if I'm sick, I definitely wouldn't want to go to work. And then as soon as they're sick, they're like, I got to go to work. I go to work. So the other big takeaways from this that were really interesting is, like I said before, most people cited social either obligations or just interests in why they concealed it. They wanted to get on that plane because they were looking forward to that travel. They didn't want to miss the concert. They were really looking forward to spending time with their friends. Some people did cite institutional pressures, but that was a significantly smaller portion of the variance. So that's also pretty interesting because if you were to ask me, I would say that probably most people would say, well, I can't miss work. That's why I had to go. I don't have any more sick days or I can't afford to not get paid or they're going to get pissed at me if I miss. And to be fair, this happened, they looked at a lot of this stuff during COVID. So they weren't just asking people, how likely are you to lie about being sick? But they also asked them, like, how likely are you to falsify a school mandated, like at their university? during COVID, you had to basically like sign something when you came in, you know, like symptom screeners, you know, like, I have not had a fever, I have not had a cough. And so that was one of the components. It was... are you covering up symptoms? Are you coming to work or school without telling people you're feeling sick? Are you falsifying symptom screeners? And they did see that people, the highest percentage of people reported covering up their symptoms, but also people did say that they falsified symptom screeners or they came to work and just didn't say anything about being sick. So they didn't actually, quote, lie in their minds. They just concealed it, which is lying. You know, what's the big takeaway here? Because I don't think this... I don't think this surprises any of us. Maybe the magnitude of it is surprising, but I don't think it's a surprising thing that as human beings, people are likely to conceal how ill they are in order to continue to go to their social obligations or to continue to go to work or school. I think the thing that's worrisome here is at least for me personally, and I'm curious what you guys think about this, is how, you know, if you remember during COVID, a lot of the backlash was that some of the measures were quite draconian. Like people were not happy with being forced to wear masks or with having mandatory temperature checks or things of that nature. But research like this shows us that this cannot be an honor system. you know people aren't going to. they're always going to paint themselves in a light. that is the least I guess revolting or or frightening. and that's I mean it makes sense evolutionarily right. like you don't want to be around somebody who's sick you don't want to get sick and sick people are like gross to us and sick people are scary to us. and especially when we're talking this this whole entire study was looking specifically at infectious diseases. So contagious sickness, like things where if you coughed or sneezed in public, somebody else might catch it from you. They did do a whole, just as a caveat, I should say, in many of the studies, they actually did carve outs for COVID simply because of the stigma around COVID. I think that they were afraid personally that they weren't going to get honest answers. Because like at the time, people know I would never go to work if I had COVID, knew I had COVID. What kind of a monster am I? You know, I do think that's different now. But at the time, there was so much stigma around it that they didn't want to include that in most of the studies because they were afraid they wouldn't get very, I think, honest responses.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean I think a lot of it is cultural. There is – and certainly within healthcare for physicians, there's a lot of pressure to tough through a lot of hard situations. That's just sort of the culture.

'''C:''' Which is funny because also in the same – you could say in the same breath that for many physicians, there's a mandate that they can't go to work if they have an infectious disease.

'''S:''' There has to be. That has to be the case. And that's why I agree. Like it shouldn't be just left up to 100% discretion because then you have that conflict of interest where I don't want to seem like a weenie. I don't want to dump my patients on all of my colleagues or – Because it is burdensome. It's not a little thing. I was the inpatient attending for a couple weeks early January. And I got sick. And I kind of know who gave it to me. But that's all right. Whatever. I got really sick. And I felt bad about having to call the backup. Yeah, I mean, the person in charge of the ward service would say, hey, I'm sick. But there are specific protocols. I had to get two negative COVID tests two days apart. So I did everything I could very diligently. But still, it was a huge burden for me to just suddenly have to miss two days of inpatient service. People had to interrupt their careers for two days and come and cover my ass. But I had to do it. But even still, I was following protocol. I still felt the social pressure. It's, oh, crap, I'm being a weenie and dumping on my colleagues.

'''C:''' And that's in a white-collar position. You think about people who, during COVID especially, were working in farm settings or were working in meatpacking settings and things like that, where they're like, I can't not go to work.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Like if I don't go to work, I don't get paid. If I don't get paid, I could lose my house. You know, it's like you have all these things. So you've got the institutional pressure. You've got the kind of internal pressure. But then you also and again, I think that says something about this study that it was mostly looking at health care workers and university students that their main reasoning was social pressure. They didn't want to miss stuff, you know, and that could just be saying something about the actual sample. This was college students and healthcare workers mostly and an online sample. So the researchers did say the next step is they're super curious about culture and looking at people from different cultures and at different SESs to try and understand how some of these responses might change.

'''S:''' All right, Evan, tell us about this double brood.

=== Cicada Double Brood (52:04) ===
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'''E:''' The double brood, yes. I know. And we knew this was going to happen. It's been on the calendar only a matter of time. But now we are just weeks away, a couple months, from the emergence of North American cicadas. That's an occurrence that takes place in the early spring on some very specific years. So specific that, yeah, you can mark your calendars by it. Cicadas live the vast majority of their lives underground. We're talking about billions of these insects all over the eastern regions of the United States. Some of the cicadas will emerge, and it's a predictable cycle where cicadas in specific regions make their emergence either once every 13 years or once every 17 years. And those emergences are called periodical broods.

'''C:''' But 2024 is special.

'''E:''' We have a BOGO. Buy one, get one. Or brood one, get one. We have two periodical broods emerging at the same time this spring. Yep. And this is a less than once in a lifetime experience. The last time these two specific broods emerged at the same time, 1803. Whoa. Thomas Jefferson was president. And the next time it will happen, 2245. So yeah, not even a once-in-a-lifetime event.

'''B:''' That's like Star Trek time.

'''C:''' Jeez. So last time, did people literally think that it was like some biblical shit going on?

'''E:''' Yeah, they always do. They confuse it sort of with like a locust plague, and absolutely, it takes on sort of a biblical meaning to it. But it's certainly not a locust plague. There's no destruction involved, thank goodness, with the cicadas coming along. So yeah, so cicadas, real quick, here's how it works. They start their lives as eggs. The females will lay 200 to 400 eggs into tiny holes that they make in the branches of trees and shrubs. And after six to 10 weeks, cicada young called nymphs hatch from the eggs and immediately fall to the ground. Then they burrow underground and they attach to the tree roots. The nymphs stay buried to suck the tree sap of the roots for anywhere from two to 17 years. And that depends on the species. While underground, that's called the dormant period, and when it ends, the cicadas emerge above ground at sunset when the temperature of the soil is correct. They climb the trunk of the nearby trees, then they shed their skin, and boom, adult cicadas emerge. than can live out their last few months of life above ground. Okay, so cicadas, what? They're bugs, right? No big deal. Tons of bugs, trillions of them, born all over the planet every year. What's the big deal? Well, cicadas, like all insects, they impact the environment in many different ways, but none are more impactful to environmental noise than cicadas. They are the loudest insects in the world. For example, there's an African cicada named Brevissana brevis, and it is the world's loudest insect. Its loudest song is almost 107 decibels when measured at a distance of 20 inches away. And by comparison, a chainsaw has a 110 decibel level. And there are two species of North American cicada, and they're second in the world. They come in at about 106 decibels. Yep. The cicadas, they have timbles in their abdomens. They create the noise when they expand and they contract. The males use the noise to attract the females, of course. Oh, and they also have – they evolved a means of closing up their own ears when they're singing so they don't deafen themselves.

'''J:''' Oh, isn't that convenient for them?

'''E:''' Exactly. Protect them. Protect themselves from this enormous noise that they emit.

'''C:''' Evan, isn't their song like almost exclusively a breeding song?

'''E:''' Yes, it is. And each brood has a different one, a distinct one, which is part of also what makes it its particular category, its own brood. Okay. When the brood emerges, it gets going. The peak noise can overtake most other noises we hear in nature. Now, how many cicadas are there in a brood emergence? Many billions of them, of course. But here's something. The densest areas, there can be a concentration of 1.5 million cicadas per acre. Yeah. One acre of land, 1.5 million of these.

'''S:''' Wow.

'''E:''' Could you imagine that? And then, okay, now you're going to have a double brood, okay? Now, the regions of the two broods, and these broods are officially called Brood 13 and Brood 19. For these two broods which are coming, the regions in which they emerge, for the most part, they're in different areas. But there is going to be a little bit of overlap. So could you imagine if you do have an overlap and you get these two broods emerging with a potential density of 3 million cicada per acre? Ah, my gosh. That would be loud. Get your earplugs ready. I'm not joking about that. I mean, as someone who goes to concerts regularly and often – metal concerts with my daughter. I know the importance of proper hearing protection. You have to have it or else you're going to damage yourself. The cicadas will be so loud in some areas it's going to...

'''S:''' How loud will they be?

'''E:''' So loud that it will drown out the sounds of highway traffic where you live and airplanes flying overhead. There have been cases of people developing tinnitus as a result of cicada noise. Yep. According to the U.S. – what is it? The CDC. Yes. Hearing loss, damage to the nerve ending in the inner ear, thyroid problems to exposure to loud noises. And right now they say about 45 million Americans struggle with a disorder. Cicadas can impact that, definitely. You know, when you're reaching 100, here's what they say. Cicada buzzing, it can reach 100 decibels and 15 minutes of that exposure can be enough to cause hearing-related disorders. So 100 decibels, a jackhammer in operation or revving of a Harley Davidson motorcycle. Yep. By the way, so you can know on the map where to look. Or in case you live in these areas, Brood 13 will be predominantly occurring in the, well, greater Chicago region of upper Illinois, along with parts of southern Wisconsin and Iowa, plus other regions along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Brood 19 is more centralized to the state of Missouri. So most of Missouri will be impacted, but also parts of Illinois will be impacted. That's where potentially some of the crossover will occur, the double brooding. in the same areas, but also Arkansas, Tennessee, and other States. in the Southeastern U S brood 19 is considered the largest of the broods. when, when they, uh, when they emerge. So here we go. Here come the cicadas. double your fun.

'''S:''' I remember the last time they were out in Connecticut. Actually, I was visiting someone in Maryland. We're at a park, and I'm walking in the park on the ground. There's millions of holes in the ground. I'm like, what were those from? Is that an ant colony? Then I remember. Every one of those holes is a little cicada climbed out of. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, it was amazing.

'''E:''' Oh, and finally, Steve, I'll throw this in. Some people are calling this Cicade Apocalypse just to kind of have fun with it, you know. Yeah. So if you hear that word, that's what they're referring to.

== Who's That Noisy? (1:00:10) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
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|answer = [https://youtu.be/4y1rlS5cX7Y?si=ili7hnDHoJ31qVTC&t=2 Shoe-billed stork clacking its mouth] 
[[File:969 shoebill.jpg|left|400px|thumb|link=https://laughingsquid.com/shoebill-stork-mimics-movements-of-keeper/|"A Statuesque Shoebill Stork Sweetly Mimics the Movements of a Visiting Keeper" Click/tap image for article.]]
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'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Evan. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

'''J:''' All right, guys. Last week I played this noisy. What do you think, guys?

'''S:''' Sounds like a video game.

'''C:''' Yeah, it sounds like a gun.

'''E:''' Yeah, it sounds like maybe like almost had Tommy Gunn-ish from a 1930s movie with... Edward J. Robinson, shame to rub you out.

'''J:''' Without a doubt, it totally sounds like a gun. So we had Visto Tutti write in. He said, this noisy is the 1984 arcade game called Turkey Shoot, where a machine gun with haptic kickback was used to shoot turkeys on a video screen. I played, I think if I'm remembering correctly, I'm sure I played this game. He said, I'm not sure if the game was banned, but it sure would have been for its blatant anti-foul propaganda. Um, it is not a video game, but that is a wonderful guess because lots of video games have sounds like that. Uh, another listener named Michael Blaney. These are very frequent flyers here on who's that noisy. Michael says, hi Jay. Hmm. Gunshot is too easy. So I'm not going with that. So I'm going for an automated assembly line riveting machine. Look that up. I couldn't find that sound to compare it. But I mean, sure. I know that there are rivet machines that pound the rivets in as they're heated up, right? So I could see that. But that is also not correct. Then the last guest from this week, Liam Wenzelik. W-E-N-Z-L-I-C-K. Wenzelik. Got it. Liam Wenzelik. Wenzelik, maybe. Wenzelik. Yeah. He says, who's that noisy? Hey, I used to work at a steel and it sounds like a hydraulic pecker on a digger pecking at slag. I would imagine that that's a machine that would probably break up the slag that falls when they're pouring the steel. The slag comes off and they probably have to get rid of it somehow. That's about the extent of my knowledge of steel mills. But anyway, that is not correct. But then we got so many correct answers this week because apparently lots of people know a lot about this. But the first person to send in the correct answer, listener named Paolo Ciarocca. And he said, Hi, Jay. Long time listener since 2014. First time guesser. I think it's the call of the shoe bill bird. Um, and he's from Edinburgh, Scotland. And he said, I was a live stream guest firing COVID lock firing during probably during COVID lockdowns. So we have actually met via video call and I, I vaguely remember you. I do remember you. Um, So this is a very large bird. The shoebill is a tall bird with a typical height range of 110 to 140 centimeters or 43 to 55 inches. And some specimens reaching as much as 152 centimeters or 60 inches. That's huge. The length from tail to beak can range from 100 to 140 centimeters or 39 to 55 inches. And it could have a 260 centimeter or 8 foot 6 inch wingspan. It's a huge bird. Big bird. So take a look. Look up the shoe bill. Now, this noise is generated by the shoe bill basically clacking its mouth open and shut really fast. This sound was taken, I think, from an interior. So that's where the echo is coming from. And the whining that you hear is the bird. So listen again. Now, Evan, talk about animals making noises. Oh, my God. Right. Could you imagine living across the street from one of those?

'''E:''' You know, I'd be ducking for cover if I heard that all day.

'''J:''' Oh, my God. That's great. Great noisy. Thank you so much for sending that in. I have a new noisy this week. This one was sent in by a listener named Mario.

'''S:''' Marlo Lemieux.

'''J:''' Yes, that's a cool name. So here is the noisy for this week. Not an easy one. So you could email me if you think you know what this week's noisy is or if you heard something cool because I really do appreciate those emails because they keep the show going. Email me at WTN at theskepticsguide.org. You guys can attach any sound files directly to the email because this isn't going through the website. So you just simply just drag and drop the file that you want to send me so I can hear it. Some people send me in noisies and don't send me the sound files, and then I have to email them, and it's not easy for me. So please do include the file.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (1:04:08) ===
[Hissing, vibrating, and ratcheting sounds]

'''J:'''...{{wtnAnswer|970|what this week's Noisy is}}...

== Announcements (1:05:13) ==

'''J:''' We have stuff, Steve. We have stuff going on. So we are in our 19th year. And this year, we will be achieving our 1,000th episode.

'''S:''' Oh, whoa.

'''J:''' 1,000 episodes.

'''S:''' 1,000 episodes.

'''J:''' Probably have done about 400 with you, Cara?

'''E:''' 400. 300? 300.

'''J:''' I don't know.

'''E:''' Probably more.

'''C:''' No, I think it'd be more than that by now.

'''E:''' 2015.

'''C:''' Yeah, so how many is that a year?

'''E:''' Roughly 50.

'''S:''' Yeah, so like half of, yeah.

'''J:''' Wow. All right. So we're up there too with Cara. It's a big milestone for all of us. And we will be announcing some plans that we have for that. We are formulating those right now. But we have plans that are already in place if you would like to join us. So we have tickets still available for the Dallas extravaganza. This will be happening tomorrow. on April 6th. that is April 6th. it is in Dallas and you can easily go to the SGU website. that's the skepticsguide.org website. there's a button on there if you want to buy tickets for that. tickets are selling out pretty quick. so if you're going to be there or if you're visiting for the eclipse please come check us out. we also have a VIP available if you want to spend an extra hour with us at that show before the show and you get some perks with that as well. So please do consider joining us on that show. The other private show, it sold out. And ticket sales went really quick on that. We were very excited. But for those of you who are going, we're looking forward to seeing you there. There's a couple things you could do to help support the SGU. One of them is you could join our mailing list. We send out a weekly email. You could easily do that on our website as well. Go to theskepticsguide.org. We have a link there to join the email list. We send out an email every week. that is a summary of all the content that we've created the previous week. We're getting a lot of positive feedback on that email. So if you're interested, just please go join our list. You could give our show a rating on whatever podcast player you're using. I still think that Apple iTunes is basically the one that most people go to to get information like that, like rating information. But please do drop us a like or give us a review if you don't mind. That'll help other people find us. And of course, the absolute best thing you could do to show your patronage is become a patron of the SGU. You can go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide. We are currently 600 patrons away from us having to fulfill the 24-hour SGU live show, which we promised that we would do when we reach 5,500 patrons. So if you guys are interested in seeing that, now would be a good time to join because it is actually coming up. I predict that we will end up probably having to schedule that show that at some point this year we'll schedule it. I don't mean it's going to happen this year. We might have to push into next year depending on when it happens. But that's one of my predictions for 2024. Anyway, guys, thank you all for your support.

[[SGU Episode 1000|{{tooltip|_Jay_mentions_one_thousandth_episode_|expected to be broadcast 7 SEP 2024}}]]

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== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups ==
=== Correction #1: Moon Timeline (1:08:17) ===
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'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Jay. A couple of corrections that I want to do. So a couple of times on this show I've mentioned that when talking about the Artemis program, right, Jay, that the original timeline was 2028 for getting to the moon, but then the Trump administration moved it up to 2024, and now it's being delayed again. Now we're saying 2026, right, before landing on the moon. No, no, no.

'''J:''' No, not landing on the moon.

'''S:''' 2026 just to go around the moon?

'''J:''' Yeah. Well, the flyby I think was pushed to 25 and late 2026 we might have boots on the ground. Yeah. It's going to get pushed. Okay.

'''S:''' 2026 landing on the moon unless it gets pushed again. Right. But it turns out that that's incorrect, right? So I was basing this on the reporting at the time and there are like the Washington Post, the New York Times and then a lot of the space news is basically reiterating this notion that the original timeline was 2028 and it was moved up to 2024. But, you know, I was emailed by Jeff Wakesman who was – as he says, he was working at NASA HQ at the time. So apparently he knows that that was never the case. That was basically misreporting. That essentially what really happened was that the – like the Obama administration wasn't that interested in deep space exploration. And then the Trump administration was interested in it, but Trump wanted to go to Mars. And it was actually Pence who pushed going to the moon. The, you know, NASA, like basically saying we're going back to the moon and we're going to get there by 2024. That was actually Pence. And then when the Biden administration came in, there was a debate between the moon – what he called the moon Democrats and the Mars Democrats.

'''E:''' Oh, gosh.

'''S:''' And basically the moon Democrats won.

'''B:''' That's awesome, man.

'''S:''' Yeah, which is a good thing.

'''E:''' Yeah, that is good.

'''S:''' But there was never this 2028 timeline. That was just a fiction. He's not even really sure where it came from.

'''E:''' There was a graphic I recall seeing. And I don't know if NASA put it out or somebody else put it out. I can't remember. But at the end of that timeline, it stretched across kind of just a bar. At the end, it did say 2028.

'''S:''' It was an approximate. Yeah. So that's what he thinks. It was maybe from something like that. But it was never policy. Like it was never a decision or a timeline that NASA had that were going in 2028. That never existed. It might have been some analysis or whatever, as you say, some kind of chart or whatever. But it was – that was basically just fiction. But having said that, the 2024 timeline was aggressive. It was very, very aggressive, and they knew that it was aggressive. It was partly for, you know, we want to make sure we beat China there. You know, that was part of it. So it's not surprising that the timeline has been delayed, you know, because, again, the 2024 is probably the maximally ambitious timeline to begin with.

'''B:''' Yeah, remember, Steve, you said that when you go aggressive like that, that's actually a great tactic. because if you say, yeah, we're going to do it in 2028, then people kind of forget about it. They're not motivated to get the funds and to get the ball rolling. So when you go extra aggressive like, oh, man, we got to get started on this and that really helps push it along. And if it gets pushed back a little, that's fine. But now you're committed and it's like you already got the funds in there. The work has been a lot done. So it's actually a good move to be extra aggressive or even maybe unrealistic.

'''S:''' It's probably good at the NASA end. Like if you want to get there by 2028, say you want to get there by 2024.

'''B:''' Right, exactly.

'''S:''' But it's not great for a PR perspective because then the repeated delays makes it seem like you don't have your shit together and people get disappointed. Yeah.

'''B:''' Everyone expects delays at this point.

'''S:''' I guess that's the kind of argument is that it's pretty expected. We're not shattered by it. We kind of were expecting this the whole time. It's still disappointing.

'''E:''' We learned our lesson from James Webb, I think. To me, that was okay. Whatever they're going to say, you have to tack on more time because this stuff is so complicated. Of course it's going to take longer than they're expressing.

'''S:''' I'd rather have them do it right than do it quick.

'''E:''' Of course, especially when there's lives at stake.

=== Question_Email_Correction #2: Long Acting Insulin (1:13:02) ===
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'''S:''' Absolutely. The next one has to do with a science or fiction. This is going back to the end of 2023. Oh, wow. I barely remember that year. Yeah, I know. It's like it's lost in the mists of time. This one comes from a listener named Seth and Seth says, It was pointing out, so if you remember, there was a fiction item where I said that a company has developed a hydrogel that releases insulin slowly so that you only have to inject once every three months to cover your insulin. Do you guys remember that one?

'''B:''' Yeah, I do.

'''S:''' And he was pointing out that there actually is a, it's actually a micro gel with nanoparticles that does have sustained release of insulin, but this lasts for 22 days and is in mice. So I said, okay, that's closer than I thought, but that doesn't make it not a fiction, right? You know, three months in humans, 22 days in mice, it doesn't render it fiction. Yeah. I've done that before, like saying, like, this has been shown to work in humans. It's like, no, it's actually only in mouse studies. I've made a science of fiction that way many times before. But so for a quick background, though, so for people who are insulin dependent, either type 1 or type 2 diabetics that are insulin dependent... You know, there are different types of insulin that they use. There's sort of the basal insulin. It's like their minimum basal need of insulin, right? So you can get a long-acting insulin to cover that. And then there's so-called prandial insulin where, like, if you eat a big meal, then you've got to take insulin right at that time to cover the glucose spike for that meal. So the problem with getting like one injection that's going to last for a long period of time is that that really would work better for the basal insulin. And so and we already have that kind of longer lasting or like slow release insulin to cover sort of the basic needs. But then you still need to take the prandial like as needed. I just had a big meal insulin on top of that. But this new study was showing that, you know, the microgel can sense the overall level of blood sugar, you know, of sugar in the blood and therefore can release more insulin to cover the prandial dosing as well as the basal dosing. So that's why, like, even if you need both, you could still be covered for 22 days, at least in mice. in the study, you know, that was done. So that's a very interesting technology, and I hope this works out in people and they continue to push that forward. It would be great, again, if you're an insulin-dependent diabetic just to have to take one injection, you're good for a long period of time rather than have to measure glucose levels and inject yourself multiple times a day. But it doesn't change the fiction. And you guys got all this one right, by the way. You guys all correctly called that out as the fiction. Of course we did. Yeah.

{{top}}{{anchor|interview}} 
== Interview with Dustin Bates (1:16:01) ==
{{Page categories
|Interview = 
}}
* [https://starset.fandom.com/wiki/Dustin_Bates Dustin Bates], lead vocalist, songwriter and keyboardist for the American rock band {{w|Starset}}


'''S:''' We are joined now by Dustin Bates. Dustin, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

'''DB:''' Hey, thanks for having me.

'''S:''' And Dustin, you're the lead singer of the group Star Set. How would you describe your band?

'''DB:''' Cinematic, hard music. There's some rock elements, metal elements, EDM. It's kind of across the gamut. But yeah, definitely cinematic.

'''S:''' What makes it cinematic?

'''DB:''' Everything about it from the music to the marketing to the visuals is movie-esque. And we have a live violinist and live cellist. And so we bring in all of these symphonics to the music.

'''S:''' Have you ever recorded music for a movie?

'''E:''' I have not, but that would be pretty amazing.

'''S:''' That would be awesome. Yeah.

'''DB:''' The video game industry seems to appreciate your music very much. Yeah, and it keeps growing, actually. We're in the middle of our next tour. We're going to China for three weeks for, I think, yeah, eight shows in a row there for a gaming convention, I guess.

'''S:''' Awesome.

'''DB:''' Because, you know, they used our music.

'''S:''' Video games are very cinematic these days.

'''J:''' Dustin, I was looking up some pictures of the band and I found this goddamn remarkable picture of your guitar. I'm not sure if it's you because there's a helmet. Basically, somebody's wearing a sci-fi space suit.

'''DB:''' Yes.

'''J:''' That is so bad. How did that come into being? Tell me the backstory on that.

'''DB:''' Yeah, there's a running narrative with the band. And in fact, there's a novel out, a Marvel comic out, and there's going to be a second novel out that actually drops in conjunction with this tour. But when we first came out, there was a space element to the narrative. And that first version of the spacesuit was homemade, the first couple. And then we started to get help. And this next tour actually is on... kind of going to be unbelievable where you have new suits and they're they're just hollywood ready.

'''J:''' whoa that is so cool awesome. that looks like a lot of fun. I mean you're basically in the band that I always wanted to be in because like there's like a science fiction backbone to it that really like sets the tone. I really really like the look.

'''DB:''' that's awesome thank you.

'''S:''' so evan you actually hooked us up with with dustin. you want to talk about with him why he's coming on the show.

'''E:''' Yeah, I have to go back to 2019, Dustin, when Star Set was performing in Hartford and my daughter, Rachel, introduced me to your music and she very much wanted to go to the show. So we decided to go. We got the opportunity to not only see the show, but also meet you. And based on what I had read and heard, I thought it'd be a nice opportunity to sort of introduce myself and our show to you, plus brought you a copy of our book. So that's where we first met. Yep, I still remember it. That was a very memorable hang. You usually don't get to talk about science and associated topics after a show, so that was very welcomed. What was interesting when I was looking into your history a little bit is that you had studied at Ohio University electrical engineering. You Were a PhD candidate there. Yep. And you also taught at the International Space University, something I didn't even know really existed. Yeah. Yeah, that was – it's an amazing – I did the summer program, and I went back and actually taught, and it was an incredible experience. I was – when I was helping to teach in TA there, I was, I think, 25. And all the others – like the students were all older than me because you had to have a degree to even – be a student in, you know, places like Boeing and NASA sent students and, and it's from all across the globe. And I met people that ended up being directors at SpaceX and, and Starlink. And so it's really been, it was an incredible experience. Certainly has had an influence on your music and, uh, all the, uh, all the work that you put into Star Set. You know, I was in bands before this and I feel actually lucky that they didn't, you unceremoniously. you know at the time it felt terribly but I'm very much where I feel like I should be. this is a blend of all of my passions and nerdery.

'''S:''' now dustin you're going to be joining us in dallas. uh for the eclipse.

'''DB:''' yeah uh it's amazing that the stars align for that we um where you know. when I realized that the eclipse was happening I was like oh crap We got to be on tour and it has to be Cleveland or pretty much Dallas. And I'm pretty sure this tour exists the way it does because of this eclipse. Interesting. I'm super pumped for it.

'''J:''' Awesome. Yeah. So you're going to be joining us for something we call an SGU private show plus, which means we're not just doing a two hour live show, but we're going to hang out with the audience and do some fun stuff for another hour after that. So to be determined on what we're going to do, but everybody's talking about it right now. We usually start talking a couple months before the show to come up with some new stuff. So I'm really looking forward to it. Awesome.

'''E:''' Me too. Can't wait. Dustin, the tour, the next Star Set tour is kicking off right around the same time as the eclipse. Where can people go for more information to see the show? Yeah, starsetonline.com. There's still some tickets available. I believe most of the VIP experiences have sold out, but there's still tickets in two-thirds of the cities. Well, having seen your show about, oh gosh, seven or eight times so far, I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you. And I definitely – this is an honest statement. I think this is going to be the most wild and immersive one. We're having a ton of fun designing it. So I hope to raise the bar on it for you.

'''S:''' Dustin, we're really looking forward to meeting you in person when we're all together in Dallas for the Eclipse and having you join us for our live show there. So thanks for coming on the show tonight and giving us a preview.

'''DB:''' Thank you so much for having me.

'''B:''' Thanks, man. Thank you, Dustin.

'''J:''' Thanks, Dustin.

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:22:17) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
}}
{{SOFinfo
|theme = Animal emotions

|item1 = Most rats will stop pulling a lever to deliver a preferred treat if that lever also gives a fellow rat a small electric shock.
|link1web = https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/rats-empathy-brains-harm-aversion
|link1title = Rats avoid harming other rats. The finding may help us understand sociopaths.
|link1pub = natgeo

|item2 = A recent study shows that goats are able to tell the difference between happy sounding and angry sound human voices.
|link2web = https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722300307X?via%3Dihub
|link2title = Goats discriminate emotional valence in the human voice
|link2pub = Animal behavior

|item3 = Capuchin monkeys are one of the few non-human animals to be shown to cry emotional tears.
|link3web = https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/humans-are-the-only-animals-that-cry-and-we-dont-know-why
|link3title = Humans Are the Only Animals That Cry — And We Don’t Know Why
|link3pub = Discover Magazine

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction =capuchin emotional tears
|science1 =rats have empathy?
|science2 =goats differentiate voices

|rogue1 =evan
|answer1 =rats have empathy?

|rogue2 =bob
|answer2 =rats have empathy?

|rogue3 =jay
|answer3 =capuchin emotional tears

|rogue4 =cara
|answer4 =capuchin emotional tears

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win =y 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' It's time for Science or Fiction. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week, and that theme is animal emotions. Actually, not inspired by Jay's news item, just a coincidence because this is based upon something else I saw on the news. But there's three claims that have to do with animal emotions. Okay, you ready? All right, here we go. Item number one, most rats will stop pulling a lever to deliver a preferred treat if that lever also gives a fellow rat a small electric shock. Item number two, a recent study shows that goats are able to tell the difference between happy-sounding and angry-sounding human voices. And item number three, capuchin monkeys are one of the few non-human animals to be shown to cry emotional tears. Evan, go first.

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''E:''' All right, rats. They will stop pulling a lever to deliver a preferred treat if that lever also gives a fellow rat a small electric shock.

'''S:''' Yeah, so apparently the study was asking the question, do rats have empathy? And so apparently the answer is yes, if you interpret this study that way.

'''E:''' Okay, so the rat's pulling the lever, getting the treat. At the same time, it's witnessing another rat getting shocked, and it's making some sort of connection between those two events and sort of figuring it out. That seems like a stretch. um to me do rats tend to have more of a pack mentality to them like the damaging of one means everybody is going to suffer in some way right? is it part of a collective collective thought? thought with other rats? I don't know that. one seems sketchy to me. the second one About goats being able to tell the difference between happy-sounding and angry-sounding human voices. That would not – I don't know that that would – I don't think that surprises me. Because I think other animals have been shown to have that. So why not goats? Why would a goat brain, you know, goat neurology not work the same way as perhaps some of the other animals like dogs who fall into that category? I think that one's right. And the last one about the monkeys, these monkeys. One of the few non-human animals to be shown to cry emotional tears. Oh, gosh. Why did I think at some point I was told, like, humans are the only ones who cry for emotional reasons, shed tears. So it's either that one or the rat one. And I guess... Oh, boy. It's one of these two. Gee whiz. I'll stick with my first guess. I'll say the rat one is the fiction, but I will not be surprised if I'm wrong and it's the monkey one.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' Oh, boy. Yeah, these are good, man. I could kind of justify yes or no for any of them. I think I'm going to go with the rat one, although the interpretation that they have empathy isn't necessarily the best alternative. Couldn't they be thinking also like, oh, man, look it. I pull this lever and that rat gets shocked. Maybe I'll get shocked if I hit the lever again. They might be doing that self-preservation instead of anything that's empathic. But what the hell, I'll go with the rats.

'''S:''' As the fiction.

'''B:''' As the fiction, yes.

'''S:''' Okay. Jay?

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' The first one with the rats, I mean, that one seems the most believable to me. It doesn't seem like that much of a leap to think that they would be able to tell when another rat is in distress. They just have to be able to connect the act of getting the food with the electric shock. So I don't think that one is the fiction. That's likely science. The second one is a study that shows that goats are able to tell the difference between happy sounding and angry sounding human voices. Yeah, I mean, again, like, you know, hearing, being able to detect an intonation difference doesn't seem to be that complicated to me. You know, like, why wouldn't they? You know, like dogs can do it really easily. I don't see why a goat couldn't do it. And the last one about the monkeys crying, you know, I have never heard anything of a monkey crying in my entire life. I don't know. For some reason, I just don't think monkeys can cry. I don't think humans are the only ones that cry, except crocodiles. Yeah, I think that was a fiction, Steve.

'''S:''' Okay, and Cara.

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' I'm going to go with Jay on this, not because I don't think other animals can't cry. I know lots of animals that can cry, but I don't think we've ever been able to link tears to emotion. Animals have tear ducts. They can cry when they get shit in their eyes, but I don't think that other animals... I don't think we have any evidence unless this is like a new study that I haven't seen. And if they could find that a capuchin would cry sad tears, it makes no sense that like a chimpanzee or bonobo or orangutan or an ape wouldn't because we're much more closely related to them. I do think a rat, again, like Bob said, I don't know if you would call it empathy. I might call it empathy. I don't know. I mean, it's a construct, whatever. But rats are really smart. Rats are very, you know, they can't puke. So if they see another animal eat poison, and then if they see another rat eat poison and then die, they won't eat that poison. So I think that they would watch and be like, oh, crap, this is shocking that animal. I don't want to do that. And then goats. Yeah, goats are super similar. They're social animals. They're very social. They're domestic hits. They were raised in farms. Of course, they're going to be able to respond to the farmer's voice, like if it's angry or sad or I guess happy or angry. So yeah, I don't know. The monkey one's the one that sticks out the most to me.

'''B:''' I don't know how smart rats are. I've got a small infestation, and I lined up three of my rat traps, one after the other, and I go up and look in the attic, and all of them are filled. Like, oh, boy, they see two other rats dead, and they're like, yo, I think I'm going to get this peanut butter. I think this one's going to work for me. Snap.

'''J:''' Bob, those aren't rats. Those are mice.

'''B:''' Mice, rats, yeah, whatever.

'''S:''' Bob, maybe they all died at the exact same time.

'''B:''' I discounted that possibility.

'''S:''' Wholesale. Bob, I once caught two mice in a single trap. Oh, twofer. Nice.

'''E:''' Holy crap.

'''B:''' They're like running for it. It's mine, mine, mine.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' All right. Let's start with number two. A recent study shows that goats are able to tell the difference between happy-sounding and angry-sounding human voices. You all think that one is science, and that one is science. That is correct. That was a recent study that showed that. And what the way they did? it was that they habituated the goats to one of the noises, either the happy noise or the angry noise. And then they flipped and, and see if the goats noticed basically. And they did, they would tend more quickly and for longer to the change, you know, in the, what we call the valence, the emotional valence of the human voices. Um, So that was their paradigm. for can they tell the difference between those two things. And yeah, they're domesticated animals, and so it's not surprising that they would do that. Plus, goats themselves are very vocal, so they already have the wiring there to hear and interpret.

'''C:''' They sound like babies.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' Yeah, each other. So it's not that much of a stretch. All right, let's go back to number one. Most rats will stop pulling a lever to deliver a preferred treat if that lever also gives a fellow rat a small electric shock. Bob and Evan, you think this one is the fiction. Jay and Cara, you think this one is science. And this one is science.

'''C:''' Yeah, Jay.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Whatever. Good job.

'''E:''' I was right because I said if I was not right on this one, it was the other one.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' So I was right in what I said.

'''S:''' Covering your bets. So rats actually seem to have a pretty wide range of emotions including behavior that seems to follow a construct of empathy. As Cara said, it is also a construct. The researchers are quick to make a distinction between emotion and feeling. Feeling is a subjective experience. We have absolutely no idea what the rats are feeling. Emotion is a programmed response to a situation that involves a behavior. That's interesting.

'''C:''' It's like, you know how rats can... They laugh when you tickle them. And so that's an emotion maybe, like laughter, but you don't know if they're actually feeling joy or if it's just a reflex.

'''S:''' You don't know what they're feeling, but that's irrelevant to the research. So... There's a lot of research in this area. This is not just like an isolated study. There's also a researcher who is doing a series of studies in rats and they found that a rat will also free a fellow rat from a cage, right? And they'll do that even if they don't get to subsequently interact with the rat. So they're trying to control for variables like, well, maybe he just wants to play with the rats. We're like, hey, come out here and play with me. It's like, nope, he'll free him just to free him. What a good boy. But, Cara, only if they're the same color. Racist rats.

'''B:''' Racist rats.

'''S:''' More specifically, only if they have been socialized to that breed of rat. So if they grew up with that kind of rat, it's not just about color. It's also about just like...

'''C:''' So it's like a kin thing.

'''S:''' The distinctive sort of breed of rat. And if they were brought up alone, they won't free any rats, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they basically will free rats that they have been socialized to say that they're my group.

'''C:''' Yeah, my kinship thing. That's really interesting. There's a lot of interesting stuff in like evolution or evolutionary biology about like kinship evolution, not just the individual but like the family unit or the group.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Yeah, interesting research. Which means that capuchin monkeys are one of the few non-human animals to be shown to cry emotional tears. Is the fiction, Evan, you are right. Humans are the only animals that cry emotional tears. There's three kinds of tears, right? There's sort of the basal tears, which is the constant secretion to keep your eyes moist. Then there's reflexive tears, like you get something in your eye and it tears. And then there's emotionally triggered tears. And humans, we don't know why, but we're the only species that has emotionally triggered tears. We don't know evolutionarily why that happened, why it's never happened to any other species, but there it is. I thought it would be a little bit too obvious if I said like a chimpanzee. That's why I went with the capuchin monkey. The fact that they were so weird and specific might make it believable. I don't know.

'''C:''' I might have bought it more if it was a chimp. Or like thinking about Coco the gorilla or something. I wonder what it would be like if there was an ape, like a chimp or a bonobo. I'd say bonobo. If a bonobo was raised exclusively around people who cried a lot. Could it learn to cry? Probably not.

'''S:''' I don't know.

'''E:''' It would imitate, but maybe would it shed tears?

'''C:''' I don't know.

'''S:''' I think it's such a...

'''C:''' Because I don't know how much we evolved that as an... I mean, it's clearly a social response.

'''S:''' But it is an involuntary response.

'''B:''' It's hardwired, man.

'''C:''' It is involuntary, but it's... Yeah, and you're right. Like, I don't like the word hardwired, but it's involuntary and somewhat reflexive. But we could have evolved for it to be that way because of social cues, like laughing or smiling.

'''S:''' Mm-hmm. Yeah, but babies smile even if they're blind. Yeah, that's true. They don't have to see it.

'''C:''' Right, but I wonder how long, like when did we start doing that? And did it continue throughout our lineage because we started doing it evolutionarily?

'''S:''' Yeah, those are always interesting questions. I know one of the ways that we try to get at it is to say, what are the things that are universal to all human cultures? And then we assume that it's plausible, therefore, if every human culture does it, it's probably something that was present in our ancestors long before we divided up into different cultures.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's probably like there's something genetic. And then the question becomes like, why is it in us and not a chimp? Or like, when did that division happen? Or I don't know. It's fascinating.

'''S:''' Right. I stayed away from pets because pretty much anything pets do, you would believe. You know what I mean? Yeah. If I said whatever. If I said anything. And it's all true. It was really hard to find a negative. It was hard to find a definitive statement about an emotional ability that an animal doesn't have. You know what I mean? That's why crying was the only thing I could find to be the fiction.

'''C:''' And even with that, people will claim up and down that they've seen animals cry emotional tears, but there's no good scientific evidence to back it up.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's pretty clear, I think, that they don't. Yeah. They're anthropomorphizing. They're just over-interpreting reflexive tears or something else. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:36:14) ==

{{qow
|text = If you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, "Wow, I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong."
|qowAuthor = , American journalist
|author = {{w|Kathryn Schulz}}
|lived = 1974-present
|desc = American journalist and author
}}


'''E:''' If you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Katherine Schultz. She's a columnist with New Yorker magazine. She's also the author of the book, Being Wrong, Adventures in the Margin of Error.

'''C:''' Ooh, I want to read that.

'''E:''' Yes, and that line was the last line she delivered at a TED Talk back in 2017. That was the quote.

'''S:''' Yeah, I like it.

'''E:''' About being wrong. It's important.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

{{Outro664}}{{top}} 
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SGU Episode 968

2024-05-01T20:08:08Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

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|caption = Image taken on the Moon by Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2 (LEV-2) of robotic moon rover Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM. Credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency/Takara Tomy/Sony Group Corporation/Doshisha University <ref>[https://www.npr.org/2024/02/15/1231636892/japans-origins-of-the-moon NPR: Japan's space agency says it may now have clues about the origins of the moon]</ref>

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|cara =y
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|qowText = We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
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== Introduction; Japan's lunar probe; other lunar missions ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. ''(applause)'' Today is Thursday, January 25th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening, everyone.

'''S:''' How is everyone? Doing good.

'''C:''' Doing all right. A little jet lagged, but I'm here.

'''S:''' Didn't land on your head like that Japanese probe back here?

'''C:''' No. I had a safe landing back in LA. Thank goodness. So what happened with that thing? Yeah.

'''S:''' You know, it landed on its head.

'''E:''' And pictures don't lie.

'''S:''' Yeah, it was really interesting that they got a picture of it. Evan and I were just trying to figure out how that happened. But the probe itself apparently released the cameras to take pictures of the landing.

'''E:''' Yeah, as part of the greater mission, there were some other probes released, which I didn't know about. I hadn't read about those. Mm-hmm. Prior to this incident today in which this picture, which I think is now going to become a famous picture, I think, in space.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. History. Iconic.

'''E:''' Yeah, in a way. You know, not in a good way. Does that make it infamous? But, yeah, there were these autonomous probes released by the package that was sent down. And they were down there to kind of capture, you know, the moment that the lander was supposed to land. Yeah. That's kind of interesting. It's like sending the press down in a way to, okay, here it comes. Let's go see it, which is a great idea.

'''S:''' It is a great idea. And in fact, it should be incorporated even more, I think, into missions. I mean, it's like if we talked about previously the fact like the first Apollo mission that landed on the moon, Apollo 11. Taking picture of it or videotaping everything was an afterthought and they didn't do a good job of it. It wasn't really built into the mission. like we're going to do everything we can to get the best quality pictures and video of this historic event. They just weren't thinking about it.

'''E:''' Not prioritized.

'''B:''' They even wiped out some of the film to reuse it.

'''E:''' Yeah, they copied – oh, they erased the tapes. Oh my gosh.

'''S:''' Later missions, they got a clue and they started to figure it out. But this is a good idea. Just drop a camera, film the landing. And in this case with the Japanese spaceship, like it gives them really useful mission-critical information. It's upside down, you know.

'''E:''' Which is why they were having some issues.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Oh, I wonder what's going on here. Oh, here's your problem. Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, boy. I mean, that it survived and touched down in this way also is kind of remarkable.

'''S:''' It almost looks like a cartoon, you know, the way it's like on its head like that.

'''E:''' But it's quite the photo.

'''S:''' But again, it reminds us – again, we grew up in the Apollo era and it's like 50 years later. So to some extent, it seems like just landing on the moon isn't that big a deal. But it's hard. This is two missions now that have failed.

'''C:''' Did it completely fail?

'''S:''' I mean – Well, I don't know that you would call it a success landing on its head. Well, it depends.

'''C:''' I mean, but it's on the moon.

'''B:''' If they can get the solar – the photovoltaics working, I think they can get something accomplished. But I think that seems like it's up in the air.

'''S:''' The mission is compromised.

'''E:''' Yeah, and there's apparently no way to write. the fact that this machine is now standing on its wrong side. It has no compensation. There's no way to move it.

'''S:''' It has no way to turtle, like to flip over.

'''E:''' Right, it can't extend an arm and kind of push itself or anything else, apparently, from what I read.

'''C:''' I mean, it's still a pretty big deal. Only five, I just looked it up, there have only been five nations that have sent Amazing. Can you name them all? Mm-hmm.

'''B:''' Oh, wow. They couldn't get the solar cells to work, it says here. They decided to hibernate it for now. That doesn't look good.

'''E:''' Well, I don't know. Do they think that they'll be able to send something in the future to fix it?

'''S:''' But if you're going to send something, it's just make that thing the probe. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.

'''B:''' Probably be just as expensive.

'''E:''' But Carrie, you're saying the five countries. Let me guess. United States, Soviet Union or Russia, China, India, and now Japan. Yay.

'''C:''' Good job.

'''S:''' Yay.

'''B:''' Too bad we just can't send Superman. Hey, Superman, go up there and just flip that thing over, please. Thank you. Right. Yeah.

'''S:''' That's cheating.

'''E:''' We'll send General Zod instead.

'''B:''' Yeah. He destroys stuff on the moon. He doesn't fix it.

'''S:''' So if there were superheroes of any kind like that, like people who could just fly to the moon, would that be a plus or a negative for our space program, right? Would that like make us lazy and overly reliant on them? Yeah, would we need a space program? Or would it help?

'''B:''' I doubt they would want to be monopolized in that way. But I think in certain scenarios, you just have to build something that could sit there. You wouldn't need to really consider anything else. Like, here, drop this right here on Pluto. That would be great. That would be awesome. But then, of course, crime would spike while he's away or she's away.

'''C:''' But is it instant? How quickly does he or she get there?

'''S:''' Well, I mean, assuming the speed of light is still relevant, it'd take a while.

'''C:''' Did Superman ever go to the moon?

'''E:''' Oh, yeah.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''B:''' How long did it take him?

'''E:''' Wait. Did Superman go to the moon or did just the bad guys go to the moon?

'''B:''' Well, in the movies, they fought, didn't they?

'''C:''' How long did it take him?

'''B:''' The stupid third movie. Oh, my God. That was bad.

'''E:''' I mean, in the comic book, it seems like it's instantaneous, right?

'''C:''' It's a thing.

'''S:''' No. Speed of light. Although Superman in canon can go faster than the speed of light, but he doesn't do that often because it reverses time. You know how that works.

'''C:''' I love how the need to have scientific accuracy in something that is so ludicrous. Sarah, please.

'''S:''' Come on.

'''C:''' I mean, please.

'''S:''' Along similar lines, if we had people with mutants or with superpowers who could have really good healing, would that impede medicine or medical advances? Of course it would. We could really cure things if we actually have to.

'''B:''' Depends how ubiquitous it is.

'''S:''' Yeah, depends on how available they are.

'''E:''' It wouldn't strap them down and extract them.

'''C:''' Yeah, could we study their methods and mimic them or utilize, you know, could we learn from them?

'''S:''' Or if it's too advanced, it's indistinguishable from magic and we can't reverse engineer it.

'''B:''' Yeah, and superpowers, they could not – science could not figure out how the superheroes work and it's interesting. That was just – we don't know.

'''E:''' Yeah, and I think for story's sake, it's sometimes better to not know because when in stories, they try to tell – they do try to sometimes explain these things, midichlorians.

'''E:''' Midichlorians, yeah.

'''S:''' And it becomes a disaster, right?

'''E:''' I mean how bad is that?

'''S:''' It's very hard to do that. well enough that it's better than just having it being a mystery.

'''B:''' And hard science superheroes just would not work. It's just like they would just be boring.

'''S:''' I don't know about that. It would be really challenging. I'd love to see somebody try.

'''B:''' I would find it interesting, but it would not be nearly as spectacular as the magical abilities that we see now. But I agree. I would like to see somebody do it.

'''S:''' Like actually have to deal with things like inertia.

'''B:''' I don't think it would have broad appeal.

'''S:''' I don't know. I don't know about that. I mean if it's good storytelling, it's good storytelling. But like hard science fiction, the physics becomes another character, something else that you have to contend with. Right.

'''B:''' How much of that are you seeing these days? Not a lot. Not a lot of good hard sci-fi.

'''S:''' Because it takes a lot of work. I think it's just – Expanse. A lot of – Expanse was pretty good. Yeah. And it was great.

'''B:''' Even they had their gimmies.

'''S:''' They needed a few gimmies. Well, sure.

'''E:''' Even the Martian had its gimmies.

'''B:''' Not too many though.

'''E:''' They never solved the space radiation thing. They never – I don't think they went into that.

'''C:''' Well, in the dust storm.

'''E:''' Unless they did in the book. I did not read the book.

'''C:''' Wasn't the whole thing about the Martian, the dust storm, like not reasonable?

'''E:''' No, the ship itself.

'''C:''' Oh. I just mean like there were still gimmies.

'''B:''' The biggest gimme with the Martian was the wind knocking down the damn ship. That's what I'm trying to say.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's the storm.

'''S:''' Like that just didn't happen that way. He admitted that. He's like, you just needed to wait for that to happen.

'''C:''' He's like, it's a device.

'''B:''' That's fine. That's fine. Yeah. If I remember, the RTGs were also like they had to be buried. It had to be buried and far away. It's like, no, they're not dangerous like that. You could be closer to one. You don't have to bury it to be safe. Speaking of, that's for the end of the show.

{{anchor|swindlers}} 
== Swindler's List: Deepfake Robot Call (8:37) ==
{{shownotes 
|weblink = https://www.wired.com/story/biden-robocall-deepfake-danger/
|article_title = The Biden Deepfake Robocall Is Only the Beginning
|publication = WIRED.com
|note =not 
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Jay, you're going to start us off with a swindler's list.

'''E:''' So on Sunday, the 21st of January, a robocall went out to an unknown number of voters in New Hampshire, right? This was last week. The recorded message was from Joe Biden, and he told them not to vote in the primary. The truth is what? That this was not a recording of Joe Biden. It was an AI deepfake. So take a listen. So somebody created this and sent this out to a bunch of voters.

'''B:''' It's important that you save your vote for the November election. Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again. Sounded legit.

'''E:''' Yeah, that wasn't it in its entirety. But basically, you know, people got these phone calls. I don't think that they know how many people responded in the way that the phone call wanted them to. But over a dozen people called in complaining about it. Yeah. That's an interesting story. So there's an investigation by the New Hampshire attorney general's office and they're trying to find out who created the robocall. Attorney General John Formella said that the call falsely appeared to be coming from Kathy Sullivan, who is a former state Democratic Party chair that's involved in a super PAC supporting Biden. That's a pretty interesting little cranny to this thing because they had to get her phone number. They had to be able to spoof where the number was coming from. Now, of course, the real issue here is that generative AI technology, it's improving. It's accessible. And right now, I could very easily make that phone call myself. As far as all the phone manipulation that they did, I'm sure with some internet research I could figure out how to do that too. So basically anybody can do this. Make fake political messages and very soon believable fake video. That is literally coming in the near future. Everyone is going to be able to make video as well. So experts are warning us that there's going to be an unprecedented election disinformation here in the United States in 2024 due to the AI deepfake technology. This has been happening with elections worldwide. It's not something that's only happening in the United States, of course. The White House and Biden's campaign manager confirmed that the call was fake. So Joe Biden absolutely did not record that. The pathetic thing is despite the fact that both the Democrats and Republicans here in the United States, both parties are saying that they want to create regulations around AI. Nothing has happened yet, which is to be expected, especially with the deadlock that the US government is in right now.

'''E:''' Yeah, tend to be reactive.

'''E:''' Yeah. So you guys, we all think, yes, we have a problem with disinformation today. But in a few years, it's going to be an absolute nightmare. This is going to be happening all the time. You're never going to be able to trust anything you hear, anything you see. I'm not even sure how we're going to vet whether something is true or not.

'''E:''' We need to run it through other filters. that will detect whether it's AI or not, right?

'''E:''' You have to – Sure, but who's going to do that and on what level would that be done?

'''B:''' That's an arm race that just like. really it's just going to go back and forth, back and forth. There's no like, oh, yeah, we solved that. You'll never be able to always detect it.

'''E:''' Yeah, we're chasing a tail on that. It's a back and forth arms race.

'''E:''' Well, but something has to happen. I mean if you just let it run wild without going in check at least, I think that would be worse.

'''S:''' That would be worse. I agree. I'd do something.

'''E:''' Yeah, you could penalize people heavily on it, but then, you know...

'''E:''' Yeah, we need more tighter laws on this stuff.

'''E:''' You'll have AI available. that's outside of the country.

'''S:''' So, Jay, you said that they're investigating that, but did they say in the article whether or not that was actually illegal? Did the people who put out that robocall break any law that they could use?

'''C:''' Well, that's election tampering, telling somebody not to write something onto a ballot. I would think that would be election tampering.

'''E:''' And unauthorized use of a Yeah.

'''E:''' I mean there's definitely some laws broken. I'm not exactly sure and it depends on the state as well.

'''C:''' Yeah, there might actually be federal things going on there too because they might have crossed state lines to do it.

'''B:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''E:''' I wouldn't be surprised.

'''S:''' But if a foreign country did that, what option do we have? Not much. Huh.

'''C:''' That's like cyber warfare. Yeah.

'''S:''' Also, even if it gets debunked, the damage is done.

'''C:''' Yeah, you can't put the genie back.

'''S:''' You move the needle by one, two percent in the U.S. and that could be an election.

'''E:''' We will be having conversations where we say this was fake and all these people believed it and they will never not believe it.

'''C:''' Well, and even if they don't believe it, there is that it's prejudicial. Like, so even, you know, it's like, it's like Trump right now during his hearings, every time he like speaks out and they're like having to, I don't know what the penalty is, but he's like constantly being reprimanded by the judge. because if you just say stuff, then they have to tell the jurors, okay, that's stricken from the record. Pretend you didn't hear that. That's really hard to do. Like you can't just unhear something. And I think that we don't. our criminal justice system, you know, obviously is a good example of why that. it would be really actually really interesting to see if any sociologists have studied this phenomenon, like looking at court cases where things that were prejudicial were said and then stricken and then seeing how it affected the jurors decision making. So I can almost guarantee that you can't you can't unhear things.

'''B:''' How do you even study that?

'''S:''' I'm sure you could come with a psychological paradigm to study that.

'''C:''' For sure. Yeah. You could either induce it where you're right, like experimentally, or you could probably study it. You could look at court cases after the fact and compare ones where that happened to ones where it didn't. But yeah, that'd be interesting. I don't know. Yep.

'''S:''' Brave new world. It's rough.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 
=== Oxygen Bottleneck (14:42) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.iflscience.com/the-oxygen-bottleneck-astronomers-find-huge-new-problem-for-alien-civilizations-72460
|article_title = The Oxygen Bottleneck: Astronomers Find Huge New Problem For Alien Civilizations
|publication = IFL Science
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Bob, tell us about the oxygen bottleneck. What is that? Wait, what? Okay, sure. Yeah.

'''C:''' Who, me?

'''B:''' Yeah, researchers conclude recently that technological civilizations might need a high but narrow range of oxygen levels in their atmospheres in order to have their own industrial revolutions and develop technologies that we can detect. This was really interesting. The paper was recently published in the journal Nature Astronomy and is called The Oxygen Bottleneck for Technospheres. So yes, in the unending series of news items covering why intelligent life in the universe is either more likely than we thought or less likely than we thought, here's another one for the less likely side of the coin. And I love the name that they came up for it, Oxygen Bottleneck. It sounds like an episode of the Big Bang Theory, doesn't it? So their argument really boils down essentially to one thing, fire. Have you ever thought – here's a thought experiment. Have you ever thought of a completely water-based intelligent alien community completely underwater all the time?

'''S:''' Yes, I've thought about that. Yes.

'''B:''' Yes, we have. We have specifically talked to you. How limiting would a lack of fire be to their technological development, right? So according to these scientists, this idea applies even to land-based extraterrestrials if they're on a planet without the right amount of atmospheric oxygen. Now, fire, of course, was critical in so many ways. We know this. To keep warm and inhospitable environments, for cooking and getting our bodies and brains more calories. It may have even led to larger brains, right? Cooking and all the extra calories it provided. We use it to control our environment and hunt. But the most critical application of fire was probably as an energy source, right? Metallurgy. Fire, as they say, evolved into more sophisticated uses such as metal smelting, melding, and tool fabrication. Finally, it provided both the energy source and the fuel, for example, charcoal, that initiated the Industrial Revolution and led the great acceleration in…. And the Anthropocene, which of course is our current technological or geological age in which humans – I mean if you could describe the Anthropocene, that's basically the age where humans are the shit, right? We are like – we are it. We are affecting and impacting the world more than basically anything else. So that's why they call it the Anthropocene. So it's an interesting thought though, trying to imagine an industrial revolution without fire. It's – you got to get really creative to make – to really make that happen and actually be interesting in a story. For that fire to happen though, you need more than you might think in the atmosphere but not too much. So too little, like if it's below 18% and it starts getting very, very hard to burn wood or other plant material. But if it gets over 35% oxygen, then you'd never evolve forests or of trees or similar alien plants because they just burn down at the drop of the hat. The authors conclude that the sweet spot for oxygen in the atmosphere is just above 20 percent. And shocker, guess what the earth has? It's like 21 percent. And, of course, it's gone up and down. It actually was high. It was up to 35 percent for a while. It didn't last terribly long. But, I mean, for the life of the human evolution, of course, it's been right around where it is now. And it never got over 35. If it did, we could have been in trouble in terms of having like trees and stuff like that. So co-author Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester. He said, imagine a young and intelligent species on an alien world with an atmosphere that's just 1% oxygen. Those clever tool-using creatures would never get the chance to watch a tree burn after being hit by lightning and get the idea of using fire for their own purposes. They would never have the chance to learn how fire could be used to cook food or, most importantly, melt metals. The poverty of oxygen in their air would likely box these creatures in forever, limiting their development. It's sad. It's really – thinking about that, it's like, oh man, imagine never even realizing what you're missing out on. It reminds me of – we're talking about The Martian and you guys remember Hail Mary? That's such a good book. There were aliens in his book and Ware's book Hail Mary where – They were sound-based, so they never even knew about light in the universe. Everything was – all their knowledge and technology was based on sound. All right, not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea. And the authors looked at alternatives to fire, right? You can't – there's got to be alternatives, right? And yeah, they discuss in their paper focusing stellar light. to create energy that way, heat using geothermal energy and even using naturally occurring nuclear reactions, all interesting ideas. But then they list the obvious advantages of combustion, of biomass, and there's just so many of them. It's globally available. It's self-sustainable. It's portable. It's relatively easy to master and reproduce. So it's kind of hard to disagree with their conclusion that, I'll quote, combustion is the most accessible and versatile means to kickstart the rapid progress of a young civilization. So yeah, it seems pretty... Pretty critical for any civilization if you really wanted, as they say, kickstart your progress. But then the last paragraph of their conclusion, they diverge a little bit. They start examining the implications of the oxygen bottleneck for the search for extra – for evidence of technology on exoplanets. There are some interesting ramifications. It probably would make sense to prioritize exoplanets that are above the combustion threshold. If we're trying to evaluate, say, these technosignatures, maybe we would have to assess the credibility of these possible technosignatures through this lens of an oxygen bottleneck. If they had oxygen in their atmosphere but it was 5% and you're finding technosignatures Maybe you lower the odds a little bit that these technosignatures are really what they appear to be. Interestingly, this could also help us theoretically. You're familiar with the Drake equation, right? It tries to estimate how many of these detectable technospheres would arise in the universe. This could help inform that. If we determine that planetary evolution results in high oxygen levels, only in the rarest of rare cases, that could even give us insight into the Fermi paradox, right? asks, where are they, right? And the answer may be, well, there's not too many of them because not many planets actually produce enough oxygen to produce fire that you can then turn and leverage into a technology-based civilization. So of course, life always finds a way, right? I wouldn't be surprised if humanity has its own blind spots of possible technological development as well that we've never noticed. There could be unusual forms of life in worlds so alien out there that these technological avenues open up to them that a carbon-based oxygen-breathing life form would never consider because of our very nature. But then of course physics is physics even on – no matter what planet you're on. And I think – and we know a lot of physics obviously. So I think it would be hard for some of these avenues to be completely hidden from us forever, right? And it does seem likely that if you're not in that sweet spot of oxygen, it could be very tough and maybe it would take a very mature civilization much longer to develop – serious technology, like metal-based technology. It would take them quite a long time to get to that point. I mean imagine if we had no metal-based technology even for thousands of years from now until we really figured it out, figured out a way to use other sources of energy besides fire, ubiquitous fire.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's an interesting thought experiment. But I think you have to say it more as developing technology like our technology.

'''B:''' As we know it. Exactly. Exactly.

'''S:''' But yeah, the thing is – and I thought about this too. Like yeah, couldn't aquatic species like develop spacefaring technology let's say? But it all depends on. are there other pathways to developing advanced technology that don't involve metallurgy? Yeah.

'''B:''' Yeah, there's types of burning that don't need oxygen.

'''S:''' But I mean – Or maybe you could have just totally organic-based technology, right? Yeah, absolutely.

'''B:''' I thought about that and there are examples in the science fiction literature of that. The thing is though, that seems certainly possible to me, right? That certainly seems like an interesting possibility. But I think part of the point there, Steve, is that sure, that could happen. But it's much harder, much, much harder. It would take much more – time and development to get to that point potentially. Who knows?

'''S:''' But is it? Is it harder?

'''B:''' We don't know because we have an M of 1. But it seems – but man, it's definitely – it might not be much, much harder but I think you could agree that it's harder.

'''S:''' No, I don't agree. I actually don't agree. Steve – I think we don't know, Bob. We are so biased by our one pathway to technology. If we had a thousand civilizations that we could start doing statistics on, then we could make statements about that. Supercomputers. We have an N of one. I mean maybe it's easier to develop biological technology. Who knows?

'''B:''' I disagree. I mean so you're going to have – how long have we tamed fire? How many millennia have we tamed fire? So you're saying that they – Probably two million years. So they could have started on the pathway of biological technologies millennia ago instead of just taming fire?

'''S:''' I mean I'm not saying – Bob, we've been burning – we've been cooking food for two million years.

'''B:''' Oh, two million years. So you're saying they could have started on the pathway of biological technologies a million years ago. Do you see what I'm saying?

'''S:''' No, I don't. I don't see what you're saying.

'''C:''' Because, Bob, we don't know what their version of fire would be. Like, you're basically saying that fire became, like, the catalyst for all of these other things.

'''B:''' But we don't know what their catalyst— Well, on Earth it did. We've got one data point.

'''C:''' Exactly. So if it was an aquatic— world it was or an aquatic ecosystem and the intelligent organisms were building organic. i don't know structures. you know organic technology. we don't know what their fire is. yeah like. what if they could harness? yeah what if they could like?

'''B:''' they may be harness gases and use the gases for something Or they may be able to use their own biology to extrude these biological constructs to do weird things. I mean sure, right. When you consider that, they could potentially take advantage of some sort of biological technology depending on their actual – They're weird biology that we just can't even imagine right now.

'''C:''' Or just what's on their planet. Like, you know, we're at a stage now where a lot of our very advanced technology requires all of these like minerals and metals that we have to like excavate from the planet. Like they're not things we can make. We have to find them.

'''B:''' Imagine being on a planet that's so metal poor that you're just like, oh boy, no natural resources. That's another discussion right there.

'''C:''' Yeah, that would be a huge bottleneck.

'''B:''' That would be horrible. Can you imagine?

'''S:''' Again, from our perspective, you're correct. This is the thing that we will never see, like statistics. What if you grew up in a planet that has a surface gravity of two? Do they never go into space? Because chemical rockets can't get you there. If they're metal poor, do they never develop technology because they have no pathway through metallurgy? Is there an oxygen bottleneck? Or are there so many different pathways that they always find a way?

'''C:''' But Steve, I do kind of agree with bob on that like when you said yeah again you know we don't know. he said metals but then immediately after that he did say imagine living on a planet that was poor in how did you word it bob mineral? no you said just natural resources. And if you think about it that way, that's a pretty broad statement. Whatever natural resources are necessary for their development, I don't see how you could have advanced technology on a planet where – Well, you got to have something.

'''S:''' Exactly. Saying lax resources is a really broad statement.

'''C:''' True. But that's probably the broadest bottleneck out there.

'''S:''' Yeah, sure. Resource bottleneck? Sure. I think I buy that in principle. But again, getting back to the oxygen bottleneck, that seems to me to be highly specific for one pathway to technology. And we just don't know if that is the easiest path or if it's just the one that we took because for us, that was the pathway of least resistance. If you have a planet on which you can easily combust stuff, sure, that's probably going to be your preferred pathway to technology, especially if you have a lot of – if it's metal-rich.

'''C:''' Yeah, and things combusted naturally. Like you said, Bob, like that was something we harnessed.

'''B:''' Right. You never saw lightning hit a tree and like, holy crap, look at that.

'''C:''' What is that? How do we use that?

'''B:''' Oh, my god. Could you imagine that day for humanity when that first time that happened?

'''E:''' Bob – Maybe they invented waterproof matches. You just don't know.

'''S:''' So I think I could believe that that's the case. I just don't think we can assume that it is because I could also believe, for example, that another species might – looking at people on Earth goes like, oh my god, they never developed this resin-based technology. How did that happen? Right, right. Oh, it's because they had this weird sweet spot where they could burn metals. That is so rare. Yeah, absolutely. So they never took this other obvious pathway to technology that most other civilizations do or whatever.

'''B:''' I think we won't know. We won't know any of that until – That's what I mean. Until we can simulate evolution. Just here's the laws of physics. Evolve and to see what life forms evolve in silico and see what happens.

'''E:''' We need more powerful computers.

'''C:''' What do you think will come first though? Do you think discovery or simulation?

'''B:''' Absolutely simulation.

'''S:''' Unless the encyclopedia Galactica is beaming down to us right now. We just don't know how to read it. You just have to find it and everything. That would be nice. Here's the history of the universe. Here's what the last 10,000 civilizations were like.

'''E:''' It's embedded in every neutrino.

'''B:''' That would be nice, but I think we're going to have to wait for simulation.

'''E:''' Probably.

=== NASA Opens Osiris Rex Canister (29:10) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.space.com/nasa-osiris-rex-asteroid-sample-canister-open
|article_title = NASA finally opens OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample canister after freeing stuck lid
|publication =Space.com
|redirect_title = 
}}

_rogue_mentions_apophis_{{link needed}}

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Bob. Jay, tell us about NASA finally opening the OSIRIS-REx canister.

'''E:''' Yeah, so a quick refresher, guys. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, we sent a rover to asteroid Bennu back in September 8, 2016. That's a long time ago at this point. So it arrived near the asteroid December 2018, and the samples were finally collected after a brief touchdown on October 20, 2020. So it was there for a couple of years. You know, sussing out the asteroid, you know, picking a place to land and everything. Now, this is important because this was the first U.S. return mission from an asteroid. The capsule containing the asteroid sample came back to Earth on September 24, 2023. You know, not that long ago. And we were all excited. And they said that they had 70.3 grams of rock and dust. And then they couldn't open it. So the problem was that two of the 35 fasteners that were on the probe that was sent back that had the samples in it, they were not releasing. And NASA tried using all these different pieces of equipment that they had to try to get it open. The confounding issue, though, was that they wanted to keep the sample inside the canister free from contamination. Of course, because you don't want earth microbes to get in there and then you don't know what you're looking at. So the team at NASA's Johnson Space Center had to design and build some new tools to specifically help the effort to get the canister open. So the challenge was not just opening the fasteners, but doing so in a way that wouldn't compromise the scientific integrity of the samples. And that was their number one priority. And it took a long time. And they did it. So the new tools needed to be made from materials that were approved for curation and could function within this confined space that they had. They call it like a specialized glove box that they had it in. So this glove box was treated with a constant flow of nitrogen, which prevented Earth's atmosphere from contaminating the sample. And just as an example, you take a sample of air, especially close to the ground. I mean there is an incredible amount of debris in the air everywhere. There are molds and pollen and all sorts of stuff. So they don't want any of this stuff in there. Dander. Yeah, everything. We're in a constant sea of just junk floating in the air that we're breathing in. We live in a soup basically.

'''S:''' Bacteria clouds. Bacteria clouds.

'''E:''' So what they did was they created two tools that they needed new bits made from surgical non-magnetic stainless steel. And these tools were designed to fit into this glove box, remove the fasteners, and allow for the safe disassembly of the canister head. And they finally got it open on January 10th, 2024. So NASA intends to catalog all the Bennu samples later this year, and this catalog is going to be available globally, which is really cool. So they're going to allow scientists and other institutions – they can request samples for research, for display. These samples will probably be over the globe this year just from them sending stuff out, which is really cool. You might be able to see some of this in a museum. So Bennu itself is a carbon-rich asteroid and it's remained largely unchanged over the 4.5 billion years that it's been around. And studying the samples that we took from it could definitely provide us some cool insights into the formation and the evolution of all the celestial bodies that we have in the universe, you know. It enhances our understanding of the universe basically, which is great. As much as this type of thing, it's not going to really answer any big questions like where do we come from and all that, but it is going to answer some questions for us to help us have a clearer picture of what the universe is that we live in.

'''B:''' And the early solar system as well.

'''E:''' Exactly right, Bob. I forgot to mention that. The early solar system is a part of what we want to understand. So now there's another cool part to this whole thing and I had no idea about any of this. So did you guys know that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is still out there and it's heading to another asteroid? Did you guys know that?

'''E:''' I think I recall that.

'''E:''' The ship didn't land in the traditional sense. Like if you think of like a moon lander and it's coming down and they're slowly descending and then they finally rest on the planet and it's just sitting there. It did something called a touch and go. So the asteroid has low gravity. So the ship located a good landing spot, which took a long time. Ridiculous. It lightly touches down on the surface, like barely touches the surface of the asteroid. And then it blasts the surface of the asteroid with nitrogen gas. This kicks up all this dust and small rocks. And then as that all settles back down, they had their collection pan there waiting for stuff to fall into it. So then that seals up. The ship left the asteroid and then it shot back the canister back to Earth. Now, they renamed the ship because it's heading to an asteroid called Apophis.

'''S:''' Yeah, Apophis. Apophis.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. Infamous.

'''E:''' To have a close encounter with Earth in 2029.

'''E:''' I pronounced it correctly. Thank you. Thank you, Cara.

'''S:''' I appreciate that.

'''E:''' I have a one in five chance. I'm pronouncing this word correctly. So this asteroid has some close approaches to Earth and we've been wanting to study it and we want to know what it's made out of. And, you know, the more the more we know, the better. Right. It is a it does have a potential impact on the planet in the distant future. And the spacecraft now is renamed Osiris Apex, which is just so cool. Right. Like this ship is a new mission, new name.

'''E:''' That's right.

'''E:''' And it's got solar panels and, you know, it has, you know, just plenty of energy to continue going on. And, you know, I just think it's pretty cool. I would love one day, guys, if we were at a museum to be seeing a piece of that asteroid.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Yeah. I think we will someday.

'''E:''' Yeah. We got to smell the early universe.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Yeah. Yeah.

'''E:''' It smelled kind of like a barbecue.

=== Learning and Longevity (35:23) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://neurosciencenews.com/longevity-learning-25516/
|article_title = More Education, Longer Life: Global Study Reveals Link
|publication = nnn
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Cara, tell us about learning and longevity.

'''C:''' Yeah, this is a really interesting study that was just published in The Lancet Public Health called Effects of Education on Adult Mortality, a Global Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. And this was published by a collaboration between... the IHME, which is the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and CHAIN, which stands for the Center for Global Health Inequalities Research, and that is at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. So there's like a ton of authors on this study. And I just want to qualify at the beginning that this is one of those news items where, like, I'm going to tell you something we already knew. We just know it way better now. And that's really what's going on here. We always knew that education was associated with lowered all-cause mortality, meaning that of any reason, people stay alive longer. They don't die younger. If they are more educated, that there's a really obvious and it's been measured hundreds, actually thousands based on this study, thousands of times in the literature.

'''S:''' So Cara, what you're saying is that if people listen to the SGU, they will live longer.

'''C:''' Never studied that. We're talking – But we can extrapolate. We can extrapolate that from the data.

'''E:''' That's not unfair.

'''C:''' That's not unreasonable. Not unreasonable at all.

'''S:''' I'm going to go with that.

'''C:''' Yeah, we'll go with that. We'll go with that. News story over. Moving on. So yes. So basically we've known for a long time that education is correlated with reduction of the risk of death. What this study wanted to say is like, how much so? Like, let's look at a big analysis across, they started with like thousands of studies. They brought it down quite a bit by excluding a lot of, you know, just like poorly designed studies and repetition. But they still were looking at thousands of data points by the end of this. And they found some really interesting outcomes. So let's talk about them. Regardless of age, sex, race or ethnicity, marital status, income, occupation, employment status, we found that there's a large correlation between lowered mortality or reduction in the risk of death and education. On average, each additional year of education decreases the risk of death by 2%. But there are big kind of breaks in that. There are these sort of points in the education where we see a more significant change. So I want to go over that part first. Okay, and I have it highlighted.

'''B:''' I assume they factored for like the more education you have, the more disposable income you probably have, which also can – Yeah, you said income, right?

'''C:''' Yeah, income is a big part. Yeah, they controlled for income. They controlled – and the way that they described their controls is really interesting because this is a global study. So socioeconomic status or these kind of social variables, they're going to differ across different nations. So whereas in – there were two African nations that they looked at. They were actually controlling for things like wealth. In other nations, they were controlling for things like poverty or they were controlling for things like – whether or not somebody was actively employed. So it's not standardized across, but they did look at income across all individuals. And then they tried to make those comparisons clearly within the culture or the society where those people lived. Now, I do want to do another caveat here, because you brought that up, which is that this was heavily focused on And this is a bias. It's an intrinsic bias. But it's not because the researchers chose not to look at the studies that weren't out of this region. It's because those studies don't exist. But it's heavily biased on what they call the GBD. That's the global burden of disease quantification of wealthy nations. So most of these studies that have been published took place in like European, Americas, Australia, New Zealand. There are studies in other parts of the world that were included, but their numbers are significantly smaller. So the researchers do say in their discussion, we would love to see more data in significantly poorer countries. But again, That's not to say that the data don't point to the fact that this would be the same or even more of a significant change in those regions. So even in very, very rich nations where a lot of the people are educated, we see significant differences based on how educated they are after controlling for all those things I mentioned before. Yeah. So compared with no education, this is pulled straight from the from the results section of the paper compared with no education, completing six years of education. So what they're saying is across the world, that's roughly a primary school education. that's associated with a 13.1% reduction in mortality risk after controlling for age, sex and marital status. The reduction in mortality risk was 24.5% after 12 years of education. So that's approximately secondary school. And then we saw another significant break after 18 years of education. Now that's a lot of education. That would be like for our listeners here in the US, that would be elementary, middle, high school, and then at least two years of graduate school or more specialized training. I know that those things are called different things across the world. So that's quite a bit of education, 18 years. But that was associated with a 34.3% reduction in mortality risk. So on average, it was about 2% per year of education, but we did see these kind of breaks in the data. Here's something really interesting. The health benefits of education are comparable to massive lifestyle factors. So the researchers actually compared lifestyle factors, and I want to kind of just tell you a couple of them because they are pretty mind-boggling.

'''B:''' So Steve could like smoke and drink his face off and he'd be fine?

'''C:''' Well, no.

'''B:''' It would balance out.

'''C:''' It might balance out. Steve's even better because he doesn't do those things. So they found that, for example, 18 years of education. So remember, that's significant. That's the one that I mentioned is, you know, we're into graduate school by that point can be compared to that of eating a healthy and recommended like dose of vegetables every day as opposed to not eating vegetables at all.

'''S:''' Wow, that's big.

'''C:''' Yeah. So if somebody with no education is more like somebody who doesn't eat any vegetables, somebody with 18 years is more like somebody who eats vegetables every day. Here's another one. Not going to school at all, so no education, is as bad for you as drinking five or more alcoholic drinks a day or smoking a half a pack a day for 10 years. That's the comparable effect or I should say protective effect that education has. Here's something else that's kind of interesting. We do see a more significant protective effect in young people as expected. But even in older people, we see a big change. Over 50 and even over 70, we see a big change. So it's still protective for mortality at that level. And so, of course, the authors of this study, you know, the big takeaway that they say is This needs to be a massive area of economic development across the globe. You know, we often talk about preventive strategies and policy decisions for lowering mortality, right, for keeping people healthy and for, you know, increasing their longevity. But we don't often think about the fact that education in and of itself does that. And if we talk about why it does that, like do you guys have some ideas why people who are more educated live longer?

'''S:''' I mean is this a reverse Darwin effect that we're seeing? I mean more educated people are less likely to do stupid, risky things? I mean one idea – I mean to me obviously there could be confounding factors galore. But it sounds like they controlled for most of the obvious ones. Yeah.

'''C:''' And of course, they saw that those factors are deeply implicated, right? But you're right, that the effect still exists on top of that, but they are attenuated deeply. So if you think about it, you're right. People with a lower education are probably going to make more money. Right. Right. You're going to be able to make more informed decisions about your health care. They also mentioned that people who are highly educated, usually they just have more coping mechanisms. They have more psychological resources. They have more social circles. And we know that those things are also implicated in longevity.

'''B:''' A lot less pseudoscience.

'''C:''' A lot less pseudoscience, probably more educated people, especially I would argue educated women are going to be more informed about their reproductive health. And they're going to be able to make decisions, hopefully, that prevent a lot of in 50% of the population. We know that a lot of reasons that that women die young have to do with reproduction. And so I think across the board, more education, it just affects people's lives in the positive on almost every factor that you could measure.

'''S:''' Yeah, and I could tell you, and I know there's data on this, but also anecdotally as a physician, that better educated patients just interact a lot better with the healthcare system. Completely. Yeah, and in all sorts of subtle ways. It's almost like it's hard to quantify, but it's like they're just more compliant. Again, they make better decisions. They do so many things that is better for them in terms of their healthcare system.

'''C:''' Just understanding, really understanding what's going on because it's very hard. We've all done things in our lives where we make decisions and we have behaviors based on reason and logic. And then we've all been in situations where we've made decisions and we've changed our behaviors based on – sort of like just following the rules, right? I was told that this is how I have to do it. I have to do it. We've all been in situations like that. In an airplane, for example, you have to do things a certain way. You're like, this is stupid and antiquated. And if it were up to me, I would do it this other way. But I have to just follow the rules. And I think That's a good example of what you're talking about, Steve. For people who are less educated and don't understand, you know, why if I do X, is Y going to be the result? They're just going to do it because they were told to do it. But that means that if there's a slight shift, they're not going to be able to modulate around that shift. It's going to be more black and white thinking, more concrete thinking. And obviously, education leads to more flexible thinking. It leads to better cognitive flexibility. Yeah. But I think it also leads to more self-advocacy. It leads to a sense of agency. for education for a number of sort of social and civil reasons. But we should also be talking about it from a pure, like, global health burden perspective. Education saves lives. And I don't think we make that connection as often as we probably should. Yeah.

'''S:''' I mean, it's better for people individually and for society in so many ways. Oh, absolutely. Education is just a boon to any society. Yep. It is probably the best single investment that any society can make in its own people. Agree. Agree.

=== DNA Directed Assembly (48:00) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theness.com/neurologicablog/dna-directed-assembly-of-nanomaterials/
|article_title = DNA Directed Assembly of Nanomaterials
|publication = nn
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, what do you guys know about DNA-directed assembly?

'''E:''' Assembly of what? Like nanomachines?

'''S:''' So, Cara, this is in your favorite discipline of material science. Material science.

'''C:''' Oh, that kind of assembly. Okay.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' I was like, all assembly in your body is DNA-directed.

'''S:''' This is using DNA for the assembly of inorganic materials. which has actually been going on for about 10 years. This is something that we were actively using in industry. But there's a recent paper looking at ways to make this DNA-directed assembly programmable and more powerful. So... This is something I had very little awareness of the details of this, so I thought it was very interesting. So what the researchers did is they essentially used the DNA-directed assembly. This is basically a form of self-assembly, and the idea here is that we're trying to build things at the nanoscale. We've talked about the fact before that this is the new age of material. science is manipulating the structure of materials at the nanoscale. That's awesome. Yeah, this is how you get to metamaterials, which have interesting properties. Properties, again, they go beyond the properties of the stuff itself, but properties that derive from the nanoscale structure. but also just the ability to create combinations of materials at the nanoscale that could have programmable properties. Like if we say, oh, we need this to be more conducting or more insulating or respond to a magnetic field or not or whatever, stronger, harder, more ductile. The basic process is that you build a scaffold or some kind of structure. They make an analogy like this is like the frame of the house, right? And then, of course, you install things in the frame for whatever specific properties you want. And that is where the DNA-directed self-assembly comes in. And they could work with all kinds of materials for this, both metals, metal oxides, and other specific alloys or metal oxides. I say like platinum, aluminum, doped zinc oxide, like that kind of stuff. They can get really, really specific. Then they do one of two things. They either did a gas infusion or a liquid infusion. And they're exactly what they sound like. With the gas infusion, you basically use whatever element you want to infuse into that framework in a gas phase. And that can penetrate deeply into the structure. Like, oh, I want to put aluminum atoms deep within the structure. You could basically make a gas phase of whatever element. and it assembles inside the nanostructure. Then the liquid phase is another way to do this, but that tends to deposit things more on the outside. So by using a combination of those two, you could then get to this three-dimensional programmable structure embedded with whatever other elements you need in order to create the properties that are desirable. The goal here is also – so again, these kinds of things are being used but they're trying to like put it all together in this study to show that how much control you actually can have, right? You can create these 3D nanostructured inter-organic materials that have programmable properties. But also they're trying to refine the procedure so that it can scale, right? Because if you can't do this on an industrial scale, then it may be great for making specific one-off things for NASA, you know, that they're going to send into space. But it's not going to be sitting on your desktop, right? It's not going to be the kind of thing that's going to be like a computer chip in every device or every computer, right? but if you can get to the point where this is a scalable industrial process, and it also means it has to be cheap, right? It's got to be inexpensive and, and scalable. Then this is change the world. Yeah. Then that will change the world, right? Then, then, you know, we could mass produce these things. So this is really what we need to do in order to be able to take a lot of our technologies to the next level, right? Because it, You know, there's only so many alloys. I mean, there's a lot of alloys. But, you know, and we are still discovering new alloys. But the thing is, like, there's only so many elements. Like, you can't – like, discovering a new element is not going to get us in it because we've discovered them all. The only ones that, you know, at the high end of the periodic table are just very large and unstable. We're not going to be building stuff out of them.

'''B:''' Well, probably not.

'''S:''' Yeah, Bob, probably not.

'''B:''' Islands of stability, you know, I'm not ruling that out.

'''S:''' They're just relative stability. You're not going to build stuff out of it. It's like, ooh, it survived for 20 nanoseconds instead of only one nanosecond.

'''B:''' We don't know. It could be more dramatic than that. But, yeah, I mean, it's not likely.

'''S:''' Yeah, milliseconds.

'''B:''' I'm holding out. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, I'm not holding out any hope. You know, yeah, sure, alloys, sure. We do have these super alloys that, you know, like have extreme heat resistance. So there's still, I think, some advances to be made there. But mostly, I think, going to the next level of super materials is going to involve the nanostructure, right? That is where those super properties are going to come from. And really, we're just getting started with that whole line of technology there. And this kind of thing – so self-assembly is like one of those key concepts because at the nanoscale, like there's only so much you can do to place individual atoms where you need them to go. You know what I mean? Like that's not how we're going to be doing things. You need to create – the manufacturing method has to have some kind of self-assembly in there. Things have to put themselves together. And we just need to figure out how to direct that self-assembly. and that's where the DNA comes in. You're using DNA because DNA is programmable when you think about it, right? We can build DNA with pretty much any structure that we need. And then – so that becomes like the template that directs the self-assembly of the materials that we need. So the whole concept is very, very cool. And this may not be the precise methods that will ultimately be used in mass production, but I think we're getting pretty close. And again, some of these technologies are already in use, like they're already being used. Uh, but this is just taking it to the next level. So I think this is, you know, we're going to be seeing a lot more of this in the future. And this could be like the next, you know, real revolution in material science. That's going to be like one day be like, Oh my God, everything is made of this stuff. You know what I mean? It's like plastic was, you know, whatever, 50 years, 60 years ago, just in the good way. There's always a bad way too. But I mean like in the good way that plastic was a revolution, you know what I mean? Like the ability, it still is.

'''E:''' Right.

'''E:''' I mean it's an incredible material.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' We just – World-changing. Yeah. We're just – we're not handling the production of it well.

'''C:''' We're not handling like – So revolutionary that we took it for granted.

'''S:''' Yeah. It was too successful.

'''C:''' We deeply took it for granted.

'''S:''' It was too successful so that we don't know what to do with all the stuff that we're making. It's so cheap to make. It has so many desirable properties. It's going to be the same thing. We also talk about carbon nanofibers, carbon nanotubes, et cetera. Same thing, although we're still trying to figure out how to mass produce those with the right properties, et cetera. But I think the future technology is going to largely be made of metamaterials that are self-assembled at the nanoscale using these kinds of techniques.

'''B:''' Yeah, we could see some real dramatic stuff with metamaterials. We're just scratching the surface with that as well.

'''E:''' Cloak of invisibility.

'''S:''' Yeah, whenever you read anything like that, like about tiny, tiny lenses or invisibility cloaks, whatever, even though that's hype, the way that's sold. That's all metamaterials. Yeah, absolutely.

{{anchor|news5}}
=== Bleach Peddler Going to Prison (55:57) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/antivaxxer-roger-blake-jailed-for-selling-bleach-as-covid19-cure-in-new-zealand/news-story/32405deb14c35f03af336903abae19e1
|article_title = Anti-vaxxer Roger Blake jailed for selling bleach as Covid-19 cure in New Zealand
|publication =News.com.au
|redirect_title =
}}

'''S:''' All right, Evan, tell us about this bleach peddler.

'''E:''' The bleach peddler.

'''S:''' The bleach peddler.

'''E:''' Well, I'll start with a saying, because there's an old saying in the world of board games. Go to jail, go directly to jail. Perhaps you're familiar with that one. Sometimes life can be like a board game.

'''S:''' Do not pass go.

'''E:''' That's right. And do not collect $200. And sometimes life can be like a board game, especially when you choose in the real world to sell fake and dangerous COVID cures to people. Go to jail. And that's what happened just this past week in New Zealand. Yep, we're talking about the worldwide scam that, I don't know, seems to know no boundaries. Miracle Mineral Solution, MMS. That's crazy. Boy, this thing just comes up all the time.

'''C:''' Which is literally just bleach, right?

'''S:''' It's industrial bleach.

'''E:''' It's bleach. But the people at MMS want you to buy their bleach and drink it so you can do away with your COVID. And before, COVID was kind of the thing it is now. They wanted you to drink it to get rid of malaria or cure your HIV, right? Common colds, autism, and of course, cancer, among many other things that they said it would help you with. Right. So, MMS, Miracle Mineral Solution, it's sodium chloride, and the end user combines it with hydrochloric acid or citric acid, and that creates chlorine dioxide. Now, chlorine dioxide, that's not just your run-of-the-mill, over-the-counter, regular Clorox bleach. Nope, it's used for industrial-grade purposes, sterilizing machinery and industrial surfaces, among other things. Now, this latest news concerning this poison is that a fellow in New Zealand has been found guilty. He was brought up on 29 charges, 29 charges, most of which were counts of what they're calling breach of the Medicines Act in New Zealand. And a few other counts, obstruction of ministry officials and making false statements. But 29 charges in all, this person has been found guilty. And the other day, the sentence was handed down. Now he's going to jail. Actually, he's been in custody for about 20 years. Four weeks, but his sentence is now official.

'''S:''' Evan, I have to be pedantic because you left the door open for me to be so. He's going to prison. I'm assuming he already was in jail.

'''E:''' He's being held.

'''S:''' Jail is where you are held before you are sentenced. But once you're sentenced, you go to prison.

'''E:''' I use them interchangeably.

'''S:''' A lot of people use those two words interchangeably, but they're different.

'''E:''' Yeah, they mean different things. You get the idea.

'''S:''' As I said, I'm being pedantic just to be pedantic.

'''C:''' Can you not have a jail? Is there ever a jail sentence? Held in jail, sentenced to prison. I mean, I know what you mean, and that does happen all the time, but I think people can get jail time.

'''S:''' I just think people are using that term loosely. Right. Yeah, if you are convicted, you are sent to prison.

'''E:''' Well, thanks for heading off the 100 emails we were about to get on that, Steve.

'''S:''' That's part of the reason.

'''E:''' I totally get what you're doing there. Absolutely. All right. So who is this person? His name is Roger Blake. And he is to New Zealand what Mark Grennan is to the United States. Now, you recall back in 2022, Mark Grennan, along with his two sons, were found guilty of crimes and imprisoned for selling MMS bleach to their victims. Mark Grennan was sentenced to 13 years. In prison for his actions. The sons each got five-year sentences. But you know how Mark Grennan tried to defend himself in court as I was reading up on this? He defended himself, First Amendment, freedom of religion. That was his defense. So, no, not even here in the United States where freedom to practice religion exists. That is not a legal shield against fraud and injuring others. So, yes, we have freedom of religion, but not to that extent, thank goodness. Roger Blake, so he's got his own thing going on. He's been in the bleach-selling racket for quite a while, and he's been previously warned from New Zealand Ministry of Health officials about promoting this product as far back as 2009. And at that time, he was claiming it was a cure for cancer. And since then, he had suffered warnings again no less than five more times over the next 10 years. Now, if that's a lot of good, all those warnings did because it really didn't deter him. But he was very sneaky and sort of cunning about selling his products. The website that he used to peddle this stuff is not based in New Zealand. So there was limited jurisdiction as to what could really be done to him. Plus, he was combining the sale of the MMS bleach with the selling of other products having to do with actual water purification, legitimate products. So he used that kind of as a means to cloak his quackery under an umbrella of legitimacy. And that, you know, kind of obfuscated things. It was not the easiest thing to directly uncover. But who owned the website? overseas? Yep, Mark Grennan himself. And he was hosting that site out of the Dominican Republic. So, you know, kind of these jurisdictional issues at play here. Do you know what that reminds me of? Wow.

'''C:''' That reminds me of when Trump was like, can't you just like shine a UV light inside of your body?

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh.

'''B:''' He mentioned bleach.

'''S:''' He did mention bleach. He did.

'''E:''' He mentioned bleach, you're right. He did. Oh, boy. I mean, thank goodness he didn't really go much further.

'''S:''' And you could see like the medical expert behind him was like doing a face palm. Oh, my gosh.

'''E:''' He also said, I don't always hear what people want it for. And then when people place an order, I don't know what they are using it for. But I would say 5% of them use it for autism curing. But most of it's cancer. I personally know people who have gotten rid of their cancer within a few weeks, all without those horrible side effects that you get from the mainstream options. We've had people who have cured their cancer for under $20. Isn't that great? Wow. Yeah, there's no evidence whatsoever, by the way. I think we officially have to say this, that MMS or chlorine dioxide works against pathogens or toxins in the body when consumed. In fact, they say ingesting these products can cause dangerous and potentially life-threatening side effects, such as acute liver failure, among other things.

'''B:''' I mean, do they have a body count? I mean, you're telling people to drink bleach and they're doing it. I mean, there's got to be some body count, right?

'''C:''' Yeah, there must be people who died from that.

'''E:''' So in the article, they're saying that there are not – they cannot trace back a death or a significant injury that anybody has put in or claimed was a result of having consumed his product. You mean in New Zealand? Between December of 2019 and March of 2020, which was, you know, like peak COVID hysteria. And the authorities basically said, that's enough. We're going after you now. And we're going to take you to the mat. It took a while. They did it. He had his trial. They found him guilty. 29 counts against him. However, 10.5 months in jail. That is the sentence.

'''C:''' Oh, then you know what? Paltry. We also don't know how like obviously New Zealand's justice system works, but I just looked it up to be even more pedantic, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' It's jail if the sentence is less than a year.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. Is that right? Yeah.

'''C:''' So you go to jail to await, obviously, your trials or your bail hearings. But if you're convicted, if your sentence is less than a year, you spend it in jail. Anything over a year, you spend in prison here in the U.S., That makes sense.

'''S:''' Because jail is short term.

'''C:''' It's short term. And it's minimum security. It's a completely different thing. It's like a sheriff holding you. It's run by the local jurisdiction as opposed to the state or the federal. But who knows? In New Zealand it might be completely different.

'''E:''' So some comeuppance, I suppose. I don't, you know, who knows? He'll be back down the street next year doing this again. I'm afraid.

'''C:''' That's the hard thing when like charlatans are operating rogue outside of a regulated position. Like, you know, we hear these horror stories about actual licensed physicians doing terrible things, but at least we can revoke their licenses. Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' That has teeth.

'''C:''' Yeah. But like when somebody is doing something that they don't need a license to do it, you're right. They can always just keep doing it a different way, which is so scary. Yeah.

'''S:''' And I think that, you know, the powers that be underestimate how sociopathic these people are, you know?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' I mean, do they really have to wait until somebody actually dies that they can pin that crime onto this person?

'''S:''' Unfortunately, that often makes it easier.

'''C:''' But the good news is, I mean, there is precedent. People have died from this very solution in other countries.

'''E:''' Yes, they have.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Evan. Yep. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? (1:05:45) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 967
|answer = Balloon ribbon "saying" "Happy New Year!"
|}}


'''J:''' All right, guys. Last week I played This Noisy. Any idea, guys?

'''E:''' That sounded like C-3PO when he got shot on Cloud City in Bespin, when Chewbacca was putting him back together in his head.

'''S:''' Yeah, sort of.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah, a little bit of that.

'''E:''' A little bit. I know that's not what it is, but that's what it reminded me of.

'''C:''' They were saying actual words, whatever it was, right?

'''J:''' Maybe, maybe. Let's see what the listeners think. So a listener named Frederick Neah. He gave me the pronunciation of his name and I can't pronounce it. N-A-Y dash A-W-H. A-W-H. Neah.

'''E:''' Neah.

'''J:''' All right, Frederick Neah. He said, hello. Oh, my birds, I have not heard that noise in ages. This is a slowed down, degraded, pull-to-speak doll from the late 80s and early 90s. And then he goes on, I will even wager that this is specifically from the 1990 blue Bart Simpson pull-to-speak doll.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' So I remember these weird dolls where you pull on a string and then the string goes back up into the doll. And as it does it, something is spinning in there. that's making some talking noise. And this is a very good guess. I've heard it. I know exactly what you're talking about. But this is not correct.

'''E:''' Remember the Barbie doll? Like math is hard or something. I don't know if that's exactly what it was, but oh my gosh.

'''C:''' Horrible. Absolutely horrible.

'''J:''' Jim Kelly wrote in and said, Hi, Jay. My guess on this week's Who's That Noisy? is that this is a cockatiel. It's possible that this is the cockatiel that was affectionately known as Rosedale who lived in the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco during the 1960s. I'm not surprised that some people guessed birds. This is most definitely not a bird. But, you know, if you guessed bird every time, you'd be right a lot of the times because so many cool noisies come from birds. Another listener named Micah Swindles said, Hey, Jay, I think this week's noisy is someone tightening cable ties. Now, I consider this guess to be a close one, guys. Right? He's saying somebody's tightening cable ties, you know, like a zip tie.

'''S:''' Mm-hmm.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Damn, nice.

'''J:''' And I'm submitting this answer from Wainuiomata in New Zealand. Wainuiomata. Okay, I pronounced it right. Sounds good. Everybody's giving me pronunciations now. Yes, it's my weakness.

'''B:''' Don't mangle my name.

'''J:''' I have a winner. I will tell you before I give you the answer, I'll tell you that I have never heard of or seen this thing before. It's one of the reasons why I picked it. A listener named Shane Hillier wrote in and said, It's a balloon ribbon that's been given Ridges... As to produce the sound, happy new year. When one places the ribbon between their forefinger and thumbnail with some pressure and pulls lengthwise down the ribbon, right? So it's like, imagine a zip tie and you're holding it in one hand and then you run your fingernail down the length of it as you pull it away, right? apparently you're supposed to do this next to a balloon because the balloon will actually reverberate the sound and make it a lot louder. but they're able to in the bumps and ridges on that piece of plastic when your fingernail rubs up against them it actually makes the sound. it makes a sound of like words. so here it is. it's saying happy new year and the person is using this the way i described. he's running his fingernail down along the length of this piece of plastic.

'''S:''' Oh, wow. And now you can hear it, right? That's like the audio pareidolia. Now that you know what it's supposed to say, your brain totally hears it. Mm-hmm.

'''J:''' Yeah, so I mean I've never – I don't know if any of you guys ever saw these. I never saw these. I never heard about these things. But it's pretty cool. I definitely would like to try one. I don't even know if you can get these anymore but it would be pretty cool to try it out. Anyway, so this noisy was sent in by a listener named Yer Eshel last week. That's cool. Thank you so much for sending that in. You showed me something brand new. I never even heard of those before. I have a new noisy for you guys this week, and this noisy is sent in by a listener named Victor Weinvelmayer.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (1:09:50) ===
["rat-a-tat" with a brief animal clucking sound]

{{wtnAnswer|969|what this week's Noisy is}}

== Announcements (1:10:20) ==

'''S:''' All right. GTA.

'''J:''' If you guys think GTA 5, if you guys think you know what this week's noisy is or you have heard something cool and you want me to consider playing it on the show, you got to email me at WTN at theskepticsguide.org. Steve, tickets have been flying off the shelves for our two shows. Yeah, this is really cool. So I think that we are far enough away from the pandemic where people are actually starting to go to shows again. Mm-hmm. yay uh taylor swift doesn't seem to have a ticket sale problem but is she coming to the show in dallas? so if you are interested in seeing the sgu when we're in dallas guys there are still tech tickets for the extravaganza which is our stage show. um that's like a improv comedy slash science-based uh show at last. uh it's. But, you know, about – it's over an hour and a half, hour and a half, a little more. And we will basically show you how you cannot trust your perception, right? Your brain is flawed and it fools you all the time and we will show you many ways how your brain can fool you.

'''B:''' If you're a geek, you'll love it.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's fun. It's just a – we're laughing the whole time. It's a great night. So you could go check that out. Unfortunately, the private show tickets are sold out big time. Those tickets like flew. I couldn't believe it. It was awesome because so many people there haven't seen us. We've never been. So I guess a lot of people have been waiting for us to come to Texas and that's what happens.

'''S:''' Plus the eclipse was very cooperative. Yeah. Well, yeah. There's going to be more people in time. It was like perfectly timed on a Monday, you know?

'''J:''' Yeah. So if you'd like to see us at the extravaganza, George Hobb is the host of that show. All five of the rogues will be there. And you can go to theskepticsguide.org and there's a button on there that you can press for the extravaganza and you can find out more and you can buy tickets. Evan, why don't you tell us about who will be appearing at the private show with us?

'''E:''' At the private show on Sunday, April 7th, we're going to have a very special guest. His name is Dustin Bates, and he's the lead singer of the group called Star Set. So for you Star Set fans out there, this is going to be your chance to say hello and meet Dustin Bates, lead singer. He's going to join us. He's going to be our special guest joining us for the recording of the episode. And he's an admirer of the SGU. He loves science. He loves technology. He loves future discussions and future talks, which I know is something we all love as well. And it's going to be a tremendous amount of fun to have Dustin Bates on the show.

'''J:''' Yeah, definitely looking forward to it. And again, unfortunately, that show is sold out. But if you have tickets, you will definitely get to meet and see Dustin. So a few things, guys. Yeah. It's the new year. We have a crazy year ahead of us, especially here in the United States. No matter what you believe, it's going to be a crazy year. But the one thing that stands firm during all these times is that critical thinking is incredibly important. It's something that everyone that listens to this show, I'm sure you have an understanding of what it is.

'''S:''' And it makes you live longer.

'''J:''' And apparently it gets a bit longer.

'''E:''' Science says so.

'''J:''' We take the work that we do here very seriously. We know that it's meaningful and that's why we've been doing this for 19 years. If you would like to show your support, which we could absolutely use. please consider becoming a patron of this show. You can go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide. We have different levels. You will gain access to our discord, which we have an unbelievable community of people there. A lot of the, a lot of people from our discord, you know, our Patreon group came to the not a con conference and lots of first time meetings and everything. And it was incredible. I am bragging when I say this, but, The SGU patrons are a wonderful group of people.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a really good community.

'''J:''' It is. We just got – I feel so lucky that we have so many good people in our community from all around the world. It's just a really, really cool group of people. And you could become a part of that group. Go to patreon.com. skepticsguide.com. If you want to show us some support, you could also join our mailing list every week on Monday or Tuesday. We send out a weekly email that tells you everything that we've done in the SGU universe the week before, right? So it's last week's show, any YouTube videos, any TikTok videos, any blogs, all the content that we've created. We outline it all there for you. So it's the previous week worth of content that, And all you got to do is go to theskepticsguide.org and sign up for this weekly newsletter. It's a lot of fun. We've been doing it now for, what, like six weeks now, Steve?

'''S:''' Yeah, something like that.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's going good. And you could also, one last thing, if you enjoy the show, you can give our show a rating on any podcast player app out there. You could look and see if you can give us a rating on how you feel or a comment. That would be wonderful. It'll help other people find the show. Thanks, guys.

{{anchor|followup}}
{{anchor|email}} 
== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:15:04) ==
=== Follow-up #1: Nuclear Batteries ===
{{shownotes email 
|text = 
|sender =
|location = 
|redirect_title = 
|}}

'''S:''' Thank you, Jay. One quick email. We had a few people follow up on my news item last week about the 50-year battery. You guys remember the beta voltaic using beta radioactive decay to directly generate electricity. And there's Chinese companies saying, yeah, we can make a battery using beta decay of nickel-63 into copper, and it'll last for 50 years. which is their way of saying it as a half-life of 101 years, which is not unreasonable. But yeah, we basically said the numbers don't add up, right? It just wouldn't create a lot of power. And don't expect this to be powering your phone anytime ever.

'''B:''' Hey, wasn't that my news item?

'''S:''' Was that yours? Oh, that was your news item, yeah. You blogged about it. I blogged about it, and then you talked about it on the show. Yeah, you're right about it. Yeah, so it was our news item.

'''B:''' Honk. Yeah.

'''S:''' But, Bob, this is one thing you didn't talk about, and that is how much do the isotopes cost?

'''B:''' And a few people— Yeah, I mean, I just said quite expensive, but yeah, based on the email and the details— But they're so small. They're even more expensive than I thought.

'''S:''' More expensive than—yeah, and I had read that too, but I thought, well, but if we just like deliberately mass-produce them, could that bring the cost down?

'''B:''' So right now— Or just use the waste products from the existing reactors. Yeah.

'''S:''' Apparently, though, even that's not going to work. So— So for example, if you're using nickel-63, that isotope for your beta decay source, apparently that would cost about $20,000 a gram. The battery for your phone is going to cost $100,000, an incredible amount of money, like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

'''E:''' Last 50 years.

'''S:''' And so, yeah, so one listener in particular, yeah, this was Dr. Garrett Bruhog gave us the most detailed information. And because this is apparently his area of expertise. So, yeah, you know, it's just crazy expensive. It would absolutely not work. And the thing is – so according to him – and I did back this up with my own research – is that there's two reasons why this – like you just can't use material from existing nuclear power plants to do this. One is that some of the isotopes you can't make in a commercial nuclear power plant. You would need a special one, which, of course, that would be pointless. Again, it would be so expensive. But here's the other thing, which I didn't know about, which he informed me of. The irradiation part aside, like just getting – purifying the isotope you need to irradiate in the nuclear power plant is massively expensive. Yes. And even if you used graphite, which is some nuclear power plants use graphite like the rods as a way of controlling the reaction, and that creates a lot of carbon-14, which can be used as a beta source. But the problem is it's a little bit of carbon-14 mixed in with other isotopes. So you'd have to enrich it. And the enriching process is massively expensive. So basically there is no pathway to not ridiculously expensive beta sources, right? So like this is never going to be a consumer product.

'''B:''' With fission.

'''S:''' With fission, yeah. He did say maybe in the future if we get fusion reactors. But I think even then it's the enriching that's going to be a limiting factor. So we would need to have some kind of breakthrough that will allow us to cheaply enrich these isotopes and then also cheaply irradiate them. It's like those two steps are both involved. Or you take irradiated stuff and you enrich the isotope. That's going to be the beta. Either way, you need to both irradiate it and enrich it. And both of those things, either by itself but certainly both together, makes this stuff in the tens of thousands of dollars per gram range, which means no. This is not going to be a battery source. I'm not going to be running your iPhone. Okay. Yeah. You know what that means.

'''B:''' Disappointing.

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:19:15) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
}}
{{SOFinfo
|theme = {{w|Last Glacial Period|The Ice Age}}

|item1 = During the last glacial maximum greater than 50% of the Earth's surface was covered in ice.
|link1web = https://www.ancienthistorylists.com/pre-history/top-10-things-you-should-know-about-the-ice-age/
|link1title = Top 10 Things You Should Know About the Ice Age
|link1pub = Ancient History Lists

|item2 = Most of Canada has no native earthworms, because they were wiped out during the last glacial period.
|link2web = https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/invasive-earthworms-threat-forests-climate-change-1.6154164
|link2title = Invasive earthworms are remaking our forests, and climate scientists are worried
|link2pub = CBC

|item3 = At the end of the last glacial period, about 10,000 years ago, the Earth's tilt ({{w| Axial tilt |obliquity}}) was 24.5 degrees, and since then has decreased to its current 23.4 degrees.
|link3web = https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2948/milankovitch-orbital-cycles-and-their-role-in-earths-climate/
|link3title = Milankovitch (Orbital) Cycles and Their Role in Earth's Climate
|link3pub = NASA

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = 50% covered in ice
|science1 = No native earthworms
|science2 = Earth's tilt has decreased

|rogue1 =cara
|answer1 = 50% covered in ice

|rogue2 =jay
|answer2 =50% covered in ice

|rogue3 =Evan
|answer3 =50% covered in ice

|rogue4 =bob
|answer4 =Earth's tilt has decreased

|host =Steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win =y 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' That means it's time to go on with science or fiction. It's time for science or fiction. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake. And I challenge my panelists to tell me which one is the fake. And we have a very cool theme this week. The theme is the Ice Age. Which one? Evan, that pun was just for you. So when you say the Ice Age, that traditionally refers to the most recent Ice Age, which we are still in. There have been five Ice Ages on the Earth. But the ice age is the current one.

'''E:''' And we're in an ice age right now?

'''S:''' If you say so. Yes, we are in an interglacial period of an ice age. That's right. Okay, you guys ready? Yep. Here we go. Item number one. During the last glacial maximum, greater than 50% of the Earth's surface was covered in ice. Item number two, most of Canada has no native earthworms because they were wiped out during the last glacial period. And item number three, at the end of the last glacial period, about 10,000 years ago, the Earth's tilt, obliquity is the technical term, was 24.5 degrees and since has decreased to its current 23.4 degrees. Cara, go first.

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' No.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''C:''' No, I know. The end of the last glacial period. So all three of these reference the last glacial period. Is that right? They're all three referencing the same time frame.

'''S:''' Okay, I just want to make that clear. Pretty much, yeah.

'''C:''' Okay. So basically you're asking, did the Earth's tilt decrease by, what would that be, 0.9 degrees? No, 1.1 degrees. Did Canada lose its earthworms or was the earth covered? Okay, can you clarify something for me? You said greater than 50% of the earth's surface. Do you mean land? Nope.

'''S:''' I mean the earth's surface, just as stated.

'''C:''' I think that's the fiction. That seems like a lot. I could be wrong, but that seems like a lot.

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''S:''' Okay. Jay?

'''J:''' Yeah, the Earthworm one seems really strange to me. And this was because of a glacial period. I don't know. I don't know how deep they go and I don't know how far down the cold penetrates. I mean, I suppose that can happen. The third one here, at the end of the last glacial period, 10,000 years ago, the Earth's tilt was 24.5 degrees and since then has decreased. That sounds familiar to me. I don't know. I mean I definitely agree with the Cara not liking the first one. about 50% or greater than 50% of the Earth's surface was covered in ice. I don't think that when there has been past ice ages or at least the last one – I don't think it covered half the planet. I don't think so. I think it was just – because you know all the rocks, the huge boulders and rocks that can be found like for example in New England in the area where I grew up. Yeah. That they have marks on them from being pushed from the Arctic ice, right?

'''E:''' That's right.

'''J:''' Like Long Island came from debris that got pushed by glaciers if I'm remembering my history correctly. Yeah. But I think that's about as far as it went. I don't think it went down to like the equator or something. Yeah.

'''S:''' Down to the equator would be 100%, Jay. Right.

'''E:''' Because you're going from – Yeah.

'''J:''' It's going from both ways. Yeah. Right. Understood. Yeah. I don't think it's 50%. I think it's much less than that.

'''S:''' Okay, Evan?

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''E:''' Yeah, I think I'm on board with this particular one. I am familiar with the earth tilt changing over years. I can't remember the exact change, but this seems reasonable. that 24.5, I think, is close to where it maximally tilts and it goes back down to like 22 or something. So it fluctuates back and forth. And that has a name to it. I think somebody who discovered it. I can't remember what it's called. But the earthworm one I've never heard of before, and certainly to say it was wiped out during the last glacial period, that's new news to me. But it's the 50% of the Earth's surface. I mean, yes, Jay, I also recall that the glaciers pushed down debris and everything and formed Long Island. I was taught the same thing on the retreat, all the boulders and things. were revealed in the wake of its sort of destruction, if you can call it that. But the 50%, that'd be the oceans? No, I don't think it got over the oceans like that. No way. I think 50% of the Earth's surface is fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, and Bob?

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' I think I'm prepared to be surprised by the 50% earth. Yeah, I think that one's going to be science. The earthworms. Yeah, I could see glaciers wreaking havoc. And since you guys are talking about your interesting facts with glaciers, my favorite is the fact that the ice from the glaciers over, like, say, North America was so heavy.

'''S:''' How heavy was it?

'''E:''' It was so heavy. It was so heavy.

'''B:''' It compressed the land and the land is still springing up as we speak. It's still popping back up after that compression. Boing. For some reason, I know you guys are – some of you are confident about the tilt. I don't remember seeing the tilt changing that much in just the past 10,000 years. That's rubbing me the wrong way. I'm just totally going on my gut with that one because it seems reasonable that it could mess up the tilt that way with all that ice. But I'm going to stick with the number one with the 50% and say that that's science. But I'll say that the obliquity – I'm going to say that one is fiction. Yeah.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Okay, so you guys all agree on number two. So we'll start there. Most of Canada has no native earthworms because they were wiped out during the last glacial period. You guys all think that one is science and that one is science. That one is science. Yeah, the glaciers killed all the earthworms.

'''C:''' Oh, my goodness.

'''E:''' Why wouldn't they just put them back, you know, bring them in from other places? Because earthworms are really important, aren't they?

'''S:''' Well, as I said, there are no native earthworms. Europeans imported earthworms. This was like not just Canada but also northern United States. Really? Yeah, yeah. And I had to say most because there were some areas that didn't get a lot of glacier and the earthworms survived. But basically most of Canada has no native earthworms. And earthworms can only spread so fast. And so they haven't had enough time. They are slow. Yeah, they haven't had enough time to spread back into that area. And so basically the ecosystem evolved without earthworms. And then Europeans came in and imported earthworms for their farming and gardens and whatnot. And it's actually wreaking havoc with the local ecosystem because they evolved without earthworms.

'''B:''' Damn, man. Yeah.

'''S:''' So the species that are there are not native. They're all introduced.

'''B:''' Pesky humans. Yeah.

'''S:''' Interesting. Okay. Which one should we go to next? Say it. Say it. The question is, how much of the Earth do you think was covered by the glacier during the last glacial maximum?

'''E:''' Probably 10%. 25%.

'''E:''' What do you think, Cara?

'''S:''' I'll go with 50.

'''C:''' I split the difference between the two of them. We'll say 17.5%.

'''S:''' And then on the flip side, so what is the relationship with the tilt of the Earth's axis and the glacial period? So would a greater tilt, which means more extreme seasons, be associated with the glacial period or the interglacial period? You know what I mean? With that, what do you think about that? That's interesting. The axis does change over historical time.

'''C:''' So isn't that why we have glacial periods?

'''S:''' That's the question. Is that why we have glacial periods? And if so, what's the relationship? Is there more tilt or less tilt?

'''B:''' I'd say less.

'''C:''' I'd say more.

'''E:''' I'd say... I have no idea.

'''B:''' More extreme weather is also hotter summers.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' That's right. So, number three, at the end of the last glacial period, about 10,000 years ago, the Earth's tilt obliquity was 24.5 degrees, and since then has decreased to its current 23.4 degrees. Bob, you think this one is fiction. The rest of you think this one is science. And this one is science. So, Bob, you're right. But that's why the glacial period started to melt when we hit the maximal tilt because of the summer heat. The summers are more extreme, even though the fact that the winters are more extreme didn't really have much of an impact. But the fact that the summers are hot enough to start to melt the glaciers. And so, of course, it's taken a long time for that to happen. Right. But yeah. So now we're getting – the tilt is getting smaller and smaller and it will – the minimum is 22.1 degrees. Right. So it goes between 24.5 and 22.1. We're kind of in the middle right now at 23.4. Right.

'''B:''' And that's consistent? I mean, we think that's consistent?

'''S:''' Yeah, that's it. Back, forth, back, forth. It's a 41,000-year cycle. It's a wobble. It's a 41,000-year cycle. And you know what drives that cycle? Dynamo? It's not the sun. It's not anything intrinsic to the Earth, and it's not the sun.

'''B:''' Oh. Oh. Our position in the galaxy?

'''S:''' Nope. Good guess. That's a really good guess. Happens to be wrong. The current theory is that it's Jupiter and Saturn. It's the gravitational tugging of Jupiter and Saturn. Wow.

'''E:''' Wow. Can account for a two and a half degree change in the – There are two other cycles.

'''S:''' These are collectively called the Milankovitch cycle. That's it. That's what you're thinking of. That's the name. So there's the eccentricity of the sun. And some people thought, oh, maybe when we're farther from the sun, that correlates with it. But no, it doesn't. It's really – the eccentricity also changes, again, because of the planet, the big planets. And that changes from – it's almost circular to just slightly eccentric. But that is too little to really have any significant effect on climate. And then the third one is precession. And for a while, we thought that precession was causing the glacial periods. But that's a 26,000-year cycle and it doesn't correlate. It doesn't line up with the glacial periods.

'''B:''' That's the wobbling like a top.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' Yeah, that's the one where it's – yeah, like a spinning top will rotate around its axis. But it's the wobble of the obliquity that is probably – that correlates well best with the glacial periods. Interesting. All of this means that during the last glacial maximum, greater than 50% of the Earth's surface was covered in ice. That one is the fiction because the real answer is – you guys were all wrong. It's a third, 33%. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's still more than you think, but I had to exaggerate it enough. I guess I overshadowed a bit. But it's a lot though. You think about a third of the Earth's surface and not the land surface. The Earth's surface was covered in ice during the last glacial maximum, which was about 20,000 years ago.

'''B:''' We have had 100% of the snowball earth.

'''S:''' Yes. There's been at least two times. Although, Bob, I don't know if you've heard, but some scientists call it slush ball earth because they think it was maybe not totally frozen over. But it was either snowball earth or slush ball earth. One of those cycles lasted 300 million years. Another one lasted 200 million years. Yeah. Before we eventually came out of them.

'''B:''' I wonder what life was like under all that snow.

'''E:''' It takes a long time to get – oh, my gosh.

'''S:''' Well, this is like – well, the first one was 2.4 to 2.1 billion years ago. So there was life on Earth but there was probably pre-multi-sided life. All right. So good job, guys.

'''E:''' Thank you, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah. Evan, give us a quote. I'm still good at fooling Bob apparently.

'''B:''' Goddamn expert at it.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:31:45) ==

{{qow
|text = We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
|author = {{w|Denis Diderot}}
|lived = 1713-1784
|desc = French philosopher and art critic
}}


'''E:''' This quote was suggested by a listener, Christos from Ottawa. Thanks for suggesting this one, Christos. We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter. And that was by the French philosopher Denis Diderot from the Enlightenment period in the 1700s. Yeah.

'''S:''' Very enlightening.

'''E:''' Prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment. Also studied philosophy at a Jesuit college. Now, Steve and Bob, what, you guys went to a Jesuit high school, right?

'''B:''' We did. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

'''S:''' It was an interesting experience because it was – the Jesuits – it's Catholic but it's at the non-magical end of the spectrum of Catholic beliefs. You know what I mean? Like there are the subset of Catholics who believe like all of the magic, right? Like in possession and demons and that kind of stuff. The Jesuits are the philosophers. They're the scholars and philosophers within the Catholic tradition. I took four years of theology in high school, but it was very much like you could almost not even believe in God and still study what we were studying. You know what I mean? It was kind of incidental. The fact that God exists was kind of incidental to what we were studying. It was more like the history of the Jewish people, like the Bible as literature, as work.

'''B:''' You read the whole damn thing. Yeah.

'''S:''' I thought it was a good experience, especially as a skeptic, having a really good working knowledge of the Bible comes in handy a lot for a lot of the stuff that we deal with. Cara, your background is the same thing, right?

'''C:''' Yeah, we had to go to – well, I stayed in Mormonism until I was 15 is when I left. But because I was born into it, obviously we did your standard Bible and Book of Mormon study. Yeah. Like on Sundays, but we also had Wednesday night youth group. And then some people know this, some people don't. Mormon children, once they get to high school, they go to seminary before school every day. So I had like at 6am, I had an hour of like Bible and Book of Mormon study every day before school. and like obviously i hated it. it was like horrible but looking back i'm really glad. i mean i was like half asleep most of the time. but i am really glad that like there was so much of that scholarship now don't get me wrong ours my my study was not kind of like a secular approach to those texts. it was deeply biased and and um i had to like undo all of that. but it was really cool to have been able to have read all of those books and annotate them and you know.

'''S:''' Yeah, I think it gives you more insight into belief systems, whether religious or otherwise. I have colleagues within the skeptical community who are atheists and critical thinkers and skeptics, and they were always atheists. They were brought up in an atheist household. And I do think they have a harder time wrapping their head around the mind of a believer. Yeah. I mean never having spent part of their life inside of that. It's like for me. it's easy to understand how people rationalize their beliefs and how they square that circle and resolve their cognitive dissonance and all that stuff because I was there when I was younger.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah, 100%. And like, I tried to believe it. Yeah, yeah, sort of. I bought into it when I was really young. Maybe not. I don't know. It's hard to say. But I actually, when I was in Scotland these past couple weeks, I actually rewatched Under the Banner of Heaven. And if you guys still haven't seen that, I highly recommend it. It is a brilliant series. Okay, good. But I think it can help some people because especially like with the Mormons, a lot of people are like, how do they believe that? I think that Andrew Garfield – well, the writer, just the entire production does help you sort of put your head in the mind of somebody who's struggling with their faith and see it from that perspective.

'''S:''' So my recollection and I think the hardest thing for me, like what Catholics are really good at is guilt and shame. Oh, yeah. And we were raised to think that faith was a virtue. And that was so deeply embedded in us. That was the last thing to go. Like, just to realize I could be a good person without faith, that was the last thing that I got rid of. Right. And we weren't even that religious. We didn't go to church every Sunday, but it was just sort of baked into our worldview to such a degree that I didn't even realize how much we internalized that until we're like, gee, you're right. It's not a virtue. I could be a good person without having faith. And that didn't happen until college for me, where I got rid of the last vestiges of that programming.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's rough.

'''E:''' We've all emerged to some degree at some point. Yeah, we were all there.

'''C:''' That was actually kind of the topic of, I remember an organization, I think it was a freedom from religion organization gave me an award once. And that was sort of the topic of my talk was this idea of like morality among secular individuals and how it's sort of our duty as citizens to to be moral individuals and to set good examples because the perception among so many religious people is that somebody who's atheist is fundamentally lacking those virtues.

'''B:''' By definition.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' And the opposite is the truth.

'''C:''' Oh, 100%. Because the reason we're like that is not because somebody told us to be like that. We got there on our own. I want to be good to my fellow human.

'''B:''' I love when they imply that they would, without God and the Bible, they would be raping and pillaging. Really?

'''E:''' Yeah, really.

'''S:''' I mean, I've had people say that to me, like religious people. So you're telling me if it weren't for the threat of going to hell, your instinct would be to go out raping and pillaging and murdering? Right. Like that's what you would be doing? Yeah. If you didn't have a supernatural being telling you not to, I think – but again, that's good. It's just built into their worldview. They don't even really think about it rationally.

'''E:''' It's such a convenient position.

'''C:''' Because you hear the same argument with the anti-LGBTQ kind of stuff. Like when you talk to somebody who's deeply religious and also very anti-gay, they always use the same argument about like protecting the family structure, whatever it is. But it's always like, well, we can't let them marry because then what? You'd just be gay tomorrow? Like, is that your reasoning?

'''E:''' Like, that's insane.

'''C:''' But yeah, you'd hear those arguments all the time.

'''S:''' Right. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''B:''' Sure, man. Thanks, Steve.

=== Rogues' past religious schooling ===

== Signoff (1:38:29) ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

{{Outro664}}{{top}} 
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SGU Episode 966

2024-05-01T19:44:09Z

Ralsettem: Adding AI transcription

{{Google speech|episode}}
{{900s|966|episodebox}}
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|episodeIcon = File:966 total solar eclipse 2024.jpg

|caption = Why the 2024 total solar eclipse will be such a big deal: a particularly active sun will make for spectacular viewing and science opportunities <ref name = eclipse>[https://www.sciencenews.org/article/total-solar-eclipse-sun-science-viewing-2024 Science News: Why the 2024 total solar eclipse will be such a big deal]</ref>

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|cara =y
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|Evan =y
|qowText = I'm not sure why I enjoy debunking. Part of it surely is amusement over the follies of true believers, and partly because attacking bogus science is a painless way to learn good science… Another reason for debunking is that bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society.
|qowAuthor = {{w|Martin Gardner}}, American mathematician

|downloadLink = {{900s|966|download}} 

|forumLinktopic = 55297.0
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== Introduction, winter sicknesses ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is January 11th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. ''(applause)'' Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening, everyone.

'''S:''' How's everyone doing this week? Good, good, good. Nice. Surviving the storm? Yeah. I don't know if you guys could tell, but I'm getting over a cold.

'''E:''' We can tell. A little bit.

'''C:''' Just a cold? Yeah.

'''S:''' I think so. I mean, I tested negative for COVID twice.

'''C:''' How many times? Okay.

'''S:''' Twice, 48 hours apart, like I'm supposed to. So I'm inpatient ward attending last week and this week. So I'm going around the hospital, you know, working in small rooms with lots of people. And so I'm not surprised, you know, that I picked something up.

'''E:''' Yeah, the crud.

'''S:''' I had to actually get coverage for two days. I couldn't go in. Both because I was just, you know, too sick to work. But also I was, you know, I had to test negative. You know, I had to follow protocol. Right. Yeah, it was pretty bad. Pretty bad cold. Not the flu level, you know, definitely not COVID level. Just a pretty bad upper respiratory infection. My voice was much worse yesterday and the day before. I was like squeaking on Tuesday. It started with a pharyngitis.

'''C:''' Do you test for RSV at all?

'''S:''' No, not routinely. I mean, I guess if I were not getting better, if it were more serious, we would. But there's a lot of COVID, flu, and RSV in the hospital.

'''C:''' Yeah, they're calling it a tripledemic, which is, we know that none of those are actually an epidemic or pandemic right now, but still. Yep. Tripledemic.

'''J:''' Theoretically, you could catch a dozen viruses at the same time, right? Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah. In fact, you're more likely to because your resistance goes down.

'''B:''' Steve, did you say pharyngitis? Pharyngitis. Pharyngitis?

'''C:''' His pharynx was irritated.

'''B:''' Don't let that word just slip by. Give us some details. How is that different than laryngeitis?

'''C:''' Instead of your larynx, you've got your larynx and your pharynx.

'''B:''' The pharynx.

'''E:''' Yeah, the pharynx. Right, Bob?

'''B:''' I don't think I've heard that word in decades.

'''S:''' Pharynx. So, yeah, it's a typical course for me. Like, it starts with a sore throat. I'm like, oh, boy, here we go. You know, I get a little bit of a sore throat. Then that gets really bad. And then that progresses to, you know, the runny nose and stuffy nose. And then it all solidifies until, you know, it's really, really bad. You know, lasting two to three days. The one variable is will I get any bronchitis, which I did not this time, which is good. Because if you get bronchitis, then that's like weeks of coughing. Yeah, and like using an inhaler.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's not fun.

'''E:''' Jay just got over a bout of that, right?

'''B:''' I think he's still coughing.

'''J:''' Yeah, my cough is way better. I mean, but damn, I had a cough for a month.

'''C:''' And that sucks too because if you – Let's say that you have an upper respiratory infection and then you clear it, but you've still got this lingering cough, right? So you're no longer infectious. You're no longer communicative. But you're like walking around in public coughing. I don't want to go anywhere near somebody who's coughing right now. Yeah, I know. There's a massive spike in COVID right now. As we expect, after the holidays, everything's up. Deaths are up 12.5%. Hospitalization is up 20%. I don't know, when I'm hearing people coughing, I'm just having to assume the worst. And I think the scary thing is we're seeing that hospitals are upping their mask policies again. But I didn't see a big change. Like I'm in Scotland right now, like one out of 40 people had a mask on. And that's not country specific.

'''S:''' They changed the mask policy at Yale too fairly recently from mandatory to voluntary. But also if you have symptoms, you have to mask. And I still have to mask whenever I'm treating a patient in the hospital. But just walking around, most people are not masking.

'''C:''' But a lot of hospitals are re-upping their mask requirements.

'''S:''' I know. I think they should. The thing is, I went two years without a cold.

'''C:''' I know, right? Isn't that amazing?

'''E:''' Yes, I know.

'''S:''' I did it as well. And then when they changed the mask, I got sick, I remember, the week after they changed the mask. Yeah, as soon as they – And I've now been getting my two, three per year like I used to pre-pandemic. So the masking and social distancing, that whole thing works. Yeah.

'''C:''' I wore an N95 the whole flight. But the funny thing is just like I was – there were a handful of other people but not many and almost none of the – airport personnel like almost none of the flight attendants were wearing masks either. yeah and you know you hear the little like and you're like oh god that person's giving the whole plane covid.

'''E:''' yeah now how how how robust are the filter systems on these airplanes? i hear they're good.

'''S:''' they're good. they're very robust. they're not going to prevent covid from spreading. if somebody's got it though you know what i mean it's not. it's not going to filter out every virus.

'''E:''' Then – I mean playing a little devil's advocate, we're not hearing about a plane load of people that landed and it turned out. 200 of the passengers all came down with COVID, right? We're not hearing those stories.

'''C:''' Well, but I don't think we would hear those stories anymore because A, like the general population is mostly vaccinated and mostly has immunity from having had infections. So not everybody that has exposure is going to catch COVID. Right. the same way that they used to be. People aren't testing anymore. Yeah. Like a lot of people are catching it and it's mild or it's a cold, you know, it feels like a cold or whatever. And they just are assuming they have a cold. Like I'm still testing, but a lot of people aren't because they're like, eh, whatever. You're going to get it. You're going to get it. Like the culture around it has changed.

'''E:''' I have test kits at home. I have them at work and I even have one in my car.

'''C:''' Just in case. I have them at home. I always order them when the post office or whatever. that thing is where the government gives you free tests. I always stock up on them. And they're easy to get now. You can go to any pharmacy and buy them over the counter. Like people aren't out of them like they used to be.

'''E:''' Oh, gosh, right.

'''C:''' Remember that? Yeah. But yeah, I think a lot of people aren't testing. Also, the last time I got it, I tested negative the first two times. So that's happening to a lot of people too. They're testing negative and then they're going, oh, well, and they're just not retesting. Yeah.

'''B:''' Are you symptomatic and negative?

'''C:''' Yes. When I – the first – the only time I've had COVID, I was symptomatic and negative on a rapid antigen test for the first two tests and then I was positive.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's why you got to repeat it in 48 hours.

'''E:''' And we haven't come up with a cold test, common cold test.

'''S:''' Too many viruses.

'''C:''' Yeah, there's too many different types of cold.

'''E:''' I see. It's too many ways of going.

'''C:''' But it would be nice if we had at-home flu tests.

'''E:''' Wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah, that would be nice.

'''C:''' It would be great. I would love it.

'''E:''' But I think, you know, I mean, if you got the flu, it's kind of – I don't know.

'''C:''' I feel like a lot of people underestimate the flu and they'll say they have the flu when they have a cold. Yeah. Right. And so I would love for culturally us to reacquaint – reacquaint ourselves with how severe the flu really is.

'''E:''' What's the hallmark?

'''C:''' I think body aches, right? For me, that's the hallmark. Oh, gosh.

'''E:''' The aches and the chills and the spiking of the fever.

'''C:''' Like malaise.

'''S:''' Mark Crislip would say with the flu, it feels like you're coughing up a lung, right? And that's the big difference. You feel like you're going to die. You're really sick. Yes.

'''C:''' It's been my experience. It's like mild malaria. They say malaria is like the flu on steroids. But a cold can sometimes – like sometimes I don't have malaise at all with a cold or a fever. Right. But I think different people have different experiences.

'''B:''' I don't think I ever had a flu. I don't ever remember having the flu. I've had it twice.

'''E:''' I must have, though. Last year was the last time I had it.

'''S:''' I had it, I think, 20 years ago was the last time I had the flu.

'''C:''' Yeah, the last time I had the flu was in college.

'''E:''' Prior to that, I had it about 20 years, yeah.

'''C:''' But it was brutal. I mean, I had to go into urgent care. They almost gave me an IV.

'''S:''' Whoa.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, well, yes.

'''C:''' My heart rate was so high, and I wasn't really getting enough fluids.

'''E:''' It's a terrible feeling, Bob. You feel like you're on the verge of dying.

'''B:''' I feel sad for you mortals. It's a painful experience.

'''E:''' Yeah, and you said that about COVID too until you caught it at Disney World.

'''B:''' I held it off as long as I could. I didn't want to stand too far from humanity.

'''C:''' Don't you think the thing that's bananas about COVID is that even though it does have hallmarks, right? Like we've all heard about them, like loss of smell or taste, you know, like all these different things that are very specific to COVID. It seems like everybody's COVID experience has been wildly different. Like some people get so sick when they get COVID. And for me, It was indistinguishable from a cold. I would not have known it was COVID if the test hadn't told me it was COVID.

'''J:''' Yeah, I mean, and you were vaccinated when you got it, right?

'''C:''' Uber vaccinated.

'''J:''' Yeah, that's probably a big difference there.

'''C:''' But some people who are still Uber vaccinated are getting super severe cases and then getting long COVID symptoms. So it's quite interesting. I mean, obviously not as many. The vaccine is saving so many lives and it's obviously doing exactly what it said it would do. It's preventing serious illness. But It's an interesting virus in that the personal experience of catching it does seem to be very variable. Yeah.

{{anchor|dumbest}} 
== Dumbest Thing of the Week (9:22) ==
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'''S:''' All right, Evan, you're going to start us off with the dumbest thing of the week.

'''E:''' Yep, dumbest thing of the week. Okay, by show of hands, who would like to hear the dumbest thing of the week? theme song? I don't see any hands. Who's raising their hands? Oh, it's a podcast. That's right. Maybe we should take a, what, a verbal vote on that? No one? Oh, I got no one. Okay, I'm sure we'll have some emails about that disapproving of your choice, but maybe next time.

'''S:''' All right.

'''E:''' Let's get to it. This week's recognition goes to the man on the throne, the Wizard of Windsor, the Sorcerer of Scotland, the mightiest of all muckety-mucks, that King of Kings, Charles Philip Arthur George, you know him best as King Charles III. Steve, you can insert an applause track there. Or a boo. I'm not really supposed to tell you how to edit. I know I've told you that before. All right, what has His Majesty done to be so deserving of such a high honor? Well, it seems that a few fortnights back, while many of us were all distracted with the merriments of the season and the changing of the calendar, Charles III was busy naming Dr. Michael Dixon as the new head of the royal medical household. Who is Dr. Michael Dixon? Well, he's part of the Royal Victorian Order and he carries the title The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Most Excellent. He's a triple board certified health practitioner dedicated to a scientific approach to medicine and an outspoken skeptic of pseudoscientific claims. Just kidding. He's a quack with a capital quack. He is. He's the chair of something called the College of Medicine and Integrated Health established in 2010. And I don't know. When I hear integrated health, I think that's a red flag. Yeah. Dixon believes in homeopathy. And the practice of verbalism. And apparently he's open-minded about faith healing. Yep. He once invited a Christian healer into his surgery to treat chronically ill patients and experimented with prescribing an African shrub called devil's claw for shoulder pain, as well as horny goat weed for impotence.

'''S:''' Ooh.

'''E:''' I've heard of that one before.

'''S:''' It's right there in the name, Evan.

'''E:''' I know, right? Horny goat weed. How can you go wrong with a weed so aptly named? Dixon has apparently also championed such things as thought field therapy.

'''S:''' Oh, boy.

'''E:''' You've heard of that one before, right? Yep. Christian healing – oh, and an Indian – India, Indian – herbal cure of ultra – called – it's ultra diluted with alcohol, whatever that is, which claims to kill breast cancer cells. Not even really sure what the hell is going on there, but that was in the write-up. So he's now head of the royal medical household. What is that? The person with the title of head of the royal medical household, they have duties which include the overall responsibility for the health of the king and the wider royal family. And he even – or she – get to represent them in talks with British government agencies, officials, and representatives. Right. Dr. Dixon once wrote a paper for the British Journal of General Practice. The title of the paper is The Physician Healer, Ancient Magic or Modern Science? In that paper, he wrote the following. It seems that the physician healer is now poised to rise again like a phoenix, not on a wave of nostalgia, but because modern science demands it. Placebo research and psychoneuroimmunology are beginning to clarify a role in which caring is no longer an act of compassion or indulgence but has everything to do with curing or in the preferred modern term, effectiveness. Yeah. So in other words, modern – I'll translate for you. In other words, modern science demands that we incorporate age-old treatments and practices which have little or no scientific merit whatsoever. Right. I read about this most recently through an article over at The Guardian written by Martha Gill, who asks, why do the elite put their faith in snake oil? Which is absolutely one of the correct questions to be asking here. Here's what she writes. Two factors are at play. First, the elites tend to overestimate the value of their instincts. King Charles, as well as someone like Cindy Crawford, spend their time surrounded by suck-ups. They are themselves exception to the rules that govern others. If a gut feeling leads them to thought field therapy rather than modern medicine, they might be more inclined to believe it. And the second is something first observed by Charles Percy Snow in his famous remarks about the two cultures in the West. Ignorance of literature and the arts, that will exclude you from highly educated circles. But it's perfectly acceptable to have no grasp of basic science. The second law of thermodynamics, for example, or how to define acceleration. You combine overconfidence and an ignorance of science and you get an aristocracy convinced that crushed bees and aconite are the answers to all their problems. Now, aconite is a strong, fast-acting poison that causes, well, it's sometimes used to. They say it's medicine, but if you take it with too much of it, it will cause side effects such as nausea, vomiting, breathing problems, health problems, and death. But if you claim that there's a memory of that molecule in the substance in a liter of water, then it's a cure for nausea, vomiting, pulmonary issues, heart maladies. It can't cure death. Sorry about that one. So therefore, it's with great fanfare that the appointment by his majesty of this most excellent quack allows them both to add to their many list of titles and stations. They are now officially the dumbest thing of the week.

'''S:''' This is old news for King Charles, that he's been enamored of homeopathy and alternative medicine and all that stuff.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, I agree with that assessment of why I think the elite are susceptible to this sort of thing. It is a combination of overconfidence and scientific illiteracy. But also I think there's something about – I mean the wellness industry, alternative medicine industry, it feels like a special hack, right? Like you have like here's the real treatment that they don't want you to know about sort of thing. And I think there are especially – the elite are especially vulnerable to that kind of con game where it's like you're getting a peek behind the curtain. You're getting the special real stuff. Yeah.

'''C:''' Right, because they actually do get that a lot in other aspects. So yeah, it doesn't feel like a scam. It feels like, oh yeah, I'm special.

'''S:''' That doesn't exist in medicine. It's like we give the fake medicine to poor people and real medicine.

'''E:''' There seems to be a historical correlation to this as well, Steve, with astrology, right? The courts and kings and emperors and whomever else would have court astrologers because they would be able to predict things and have special access, like you said, to information. That other lesser people aren't entitled to, shouldn't have or whatever. So that's why they relied so much on astrologers and other forms of divination. Nostradamus is the most famous example of one of those people.

'''S:''' Rasputin, another example. Oh, yes.

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' These guru-type figures find their way to nestle up to the rich and powerful.

'''E:''' And there they are now with full title and privilege.

'''S:''' Very, very common. All right. Thank you, Evan.

'''E:''' You're welcome.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


{{anchor|news#}} 
=== Dual Sympathetic Reset (17:10) ===
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|article_title = Dual Sympathetic Reset for PTSD
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'''S:''' Have you guys ever heard of the dual sympathetic reset? No.

'''B:''' No.

'''C:''' Dual sympathetic reset.

'''J:''' No, I have not.

'''E:''' Dual sympathetic reset. Is that a key on my keyboard somewhere? All right.

'''C:''' Hold on. Let me see. I feel like this is some like psychology annoying thing.

'''S:''' Yes, it is some psychology annoying thing.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, this one is especially for you, Cara. This is becoming an increasingly popular treatment for PTSD and anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder. The idea is that you give a stellate ganglion block. You're blocking a nerve bundle that's part of the sympathetic nervous system. This is an established treatment for certain kinds of pain, especially like facial pain. That has an autonomic component to it, you know, like the autonomic feedback is somehow feeding and sustaining the pain syndrome and it can be effective on everybody and sometimes it's only short term, etc. But yeah, it's, you know, it's one of the treatments that we have for it. So they're using the same procedure, using a type of Novocaine and steroids, injecting it into the ganglion, this clump of nerves in the neck, in order to block sympathetic activity, in order to treat PTSD and anxiety. So how does that work? How does blocking a nerve affect PTSD? I mean, the short answer is it probably doesn't.

'''C:''' Are they trying to look into the startle reflex and some of those issues?

'''S:''' Yeah, so it's based on this notion.

'''C:''' Like hyperarousal.

'''S:''' Yeah, that people with PTSD have hyperarousal, like their sympathetic nervous activity, you know, their fight or flight activity is jacked up. And therefore, if you physically block that, that sympathetic response, that will then treat the PTSD.

'''C:''' I suppose I could see it could potentially treat a symptom of the PTSD. Yeah. But not the actual PTSD. Yeah. Psychotherapy for that.

'''S:''' If you have anxiety and your heart is racing and you're sweating and you have headaches, we give you beta blockers to block the sympathetic response that's being driven by your anxiety.

'''C:''' But that doesn't treat the anxiety.

'''S:''' Does not treat the anxiety. However, the only thing we can say is sometimes the physical symptoms of anxiety make people anxious. You know what I mean? They get anxious about the symptoms that they're having. And if you short circuit the symptoms, that can help from triggering the anxiety. But you still need to treat the underlying primary anxiety disorder. You still need to treat the PTSD. So this is where the pseudo neuroscience comes in. So this is why you might wonder, why is it called a sympathetic reset? The treatment is a sympathetic block. But they call it this dual sympathetic reset. Why? Because they're rebooting the brain by doing this. Right? Brains reboot?

'''C:''' Yeah. I mean, we use that. It's annoying.

'''S:''' Yeah. So they're like, I know, it's annoying. So they're resetting the sympathetic nervous system to basically flip the switch from on to off. And that actually was causing their PTSD or sustaining the PTSD. Again, not just a symptom of the PTSD. And therefore, it... cures it like it cures the ptsd. that's the idea. so it is you know in my opinion that's pseudoscience that that's is a very hand wavy metaphor type of explanation that's not grounded in any kind of legitimate science. but let's look at the evidence. what clinical evidence has there been? precious little right. so there there have been a couple of recent systematic reviews that look through the literature myself to see what's been published out there. Basically, most of the studies are case reports and case series, i.e. anecdotal. Now, it's to be expected that there's going to be a strong placebo effect here, right? Because you are actually treating a physical symptom. Right. And it's a procedure, and procedures, especially invasive procedures like needle sticks, have a higher placebo effect than less invasive interventions. Right. There's sort of a – people have to justify the procedure and the cost and all that and so they convince themselves that it must have worked because they invested so much in it, et cetera. But in any case, so there's an expected high placebo effect for this. But of course – and this gets back to what you were saying, Evan, like with that quote of the guy that Charles appointed. Mm-hmm. That's all about placebo medicine, right? That's about, well, the placebo effect isn't just a solution. It's a real curing. They use the word cure, which is like mind-blowing because the evidence clearly shows that that's the one thing it absolutely is not, right? It is not disease-modifying. It is not curative. It doesn't change anything objective. It is purely subjective, symptomatic, and, in fact, self-limiting. But in this case, they're saying it actually is curing the PTSD. So the anecdotal evidence is worthless. It's exactly what you would expect. It's just complete bias. There's only two double-blind placebo-controlled trials that have been published. They're both small, should be considered preliminary. One positive and one negative. So that's a wash.

'''C:''' So it's 50-50.

'''S:''' So that's what we see. That's what we call heterogeneity. That's the technical term that you will see. The outcomes were heterogeneous, meaning that they're not consistent. In this case, it's basically one positive, one negative, which is like that's random. That's consistent. And this is even in preliminary studies where there's a greater chance of it being positive. So this is consistent with. this doesn't work, right? This is what you would expect from a placebo intervention, right?

'''C:''' I feel like this is also – this is a medical intervention. So it wouldn't be psychologists doing this. It would be psychiatrists.

'''S:''' Yeah, or – Right? It would be like physicians. You're right. Yeah, it could be physicians. But non-physicians can do these kind of outpatient procedures.

'''C:''' Yeah, but I don't think psychologists can. Maybe like PAs or nurse practitioners. Yeah, right. Exactly.

'''S:''' Yeah, but like medical – psychologists don't do any sort of like physiologic – Yeah, so you hire a PA to do the stick for you.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' So my concern with this is, again, the idea that treating a physical symptom may help with the management of anxiety or PTSD is fine. Yeah. And it might improve outcomes. Again, I would delete the neurosudoscience about the whole resetting the brain BS. Mm-hmm. So that's one problem with it is the way it's being sold. It's being marketed as this works. It's a cure, right? So that's like way ahead of the evidence. But the preliminary promotion of this with the absence of adequate evidence is really problematic. And this is, I think, endemic to health care. This is not just on the fringe or with this sort of thing. And it really is something that we have to do a much better job of policing. I do think that within the upper reaches of academia and medicine, we are much better about it. And definitely, it's horrible when you get to the fringes. But it is, I think, a problem that's pretty extensive. And that is... You know, it's very easy to bias the language that you use. that creates a lot of misconceptions. So this treatment is almost universally described in all reporting on it as an emerging treatment. Which is a biased term. When you say emerging, that comes with the assumption that, first of all, it's being accepted and that it's inevitable that it is going to become mainstream. The other thing that I often pick up on is when they say that the optimistic use of the word yet, like this hasn't been proven to work yet.

'''C:''' Right, which is that it will be.

'''S:''' As if it's just a matter of dotting the I's and crossing the T's, but again, it carries the assumption that it does work. Or we need to do further research to see how it works and how it could best be used and optimal, blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, you need to do further research to show if it works. They never say that magic word, if. If it works, that's what the research is still trying to determine, not how it works or how best to use it, whatever. You haven't gotten past the if yet. You haven't established efficacy with scientific data. And then they call it evidence-based, which is completely inappropriate, although I do think it's partly the fault of the evidence-based infrastructure because they sort of set themselves up for this. But, again, to be fair, it's not evidence-based. The evidence-based turned from a quality control mechanism into a branding mechanism and got exploited by every quack and alternative medicine practitioner. You know what I mean? Which is part of the reason why we had to create science-based medicine. To say no, you know, to basically insulate it from that exploitation. You know what I mean? But anyway, so it's not evidence-based. The fact that a study, whatever, that there's anecdotal case reports or whatever showing that it works, that's not evidence-based.

'''C:''' So APA, American Psychological Association, considers what's the pseudoscience that, oh, EMDR, an evidence-based practice. Yeah. For that same reason.

'''S:''' Which it absolutely is not. Yeah.

'''C:''' It's not. Oops.

'''S:''' It absolutely is not. Yeah.

'''C:''' But because of the bad science, it looks like it works. It doesn't work. The therapy behind it works. It doesn't matter if you're doing EMDR on top of it. And yeah, we see that over and over.

'''S:''' This is how fake treatments become mainstreamed, right? It follows the same path. It's just at some point along the path. And then I think the biggest example of this in medicine today is acupuncture. It's mainstreaming through all of this bullshit without ever having established efficacy. All through this anecdotal type of evidence and playing with the terminology and the hand-wavy explanations for how it works without really ever having a solid mechanism of action. And it is, as Kara says, bananas. But it's, hey, are we witch doctors? Are we practicing pseudoscience? Yeah. Or are we science-based practitioners? And there's a very clear difference between those two things. But there is so much pseudoscience infiltrating modern medicine, and this is the pathway. Because then once you get invested in it, once you have a clinic dedicated to this treatment, it's never going to go away. Nope. They're not going to stop doing it because the evidence doesn't support it, you know?

'''E:''' Yeah, you get things like the College of Medicine and Integrated Health sprouting up in the last 10 years.

'''S:''' Right, right, right. It's terrible.

'''J:''' So there's nothing there.

'''S:''' Well, the evidence does not establish advocacy, right? So the terminology they should be using, not that this is an emerging treatment. This is an experimental treatment. That's what that is. And it should be used like an experimental treatment with all the ethics and informed consent that goes along with that. And it should preferentially be done in the context of a well-designed clinical trial. And only when you have established efficacy do you start to then build it out as a treatment. This is putting the cart before the horse. Significantly.

'''C:''' I wish that there would be more specificity in how it's being described, right? Like this block may reduce symptomatology associated with PTSD. Yeah. Not reduce PTSD or cure PTSD.

'''S:''' If you want to hypothesize that the physical symptoms somehow drive the PTSD itself, that's not a crazy idea.

'''C:''' No, not at all. But it's probably a combination.

'''S:''' But you've got to prove that. You can't just assume that. But that gets me to the last thing. When you brand the treatment with an assumed mechanism of action, right? This is the dual sympathetic reset. No, it isn't. It's a sympathetic block that you are using on this new experimental hypothesis that maybe it might be disease modifying and PTSD, which you haven't yet established. So it's experimental. But don't call it, don't name it an assumed mechanism or whatever that has not yet been established. That's marketing. That's politics. That's BS. That's not science. Okay, Jay, tell us about this private moon mission.

=== Peregrine Moon Mission (29:27) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=PEREGRN-1
|article_title = Peregrine Mission 1 (TO2-AB)
|publication = NASA
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''J:''' So on January 8th at Cape Canaveral, Florida, the Peregrine Lander mission was launched. Have you guys heard about this one?

'''E:''' Yeah. Oh, yeah.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's pretty cool. So the mission was developed by a Pittsburgh-based company, Astrobotic, and it was contracted under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Service, the CLPS program. And the goal was to achieve the first American soft touchdown on the moon in 51 years and also the first ever private company to be involved with that.

'''S:''' Mm-hmm.

'''J:''' So the lander was aboard the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket. Lots of cool names in space programs, right? So this was this particular rocket's debut flight. The rocket engines are a new type of methane-fueled rocket. And the lander was intended to go to the Bay of Stickiness. Ever hear about that? No.

'''E:''' Wow, that's a new one.

'''J:''' Yeah, there's a Latin term for it that I could not pronounce, but the translation is Bay of Stickiness. It's a smooth lava plain on the moon, and Peregrine's mission was integral to NASA's strategy to resume all the astronaut missions that are coming up. They want to leverage this commercial robotics for the delivery of scientific instruments and supplies and basically everything that we need to get up there. So on board the lander, there were five different instruments designed to study the moon's surface and radiation environment. It was going to search for water, I mean, water ice. And among the scientific instruments, there was a peregrine ion mass spectrometer. And this was developed partly by the UK's Open University and RAL Space. So in addition to the scientific gear, right, it has all these different instruments that they wanted to take measurements and everything. There was lots of other stuff. They had a collection of small rovers that were going to leave the lander. The lander was equipped with equipment from Mexican and German space agencies and several universities and, of course, some other companies that were building parts for this as well. There were some odd things on here as well. There was a physical Bitcoin. You could basically make a Bitcoin that actually has the data embedded in the coin, the token in there. Bottom line was it was kind of like a publicity stunt. The Japanese included something called the Lunar Dream Capsule. It had 185,000 messages from children from around the world, which I think is pretty cool. There was also cremated human remains, including the British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Some of his remains were put on that ship. So 50 minutes after launch, the lander separated from the upper stage and it was well on its way. Seven hours into the mission, Peregrine experienced an issue where they couldn't orient the craft correctly to have the solar panels be in the right angle of the sunlight. And they kept trying to make a correction and it wouldn't stay in the trajectory that they needed it to. So the problem was traced back to a malfunction in the propulsion system, specifically a propellant leak. So that leak was basically off-gassing and, you know, turning the spacecraft around, right? They just couldn't keep it on track. So unfortunately, this issue made it impossible for the lander to complete its primary objective, which was, of course, to do the soft landing on the moon. And Astrobiotic, the company in charge of all this, confirmed that it will not be able to do the soft lunar landing ever. That's it. It's just – it's not capable of doing it. So the team continued to work on maximizing Peregrine's operational life, meaning they wanted it to last as long as they could because they were still getting measurements and readouts and collecting data. Yeah, I mean, it's always good to have this stuff because, again, like what SpaceX does, you know, a crash is worthwhile if it gives you valuable data, right? So they're like, well, let's collect as much data as we can and this will help future missions. So Peregrine was scheduled to land on the moon on February 23rd. And like I said, that's not going to happen. At this point, it's rogue. I don't think they're going to be able to obtain orbit or anything. It's just out there. And at some point, we might be able to find out where it's headed and what's going to happen to it eventually. But at this point, I just think it's just out there and has no capability of steering itself or positioning itself correctly to fire the retro rockets to land on the moon. So it's never going to happen. Now, this failed mission is the beginning of a new phase of lunar exploration, right? It's unfortunate that this happened, but it does mark a very important occasion. The mission is the first in a huge push to get the private sector involved in space exploration. And it is happening. It's absolutely happening. Astrobotic is preparing to launch Griffin, which is a larger robotic lander later this year, scheduled to be launched on a SpaceX Falcon heavy rocket. Griffin's mission includes delivering NASA's Viper rover to the moon's south polar region. And, you know, there's other missions actually happening, too. So with the failure of Peregrine's mission, a company out of Houston called Intuitive Machines said, could very well become the first private company to soft land a probe on the moon because they have their Nova C lander, which is also part of NASA's CLPS program, and it's set to launch next month on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. So we're peppering the moon with missions because we need to – We've established basically a functional way to bring gear to the moon because we're going to be bringing a ton of stuff to the moon. And, you know, we need information about the moon and we need to basically start establishing a base pretty much right now in order to make any of these deadlines that NASA has for Artemis.

'''S:''' So, Jay, I was trying to understand exactly what went wrong. And from what I pieced together – because it's very sketchy in a lot of the reporting – was that there was a fuel leak, right? And the fuel leak was pushing the rocket out of orientation or the lander, forcing the thrusters to reorient it until they ran out of their own fuel. So the leak didn't directly cause a loss of fuel. It just forced the realigning adjusters to constantly fire until eventually they couldn't. They didn't have the fuel left to keep the solar panels reoriented to the sun.

'''J:''' Yeah, I mean I took it like there was a malfunction and the craft was off-gassing, right? Just like Apollo 13, right? There was some type of thing that created the fuel being shot out of the spacecraft and they couldn't – as they told it what to do, it kept turning off the course that they told it to obtain. so yeah and I agree though Steve there wasn't any like there was not a piece of information that said and right here this is where you know an explosion happened.

'''E:''' they may still be trying to figure out exactly yeah but they're not going there yet.

'''S:''' they don't have all the info yet they're being a little sketch and it's okay you know.

'''J:''' look this is so much money and so much time and attention and everything and they don't want to put out misinformation I'm sure and you know what they might not know. they might not know what event actually took place.

=== Solar Eclipse (36:44) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.sciencenews.org/article/total-solar-eclipse-sun-science-viewing-2024
|article_title = Why the 2024 total solar eclipse will be such a big deal
|publication = Science News
|refname = eclipse
|redirect_title = 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Cara, you have some exciting news about the solar eclipse. Why is it going to be so awesome this year?

'''E:''' Because it's awesome.

'''C:''' Because we're going to know, as everybody knows.

'''E:''' Well, you know, it's not going to be worse.

'''C:''' We are very excited to be attending the solar eclipse, to be traveling to Texas to do some events around the solar eclipse and, of course, witness it ourselves. Many of you may have experienced what they call the Great American Solar Eclipse in 2017. I don't know what they're going to call this one then, the Greater American Solar Eclipse. Experts are basically letting us know that there are things about the solar eclipse on April 8th that are going to be even more kind of exciting, even more ramped up than the one in 2017. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I saw 2017 in Oregon. So did you, Evan, right? Yes, I did. And then the rest of the guys, did you see a partial or did you see a total?

'''B:''' We had a total on the internet.

'''E:''' No. Where were you that moment?

'''C:''' Have you guys seen – those of you who didn't see the total in 2017, have you seen a total eclipse before? No. Never, man. Okay. So – Right there. This is going to be huge. Oh, my gosh.

'''E:''' For you guys. You are about to – oh, I'm just getting excited for you guys thinking about it coming up. That's how excited I am.

'''C:''' So not only is this going to be a significantly longer totality, which we'll dive into, it will potentially – not potentially. It will be darker. The sky itself will be darker and the sun is very likely going to be significantly more active.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah.

'''J:''' What specifically does that mean?

'''C:''' Part of that has to do with the darkness, but we'll come back to that. But the sun will be really close to its solar maximum in 2024. So there's kind of an 11, roughly 11 years. It's a bit variable, but roughly an 11-year cycle on the sun. And so there's a good chance that we'll be seeing much more activity during the eclipse, meaning these like streams of plasma. The solar corona may be much more. I guess turbulent would be a good way to put it. That ups the chances of a coronal mass ejection. I mean that's a total crapshoot. But if it happened, scientists would be over the moon because – Could you imagine? Yeah, being able to observe something like that during an eclipse gives you just like this access that you do not have when you're observing the sun otherwise.

'''S:''' Now, would we be able to see that naked eye?

'''C:''' Yeah, probably. I think you could because you can even see – How good was that? I saw activity. Like I saw turbulence with my naked eye.

'''S:''' Yeah, you said they had a glimmering.

'''C:''' And there were no coronal mass ejections. So if you saw something huge like that, like a big loop or a big stream coming off of it, yeah, I think you'd see that with your naked eye.

'''B:''' So yeah, but I would think, as awesome as that would be, I would think the odds of seeing a CME during the four and a half minutes.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's not great.

'''B:''' It's like super, super crazy low.

'''C:''' But it's higher than it would have been in 2017 simply because it's going to be a more active sun. So even if we don't see a CME, we're likely going to see more activity, which is exciting. Oh, yeah.

'''B:''' Just seeing like a streamer, like a Corona loop or whatever coming off into the Corona, that would be amazing.

'''S:''' It would be super cool.

'''B:''' You don't really see that during eclipses very often at all.

'''C:''' And even if you're just – yeah, you don't really see that. I mean I saw a little bit of activity during the 2017 eclipse. I don't know if you remember, Evan. Yeah. especially looking at photos after the fact, you can see some activity. But yeah, it's very likely that this will be more turbulent. And that's exciting for researchers, of course, because they want to be able to view this. But the second thing that I mentioned before is that it's potentially going to be darker and Simply because of the position of the moon, it's going to appear larger, which means it's going to block out more of the sun. That's great.

'''B:''' It's actually closer to the earth, so it's going to be legit a little bit larger and block more light.

'''C:''' Right. To us, it'll seem larger. Yeah, exactly. And it'll block out more of the light. And then, of course, as we know, totality is upwards of four and a half minutes in certain places, which is like twice as long. as the previous eclipse. So that just gives, not only does it give us as sort of amateurs or casual viewers, just that much more magic, right? That much more emotional experience, that much more, gosh, I don't, there's so many words I could be using to describe how incredible it is, but it also does give researchers that much more time to take observations. And there are going to be so many cool observations going on. So just so that people who maybe have not looked at the map yet are aware, we're talking kind of northern Mexico all the way up through eastern, southeastern Canada. So it's sort of... makes this band that goes across Texas, across the Midwest, across Buffalo, New York, up towards Montreal. And so there are a lot of places in the country, there are a lot of urban centers that are actually within reach of that. So even places like New York City or Boston, which are not directly in the path of totality, are within, like, driving distance. And so because of that, it's projected that just more people are going to be able to experience the wonder and awe of a total eclipse this time than they did during the last time.

'''B:''' Yeah, I read because of its path, the majority of the United States will be within fairly easy access to check it out.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's really just the Pacific Northwest, kind of the Northwestern quadrant and the, you know, like, kind of Florida region are a little bit farther away, but you're right. Just because of how, you know, obviously more people in the U S live in big cities and more big cities are sort of up in the new England area. You're right. We're going to see that a lot of major population centers are hitting it, but the West coast of course is quite far. And also the cool thing is because of just the random location of this one, unlike the last two eclipses in, in North America, uh, This year, the eclipse is going to be within the observing range of three different radars that are in what's called the Worldwide Super Dual Auroral Radar Network. They are literal monitors of the Earth's ionosphere. And so they help understand how that plasma is changing. the atmosphere of the Earth. And they help understand how that affects things like GPS satellites. And so, you know, it's studying the sun all the time. It's studying the plasma of the sun all the time, these monitors. But the last two eclipses were not within their range. So now these monitors are going to be able to actively look at the shift during the solar eclipse. And what's important, which is different between like nighttime and a solar eclipse, is that during a solar eclipse, the shift from, quote, day to night is, I mean, it's not nighttime, but it looks like nighttime during an eclipse. When all that radiation from the sun goes away and the atmosphere becomes less ionized, it happens immediately in an eclipse. And so it's really, really important data. to see what happens during an eclipse for these different observations. So that's going to be really interesting. NASA's Parker Solar Probe is going to be looking at the Sun. The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter is going to be looking at the Sun. There are terrestrial observers and space satellites that are all going to look at the Sun. if a coronal mass ejection or just, you know, some sort of interesting activity did occur, like all eyes are trained on it right now. There are some other instruments that are being planned, like the WB-57F jet. It carried instruments to observe 2017 by flying along the path of totality. It's going to be doing the same thing this time, but it's got brand new instruments on board that are updated. And because the solar maximum – the fact that it's solar maximum and the fact that totality is so long – Like we get four and a half minutes on the ground, but that means they get six and a half minutes per airplane because they can chase it, which is like really cool. And they also are going to be looking at some cool stuff that I wouldn't have even thought of. Like they may also discover some asteroids thought to exist within the orbit of Mercury, which are difficult to detect without the moon blocking the sun. Yeah. Like that's cool. They're going to be sending up a bunch of – I'm talking about a lot of different scientific groups here. But one group out of Honolulu is going to be sending up a spectrometer on a kite down in Kerrville to get above any clouds that might block the view. Because, of course, if there's cloud cover, they'll just go above them.

'''E:''' What's a cloud?

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly. We don't speak of that. Weather balloons are going to be looking at pressure waves in the atmosphere. Wow. There's even a spectrometer that's going to ride on a Gulfstream jet that's going to chase the eclipse over Texas. Here's a really cool thing. There are a bunch of ways that those of us, we mere mortals, can help contribute to the effort, one of which is this movie project. So look it up online, but there is a way that anybody who is taking amateur photography can then go and contribute that amateur photography. to a large database where they'll make like a big kind of living movie out of it with everybody's info.

'''E:''' That'll be fun to watch.

'''C:''' Yeah, so that'll be really, really cool.

'''E:''' Amazing results.

'''C:''' And let's talk about like why this is – why else this is so special? just in terms of its rarity. We know that eclipses occur all the time all over the planet. It's just they're mostly over the ocean, right? And most people aren't lucky enough to observe them. Well, this one this year in 2024 in April – is going to be the last one in North America before 2033. But that one only is going to be in Alaska. And it's the western part of Alaska, which is good for them because they're really far away from it this time. So it's good that they're going to get their own. But after that, there's one over Canada in 2044. The next one that's going to cross the U.S.

'''E:''' other than Alaska – It's like 2099 or something.

'''C:''' Well, there is one in 2045, but it's going to be more southern. So they are – like they come, but they're – it's not rare, rare. That's quite a loaded term, rare. But for some people, this is going to be the last of their lifetime. Yep. For some people, this is going to be the last one they'll be able to travel for and just So many things are lining up to make this a really remarkable viewing experience. Remarkable. And not just for us as casual observers, but for scientists as well. There's just going to be a wealth of data that they're looking forward to getting. We're talking, you know, so many observations and hopefully tens of millions of people are going to be able to observe totality, maybe hundreds of millions, the partial. Although if you have the chance, take it from me. Do not assume that a partial – a partial is cool, but it's nothing like a total eclipse.

'''E:''' They are distinct experiences.

'''C:''' Completely different phenomena. Yeah. So if that's what you've got and you are able to observe a partial, I want everyone who's even within remote range, go outside that day. Go outside, get yourself some eclipse glasses and look up. I mean, it is going to be mind-blowing. Okay. Or make yourself a pinhole camera. You can literally bring a colander outside and just hold it up and look at the ground or just look underneath the leaves of the trees. Like there are a bunch of different ways that you can see the partial eclipse. But if you're able to get within totality. And it's like a six and one have to – I don't know. Do I want to do it? Do I want to take off work early or do I want to – do it. Do it, do it, do it. If you can, do it.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh. Because it's – Absolutely.

'''S:''' Kara, walk us through what we should be doing to maximize our viewing. So first of all, like when the moon is moving in front of the sun where the sun is partially obscured, you cannot look directly at that sun.

'''C:''' Unless you have eclipse. I would wear eclipse glasses during that portion. Yeah.

'''S:''' And then during totality, you can take off – You can take them off, yeah. You can look naked eye at the sky, yeah.

'''C:''' You'll know because when you're – yeah, you 100% can. Oh, you'll know. Yeah, you 100% can. When it's got that – oh, what do they call it? Like the diamond ring phenomenon where it's just starting to peek behind, the sky goes black. Like there's a massive shift. Even a little bit of light pouring over when it's not at totality is blinding just like the sun is, right? So if you were trying to glimpse with your naked eye, which you should not do, it would just look like the sun. Right. Because it's so bright, it spills over everywhere. Obviously, with eclipse glasses on or looking through a solar filter telescope or binos, you can get solar filters for your binos now. Solar filters for a telescope generally cost more money because telescope lenses are generally larger, but you can get a relatively inexpensive solar telescope online. But if you have binoculars already, you can buy solar lenses for them that just pop on the ends and that's a really good way to do it because it's just bigger, right, in your field of view than with your naked eye. So you might be able to see more detail. But I recommend definitely have solar glasses on hand. They make paper ones. They're relatively cheap and you can buy them in bulk for large events or for your whole family. if you have anything more powerful like binoculars, I think binoculars are better for viewing than a telescope for amateur viewers because it's just easier to find it and lock in on it with the telescope. You're having to track the whole time with binos. You just have to move your head. Um, and, and really the sun is big. Like, you know, you don't need, you don't need a telescope to be able to see a lot of detail. Um, But yeah, the minute that it goes into full totality and you get that amazing ring of fire, you can take your – and really, I don't want to say should, but I take my solar glasses off because you want to get all that great detail. And you want to – I say because you've got four and a half minutes, another way to really take it in is take your eyes off the sun at some point and observe how – weird and alien-like, the landscape becomes.

'''E:''' You are on a different planet. Yeah. I promise you.

'''C:''' It is night.

'''E:''' You will be standing in a place you've never stood before.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's night during day. And just like at dawn and dusk when you can see the sun on the horizon but it's only in one part of the sky, this is just like that except it's all around you. It's the most bizarre experience. Observe what the animals around you are doing. Observe the joy on the faces of all the people around you. You know, I think there's a lot more than just looking at the sun. It's looking at how this phenomenon affects our experience. Also, if you're into photography, prep for it in advance. I personally don't like to do photography during these kinds of events because it's just. It's not what I do. Other people are going to take better pictures than me that I can enjoy and it takes me out of it. Like focusing on trying to get the right picture. Oh, yeah.

'''B:''' That's something you got to. just embrace it and don't be distracted. But for some people, that is their passion. They are – Oh, and that's great. But it's so fleeting.

'''C:''' Do it too because you're – exactly. So I'd say the good news is four and a half minutes gives you enough time to do both. That's true. That's true. So if you do want to take photos and stuff, just do your research in advance the best way to take a photo. you know, make sure you have the right equipment and the right materials. And then make sure that if you're going to do Do it and you get these amazing photos to share with your friends and family that you also share them as a citizen scientist with some of these networks so that you can contribute to this big thing.

'''B:''' Imagine a selfie with an eclipse right behind you. If it would even come out, that would be a awesome selfie.

'''C:''' Oh, I think it will. Oh, sure. I think everybody could probably do that easily. Wow. You'll have plenty of time to take it and it will be – I mean it will be tiny but I've seen a lot of them. Yeah, it will look like a weird – dot in the sky, but like a circle. It looked like a circle in the sky.

'''E:''' A black hole?

'''B:''' It does.

'''C:''' It feels very black hole-like.

'''B:''' Guys, hang on a second. Hey, Siri, remind me April 6th. What do you want to be reminded about? Bring binoculars. All right. I'm good. Thank you.

'''C:''' Nice.

'''E:''' Good thing. Wow. That's so much – yeah. You didn't have to write it down or anything.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Siri does the heavy lifting. Can I add something else?

'''C:''' Please.

'''E:''' Because I did this and this took me by surprise. This is a multi-sensory experience. We're not just talking visual, folks. We are talking the sounds. The sounds change because of the birds and everything else that is going on around you. There's a definite audible quality to this as well. And also it's a temperature change.

'''C:''' Oh, massive. Yeah, make sure you have a jacket.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''B:''' Really?

'''E:''' The temperature is going to drop like 15 degrees or something.

'''J:''' Is it frightening in any way?

'''C:''' could be it wasn't for me but I could. I remember having a distinct thought and I think a lot of people had the same thought of like. can you imagine if this happened? pre-scientific revolution?

'''E:''' oh gosh you know that the world is ending right. oh yeah it's like. okay this is it?

'''C:''' it's like what would you? yeah obviously the myths the like. you can imagine all of the magic that was sort of, that came out of this because it's so bizarre. So I could see it being frightening, especially if you didn't know it was coming or if you're somebody who does deal a little bit with like anxiety around looking through telescopes or like doing astronomical viewing. For me, it wasn't anxiety inducing because I think the awe was so much more prevalent than anything. i think the main experience for me was all.

'''J:''' oh you know what cracks me up. there are people who absolutely don't know that it's going to happen. i know there are right and then they're like they have to like. i just want to know what that experience is like. like what what fear goes through their head then? do they figure it out or do they call the police like what happens?

'''C:''' Or they're like, oh, there's some sort of weird storm and then they look up and they're like, oh. My hope is that most people are remotely educated enough to be able to be like, oh, I think I heard something about this. But you're right. There are going to be some people who – it will just go dark and they'll be like, what?

'''B:''' I would think that if they're actually caught by surprise, that their thought would be, oh, crap. Man, am I out of touch. Right? What else could you think? Like how could I not know that this was going to happen? It's like ridiculous. I can't even imagine.

'''C:''' I think the first thing people are going to think is there's a storm because if you're not actively looking at the sun – Yeah, you think it's cloudy. Yeah, what's going to happen is it's going to suddenly get dark but like darker than it's ever gotten during the day. Crazy dark like there's a – Stars.

'''E:''' We will see stars.

'''C:''' Yeah, crazy dark like there's a very serious storm, like worse than overcast dark. But that would be the first thing that I think my head would go to if I was like driving in my car. And it got that dark at an odd time of day. I would be like, oh, shit.

'''B:''' Wouldn't they say, wait, but it wasn't cloudy.

'''C:''' Right, exactly. And then you would look up. And that's when you would discover what was actually going on.

'''E:''' Very difficult to put myself in the mind of somebody who has absolutely no clue that this is going to be happening, especially if they're living or existing somewhere along that totality line in the country.

'''C:''' Yeah, if they have access to the radio or television or anything.

'''S:''' Yeah, wouldn't their first thought be, why are there thousands of people along the side of the road looking up at the sky?

'''C:''' Right. You do want to look at things like – I know I mentioned it before, but look at – The way the animals react. You mentioned, Evan, birds. Cows are interesting.

'''E:''' Yeah, right. The animal kingdom has its own set of reactions.

'''C:''' Yeah, so they're just like, guess it's night. Okay, guess it's day. Whereas apes will be like, what's going on? And they'll look up.

'''E:''' But the birds is probably the one we'll be seeing and hearing the most.

'''C:''' Yeah, just because they're so active. And insects too, potentially. Maybe crickets. Yeah. You know, Texas has a lot of cricket, so it might be interesting to listen for those sounds.

=== Boy Beats Tetris (57:17) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.iflscience.com/13-year-old-boy-becomes-the-only-human-to-ever-complete-tetris-72267
|article_title = 13-Year-Old Boy Becomes The Only Human To Ever Complete Tetris
|publication = IFL Science
|redirect_title = Boy Beats Tetris (966) 
}}

'''S:''' All right, Bob, this is a little bit of an unusual news item, but tell us about Tetris. What happened there?

'''B:''' This was really interesting. So apparently some punk kid actually officially beat Tetris recently. Wait, wait, wait. Tetris. So this raised some questions in my mind, maybe yours too. First, is Tetris still even much of a thing anymore? Oh, sure. And what does beating Tetris even mean? and how do you even do that? So – So if you've only recently arrived on Earth, Tetris is a popular puzzle video game from the mid-'80s, still chugging along after all those decades. There's many incarnations of the game, but the mechanics are always the same. You've got seven different four-block shapes called tetrominos.

'''C:''' No, they're not. Really? Huh? That's what they're actually called?

'''B:''' Well, that's what the game maker called them. Technically, they're tetrominoes, the shape. But he calls them tetrominoes. So these tetrominoes, they need to be moved and rotated as they slowly descend or not so slowly descend so that they all fit together at the bottom in completed rows. And then a completed row will then disappear. But uncompleted rows don't disappear, and they just pile up higher and higher on the screen until they hit the top of the screen, ending the game. That's usually how the game ends. And making this whole process harder is the fact that the tetrominoes fall faster and faster every level, making it harder and harder to slot in each shape to complete the row. So it starts going really fast. It's really hard to kind of navigate it and rotate it into the perfect spot that you wanted it. So yeah, simple game, wickedly addictive. As the game's creator, Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov, he quickly discovered back in the old days, it spread like wildfire. There were some companies where they just had to ban it because it was just like everybody was playing their game and not doing the work over there. So this was in – In the old days of 1985 when he created it. So it's so addictive, in fact, that Tetris has been ported to 65 different platforms, a Guinness World Record. You guys remember Tetris on Game Boy, best-selling game of all time.

'''E:''' Isn't that amazing? Yeah.

'''B:''' And Tetris goes even beyond gaming. It's really kind of embedded in popular culture in a lot of different ways. Totally. They say things like costuming and architecture even and things.

'''E:''' The music itself.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. I've even said something like the following on more than one occasion. I Tetris the crap out of our suitcases in the car. Who hasn't said that? Spatial awareness. And Tetris is even cited in real research studies on the brain. They even coined the term the Tetris effect. So yes, Tetris was a juggernaut and is still quite popular. There's a large community of players that constantly try to break Tetris records using the NES, the Nintendo Entertainment System version from 1989. To them, that is the iconic version of the game that they all play. And this culminates annually at the classic Tetris World Championship. Yeah. So what are the milestones that led to this latest punk supposedly beating Tetris? Now, you may have heard my air quotes there because when I said beating just then, it's because. how do you beat a game that doesn't have a specific coded ending to it, right? In Tetris, there's no equivalent to a final boss or a princess to save. And this is part of the reason why this story is so interesting to me. And it's this lack of a definitive ending in gaming that's That often results in what's called a kill screen, which you may have heard for the first time in reference just into this topic, this scenario. So essentially a kill screen is an ungraceful and abrupt ending, very generically speaking. So think of the infamous blue screen of death. That's kind of like a kill screen. So Tetris has something like a kill screen around level 29 because it's at that point that the Tetraminos, that they're falling at their maximum speed. And it's crazy fast. If you've never seen it, it's ridiculously fast. I just can't even imagine.

'''E:''' Like raindrops falling to the ground fast.

'''B:''' It's so – it's like how do you – How do you manipulate it?

'''E:''' How do you even get a move?

'''B:''' Well, the thing is, it's so fast that the in-game controller literally cannot keep up with it. So even if you press the button and held it down so it's constantly moving it across the screen, it still can't keep up in a lot of situations. So, of course, when that happens, then those unfilled lines of blocks that are on the bottom, they just keep piling up and up at that point. And the game just stops. when the pile hits the top of this playing screen, Bam, it ends, and that's basically kind of like a kill screen right there. It seems obvious when you look at it. It seems obvious that if the original designers, the game developers, if they even thought how far people could take Tetris, level 29 was probably the number that they said, yeah, no one is getting past 29. Because of that reason, this really was a limitation of the in-game controller. So that sticking point lasted for decades until 2011. Someone got to level 30 and they were using a technique called hypertapping. This is kind of weird. It involves, as far as I can tell, tensing your muscles and essentially vibrating your fingers in a way that lets you bypass this game controller limitation. It's a weird technique where you're just like – it's like an uncontrolled vibration, and this let people get to level, say, 35 by 2020. They broke that 29, 28, 29 barrier, and they got to 35 by 2020 using this technique. And then there was a new finger technique that was imported from other arcade video games, and this one was rolling. We've all rolled our fingers where you hit like one finger at a time in succession. You could do it really fast. You could roll the tips of your fingers on a hard surface very fast. Players would do this. They would essentially roll or tap their fingers one after the other on the bottom of the controller. And that would push up the controller against their finger on the top of the controller on top of the button. Can you picture that? Yeah. So using that rolling technique, this made them twice as fast as the hypertapping technique. And using that technique, players immediately or very quickly, once it really started spreading, they got into the 90s and then well into – into the hundreds in terms of the level of the game. So that was a huge, huge change right there. But then there's other hurdles. Once you get that high in the game, Tetris has these other hurdles. And these were essentially weird glitches or quirks in the game caused by the game code itself with its limited RAM, right? And also because the game developers just never imagined that anyone would push the limits of the game so hard so far in the future, right? Nobody ever imagined that they would get – that anyone would get the game well into the 100. So of course you're going to see these unusual glitches, things that were just unanticipated because it was never even coded to go that far. So one such glitch was revealed when players hit level 138. At 138, the color palette of the game changes. It kind of goes random. It picks random colors instead of going through. Instead of going through, it's 10 different types of color palettes. It had 10, and it would just cycle through the 10. But when you hit level 128, it just goes random, and it would create color schemes where you can't distinguish the block from the background. Right. So the blocks are coming down. Say it's like a – imagine a black block and a black background. You're not going to see it. It's very, very hard to see with some of those color schemes. So that was a huge hurdle that you just had to kind of tough your way through it and just try to get through it because it's very, very difficult. So it was at this point that AI rolls up its sleeves and enters the room. Somebody created a program called StackRabbit, which is essentially – it's a modified version of the game. And it's essentially an intelligence gathering tool. This wasn't meant to like, oh, look – My AI beat the game. It was essentially just intelligence gathering and they wanted to find the levels where the glitches would get so bad that it would result in a kill screen, a crash. Because a crash like that, if the game just stops and you get a kill screen, that's when you could say – somebody could legitimately say, I beat Tetris. I beat it into submission. So that's – to them, to the players, that – if they could do that, that's when you beat the game. That's the end of the game right there, and it was legitimate. So StackRabbit was able to play all the way to freaking level – get this – 237. It went all the way up to 237. Now remember, this is a modified game.

'''E:''' What's in level 237?

'''B:''' It was optimized for the program to run through the game. So at 237, it hit a game-stopping kill screen at 237. And that's like 100 levels beyond what the record was at the time. Holy moly. But the benefit of that program— Now we know where the endgame is.

'''S:''' Mm-hmm. Now we know where the endgame is.

'''B:''' Now we have a new goal. Well, kind of. Not really. Basically, you know what one endgame was because it showed – but more importantly, what it showed was that a game-ending glitch could be triggered – And it could be triggered by a very specific scenario, different scenarios. Like if you have these specific tetrominoes and if they were all in play and you clear, say, three lines in a row, you will very likely trigger a kill screen. So those are the kinds of scenarios that they determined. Because they used that data and they did a lot of – really a lot of hard work, a lot of math skills, a lot of extrapolation to the NES version of Tetris. And they were able to determine that such a scenario could happen not at 237 but you could make it happen at level 155. And that was only like a little higher. I think the world record at that time was like 135. So they were really on the cusp of a kill screen already. But now they knew what they had to do based on extrapolating from that AI program that brought it to the first kill screen, the first time it was identified. So this is where 13-year-old William Gibson steps in, also known as – Blue Scooty, that was his name, his game name. So he was the first one to trigger such a kill screen. And he missed the opportunity at the earliest point, which was 155. But he was able to trigger it at the next predicted kill screen just two levels later on 157. So absolutely kudos to Blue Scootie, to William Gibson. It really is an achievement. Tetris CEO Maya Rogers described this as a monumental achievement. He said, congratulations to Blue Scootie for achieving this extraordinary accomplishment, a feat that defies all preconceived limits of this legendary game. All right. So what's left now? Where else can Extreme Tetris play and go? There is an answer to this question. There's one more way to beat Tetris, and I think it's more satisfying than forcing a kill screen glitch. This one is better, obviously tougher. So now remember the Star Trek Next Generation episode when Data can't beat that cocky, funny game master guy? They're playing some sci-fi game, and Data couldn't beat him, and he was like, oh, my God, how could – I'm a super fast computer Android dude. I can't beat this guy. What's the matter with me? But he realized that on his second attempt, he tried a different strategy. And in that strategy, Data didn't try to win. He just tried to keep on playing. And that's it. He didn't try to make game-ending moves. He just tried to keep playing. And that's what he does. And he plays the guy for so long that that game master guy quits in disgust. It was really a funny scene. Rage quits. Yeah. He does.

'''E:''' He does a rage quit.

'''B:''' So this is similar to the strategy for what is truly the final level of Tetris and maybe we'll see it one day. Gamers found – they found it using a tool-assisted speed run. They did these speed runs. And I predict somebody will do this at some point. The strategy is to avoid all of the glitch crashes instead of triggering one. You don't want to trigger one to end the game. You just want to kind of like slide around them. Just don't trigger a glitch. Keep going and keep going. This eventually gets very hard because the code is so unstable at these high levels that it's actually hard to avoid a kill screen eventually. It's hard to do. It would be very, very hard. But if you can do that, you should be able to get to level 255. That's the final level because that's the last one that can be stored in memory. That's it. It can't go higher than that. And if you can clear that screen, I think what happens is all the blocks are red. They're like a very cool shade of red. But if you achieve that screen, you should be able to roll over back to level zero, the very first level. And you will have hit what they call the rebirth screen. They're calling this the rebirth screen. And I think it's much more satisfying than just causing – triggering a glitch kill screen. Like rebooting the brain. And it's even theorized that if that happens, humanity will – well, wait. Sorry. I can't tell you that.

'''E:''' Sorry.

'''B:''' Here we go. Cut that out, Steve. Thank you, people.

'''E:''' and that happened in Pac-Man as well Bob I don't know if you've seen the history of Pac-Man. when the first when the first player reached the 255th screen of Pac-Man and got to 256 what happens?

'''B:''' it's a kill screen. it gets all glitchy.

'''E:''' yep a bunch of half the screen is like a normal maze. the other half is a bunch of letters numbers and a bunch of gobbledygook.

'''B:''' I have seen that. I have seen that. so yeah similar similar idea. so interesting very such a goofy little story and I just took a deep dive. like man this is kind of fascinating shit. it is cool.

'''J:''' There's lots of stories out there of people taking a video game to the absolute limit.

'''E:''' Yeah, break it.

'''J:''' Yeah, I saw one that was about Donkey Kong. Cool. And there's personalities involved in these stories, right? There's drama and people that are lying and cheating and doing all sorts of different things. It's just a fascinating genre to read into.

'''E:''' And there's prize money involved, Bob. You alluded that there was the World Tetris Tournament and stuff. You name the game, there is probably a world tournament for it with prizes and money and other things at stake. So it's actually serious business for a lot of people.

'''S:''' That was an interesting story, Bob. Thank you. All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.



{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? (1:12:43) ==
{{wtnHiddenAnswer
|episodeNum = 967
|answer = [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nea3-XIyeU Audio variometer for sailplane]
|}}


{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy (1:15:46) ===
[Echoey squeaking with some musicality?]

{{wtnAnswer|967|This week's Noisy}} 

'''J:''' All right, guys. Last week, I played This Noisy. So two weeks in a row, guys. This week, not as bad as last week.

'''E:''' Well, it was good.

'''J:''' It blows my mind how many people actually know exactly what this thing is. And all of you out there, you know who you are. But very good job, right? A lot of people – I don't think anybody guessed. I think everybody said, I know what that is. And they told me what it was. And when you find out what it is, we can talk about it. So I got two emails that were incorrect this week. That's it, if you could imagine. Vistotuti wrote in and said, while it could be a lyrebird, I hear a more radio through the ionosphere vibe to this noisy. So I say it is the X5 solar flare that blacked out a lot of radio comms at the end of 2023. That is a marvelous guess. That is incorrect. But you know what? I bet you that there are so many things that sound similar to this and I have to look that sound up to see what it actually, what that is. But you know, you're wrong and it's okay. And then the other second person, Michael Blaney, wrote in. Hi, J. New Noisy. It kind of reminds me of the walkie-talkie I had as a kid. Always picked up a lot of static, and it had a Morse code button on it that just made a beeping sound when you pushed it. I remember those walkie-talkies.

'''E:''' My first toy walkie talkie was a set of Star Trek communicator walkie talkies. I had those as well. 75. They didn't work. No, but they sounded cool. You pressed a button and it made a beep and that's all you really cared about.

'''J:''' Right. I know. They were great. So the winner today, this was the first person that sent in the guess. And the winner is Dan Teifke. I hope I pronounced that correctly. And he said, the noisy this week is an audio variometer in a glider or sailplane. This instrument is used to provide an audio signal to the glider pilot telling him or her if they are in lift or sink going up or down. That way they can keep their attention outside the glider, right? So they don't have to look at the instruments. I will say it again. Oh, my God. So many people got this right. And so many people are like, I'm a glider pilot. How many freaking glider pilots are there out there? I thought this one was going to be obscure. Anyway, take a listen again. And now you can imagine what's happening. That is the variometer in a sailplane. Very cool. I have a new noisy this week, and I'm going to warn you ahead of time because people have asked me, please warn me if you're going to play a loud or irritating noise, and this is both. This was sent in by Curtis Grant. I hope you're prepared for this one. Oh, so many possibilities. If you think you know this week's noisy or you heard something cool, email me at wtn at theskepticsguide.org.

== Announcements (1:16:26) ==

'''J:''' Everyone, we have two events coming up. They are both happening in Dallas, Texas. If you didn't know already, you must have just heard Kara say this is her hometown city. There's lots of great food there. But we are going to have two shows in Dallas. On April 6th, we will have an extravaganza. This will be, of course, with George Robb as our host. And it's going to be a great time, and it's going to have an eclipse theme to it. If you could imagine that. Yes. Yes, it will. So you could join us for that show on the 6th. And on the 7th, we are going to be doing a private show in Dallas. I am making final arrangements now with the hotel. I'll have that address soon, but it'll be in downtown Dallas. And to get tickets for both of these events, you can go to theskepticsguide.org. There's two buttons on there. And we please hope that you join us because we're going to have a ton of fun. Join us. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean this weekend, this arrangement here where we do the extravaganza and we do the private show together, to me it's very exciting and it's just two very different shows and they're a lot of fun.

'''S:''' Yeah, they are. Sometimes people like come to the extravaganza thinking we're doing a private recording. It's like no. The extravaganza is a stage show. The private recording is a private recording of the podcast.

'''J:''' During the private show, we actually do a two-hour live recording of the podcast, and then there is a separate hour of something else. Other things. Other things that we do interact with the audience, have fun. We call that the private show plus. But the extravaganza, I mean, we've been doing this show for years now, and it's a great show. It has a science backbone to it, just so you know. We are going to teach you about how your brain fools you every single day.

{{anchor|followup}}
{{anchor|correction}}
{{anchor|email}} 
== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:18:15) ==
=== Email #1: Dimensional Weight ===
{{shownotes email 
|text = 
|sender =
|location = 
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'''S:''' All right, thanks, Jay. One quick email. The subject line is Dimensional Weight. This comes from Ron Moczynski in Fairfax, and he writes, Love your podcast, long-time listener. Have you guys, Gal, done any shows talking about the subject title here? All right.

'''E:''' I'm familiar with the concept because I've shipped things that are very light, but the box itself is so big. Yeah. It's either very flat and long or something that they have to charge accordingly to have the space in whatever transportation things they need to get it from A to B. Right.

'''S:''' That's basically what it is. So dimensional weight or volumetric weight, those are the same thing. Those are synonyms. They basically – it's not weight at all. It's volume. But the way it got that term, which is a bit misleading – is because I think these companies used to just charge by weight. But then they figured that really big light boxes are taking up a lot of space in the shipping containers, whatever, and we're not getting paid a lot because they're light and we're losing money. So they came up with this idea of dimensional weight, which is really volume. It's just length, height, width. And so you have different calculations of price based upon actual weight or volume and then they charge you the higher cost. So – and the thing is it's legitimate in itself, right? The idea that you're paying for some combination of weight and volume and they have an algorithm of how to determine the price based upon those two things. That's fine. I do agree, though, that calling it dimensional weight is a little confusing unnecessarily. And just call it volume. Call it what it is. But the other thing is they really need to disclose it. Volumetric weight. Why call it weight at all? I think it's confusing. But anyway, you have to disclose it up front with total transparency so there's no hidden fees or, again, these sort of late additional shipping charges or whatever. that happens because people didn't realize that. But definitely when you're packing a package for shipping – Right. Right. Right.

'''B:''' So what would they charge you in terms of dimensional weight if you tried to mail like a four-dimensional hypercube?

'''E:''' Yeah, or a Tesseract.

'''S:''' That's called dimensional hyperweight, Bob.

'''B:''' Hyperweight.

'''E:''' Get your terms right.

'''S:''' That has extra fees attached to it. But you have to pay those extra fees in Kwatlus.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah.

'''S:''' All right. So, yeah, it's like it's not really a scam. It's just kind of a shady business practice then mainly because they don't fully disclose it.

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:21:45) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
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{{SOFinfo
|theme = Positive global trends

|item1 = Cigarette smoking has decreased dramatically among US teens between 1991 and 2021, with daily use declining from 9.8% in 1991 to 0.6% in 2021, a greater than 16-fold decline.
|link1web = https://www.ochsnerjournal.org/content/23/4/289
|link1title = Trends in Cigarette Smoking Among United States Adolescents
|link1pub = Ochsner Journal

|item2 = The global literacy rate has almost tripled since 1990, from around 30% to 89%.
|link2web = https://www.statista.com/statistics/997360/global-adult-and-youth-literacy/
|link2title = Global adult literacy rate aged 15 years and older from 1976 to 2022 by gender
|link2pub = Statista

|item3 = Extreme poverty is on the decline – there are over a billion fewer people living below the international poverty line today than in 1990.
|link3web = https://ourworldindata.org/poverty
|link3title = Poverty
|link3pub = Our World in Data

|}}
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|science2 = Extreme poverty declining

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|answer2 =global literacy rate tripled

|rogue3 =cara
|answer3 =global literacy rate tripled

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|answer4 =global literacy rate tripled

|host =steve 

|sweep = 
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''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''E:''' "Good news everyone!"

'''S:''' {{gne}}

'''S:''' All right, let's go on with Science or Fiction. It's time for Science or Fiction. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one petition. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. So I wanted to end the show on a positive note this week. And this is also the flip side of what I did last week. Last week I had three statistics about which countries were the worst at something. And this week, I'm going to give you three positive trends happening in the world. But one of them is incorrect as stated. Get it?

'''J:''' When you say positive, you mean good?

'''S:''' Yeah, good trends. These are all good things that are happening. Okay.

'''E:''' Good news, everyone.

'''S:''' Good news, everyone. Here we go. Item number one. Cigarette smoking has decreased dramatically among U.S. teens between 1991 and 2021, with daily use declining from 9.8% in 1991 to 0.6% in 2021, a greater than 16-fold decline. Item number two, the global literacy rate has almost tripled since 1990 from around 30% to 89%. And item number three, extreme poverty is on the decline. There are over a billion fewer people living below the international poverty line today than in 1990. This is obviously all involved in the last 30 years. Bob, go first.

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' Oh, boy. So, all right. Cigarette smoking, a huge decline makes sense because I think vaping has just kind of exploded. But that's a – from 9.8 percent to 0.6, that's bigger than I would have anticipated. But I don't necessarily – Discount that. All right. So then we got the literacy drop. Let's see. Global literacy rate has almost tripled since 90. From around 30 to 89? That's huge. No, that's fiction. I'm done.

'''S:''' That's fiction. Okay, Evan.

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''E:''' You stop right there.

'''S:''' Oh, gosh.

'''E:''' Cigarette smoking decreasing dramatically. Yes, I believe that one is correct. That it should be science. Like Bob said, it's the vaping stuff. You know, the e-cigarettes, I guess, would be part of that. We're talking about traditional tobacco analog cigarettes in this particular item that you're listing, Steve. I'm making that assumption. And absolutely, I believe that that is correct. The day of the... Mad Men smokers of the 50s or, you know, Johnny Carson and everyone on TV basically smoking all over the place. That is long gone. And the second one, global literacy rate has almost tripled since 1990 from around 30% to 89%. I don't think that's right. And I'm going to agree with Bob on this. That's a huge jump. And I'm trying to think of how or why that could be the case. Not the internet. Since 1990, right? So what would be the cause of – I mean the first thing you'd point to would be the internet. So what? Have – they unlocked some sort of key that was boxed to something that they missed for all those years prior to that? Something suddenly – Popped out in the books and everything to someone? No, I don't think so. On the last one though about the poverty decline, that seems – that also seems like a very high number, a billion fewer people. That's a lot. But that poverty line is – was probably comparatively in 1990 like so down that – Yeah, by today's standard, I guess you could say a billion. So yeah, I think of the three, the least plausible one here is the global literacy one, fiction.

'''S:''' All right, Kara.

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' Yeah, I think I have to agree with the guys. I totally agree that cigarette smoking has decreased dramatically, especially here you're saying daily use. I think that that's probably an important note because I don't know if like having ever smoked has changed. I mean, I'm sure it has changed also, but I think probably a lot of teens have had a cigarette or sometimes have cigarettes, but I don't think a lot of teens are regularly smoking cigarettes anymore. I think they're vaping and yeah, the poverty one is tough. Like it's, but I think the global literacy rate one is just more extreme. So like it does seem unlikely that, but it's really hard because you don't in the, in the extreme poverty one, you don't really give any, indication of what those thresholds are. So you're just calling it extreme poverty being on the decline. Poverty, like overall poverty might not be, but maybe the worst of the worst isn't as bad as it has been. I don't know. What is the international poverty line? Has it changed? But the literacy rate going up from 30 to 89%, I wouldn't be surprised if the literacy rate is quite high now, but I think it was probably already high in 1990. That's probably – I could see that being a statistic that you pulled from like 50 years of difference or 80 years of difference, but not – oh, my God, 1990. Is that 30? No, it's like 35 years ago.

'''B:''' I know, Kara.

'''E:''' It's a third of a century.

'''C:''' Oh, my God. Yeah, I don't think – I don't think even in that – that is actually a very long time, but I don't think even in that amount of time it would have gone from 30 to 89 percent. That 30 percent figure is not sitting right with me.

'''S:''' And Jay?

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' Yeah, I'm just going to cut to the chase because everybody said everything. Yeah, going from 30% to 89% since 1990 just doesn't seem plausible in any way. I would have that number be like 10% maybe. So that's got to be the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay. So you all agree on the second one. We'll take these in order.

'''B:''' Yes, everyone agrees with me. Yes.

'''C:''' I agree with you, Bob.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' Item number one, cigarette smoking has decreased dramatically among U.S. teens between 1991 and 2021, with daily use declining from 9.8% in 1991 to 0.6% in 2021, a greater than 16-fold decline. You guys all think that one is science, and that one is science. That is science. That's a good thing. And it's not just daily use, like every way you mark it, like ever smoke in the last week, in the last six, whatever. All markers are decreasing significantly. Yay. Now, I had the same thought that you guys had. It's like, well, I wonder how much of that is just – switching over to vaping but it turns out that is not the case. wow good or at least it's not clear. so there was a. i found a study that said uh the basically that the decrease in cigarette smoking is independent from e-cigarette vaping use. it's they're they're independent one. it's not like they're correlating. the timings are all different and everything. so there there seem to be independent things.

'''C:''' It blows my mind.

'''B:''' That does.

'''C:''' I'm just like, what the hell?

'''S:''' That is really hard to believe. I disagree. Basically, what happened is smoking was on the decline before vaping took over. It's not like vaping replaced smoking.

'''C:''' No, it didn't replace smoking but it was marketed as a replacement for smoking.

'''S:''' But a minority of people literally switch from smoking to vaping. Most people who are vaping now didn't switch. They just are – so ….

'''C:''' Yeah, they're new. That's true. A lot of young people started vaping who never would have had a cigarette.

'''S:''' Right. that's the problem. so vaping was. vaping was partly marketed as you could switch from smoking to vaping and it's safer and and it was kind of promoted that way. so we've written about this on science-based medicine. is that actually true or not? and it's actually mostly not true.

'''C:''' yeah there's a good doc about um what's the really big vaping company that jewel? oh yeah there's a really good doc about jewel on netflix right now. that shows like all the missteps in their marketing and And that they're really in their heart of hearts were trying to say, let's create a safer cigarette. Like that's what they wanted. They were like, how can we let people still do the thing they were going to do but not be dying of cancer? And it became this horrible thing that children – like it's all flavors and like children.

'''E:''' I know.

'''S:''' Yeah, bubble gum and – All right, let's go on to number two.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' The global literacy rate has almost tripled since 1990 from around 30% to 89%. You guys all think this one is the fiction, and this one is the fiction. Good job, everyone. What is incorrect about those numbers?

'''C:''' The 30% has to be incorrect.

'''S:''' Tara thinks it's the 30%. Is the 89% too high? Is the 30% too low?

'''C:''' No, I think the 30% is too low.

'''J:''' 30 is too low. The change had to be much smaller than that.

'''E:''' I mean there are some countries that have 95% illiteracy rates. There are countries out there that have them.

'''C:''' Still today? I don't know if that's true. 95% is very high.

'''S:''' The 89% is accurate. Yeah. The 30%, I just made it way too low. It went from 67% to 89%.

'''C:''' That's still super significant. That's great.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' No, I'm sorry. 67%. That was in 1976. 1990. 1990 was 74. From 74 to 89. Yeah. Yeah. So it's getting better and it's pretty high now. I looked up like why.

'''B:''' C minus to a B plus, man. That's good.

'''S:''' Yeah. I looked up like why is this happening? It's hard to give one answer, but one hypothesis I saw.

'''B:''' Internet?

'''S:''' Multiple times. Web? No, it's actually industry. It's because there are more jobs that require literacy. And so in order to have a job and to compete in more of a technical workspace, so there's a lot more pressure to be literate just to get a job. So that was one big factor that I saw. But I'm sure there's multiple factors. Okay.

'''C:''' Yeah, I think the lowest literacy rate that I'm seeing right now is in Afghanistan.

'''E:''' This breaks it down between youth, adult, and elderly. It has three categories.

'''C:''' And a lot of them break it down between male and female, obviously, because in Afghanistan, 52% of the male population is literate, but only 22% of the female population. But still, that's at 37%. The next lowest is like I don't know, in the 70s. No, there's 42. Benin is 42. But yeah, it's very – It's an outlier.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' But none of them are like 95 percent illiterate.

'''B:''' Yeah. It's just not that bad anymore.

'''E:''' In some of these age categories, if you go to the – I'm seeing on the older age categories, some of them are in the single digits here. Yeah, but that's because – For elderly 65 and over.

'''C:''' That's true. But that's because – think about it. That's because that would have been the literacy rate 60 years ago or 80 years ago. All right. Yeah, the literacy rate was potentially really bad a very long time ago.

'''E:''' Yeah, Sierra Leone. If you're 65 or over, your literacy rate is 4%. Yeah. Ugh, gosh.

'''C:''' It's very sad. Yeah, because if you grew up during Civil War, if you grew up without an education – Yeah, and it wasn't prioritized.

'''E:''' Yeah, you never had to pick it up later in life.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' All of this means that extreme poverty is on the decline. There are over a billion fewer people living below the international poverty line today than in 1990. is science.

'''C:''' That's amazing.

'''S:''' There has been some significant improvement in poverty, especially at the low end. So, yeah, over a billion fewer people. This is, I think, the WHO defines the international poverty line.

'''C:''' Which is great because there are – how many more people are there now than there were in 1990? A billion?

'''E:''' Yeah, a billion people probably.

'''C:''' Probably.

'''S:''' Yeah, so it's good. So interesting anecdote for me preparing for this Science or Fiction episode. So I had the idea. All right, so there's positive trends happening. Let me have two real, one fake. Finding real positive trends was very easy, and I had a lot of things to choose from. Good. I had a hard time finding a fake one, and this is why. Ah. Because that's why I had to exaggerate one. I couldn't even find – I wanted to find a trend that was getting worse and say it was getting better. I couldn't really find one. And so the other thing is it was easy to find the actual positive. The other criterion was that it's not something we've talked about a lot because obviously if it's something that comes up on the show all the time, it's not going to be that much of a challenge, right? So there was lots of things that we don't talk about that are getting better over time. The crime rate is going down. The murder rate is going down. A lot of health markers are getting better over time. Tons of stuff is getting better over time that we don't talk about on a regular basis. Any of the negative trends we talk about all the time. I couldn't find a negative trend that we don't talk about all the time.

'''C:''' So we would all just be like, obviously, we just were discussing.

'''S:''' Right. So that was – the timing is interesting because by coincidence, I was reading a couple of articles recently, partly because of like reviewing 2023. There was like one article – A lot of people are writing about how horrible the world is, right? But there's a few articles saying, you know, when you look at all the data, things are going pretty well. You know, and like, here's like, here's the wonderful things that happened in 2023 or whatever. And some people are sort of, are making the point that, like, Steven Pinker is like, this is his thing, right? Yeah, that's his thing. If you look at all the data, Things are actually getting consistently much better. But there's a tendency to focus on all the negative things. And you could make any year seem horrible if you just list all the bad things that happened in that year.

'''C:''' But you have to put it in – But he does have a massive blind spot for the fact that global climate change is out of control.

'''S:''' Yeah. Well, yeah.

'''C:''' That is not getting better.

'''S:''' That's the criticism of his position. Yeah.

'''C:''' And like so many things are linked to that.

'''S:''' Yeah. But he will say, though, that, yeah, but there's so many things that are getting good. You have to look at everything.

'''C:''' Yeah, but none of those things matter if we can't survive as a species.

'''S:''' That may be the case.

'''E:''' I feel happy.

'''J:''' Right.

'''S:''' But I do think that there is something to this notion that the media and the public focuses on the negative. And we do it too because, again, it was easy to find tons of positive things that we don't talk about. And I could not find a negative thing that we don't talk about.

'''C:''' Well, and it's kind of like because definitionally that's not really news. Right.

'''S:''' Well, but that's – we define – why isn't it news? Why isn't it news that extreme poverty is on the decline or that global literacy is doing great or that teens – teen pregnancy is down.

'''C:''' Because historically news, like actual – like classically – It's tied to advertising.

'''S:''' Well, no, no, no.

'''C:''' Historically, even before advertising, right? Like long before we had news tied to advertising. News was a way – and journalism in general was a way to hold truth to power, right? And so what was news? It was going out and finding injustices that people weren't aware of and bringing them out into the public view. So I don't – I just think that historically news wasn't like, here's a fun, nice story. It was, hey, here's a thing you should know that you don't know because it's being kept from you.

'''S:''' Let's blow it a bit. And there's legitimacy to that. There's – like when we do it too, like we talk about the things that need to be fixed, right? Yeah, exactly. So of course that has – that tends to focus on the negative because we don't talk about things that are doing just fine because what's there to talk about? Yeah. But that, even though it's legit and there's a reason for it, it still creates a distorted view of reality. Yeah, it's a massive bias. Because we're constantly hearing the negative. And there's some interesting things. Like, for example, the majority of people think that crime is going up in the United States.

'''C:''' Right, and it's going to hell.

'''S:''' And they've thought that for the last 30 years. During which crime, except for like the blip in the pandemic, other than that, crime has been pretty consistently going down for the last 30 years and people think it's going up. They think the opposite of reality.

'''C:''' Because of that, shitty policies are put into place. That's the other thing. It has a negative effect.

'''E:''' Sure does. Yeah.

'''C:''' Just so that you guys know, I looked it up because that little joke I made about, well, there's probably a billion more people. Guess how many more people there are now than there were in 1990? Two billion more.

'''S:''' One more. 2.6 billion more.

'''E:''' That's crazy. There are 7.888 billion people, and that's in 2021.

'''C:''' So, you know, because all of these statistics are lagged.

'''S:''' But we broke 8 billion.

'''E:''' They said 8. We broke 8 billion. Last year, wasn't it?

'''C:''' Okay. So, yeah, we broke an 8 billion. So it's even more than that. The world population in 1990 was 5.294 billion.

'''S:''' Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I remember when we broke 6.

'''B:''' We thought that was a lot then. Yeah.

'''E:''' So we're screaming towards 10 billion. Yeah, we're probably – Within our lifetime.

'''S:''' But we're probably going to max out at 10 and then we're going to start drifting down.

'''C:''' Yeah, population is – I mean it is growing but the rate – the fertility rate is a lot lower.

'''S:''' The fertility rate is – overall it's not at replacement levels.

'''C:''' No. Right. It was 3.31 in 1990 and now it is 2.30. So it is still slightly over replacement.

'''S:''' Yeah. Replacement is 2.1. I think it's more than 2.

'''C:''' Oh, is it? Okay. Yeah. So it's just slightly over. Yeah.

'''E:''' So increasing at a slower rate.

'''S:''' This relates to the poverty thing again because poverty is the major driver of overpopulation because when people are poor, they have lots of kids as a hedge. And also if a lot of them are going to die, they overcompensate by having a lot of kids. And as soon as people are more secure and women are empowered, they have fewer kids.

'''C:''' Yeah, like education is another big part of that, but they're all related.

'''S:''' Yeah, so if you look at the West though, the West, like industrialized nations are not at replacement levels.

'''E:''' No.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's the global population. The growth rate right now is 0.9 annually when it was like almost 2. Yeah.

'''S:''' It's kind of a self-correcting problem. I know we're going to 100% get emails about this.

'''E:''' Oh, gosh.

'''C:''' There's only so much carrying capacity on the planet.

'''S:''' No, I know. But the thing is, you're right. But it's not going to increase forever. It will come down eventually. I mean, it can't. That's what I mean. The solution to overpopulation. The thing is, I've had email exchanges with people about this, and I keep saying, so what do you want to do about it? Seriously, who do you want to kill? What do you want to do?

'''C:''' I want to just educate more people. That's what I want.

'''S:''' That's fine. But they give me these like really suspicious abstract kind of answers. Like we have to stop this culture of whatever. But still. Eugenics kind of. Or how about this? We reduce poverty and empower women. If you do those two things, which are both good things in and of themselves, the population will come down over time.

'''C:''' A hundred percent.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' And increase literacy. Right.

'''B:''' Right.

'''C:''' Yeah, all of it. Increase education and especially among women and have women have more autonomy over their choices and their bodily decisions.

'''S:''' It turns out they don't want to be baby factories. Go for it. Exactly.

'''C:''' Yeah.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:41:00) ==

{{qow
|text = I'm not sure why I enjoy debunking. Part of it surely is amusement over the follies of true believers, and partly because attacking bogus science is a painless way to learn good science… Another reason for debunking is that bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society.
|author = {{w|Martin Gardner}}
|lived = 1914-2010
|desc = American mathematician
}}


'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' All right. This week's quote was suggested by listener Patrick from Michigan. He says, thanks for making my Saturday special for over 15 years. So longtime listener, Pat. Thank you. Oh, and also he says, congratulations, Dr. Cara.

'''C:''' Oh, thanks.

'''E:''' I thought you'd like to hear that. Here's the quote. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders, and the result is considerable damage to society.

'''S:''' You don't know the half of it.

'''E:''' Martin Gardner wrote that in 1998.

'''S:''' Very prescient. Oh, my gosh.

'''C:''' Love him.

'''S:''' All the more true today. Okay.

'''E:''' Absolutely.

'''J:''' Right.

'''S:''' All right, guys. Thank you all for joining me this week. Hope you feel better, Steve.

'''B:''' Sure, man.

== Signoff ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

{{Outro664}}{{top}} 
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SGU Episode 935

2023-06-15T14:28:50Z

Ralsettem: Ai Transcription with speaker dilazeration added

{{Google speech|episode}}
{{900s|935|episodebox}}
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{{UseOutline}} 
{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 935
|episodeDate = {{900s|935|boxdate}} 

|verified = 

|episodeIcon = File:935 Apple Vision Pro.jpg

|caption = While the {{w|Apple Vision Pro}} looks like a set of magic ski goggles, it's actually a computing platform that might eventually take over a lot of what we do today on smartphones, tablets, and computers. <ref name = vision>[https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/apple-vision-pro-first-take-3-reasons-this-changes-everything/ ZD Net: Apple Vision Pro first take: 3 reasons this changes everything]</ref>

|bob =y
|cara =y
|jay =y
|Evan =y

|qowText = Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds and fanatics. It is for scientific folk and unattainable ideal.
|qowAuthor = {{w| Cassius Jackson Keyser}}, American mathematician

|downloadLink = {{900s|935|download}} 

|forumLinktopic = 55091.0
|}}

== Introduction, Evan’s trouble with poor air quality ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Thursday, June 8th, 2023, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella.

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening, everyone

'''S:''' Evan, you're sounding a little sore throated over there.

'''E:''' What's going on?

'''E:''' I am.

'''E:''' It's not a sore throat.

'''E:''' What happened to me is that earlier this week, Monday, this sort of phlegminess developed in my throat.

'''E:''' I really don't have any other symptoms of a cold.

'''E:''' I didn't have a sore throat.

'''E:''' My nose is not running.

'''E:''' And you know, no headache, no aches, no things you kind of think about having a cold.

'''E:''' I'm like, what the heck's going on?

'''E:''' Well, what's going on, especially in this part of the country, the Northeast United States, is that we've been under some really bad air quality.

'''S:''' I know.

'''S:''' The worst in my lifetime probably.

'''S:''' Oh, absolutely.

'''S:''' Worst in my lifetime.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Like do not go outside.

'''S:''' Close all your windows.

'''S:''' You know, like that kind of thing.

'''E:''' On Tuesday, I was outside.

'''E:''' I think I was coming back from lunch.

'''E:''' I was at work.

'''E:''' And I'm like, what's wrong?

'''E:''' Something's wrong with the light.

'''E:''' Everything looked pink.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Right.

'''E:''' I'm looking at how you look at sunshine as it's on the ground.

'''E:''' It's kind of like this white generally kind of, but it was pink as if somebody put a pink filter up.

'''E:''' And I look up and there's this haze, this absolute haze over the entire sky.

'''E:''' And that sun, I know you're not supposed to look at the sun without eye protection, but I looked at it.

'''E:''' That thing was glowing pink, absolute pink.

'''E:''' And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is the wildfires in Canada.

'''E:''' And all that smoke and debris and soot is blanketing the entire Northeast part of the country and other parts of the country as well.

'''B:''' Jay, that's what we were seeing at your house Tuesday night.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Remember we were looking outside and we were curious because it looked yellow.

'''J:''' Right.

'''S:''' It was totally off color.

'''S:''' I noticed the smell first.

'''S:''' So I got home on Tuesday and I smelled the burning smell, you know.

'''S:''' And our oven, which is busted, was being worked on.

'''S:''' So I figured, oh, the guy was doing something with the oven and burned some whatever rubber or plastic or something.

'''S:''' But it wasn't going away.

'''S:''' And then I went outside and it was just as bad outside.

'''S:''' And like, oh, it smells like this everywhere.

'''S:''' Where's the smell coming from?

'''S:''' Is it a neighbor burning leaves or something?

'''S:''' And then I came to find out it's coming from Canada, quite a bit away.

'''E:''' And it's not just that campfire kind of smoke smell, Steve, as you were saying.

'''E:''' It almost has this artificial quality to it.

'''E:''' Like some plastic is burning or something.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' That's why I thought it was like something in the oven, like something, an electrical fire.

'''B:''' Weird.

'''E:''' I never smelled anything.

'''E:''' So it's not this, you know, nice wholesome sort of, oh, campfire smell.

'''C:''' It's this, bleh, this is disgusting.

'''C:''' So this is like not uncommon in California.

'''C:''' Right, right.

'''C:''' You know, like the red haze and like all of this stuff.

'''B:''' Air quality issues, yeah.

'''B:''' Big whoop, right?

'''C:''' And upwards, yeah, into the Pacific Northwest.

'''C:''' One of the things that often will happen, and usually I guess if the fires aren't as far away, but one of the things that would often happen is that you get ash that rains down on your porch, on your car, and things like that.

'''C:''' Are you guys seeing any ash on the ground or is it just the air quality?

'''E:''' You are.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''E:''' I had to watch.

'''E:''' I couldn't, yesterday I could not see out the windows of my car.

'''E:''' So I brought it home and hosed it down because that's how thick the debris, it's like pollen but about five times thicker almost.

'''E:''' I got this coating entirely on my car.

'''E:''' I had to hose it down so I could see.

'''S:''' So yeah, so what caused all the fires?

'''S:''' From what I'm reading, they're not 100% sure.

'''S:''' Lightning may have played a role, but you can't rule out human activity.

'''S:''' But it's, again, apparently in the west of Canada and the east of Canada there are different causes.

'''S:''' In the west they're saying, yeah, it's pretty clear that this is due to dry conditions resulting from global warming.

'''S:''' In the east it's not as clear how much of a role that's playing.

'''S:''' But clearly spring has come early and leading to more dry conditions.

'''S:''' This is more of like a summer fire that we're getting in the spring because the ground is drier.

'''S:''' It burns longer and is harder to put out, et cetera.

'''S:''' It's not just the superficial stuff on top with a wet ground.

'''S:''' The ground is dry.

'''E:''' Right.

'''E:''' I'm reading that this past winter they had low snowfall accumulations, not the usual typical kind of melt that occurs and would live in the ground and would postpone something like this until maybe later in the summer.

'''E:''' This wildfire season came very early for Canada this year.

'''S:''' Yeah, so even though this is – I can't remember ever experiencing anything like this before, but this may become the new normal.

'''S:''' Oh my gosh.

'''S:''' I hope not.

'''E:''' I'm going to have to move.

'''E:''' I don't know.

'''E:''' I can't live like this.

'''E:''' This is – did you see the photographs?

'''E:''' A climate refugee, Evan.

'''S:''' You're going to become a climate refugee.

'''E:''' I might.

'''C:''' Do you just have really – I mean I'm just fascinated by the fact that all four of you live within relatively close driving range and Evan, you're getting hit super hard.

'''C:''' Do you find that you – are you usually more sensitive to like environmental –

'''E:''' Well, pollen is normally – I do have allergies to pollen. It's not so unusual, but to this degree, it is unusual for me.

'''E:''' But May is typically a bad month for my allergies to begin with.

'''E:''' This kind of goes beyond the allergies I believe.

'''E:''' Again, I otherwise – maybe I do have a slight cold of some kind.

'''E:''' Some other people I know have colds.

'''E:''' So maybe I have a version of a cold and this is just exacerbating that cold.

'''E:''' But I really don't have any other cold symptoms.

'''E:''' So I'm not really sure exactly what to attribute this to.

'''E:''' Interesting.

'''E:''' Did you see the pictures of New York City yesterday, Wednesday?

'''C:''' Oh my god.

'''E:''' It's spooky seeing it in New York.

'''E:''' I mean really, they were so right.

'''E:''' They said it was – it is as if someone was shooting Blade Runner, the movie.

'''C:''' Didn't they say it was the worst air quality on record in New York?

'''B:''' Oh yes, ever.

'''B:''' Today it was lowered from hazardous to merely unhealthy.

'''C:''' Are you wearing a mask, Evan?

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Yes, I did wear a mask while I was outside.

'''E:''' But I just really haven't been going outside.

'''E:''' I've been limiting myself to being inside.

'''S:''' I've been reading about that.

'''C:''' I mean unless you have like a pretty intense air filter.

'''S:''' You really need like one of those filter masks.

'''S:''' Yeah, with those two kind of – Like a COVID-19 mask isn't good enough.

'''S:''' You need one that looks like a gas mask almost.

'''S:''' You know what I mean?

'''S:''' Like those filter masks.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' I actually have one of those.

'''S:''' I should have whipped it out.

'''S:''' What kind of mask is that, Steve?

'''S:''' Yeah, there are actually filters.

'''S:''' You're breathing the air through a filter.

'''E:''' It has the two canisters bound by the mouth to either side of the mouth.

'''J:''' You know what those look like?

'''J:''' Oh my god.

'''J:''' You have to wear one of those?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' If you really – or you stay inside.

'''S:''' Make sure that you're – if you have an HVAC system in your home, make sure you have a good filter.

'''S:''' Yeah, we just had our service last month.

'''E:''' Thank goodness.

'''E:''' They put new filters in.

'''C:''' You're probably going to have to change your – you're supposed to change your filters monthly.

'''C:''' So you're probably going to have to change your filters weekly right now.

'''C:''' OK.

'''C:''' You're probably going to have to get new filters.

'''C:''' In LA, I always know when it's wildfire season, I have to change them a lot.

'''C:''' I have like Dyson filters in every room, like HEPA filters in at least the bedroom and living room.

'''S:''' Yeah, the HEPA filter is good.

'''S:''' If you don't have that, you can get a portable air purifier with good filters and just run

'''C:''' those.

'''S:''' You definitely should do that. That could reduce like 95% of this crap in the air.

'''S:''' What can, Steve?

'''S:''' These filters.

'''S:''' Like if you run an air purifier with the HEPA filters.

'''B:''' Yeah, I got that.

'''B:''' I got mine going at maximum today.

'''C:''' Outdoor air pollution is usually worse than outdoor air pollution.

'''C:''' It's not a bad idea to have a good HEPA filter in your house.

'''S:''' I had to close my window in my office.

'''S:''' You know, because the air is so bad outside.

'''S:''' Honestly, this is the first time I felt like this really feels like a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

'''S:''' You know what I mean?

'''S:''' Like it's the first time – I know like we live in the northeast of the US and it's kind of a privileged location in that we don't really have to worry about any things like earthquakes or – Right.

'''S:''' I thought tornadoes but even the tornadoes that we had a few years ago were nothing compared to other parts of the country.

'''S:''' We rarely get hit by hurricanes and when we do it's just a really bad storm, etc.

'''S:''' And now, like I really, really didn't think that climate change would impact me directly living in Connecticut for a long time.

'''S:''' But here it is.

'''S:''' I mean this is dramatic.

'''S:''' I was locked in my house for three days because of the air quality.

'''S:''' I mean think about that.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I believe they closed some schools among other things.

{{anchor|special}} 
== Special Report: Canadian wildfires (1:46) ==
{{shownotes
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=== Climate change review (9:05) ===

'''S:''' Speaking of global warming, in preparation for COP28 which is going to happen in December in Bonn apparently, 50 climate scientists prepared a review of like where are we, some stats about where things are.

'''S:''' And it's really bad.

'''S:''' So first of all, right now we are emitting more CO2 than ever, than ever.

'''S:''' The amount of CO2 that the world is emitting is still increasing.

'''S:''' The only thing – Has the increase slowed down?

'''S:''' The increasing has slowed down.

'''S:''' That's the only thing that we've achieved.

'''S:''' That's a win.

'''S:''' But think about that.

'''S:''' Not enough.

'''S:''' We've slowed the increase in emissions but we're still releasing even more every year.

'''S:''' That's why I think – I know I talked recently about the fact that – again, I'm all in on wind and solar.

'''S:''' It's great.

'''S:''' But – and then people are – some countries are touting their mix of wind and solar.

'''S:''' It's like, yeah, but you're just – you're not even keeping up with increased demand.

'''S:''' You know what I mean?

'''S:''' You're just the new electricity generation.

'''S:''' More of the new generation is wind and solar.

'''S:''' But we're still burning more fossil fuel and emitting more CO2 than ever before.

'''S:''' So they keep a rolling average of like the average temperature increase above pre-industrial levels for 10 years, like a 10-year rolling average.

'''S:''' So you guys know a few years ago we broke 1.01 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

'''S:''' That was for the period between 2010 and 2019.

'''S:''' For that 10-year period, the average warming was 1.07.

'''S:''' And now three years later, we're at 1.14.

'''S:''' Remember the goal is to keep it below 1.5.

'''S:''' We're already at 1.14.

'''S:''' Not gun debt.

'''S:''' Another way to look at it is our carbon budget.

'''S:''' You guys are familiar with this concept?

'''S:''' Like what's the total amount of carbon we can release into the atmosphere but still keep to that one – the total, cumulative, yeah, and still keep to the 1.5 C goal.

'''S:''' So three years ago, we were – remember the whole – we got 12 years of global warming.

'''S:''' We've burned through half of the remaining carbon budget.

'''S:''' And then that's it.

'''S:''' We're going to blow through 1.5.

'''S:''' So we're failing.

'''S:''' We're just not doing it.

'''S:''' It's going to be bad.

'''B:''' It is frustrating.

'''S:''' It's like watching a car crash in slow motion.

'''S:''' You know, it's like for all the governments and so many people are talking about it and we're trying so many things.

'''S:''' It's like, yeah, but we're still emitting more CO2 every year than the year before.

'''S:''' Like we're not even coming close to really doing what we need to do to turn this ship around.

'''S:''' So we got that going for us.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' It's like, oh, OK.

'''S:''' Which is nice.

'''S:''' I don't know if there's no upside to this story.

'''S:''' It's just that we're not doing it.

'''S:''' Why?

'''S:''' Because it would take a much greater effort than – Because try to get a billion people to do one thing.

'''C:''' We can't even get people to believe it.

'''C:''' I mean imagine that.

'''C:''' You believe it when it's too late to do anything about it.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It's basically too late.

'''S:''' It's partly because there's no easy solution.

'''S:''' It's not like there's this one easy thing we need to do and we just need to do it.

'''S:''' We need to do 100 hard things that all involve tradeoffs.

'''C:''' But none of those tradeoffs are bigger than the tradeoff of what it's going to be like.

'''C:''' I agree.

'''S:''' But it's also I think part of the problem is that we can't just do individual things.

'''S:''' We need a strategic plan.

'''S:''' I thought that was the whole point of these meetings.

'''S:''' That is true.

'''S:''' But the point is like individual countries are like doing things to try to reduce their carbon but they don't necessarily have like, all right, here's our 30-year plan.

'''S:''' This is what we're going to do.

'''S:''' It's not a lot of that going on.

'''S:''' I don't think that's necessarily true.

'''C:''' I think a lot of countries have that.

'''C:''' I think we don't.

'''C:''' Well, we don't.

'''C:''' The ones that matter don't.

'''C:''' And when you say that, you mean the biggest polluters, right?

'''C:''' China, India, US.

'''C:''' Us, China, India.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''C:''' That's what you mean by the ones that matter.

'''C:''' You mean the ones who are putting out the most carbon.

'''C:''' That's exactly what I mean.

'''S:''' The ones that are putting out 90% of the CO2.

'''S:''' Even the big European countries.

'''S:''' Some individual countries are doing their bit but they're just, they happen to have low-hanging fruit they can pick.

'''S:''' It's like, yeah, you have a bunch of, some countries have the geology that they can have all hydroelectric.

'''S:''' But we can't replicate that around the world.

'''S:''' You know I've railed against like Germany for shutting down their nuclear plants.

'''S:''' That's the sort of thing that's the problem.

'''S:''' There's a lot of cosmetic changes that you could do and you could make the numbers look impressive like, oh, we've installed 40% re-arranged solar.

'''S:''' Rearrange the chairs on the Titanic.

'''S:''' Yeah, basically.

'''S:''' But it's like, yeah, until you like make a concerted effort to shut down those coal-fired plants as fast as possible, we're not going to make a dent.

'''S:''' Or switching over to electric cars.

'''S:''' It's all good that it only matters if you convert over your electricity generation to green energy.

'''S:''' If you're burning coal, it doesn't matter if you're using that electricity to charge your electric car.

'''S:''' Energy demand is going way up as well.

'''E:''' That's the thing.

'''E:''' I think I once read, Steve, I don't have the fact right in front of me.

'''E:''' I read by the 2035 there's going to be like a 50% increase in energy demand.

'''S:''' What I remember was by 2050 it would be a 50% increase in energy demand.

'''S:''' Oh, okay.

'''E:''' 2050.

'''C:''' Something like that, yeah.

'''C:''' How is that going to happen?

'''C:''' So what is the comparison, by the way?

'''C:''' Sorry to be obnoxious because I know we've covered this before, but what is the comparison to literal tailpipe emissions versus the burning of coal to produce the electricity for the electric cars?

'''C:''' Is it actually one to one?

'''C:''' It's still better.

'''S:''' Well, you're still better to have an electric car, but the benefit is pretty marginal.

'''C:''' It's like a few percent.

'''C:''' But if you have an electric car with green energy going into power.

'''C:''' If you do, yeah.

'''S:''' If you have solar panels on your roof and that's how you charge your car, great.

'''S:''' That's awesome.

'''S:''' Or if you just live in a place that has a good energy mix.

'''S:''' If you live in a location where most of your electricity is coming from coal burning, there's still a little bit of a benefit to going electric.

'''S:''' You could do so in preparation for improving the energy mix, but that is not going to solve global warming by itself.

'''S:''' That's the bottom line.

'''S:''' We've got to do all these things together.

'''S:''' Of course, the electric cars are going to increase our demand for electricity.

'''S:''' That's what I mean by strategic planning.

'''S:''' It's not just, oh, we're building some more solar.

'''S:''' How much energy are we going to need?

'''S:''' How is this going to actually happen?

'''S:''' How are we going to do it?

'''S:''' It's the quickest pathway to shutting down coal and then other forms of fossil fuel.

'''S:''' Unless we do that, we really have no chance and we're not doing it.

'''B:''' Our grandkids are going to revile us.

'''B:''' They're going to be like, what the hell?

'''B:''' But even, but I think it's our grandkids that are really going to feel it.

'''S:''' All right, Bob, you want to talk about something a little bit later?

== News Items ==

{{anchor|news#}} 
=== The Coming of AR (15:45) ===
* [https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/apple-vision-pro-first-take-3-reasons-this-changes-everything/ Apple Vision Pro first take: 3 reasons this changes everything]<ref name = vision/>

'''S:''' Tell us about the coming of augmented reality.

'''B:''' Yeah, this surprised me.

'''B:''' I hadn't been tracking this in a while, but it happened after more than a decade in development.

'''B:''' Apple debuted its augmented and virtual reality headset called Vision Pro.

'''B:''' It'll be available next year, early next year for a whopping $3,500 USD.

'''B:''' A huge amount of money.

'''B:''' So what is it?

'''B:''' What can it do?

'''B:''' What's our take?

'''B:''' So those questions are answerable, but the big question that you can't really answer is this one.

'''B:''' Is this mixed realities iPhone moment that will launch the product into the mainstream like none before it?

'''B:''' That's the question.

'''B:''' Or will it follow other super hyped products that were all supposed to be epic game changers, but weren't like remember Google Glass, Metas Quest Pro, Microsoft's HoloLens, Magic Leap 2 to name a few.

'''B:''' All of them made big claims about this is it.

'''B:''' It's starting now.

'''B:''' And they kind of like didn't get anywhere near those predictions.

'''B:''' So this debut happened at the WWDC, Worldwide Developers Conference, this past June 5th, 2023.

'''B:''' Apple's CEO Tim Cook said, today marks the beginning of a new era for computing.

'''B:''' Just as the Mac introduced us to personal computing and iPhone introduced us to mobile computing, Apple Vision Pro introduces us to spatial computing, which is an interesting way to actually present this, I think, and actually a pretty good idea.

'''B:''' In the press release, let's say they had lots of press releases.

'''B:''' One said, kind of summed it up nicely, it's a revolutionary spatial computer that seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world, allowing users to stay present and connected to others.

'''B:''' Vision Pro creates an infinite canvas for apps that scales beyond the boundaries of a traditional display, introduces a fully three-dimensional user interface controlled by the most natural and intuitive inputs possible, a user's eyes, hands, and voice.

'''B:''' So now if you haven't heard, if you haven't seen this device yet, just imagine a pair of ski goggles and you're pretty much there.

'''B:''' That's pretty damn close enough.

'''B:''' It can be tethered to a pocket-sized battery for two hours, or you could connect it to your Mac by USB-C and then you could just use it for as long as you want.

'''B:''' Each eye has a micro-LED display with a total of 23 million pixels.

'''B:''' It's more than a 4K TV, powered by Apple's new R1 chip to do the real-time processing and also the M2 chip used in the Mac computer.

'''B:''' Both of them, both chips control 12 cameras, five sensors, and six microphones, all in one device.

'''B:''' Incredible.

'''B:''' Apple apparently filed 5,000 patents during Vision Pro's development.

'''B:''' 5,000!

'''B:''' Wow.

'''B:''' There's a dial on the headset that was interesting that lets you control how much of the real world peaks through the digital screen, essentially lowering or increasing how immersive the experience is.

'''B:''' So it's not like there's a button for augmented reality, which just overlays digital content over reality, or virtual reality, which is a full replacement.

'''B:''' Everything is basically digitally created and not real.

'''B:''' Importantly, though, so you can actually do degrees where you can go make it more immersive, less immersive, but though, everything you see in your goggles, though, is digital.

'''B:''' You're not seeing through the goggles at any point.

'''S:''' So Bob, you said you're not seeing through the goggles, but the transparent settings, you're seeing the video feed of what you're putting in?

'''B:''' Yes, you're seeing the video feed.

'''B:''' So you're seeing a feed coming through.

'''B:''' I think that's an important distinction.

'''B:''' People though that who have actually demoed it said that the video feed, when you're supposedly looking through the goggles, is very, very good.

'''B:''' It's almost, he said, it was almost indistinguishable from taking the goggles off.

'''B:''' Some people said you occasionally see some obvious artifacts of the fact that it's a feed coming through, but they said it's very, very good quality.

'''B:''' Okay.

'''B:''' All right.

'''B:''' Now there's lots of different objects that you can interact with, like folders and things and images that they are not 3D or volumetric, as they say.

'''B:''' Yeah, they're kind of like two dimensional, but there are three dimensional aspects to it.

'''B:''' But I guess that will absolutely increase as this thing gets tweaked and improved.

'''B:''' Now as the press release implies, there's no handheld controllers, right?

'''B:''' It's like minority port report.

'''B:''' The interface is basically your hands and your eyes right now, and eventually your voice.

'''B:''' Probably by early next year, the voice commands will be working.

'''B:''' The system knows when you're looking at it, and when you're looking at a specific thing, and then it knows that you're looking at it, and then you can then manipulate it with your hand or your fingers.

'''B:''' That's interesting.

'''B:''' Some examples of what you can do is say I get a FaceTime call from Steve.

'''B:''' I would look at the answer button, and then I would be able to pinch it to open it up.

'''B:''' Now I wouldn't see Steve, but I would see an animated avatar or a persona, I think that they're calling it, whose mouth and facial expressions would be synchronized to Steve's voice and face.

'''B:''' It's kind of like a, what's it called?

'''B:''' An emoji?

'''B:''' Basically, it's very realistic, but it obviously wouldn't be Steve because they're just telltale giveaways.

'''B:''' No shadows is one thing, and also the skin tones is just too perfect.

'''B:''' It's obvious.

'''B:''' I don't think it's really meant to be absolutely photorealistic, but the users have said that this is very, very photorealistic, but of course, it also slips into uncanny valley that people say that it's kind of creepy.

'''B:''' This is how you're seeing the person that you're talking to in FaceTime or even Zoom, I think.

'''B:''' That's kind of weird.

'''B:''' You could take 3D videos and images and re-experience them later.

'''B:''' That seems like kind of a no-brainer.

'''B:''' There's also, there's apps that are going to be available that will be specific to Vision Pro, or you can open up your current iPhone or iPad apps and use them.

'''B:''' Now those apps and other windows can be arranged in midair all around you to work with or read or to do whatever you're doing with those windows.

'''B:''' And behind those windows, you could have either the real world video feed coming through, or you could be a fully immersive, all-encompassing wallpaper instead behind all of those screens.

'''B:''' So you're fully immersed and fully virtual reality, I guess.

'''B:''' Now there's lots of entertainment options, and of course, these were given a really high priority here.

'''B:''' There's a cinema environment where you could watch movies and TV.

'''B:''' There's a nature-themed environment that lets you make the screen seem like it's 100 feet wide.

'''B:''' This next one sounds cool.

'''B:''' It's called Apple Immersive Videos, and basically these are made for Vision Pro.

'''B:''' They're 180 degrees, 3D, 8K recordings that put you right inside the action.

'''B:''' Those seem pretty impressive.

'''B:''' I would like to check that out.

'''B:''' You can also, of course, stream Apple TV, Apple TV Plus, and Disney Plus on Vision Pro.

'''B:''' There's also gaming.

'''B:''' Apple Arcade will be available with 100 iPad games will also be available.

'''B:''' So lots of different things you can do with it.

'''B:''' In the future, I'm curious to see what does Apple envision in the next decade for this?

'''B:''' So I think right now, what they're thinking is that in a couple of years, we could see a couple of versions being offered.

'''B:''' One would be high-end, and the other one would be a low-end priced more like an iPhone.

'''B:''' So it's kind of like now with the iPhone.

'''B:''' You can get the high-end crazy iPhone for like, what?

'''B:''' What is it?

'''B:''' $1,500?

'''B:''' Or you can get one that is much more reasonable at what?

'''B:''' $6,700, $8,800?

'''B:''' I don't know.

'''B:''' I haven't bought a new one in like four years.

'''B:''' So they're going to have that option, which I think is a good idea.

'''B:''' I think it seems like an obvious thing where it'll still be very functional, but it'll be sub $1,000.

'''B:''' So okay, that's in the next couple of years.

'''B:''' By 2027, we may see Apple's long-delayed Apple Glasses.

'''B:''' So I'm really interested in that, what that would be like.

'''B:''' So I mean, this is all just like that one seems likely that we'll see Apple Glasses in 2027.

'''B:''' I don't know much about it at all, but you can just imagine just by the name what it might be like.

'''B:''' Not sure what the functionality would be.

'''B:''' Further in the future, sometime perhaps in the 2030s, Apple is thinking about or considering potentially seeing augmented reality contact lenses.

'''B:''' We've mentioned them on the show a few times.

'''B:''' That's definitely like, whatever.

'''B:''' That's too far away to really say how possible that would be.

'''B:''' Maybe that might be one of the ultimate expressions of this technology.

'''B:''' Talk about disappearing.

'''B:''' The technology would barely even be visible, but who knows how long that would take or even if that's going to be the right way to go eventually when that technology is even there.

'''B:''' I read a lot of reviews for Vision Pro.

'''B:''' They're kind of all over the place in some ways, but there's definitely some consistency.

'''B:''' For example, Neelay Patel at The Verge said, Apple has clearly solved a bunch of big hardware interaction problems with VR headsets, mostly by out-engineering and outspending everyone else that's tried.

'''B:''' Alan Trulia at Digital Trends said, The Vision Pro is technically an excellent mixed reality headset with technology that eclipses every competitor.

'''B:''' Jacob Kral from Men's Journal, he demoed, all of these people demoed the Vision Pro.

'''B:''' Jacob said, Apple really did it and is offering a mixed reality experience with excellent eye and hand tracking, a simple and intuitive interface with enough power and a high degree of immersion.

'''B:''' They got a lot right, at least from this experience with Generation 1.

'''B:''' On the more negative side, we've got Paul Tassi from Forbes.

'''B:''' He said, This tech is cool.

'''B:''' This tech is not solving any problems.

'''B:''' Fictional book characters get immersed in VR.

'''B:''' Very few people in reality actually want to do that with any consistency.

'''B:''' The continued usage rate compared to say a phone, a computer, a PlayStation 5 is drastically lower as people are wowed for a little while and then they put it down and they rarely use it again.

'''B:''' I cannot tell you how many times I've seen this with people who buy VR sets, myself included.

'''B:''' Kate Nibbs at Wired said, An Apple headset, no matter how nifty it specs, is still a big honking gizmo plonked between its wearer and the rest of the world, inherently a barrier more than a conduit.

'''B:''' So yeah, I'm seeing a lot of these sentiments being expressed all over the place.

'''B:''' Many reviewers echoed the complaint that people just don't have the tolerance to wear something like that on their heads for extended periods of time.

'''B:''' I totally agree with that.

'''B:''' Absolutely.

'''B:''' Me too.

'''B:''' It's more of a psychological thing than anything else.

'''B:''' I think this type of product as we see it now won't have the penetration that smartphones has now or even in the beginning or iPads or even Apple watches.

'''B:''' Even if it were half the price, it's just too in your face, so to speak.

'''B:''' Sorry about that one.

'''B:''' It really is.

'''B:''' I think I personally, I would use this probably for games for sure.

'''B:''' Maybe the occasional deep immersion experience and maybe once in a while for work, maybe I'll do a video explaining how annoying it gets after an hour or two.

'''B:''' But there's no way I would have a love affair with a device like this, like I do my smartphone.

'''B:''' My precious.

'''B:''' Now as we say in our book, it's folly to think that you can predict with any accuracy how people will use new technology.

'''B:''' That's so true.

'''B:''' But no matter how it's used in the future, it's almost irrelevant.

'''B:''' It seems reasonable to think that mixed reality won't see the billions of users until it's at a scale of say something like a pair of sunglasses, at least perhaps wirelessly powered by a small device in your pocket.

'''B:''' I don't know.

'''B:''' But I think you would need a much smaller form factor for something like this before you're going to see billions of people using something like this.

'''B:''' I think this is going to be an interesting niche type of technology.

'''B:''' I don't think we're going to see a deep penetration for something this obtrusive, this thing that just hangs on your head.

'''B:''' As nice as technically amazing it is, the hardware is incredible.

'''B:''' No one's complaining that the technology is crap.

'''B:''' It really is.

'''B:''' 5,000 patents.

'''B:''' I mean, it's doing some amazing work, especially for a version.

'''B:''' It's not even version 1.0.

'''B:''' This isn't even the device that's going to be for sale in January, in early 2024.

'''B:''' So all right.

'''B:''' So I'll finish with this.

'''B:''' Will we think of June 5th, 2023 as mixed reality's iPhone moment?

'''B:''' I mean, maybe, perhaps.

'''B:''' Probably not.

'''B:''' I think probably not.

'''B:''' But who knows?

'''B:''' Apple is Apple.

'''B:''' They will have big hitters like Disney making content for this platform.

'''B:''' And they're already getting many developers excited to create content for Vision Pro.

'''B:''' That's why they made this announcement this week.

'''B:''' That's why they did this many months before the launch, to get these developers excited and get them cracking and to have even more stuff available when it actually can be purchased.

'''B:''' This could potentially be the beginning of Apple's dominance of spatial computing, if it even becomes a real thing that lasts.

'''B:''' Or maybe not.

'''B:''' Who knows?

'''B:''' There could be some outlier, some other company that really hits more of a home run, something that can be, that really does take off because maybe it's smaller, maybe it's just focused on a couple of things instead of so many different things.

'''B:''' I don't know.

'''B:''' You can't really say what's going to happen.

'''B:''' What do you guys think?

'''S:''' Yeah, I'm definitely interested in it, as you might imagine.

'''S:''' I think a lot of it's going to come down to, is there a killer app?

'''S:''' What will people be using it for?

'''J:''' Yeah, utility.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' If it's like an off-the-hook gaming experience, it'll fill that niche very nicely.

'''S:''' I still use my VR headset.

'''S:''' My tolerance is maybe about two hours at a go, depending on how I'm feeling.

'''C:''' Really?

'''C:''' But don't you feel like with VR, so far, that seems to be...

'''C:''' I mean, I know it has applications beyond that, and it has amazing applications for medicine.

'''C:''' It has amazing applications in the military.

'''C:''' But for your everyday end user, it's a gaming device.

'''C:''' Totally.

'''C:''' Totally.

'''C:''' It's a toy.

'''C:''' I worry that that's kind of the niche that all these things are going to hang out.

'''S:''' There were companies that tried to get the current VR platforms into the enterprise space.

'''S:''' Like, you use it as your monitor to have a three-dimensional virtual office, and people just couldn't wear them long enough to make it practical.

'''C:''' Right.

'''S:''' Yeah, just the tech's not...

'''S:''' So, yeah.

'''S:''' So, I'm interested to see how long could you...

'''S:''' Like, if I could go an hour and a half to two hours with my current kind of clunky VR set, could you go three or four hours with this?

'''S:''' And if you could, that could be a chunk of your workday if you're doing...

'''S:''' Will this be the Zoom killer app where you're going to be in a more of a realistic...

'''S:''' Because, yeah, we all have experienced the Zoom doom meeting, right?

'''S:''' It's just hard.

'''S:''' Like, I've had 10 students with me, and I have absolutely no idea if any of them are listening to anything that I'm saying.

'''S:''' What did I...

'''C:''' Steve, that reminds me, there's a meme I saw the other day that was like, there's literally no difference between a Zoom meeting and a seance.

'''C:''' Like, Jennifer, are you here?

'''C:''' I can't see you.

'''C:''' I can't hear you.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' I think someone's trying to join us.

'''C:''' A seance.

'''S:''' I mean, I've had good Zoom meetings as well.

'''S:''' It just really, really depends.

'''S:''' Zoom is good for some things.

'''S:''' But the three-dimensional aspect and the full visual immersive aspect of VR slash AR does change things.

'''S:''' Oh, for sure.

'''S:''' Yeah, I do.

'''S:''' So who knows?

'''S:''' Again, you can't...

'''S:''' As Bob said, it's hard to predict this.

'''S:''' But if there is that killer app where people decide, it's like, yeah, this completely changes the game.

'''S:''' Like, now we could actually do virtual meetings, and they work, and they're worth it.

'''S:''' You only have to wear this thing one or two hours during your day where you do all your virtual meetings, but you've got to have this device to do that.

'''C:''' I also wonder how much of it is psychological, right?

'''C:''' Surgical theater, for example, is a really cool VR program that you can use on a monitor too, but the headsets are really great.

'''C:''' I remember covering this with neurosurgeons at UCLA, where they literally will map out a patient's tumor or a patient's whatever anomaly they have going on in the brain, and they'll practice it by flying around in their brain before they go in for surgery.

'''C:''' So that they're acclimated to the architecture, the way that they often described it was like, when you go into somebody's house that's new, and they're like, hey, can I go get a glass of water?

'''C:''' You're rummaging around the cupboards trying to find the things you need.

'''C:''' But after you've practiced in their kitchen for a while, it just becomes second nature.

'''C:''' And they want that before they go in for the actual surgery.

'''C:''' Surgeons don't give a shit.

'''C:''' They'll put the stupid math.

'''C:''' They're like, this is important, you know what I mean?

'''C:''' But I worry about the culture of being in an office building.

'''C:''' People are like, I'm not wearing that.

'''S:''' That's the thing that we can't predict.

'''C:''' It's got to be worth it.

'''C:''' It's got to be worth the expense.

'''S:''' It's got to be worth the looking dorky.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''C:''' Never underestimate the dork factor.

'''S:''' I think it's real.

'''S:''' Totally.

'''S:''' So we'll see.

'''S:''' I think that they've got to keep exploring and pushing and looking for things.

'''S:''' And also, if there was an off the hook game, I would think, oh shit, man, I might plunk down the dough for that if there was something I had to experience.

'''C:''' Something that really, really gets you.

'''C:''' You guys remember Google Glass?

'''C:''' Oh, yes.

'''C:''' Oh, gosh.

'''C:''' We talked a lot about it.

'''C:''' And they're all calling them Glass Hole.

'''S:''' That did not catch on.

'''S:''' So we will see.

'''S:''' It's an interesting thing.

'''S:''' I mean, again, yes, the tech looks great.

'''S:''' It looks like definitely a massive leap in terms of just AR, VR technology.

'''S:''' But we're still waiting for that killer app.

'''B:''' Is it enough?

'''C:''' Is it enough?

'''C:''' And also, is it solving?

'''C:''' I love that that one reviewer said, is this solving a problem that doesn't exist?

'''E:''' Yeah, the utility of it is really hard to think of.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' Like, are we doing it just because we can?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I mean, I sort of agree with that.

'''S:''' But sometimes a new technology isn't solving an existing problem.

'''S:''' It's just creating a better way to do things, something you didn't know you needed or wanted.

'''C:''' For sure.

'''C:''' But usually I think those are slower to adapt.

'''E:''' Sure.

'''E:''' Especially at $3,500 right now.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' I mean, adopt.

'''C:''' I said adapt.

'''S:''' That was wrong.

'''S:''' I meant adopt.

'''S:''' It is late.

'''S:''' I predict it'll all come down to whether or not there's a killer app.

'''S:''' Okay.

=== The Causes of Cultural Differences (34:54) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theconversation.com/nearly-20-of-the-cultural-differences-between-societies-boil-down-to-ecological-factors-new-research-206981
|article_title = Nearly 20% of the cultural differences between societies boil down to ecological factors – new research
|publication = The Conversation
}}

'''S:''' Cara, tell us about the causes of cultural differences.

'''C:''' I came across this interesting write-up in the conversation.

'''C:''' I often talk about the conversation.

'''C:''' This one was co-authored by Alexandra Wormley and Michael Varnum.

'''C:''' I did a little bit of digging.

'''C:''' Michael Varnum runs a lab at ASU, Arizona State University, called the Culture and Ecology Lab.

'''C:''' Pretty interesting.

'''C:''' Clearly, there's a bias here of this article.

'''C:''' You'll see why, because the article is claiming that a certain percentage of cultural differences come down to ecological factors.

'''C:''' This is what their entire lab studies.

'''C:''' It's what they have set out to try and understand.

'''C:''' But it's a really fascinating spin on, I guess, really social psychology.

'''C:''' This lab is within the psychology department at ASU.

'''C:''' As they describe on their website, they study how patterns of cultural variation may be understood as responses to changes in basic ecological features.

'''C:''' They use a bunch of different methods like surveys, archival data, and even EEG.

'''C:''' They're looking at specific ecological conditions.

'''C:''' When we think of ecological conditions, what comes to mind about a society, about a culture?

'''C:''' Resource availability.

'''C:''' Access to water.

'''C:''' Resource availability.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Water, population density.

'''C:''' Agriculture.

'''C:''' Agriculture.

'''C:''' They mention even pathogens, like infectious diseases.

'''C:''' Isolation.

'''C:''' Isolation.

'''C:''' All of these different things.

'''C:''' These are what they really do define as ecological factors.

'''C:''' When you look at, I guess, the whole history of social psychology as it relates to the question, why are cultures different?

'''C:''' There are a lot of explanations.

'''C:''' Religious influence.

'''C:''' Philosophical influence.

'''C:''' Different agricultural.

'''C:''' Just like what food was grown there?

'''C:''' What spices were traded?

'''C:''' Whole cultures are built around these kinds of things.

'''E:''' Especially island nations where fishing has to be a huge part of that culture.

'''C:''' 100%.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' What is food?

'''C:''' Are they near water?

'''C:''' All of these different things.

'''C:''' We've seen a lot of these explanations in the literature for years.

'''C:''' But what these researchers are saying is that there are some environmental factors that we haven't really been taking into account.

'''C:''' They said, I don't just want to talk about this theoretically.

'''C:''' I want to actually scientifically try to investigate this.

'''C:''' How do we do that?

'''C:''' They did something pretty impressive.

'''C:''' They built an entire database.

'''C:''' This was published last year.

'''C:''' There is in Nature Scientific Data.

'''C:''' You can literally go.

'''C:''' It's open access.

'''C:''' You can mine this huge dataset called the Ecology Culture Dataset, a new resource for investigating cultural variation.

'''C:''' They look at, let's see, in the Ecocultural Dataset specifically.

'''C:''' This is not necessarily what the article in The Conversation is covering.

'''C:''' This is something that was previously published.

'''C:''' It covers 220 different countries.

'''C:''' They look at nine different ecological variables using 11 different statistical metrics.

'''C:''' Nine ecological variables and 72 cultural variables.

'''C:''' Then they statistically manipulate these different variables to try and predict how much variance, like how much difference between the different cultures is accounted for by these ecological variables.

'''C:''' It's a big, big dataset that any researcher can go in and mine and do their own investigation using.

'''C:''' It's pretty cool.

'''C:''' Any graduate students out there looking for a PhD project, this is a great resource for you.

'''C:''' Basically, the article that is described in this new piece was just published in the Royal Society, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It's biological sciences.

'''C:''' The article that was just published yesterday, as of this recording, so June 7th, is how much cultural variation around the globe is explained by ecology.

'''C:''' They looked at, in this specific one, 66 different cultural variables.

'''C:''' Then they also looked at different ecological variables, like some of the ones that we just mentioned, rainfall, temperature, population, density, infectious disease.

'''C:''' They looked at that across 200 different societies.

'''C:''' They ran their statistical contrasts.

'''C:''' They found that about 20% of all of the variance in this dataset could be explained by ecological features, which is a pretty big chunk.

'''C:''' Like 20%, okay, one-fifth, it doesn't sound like a big number.

'''C:''' But apparently, and I didn't realize this, in social psychology, they're usually operating with variance numbers around 4% or 5%.

'''C:''' Usually they can say, like, the difference between these cultures is explained by X, about 4% or 5% of the difference is explained by X. 20% is pretty honking.

'''C:''' That's a lot of variance.

'''C:''' It's a big effect size.

'''C:''' It's huge.

'''C:''' Granted, their proxy for ecology is also big, right?

'''C:''' There's a lot of variables that they're looking at.

'''C:''' But they did find that a few things really stuck out to them that were kind of interesting.

'''C:''' One of them is that, let's see, the amount of variation over time in levels of infectious disease was linked to the strength of social norms.

'''C:''' So it's not just about there being high level or low level of threat from different diseases.

'''C:''' It's when the threat varies over time, you tend to see stricter social rules, which kind of makes sense.

'''C:''' And interestingly, in America, we actually had some of the lower levels of strict social norms because we didn't have a lot of threat of infectious disease pre-COVID-19 pandemic because of our health care.

'''C:''' So kind of fascinating there.

'''C:''' They also looked at how when the ecology shifts in places over time, culture actually shifts as well.

'''C:''' And you can kind of follow that with regard to different variables.

'''C:''' So I don't know, it's super interesting.

'''C:''' Not something that we can summarize in five minutes because it's like an entire lab's work and it's like this huge publication and this huge data set, but something I never really thought about before.

'''S:''' Yeah, I think we tend to think of these cultural differences as being all historically contingent.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' Not geographic or...

'''C:''' Yeah, because they were that way.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, but a lot of historians and sociologists do look at how much of it is kind of destiny.

'''S:''' Like we're just adapting to our environment and to our needs.

'''C:''' Almost like evolution, right?

'''C:''' It's like social evolution.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Right, exactly.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, interesting.

'''S:''' Makes sense.

'''S:''' All right, thanks, Cara.

=== Space Travel and Brain Health (41:40) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-33331-8
|article_title = Impacts of spaceflight experience on human brain structure
|publication = Scientific Reports
}}

'''S:''' I'm going to just do...

'''S:''' My time should be pretty quick.

'''S:''' I'm just going to talk about the latest study looking at the effects of prolonged travel in space, specifically on the human brain.

'''S:''' And the short story is there are effects.

'''S:''' The question that they had was...

'''S:''' So there's a number of things that happen when you are in space, right?

'''S:''' Even if you're in low Earth orbit on the International Space Station.

'''S:''' Probably the biggest one, what would you guys think is the biggest...

'''S:''' Physiologically, just in general.

'''S:''' Just in general, biological, physiological.

'''S:''' What's muscle deterioration?

'''B:''' Calcium, calcium, calcium, the wasting.

'''C:''' The lack of regular gravity has all of these effects.

'''S:''' Yeah, I was talking more about what is the aspect of space.

'''S:''' That's the biggest factor.

'''C:''' Exactly, right.

'''C:''' Like you're not going down in the same direction.

'''C:''' So your body was adapted for gravity.

'''C:''' Yeah, right?

'''E:''' We kind of evolved.

'''S:''' We evolved in 1G.

'''S:''' Sort of.

'''S:''' And yeah, so microgravity, we're not adapted to it.

'''S:''' And it has a big effect on the fluid compartments in our body.

'''S:''' Our body is basically just a bunch of different fluid compartments.

'''S:''' And so that has a huge effect.

'''S:''' You also got to think about things like radiation.

'''S:''' That's another big one.

'''S:''' Right, yeah.

'''S:''' Obviously, we try to shield against that.

'''C:''' But especially the farther out, like as we try to go farther, that's going to be a huge

'''S:''' problem. That's going to be...

'''S:''' That may become the biggest thing when we try to...

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a deal breaker right now.

'''S:''' With longer distance.

'''S:''' And there's also social isolation.

'''S:''' Oh, right, just psychological factors.

'''S:''' Yeah, the psychological factors are huge.

'''S:''' The lack of green spaces, claustrophobia.

'''E:''' Now that's good utility for those Apple glasses.

'''E:''' That's where the VR comes in.

'''E:''' You got to have augmented reality.

'''C:''' I know this is kind of like an aside, but my favorite thing is, have you ever watched those interviews with astronauts after they're back on Earth and they're talking to the interviewer and then they'll just like drop their pen?

'''C:''' Or they just drop things because they're so used to just letting things go?

'''C:''' Oh, awesome.

'''B:''' Yeah, I didn't notice that.

'''B:''' So funny to watch.

'''B:''' I didn't notice that.

'''B:''' Is it because of the gravity's here?

'''B:''' It's because it's like, oh, it's so heavy.

'''B:''' Or that pen is so heavy.

'''C:''' They say, let me take a...

'''C:''' No, it's like when they're done using it, they'll sign something and then they'll just drop it because they're used to it just like floating.

'''E:''' I need a drink of water.

'''E:''' They pucker in the air like there's water floating there.

'''S:''' No, I'm sure you develop your own muscle memory and it probably takes months to unwind that.

'''S:''' So this is looking at the effect of microgravity on the fluid compartment that is our brain.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' And this is building on previous research, but they had a couple of questions that they were trying to answer.

'''S:''' So what happens to the brain in microgravity?

'''S:''' So it floats.

'''C:''' It floats.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' So the gray matter tends to move up towards the top of the brain, right?

'''S:''' And the ventricular spaces or the ventricles are the fluid filled spaces in the brain, right?

'''S:''' There's water-like fluid, cerebral spinal fluid, CSF, inside the brain and around the brain.

'''S:''' It's actually produced by the choroid plexus inside the ventricles.

'''S:''' It then travels through the different ventricles, the third and then fourth ventricle, and then it passes through little holes near the brainstem.

'''S:''' It goes to outside the brain where it's absorbed by the arachnoid villi and then it gets recycled.

'''S:''' So it's constantly recycling, right?

'''S:''' It also goes down and fills your spinal cord, your spinal column surrounding your spinal cord, right?

'''S:''' So your brain and your spinal cord are all floating in liquid.

'''S:''' So obviously that might have a huge effect from the absence of gravity.

'''B:''' What's the purpose of CNS besides like a cushioning effect?

'''S:''' Well, that's probably its biggest effect is a cushioning effect.

'''S:''' Protection.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It is a shock absorber for the central nervous system.

'''E:''' That's interesting.

'''E:''' So can you concuss your spine?

'''E:''' Yeah, sure.

'''E:''' The same way you can concuss your... the brain becomes concussed?

'''S:''' Interesting.

'''S:''' Yeah, basically a bruise.

'''S:''' You can get a contusion.

'''C:''' In your spinal, like in that... what's it called?

'''C:''' The thecum?

'''C:''' Whatever.

'''C:''' In the channel where the cerebrospinal fluid is in your spine, is there a big change in microgravity?

'''C:''' The thecal side.

'''C:''' Because it's quite a small space, right?

'''S:''' No, it's actually a big bag of fluid at the bottom of the spine.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''C:''' So it could still kind of slosh up or slosh down or push it.

'''C:''' Yeah, but this is looking at specifically at the brain.

'''S:''' So the ventricles towards the lower part of the brain expand, right?

'''S:''' The gray matter towards the lower... yeah, in space in microgravity, the gray matter towards the lower part of the brain contracts.

'''S:''' The sulci, you know, the spaces between the pieces of the brain, they get sort of...

'''S:''' Like valleys.

'''S:''' Squished together.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Really?

'''S:''' So the brain contorts, huh?

'''S:''' Yeah, the gray matter sort of compresses towards the top of the brain.

'''S:''' So they were specifically studying changes to the ventricular size in astronauts based upon their length of stay, their prior history of missions, and like, so how many prior missions have they had, and the time between their last mission, since their last mission.

'''S:''' So how much time did they have to recover?

'''S:''' So what they found was that there was significant increase in the lateral ventricles for the first six months of being in microgravity, and then it kind of plateaued.

'''S:''' So that kind of makes sense.

'''S:''' Like this fluid is slowly shifting around for the first six months, and then it reached equilibrium.

'''S:''' And then at equilibrium, then basically that effect tends to plateau.

'''C:''' Was their intracranial pressure the same?

'''S:''' That's a good question.

'''S:''' They didn't measure intracranial pressure.

'''S:''' I mean, you'd have to do a lumbar puncture, you know.

'''C:''' I feel like this is like they're looking for interesting markers just because they're easy to study, but how does this translate to anything clinically?

'''S:''' They're looking at the things they could look at.

'''C:''' Right.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''S:''' Absolutely.

'''S:''' So the other thing is when you measure your intracranial pressure, that will vary based upon whether you're sitting up or laying down.

'''S:''' Because, right, if you're upright, then you have that column, you know, of fluid is really pushing down on the needle in your lower back and increases the measured pressure.

'''S:''' So you always measure the pressure in the lateral decubitus position, right?

'''S:''' Basically laying down on your side to get like that's the true pressure that we're trying to look at the horizontal sort of pressure in the system.

'''S:''' So it'd be interesting to think, like what would the pressure be in the system without gravity, you know, pushing down on it?

'''S:''' Yeah, it's probably way different.

'''S:''' Yeah, I'm sure it'd be different.

'''S:''' I just don't know exactly what it would be.

'''C:''' But also we have all these cool compensatory things that we do to keep it healthy.

'''S:''' They looked at, you know, astronauts who were returning to the station.

'''S:''' So the longer it was since they were last in the station, the more their ventricles increased when they were on the ISS, right, on the station.

'''S:''' So what that implies is that the people who had a shorter interval since their last mission, they hadn't recovered yet.

'''S:''' So they didn't have as much to go, like as much expansion to go to get back to their to the microgravity equilibrium point.

'''S:''' And that was for like up to three years.

'''S:''' It may take as long as three years to recover to your normal baseline after returning to Earth from microgravity.

'''B:''' Yeah, that's a long time.

'''S:''' So they said this could have, we're not really sure what the negative impact of all this is, there probably is some.

'''S:''' But you know, this could inform how long we make astronauts, you know, be on Earth before we would send them back up.

'''S:''' Because at least as far as the fluid shifts inside the brain, it could take up to three years to recover from being in space for six months or longer.

'''S:''' The other thing you could do is have shorter missions, right?

'''S:''' If you do like a three month mission versus a six month or one year mission, then the fluid shifts won't be as significant.

'''S:''' So yeah, I mean, again, this is just one data point.

'''S:''' This is an obviously an ongoing research, you know, the question that they're doing is this is they added some new pieces of information to it.

'''S:''' You know, for me, what this means, I think the bottom line of all this is that we need to sort out this artificial gravity business, you know, basically, which as we learned is not easy.

'''S:''' We're not talking about true, like artificial gravity, like in Star Trek, talking about spinning rotational gravitational.

'''S:''' Like the Martians, which is a crazy engineering problem.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's just a crazy engineering problem.

'''S:''' You'd have to have a huge axis of rotation.

'''S:''' Otherwise people just would get ridiculous vertigo.

'''S:''' And you know, they would sense that you're spinning and it wouldn't feel like gravity, it'd feel like spinning.

'''E:''' Who knew space was so inhospitable to humans?

'''S:''' By the way, did any of you guys experience the mission to Mars ride in Disney World?

'''C:''' Oh, 100%.

'''C:''' I thought I was gonna lose consciousness.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' So there, they spin you like a, you know, carnival ride.

'''S:''' They spin you to simulate gravity.

'''C:''' But they pull Gs.

'''C:''' Like, it's pretty intense.

'''S:''' You pull a couple of Gs, two, three, however many it was, but it was significant.

'''S:''' But I remember I went on there.

'''S:''' I know, I'm pretty sure Jay was with me.

'''S:''' Bob, I don't remember if you were with me that time that I went there.

'''S:''' I don't think so.

'''S:''' But I went with a few people.

'''S:''' I know Jay was among them.

'''S:''' And they all loved it.

'''S:''' They like, oh, that really felt like they really felt the gravity and it felt real.

'''S:''' And to me, I just got massively dizzy.

'''S:''' I just had horrible vertigo.

'''S:''' I hated it.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' That probably would have been me as well, I have a feeling.

'''S:''' So, you know, obviously there couldn't have been that big a radius of rotation in that ride.

'''S:''' But it wasn't enough.

'''S:''' It didn't, it did not function like artificial gravity for me.

'''S:''' It just was a vertigo machine as far as I was concerned.

'''S:''' But it was a good demonstration, even though it was on Earth, on this planet, that you can use rotation to simulate gravity, but you got to get that axis of rotation big enough so that most people are going to, are not going to get vertigo, you know, from it.

'''S:''' And that's not happening anytime soon.

'''S:''' No.

'''S:''' Just take, you have to make too massive of a station.

=== UFO Whistleblower (51:58) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/another-ufo-whistleblower/
|article_title = Another UFO Whistleblower
|publication = nn
}}

'''S:''' Okay, Evan.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' This is actually, I think, the most interesting news item of the week.

'''S:''' Oh gosh.

'''S:''' It'll be a fun discussion.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' But, you know, I knew we had to talk about this, the UFO whistleblower and surrounding events.

'''S:''' Oh my God, man.

'''E:''' What is going on with this guy?

'''E:''' All right, here's the basics.

'''E:''' His name is David Grush.

'''E:''' He's a former intelligence official.

'''E:''' And like you said, a whistleblower.

'''E:''' And he is alleging that the U.S. government is in possession of, and I quote, Yep.

'''E:''' So apparently he provided this classified information to Congress recently.

'''E:''' This is the whistleblower part.

'''E:''' Just recently.

'''E:''' And he said these are, we have recovered craft, okay, alien craft, along with alien bodies as well, actual life forms.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''E:''' Mm-hmm.

'''E:''' They're partial fragments, but enough to apparently do analysis with.

'''E:''' And they've been made, and this has been known for decades.

'''E:''' It has been hidden for many, many decades, not just by apparently our government, but governments around the world also apparently have this information as well.

'''E:''' And it's multiple craft.

'''S:''' He says multiple craft, not just one, not one incident.

'''S:''' It's not like Roswell.

'''S:''' Right, right.

'''S:''' Like this has been a multi-decade program where we have been like recovering alien artifacts and alien bodies in at least one incident.

'''S:''' Right.

'''B:''' Over decades.

'''B:''' And multiple governments have done it, yet we still have no evidence.

'''E:''' Now, sure enough, he brought his fine, hard evidence with him to this report.

'''E:''' Of course.

'''B:''' I mean, why would you make an announcement unless you could just back it up?

'''B:''' Exactly.

'''B:''' It's an extraordinary claim.

'''B:''' It would be kind of ridiculous.

'''B:''' I wouldn't say a word until I could actually produce real, solid evidence.

'''B:''' So what's his evidence?

'''E:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''E:''' Well, if you're looking for photographs, he didn't have any to present.

'''E:''' If you're looking for tangible, physical items, he didn't have that either.

'''E:''' He really didn't have any affidavits or anything from anyone kind of official in any other sort of capacity.

'''E:''' But he told them that he was told these things by other people from within the program, the secret program and the system.

'''S:''' We had absolutely rock solid hearsay.

'''E:''' Where have we heard that before?

'''B:''' Give me a effing break.

'''B:''' Come on.

'''S:''' It took me a while to figure out what he was actually saying because the reporting on it has been so bad.

'''S:''' Oh, gosh.

'''S:''' Because a lot of reporters said that he claims he has proof.

'''S:''' But the proof he has is not of aliens or spacecraft or anything extraterrestrial.

'''S:''' It's proof that there's a government program to look for such things.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' That's the only evidence or proof, quote unquote, proof that he had and presented to Congress, which, of course, he cannot present to the public because of security reasons, whatever.

'''S:''' But, you know, so the thing is, OK, to sort of address the point you were making, Bob, like, why would he come forward if he doesn't have the evidence?

'''S:''' He'll say, and I think he is saying, the point of what he's doing is to pressure Congress to pressure whatever agencies are in charge of this to release the information.

'''S:''' It's like, fine, then release the information.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Until it is, then it is just a big story.

'''S:''' That's it.

'''S:''' It's just a big fish story.

'''S:''' But my huge problem with this is the problem that I have with all of these narratives is that they make no sense at all.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' On multiple levels.

'''S:''' Oh, my gosh.

'''S:''' So this is requires that there are aliens who have the technology to travel through interstellar space to come to Earth.

'''S:''' They've been apparently surveying the Earth for decades, and yet they're crashing all the time, including with pilots in in the craft at sometimes it makes absolutely no sense.

'''S:''' Even with today's technology, we could do better.

'''S:''' Even with our current technology, not the interstellar travel part, but we could have unmanned drones.

'''S:''' We have we can we could hide drones as birds or whatever.

'''S:''' They could completely conceal whatever probes they were using to get whatever information they wanted to about the Earth.

'''S:''' They could be hacking into our own surveillance systems, our own communication systems, and getting whatever information they want.

'''S:''' If they didn't want us to know they were here, we would have no idea that they were here.

'''S:''' It wouldn't be this tantalizing.

'''S:''' Oh, they crashed.

'''S:''' I mean, it just makes absolutely no sense.

'''S:''' One of the commenters on my blog when I wrote about it made a very, I thought, hit the nail on the head when he said, this is a very 1950s concept of what aliens would be doing and what they would be like.

'''S:''' We've already blown away the sort of retro alien concept in terms of technology.

'''S:''' You know what I mean?

'''S:''' It makes absolutely no sense.

'''S:''' The other massive way in which this narrative makes absolutely no sense is the conspiracy part of it, which you alluded to, I believe, Bob, is the idea that you have this super secret government program, illegal too, this super secret illegal government program that's been able to keep its own existence secret from the US government for decades.

'''S:''' And they're blabbing about it to this guy?

'''S:''' No way.

'''S:''' Right.

'''B:''' But not just that.

'''B:''' Other countries are in the same boat.

'''B:''' It kind of reminds me of flat Earth-erism.

'''B:''' It's like, really?

'''B:''' All these countries are in cahoots or keeping this gargantuan secret for decades?

'''B:''' Have you met people?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Have you met people?

'''E:''' It's the typical grand conspiracy.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' And we've seen so many different studies that debunk within, what, three people, four?

'''C:''' I don't remember.

'''C:''' But like 24 hours.

'''C:''' The more people involved, the faster this stuff gets leaked.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' It's just not.

'''E:''' What's the old saying?

'''E:''' Three people can only keep a secret when two are dead or something like that?

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' On its face, it totally falls apart.

'''E:''' The fact that, yes, our government and other governments do have recovered crash programs or departments within their either intelligence communities or defense systems that, sure, if China were to, for example, send something, a drone or something over America and it crashed, yeah, there would be a recovery team that would go and get that and be secretive about it, obviously.

'''E:''' But not really.

'''E:''' And that's the thing.

'''E:''' And they would want to figure out what the heck it is.

'''C:''' But do you remember how just like a few months ago there was like a balloon?

'''C:''' Mm-hmm.

'''C:''' Yeah, the China balloon.

'''C:''' That was all over the news within five minutes.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Carrie, you're right.

'''S:''' The other thing is, so multiple alien crashes and every time the government gets there first?

'''S:''' Uh-huh.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' At no point in time does the private citizen on whose ranch it crashed or whatever, you know, call the media first like most people would do, right?

'''S:''' Wouldn't you call the media?

'''S:''' And then they get there with their streaming cameras and it's over, the game, it's game over.

'''S:''' There's no way they're going to be able to keep a wrap on something like that over multiple decades, right?

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' So there's also the fact that it has to be illegal because there's no congressional oversight.

'''S:''' Right.

'''E:''' Yeah, they didn't appropriate the funds to put this program into place.

'''S:''' That's not a little thing to pull off.

'''S:''' I mean, Iran-Contra fell apart within a year or whatever it was or two years.

'''S:''' That didn't last a single administration, you know, the Iran-Contra type of secret program they had going on there.

'''S:''' So just think about it.

'''S:''' Every single director of the program that, you know, would be running this would have had the opportunity to reveal it to Congress and blame the former person, right?

'''S:''' Blame the last guy.

'''S:''' This guy, when I was put in charge, I discovered that my predecessor from the other party's administration, that was he, was hiding this from you guys and there's been no congressional oversight.

'''S:''' So here it is, you know.

'''S:''' That hasn't happened.

'''S:''' The other big question, of course, is always why?

'''S:''' Why keep it a secret?

'''S:''' Why keep it a secret?

'''B:''' We don't want people to panic.

'''B:''' Yeah, it's bullshit.

'''S:''' I mean, so yeah, I totally get why they would keep the technology secret.

'''S:''' That they would not let, you know, the actual pieces of the aircraft get into the public domain because they're trying to reverse engineer the technology.

'''S:''' Sure, I would buy that if that were the only thing.

'''B:''' But that would mean, Steve, that we would see technology that seemingly came out of nowhere.

'''B:''' Yeah, discontinuity.

'''S:''' There would be discontinuity in technology which we haven't seen.

'''S:''' Because there's always a paper trail.

'''S:''' There's always a research background.

'''S:''' Things don't come out of nowhere.

'''S:''' There's no technology that's sort of, where did that come from?

'''S:''' Nope, that hasn't happened.

'''S:''' But, you know, especially like a material science or something.

'''S:''' But the other thing is that what would be the motivation to keep it illegal and secret for decades through multiple administrations?

'''S:''' You know, wouldn't at some point say, you know, 30 years ago we found an alien spacecraft.

'''S:''' We've pretty much extracted everything out of it that we're going to extract out of it.

'''S:''' So here you go.

'''S:''' You know, we're not going to – you know, it's still going to be in the Smithsonian under massive protection.

'''S:''' You're not going to be able to get your grubby hands on it.

'''S:''' But why keep the mere existence of it secret from the world?

'''S:''' Here's another thing.

'''S:''' Look at it from the perspective of the aliens, right?

'''S:''' As far as they know, the humans have discovered their existence.

'''S:''' They've recovered their crash craft and pilots.

'''S:''' Come out.

'''S:''' Come out of the closet.

'''S:''' Why are they waiting for?

'''S:''' So what are they waiting for?

'''S:''' The humans already know.

'''S:''' So why wouldn't they say, oh, you got us.

'''S:''' Oops.

'''S:''' We've been spying on you for decades.

'''S:''' You know, why would they keep their own existence semi-secret, you know, continuing?

'''S:''' It makes no sense.

'''S:''' It is a – again, it's a 1950s bad science fiction movie idea that does not make sense on multiple, multiple levels.

'''S:''' And that's the bullshit this guy is selling.

'''S:''' I don't buy it for a second.

'''E:''' And it's as also as if this person has no idea that everything that he's purporting has been brought up several times in the past.

'''E:''' Every aspect of his story is a rehash of stories from last generation and the generation before that.

'''E:''' There's nothing new here.

'''E:''' Zero.

'''B:''' At this point, it's pathetic and it just pisses me off.

'''E:''' But as Steve said, like this is massive headlines and stuff.

'''E:''' In fact, I believe I saw a headline tonight in which someone in Congress is going to now apparently give – write something up to one – the oversight committee or someone is going to – one committee is going to now look into this based on – Do it.

'''E:''' Based on its claims.

'''E:''' Right.

'''E:''' Fine.

'''E:''' Yeah, absolutely.

'''E:''' You should find out that zero is going on.

'''E:''' But I don't know.

'''E:''' There is reaction to this and that will just further perpetuate it.

'''E:''' The news – news media outlets love it because people – we have a fascination in our culture.

'''E:''' There you go, Cara, our culture.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' About aliens and about UFOs and things and alien craft.

'''E:''' It's absolutely seeped into the American culture and Western culture overall, this existence of extraterrestrials.

'''E:''' No doubt about it.

'''E:''' Our culture is saturated with it.

'''S:''' Yeah, but that is a good point, Evan.

'''S:''' There's nothing even remotely new here.

'''S:''' You would think if this guy were revealing something, the secret, there would be some new wrinkle to the narrative, some new thing that would make it somehow make a little bit more sense or whatever.

'''B:''' Well, the new thing here, Steve, is that this guy is like the first real official from the government.

'''B:''' Insider.

'''S:''' Like the real, real insider or something.

'''S:''' Although he isn't really.

'''S:''' He's still a friend of a friend hearsay.

'''S:''' I didn't see the evidence, but I talked to somebody who told me that they did see the evidence.

'''S:''' It's like, okay.

'''S:''' The other thing is – the last thing I'll say about this, maybe there's something going on here, meaning that this guy was somehow tangentially given information about some program that he was not privy to that has some relevance.

'''S:''' What I suspect is if there is anything to this, because he was on the task force, the UAP task force, and he's upset that they weren't giving the task force all the information.

'''S:''' So it's possible that some military or intelligence compartmentalized unit in the government was like, no, we're not giving you this information.

'''S:''' That's what he's talking about.

'''S:''' Because it's like too secret for you guys in the UAP task force.

'''S:''' No, we're not telling you how we monitor Russian whatever, high tech plane tests or whatever it is that they're doing.

'''S:''' So I suspect if there's anything to it, it's that.

'''S:''' It's that intelligence or military secrets are being kept from the UAP task force.

'''S:''' That's it.

'''S:''' It has nothing to do with aliens.

'''S:''' This guy somehow parlayed that into – they must be talking.

'''S:''' They must be talking about aliens.

'''S:''' We've seen that before, too.

'''B:''' Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' That's the only way I can make sense of it.

'''S:''' If anyone else has any other ideas how to make sense of it, I'm all ears.

'''S:''' But I cannot make sense of this story as aliens.

'''J:''' Right.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' And look, I'm sorry.

'''E:''' Anybody who says there's an alien body somewhere, something short of physical evidence is never ever going to cut it.

'''E:''' You have to have that.

'''E:''' Forget it otherwise.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' OK.

{{anchor|followup}}
{{anchor|correction}} 
== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups ==

=== Correction #1: Which Attenborough () ===

'''S:''' We're going to go on with some questions.

'''S:''' OK.

'''S:''' We're going to start with a correction of a correction.

'''S:''' I hate when this happens.

'''S:''' I feel terrible about this.

'''S:''' Yeah, I'm sure, Evan.

'''S:''' It's like – Evan, confess your sin.

'''E:''' It's like – it's a running joke that – a bad joke that won't end.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' All right.

'''E:''' Let's see.

'''E:''' David Attenborough, OK, British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and author, best known for writing, presenting in conjunction with BBC Natural History Unit.

'''E:''' He is the one who had the quote from a couple of weeks ago about concerning the Yeti.

'''E:''' Yes, not his brother, the actor Richard Attenborough.

'''E:''' OK.

'''E:''' Have I finally clarified that?

'''E:''' Yes.

'''E:''' We all assumed it was.

'''E:''' I did say – and I – initially in the quote game, I did say Richard Attenborough.

'''E:''' So it was absolutely my mistake initially, no doubt about it.

'''S:''' But we all thought you said David.

'''S:''' We reacted as if you said David.

'''S:''' I know.

'''C:''' Because that's where our head went.

'''S:''' Of course.

'''E:''' Of course.

'''E:''' As it should.

'''S:''' And it was correct because David did say the quote.

'''C:''' And the other two people in the choice were Jane Goodall and somebody else.

'''E:''' Goodall and who did I say?

'''E:''' Let me look it up real quick.

'''E:''' I believe it was – Jacques Cousteau.

'''C:''' It was another naturalist.

'''C:''' Jacques Cousteau.

'''C:''' Jacques Cousteau.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' So of course we weren't thinking the actor.

'''C:''' We were primed to think the naturalist.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' We were primed, I tell you.

'''S:''' I'm not the first one to confuse the two.

'''S:''' I've seen it being confused before.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah.

'''E:''' I'm sure.

'''E:''' But yeah, I was supposed to have clarified it last week.

'''E:''' I failed in doing that.

'''E:''' And I absolutely admit to my failure with humblest apologies to our listening audience, to the Attenborough family, and to abominable snow people everywhere.

'''E:''' I apologize to the entire species.

'''E:''' I appreciate that.

'''S:''' That was the funniest line in Black Jack's King Kong movie.

'''S:''' Have you ever seen that?

'''S:''' Where it was a perfectly delivered line.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, where they have – They're in the jungle and it's like infested with dinosaurs and King Kong and everything.

'''S:''' And they have like a real tough naturalist guy, like the explorer kind of guy on their team with them.

'''S:''' And he says very seriously and profoundly, I know what's responsible for this.

'''S:''' And everyone's like, what?

'''S:''' What is it?

'''S:''' He goes, the abominable snowman.

'''S:''' Perfectly delivered line.

'''S:''' It was just so absurd.

=== Question #1: Breaking placebo effects () ===
<blockquote> Hi and thanks for the show. Does being vocally skeptical potentially break the very real placebo effect for others? Am I possibly doing a disservice to my friends when I argue against the homeopathic "treatment" that helps them? – Jaysen Naidoo, South Africa</blockquote>

'''S:''' Anyway, one more question.

'''S:''' This comes from Jason Nadeau from South Africa.

'''S:''' And Jason writes, hi, and thanks for the show.

'''S:''' Does being vocally skeptical potentially break the very real placebo effect for others?

'''S:''' Am I possibly doing a disservice to my friends when I argue against the homeopathic treatment that helps them?

'''S:''' That's a good question, Jason.

'''S:''' Thanks for writing that in.

'''S:''' So I think the short answer is no.

'''S:''' But I have to correct an unstated major premise in your question when you refer to placebo effect in the singular.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' When you're talking about this kind of thing.

'''S:''' So the placebo effect, what is the placebo effect?

'''S:''' That is everything that happens other than an active intervention, right?

'''S:''' So if you're doing a clinical trial where you have an active treatment versus a placebo, the assumption is that in the active treatment group, you're going to have all kinds of effects plus a physiological response to the treatment.

'''S:''' And then in the placebo group, you're going to have just everything else other than the physiological response.

'''S:''' And so that's the collective placebo effect as measured in the clinical trial.

'''S:''' But when you're talking about our placebo effects, the things that make up that measured effect.

'''S:''' So that includes a lot of things that have nothing to do with whether or not you actually believe the treatment works or not.

'''S:''' Like the fact that you're in a clinical trial or that you're taking a treatment or that you're paying attention to your illness.

'''S:''' Or that a doctor is touching you.

'''C:''' Yeah, you're having an experience with a doctor.

'''S:''' Or you have hope or you are going to be more compliant with other treatments.

'''S:''' There's all kinds of things.

'''S:''' There's regression to the mean, which again has nothing to do with what you think.

'''S:''' You're going to regress to the mean no matter whether you think you're treating your illness or not.

'''S:''' So there are statistical effects.

'''S:''' There are illusory effects.

'''S:''' There's lots of contamination, a lot of confounding effects that go in there.

'''S:''' Most of them have nothing to do with belief.

'''S:''' And so no, for those things you're not going to interfere with it.

'''S:''' But let's talk about the belief part of it.

'''S:''' So there's no evidence that that component has any real physical benefit.

'''S:''' Whenever you try to study, like try to parse out the different aspects of placebo effects and try to measure like what is actually happening. It doesn't seem that there's any real physiological benefit from just the belief that you're getting a treatment. What there is a difference in is how you report your symptoms. But we can't assume that like if you say, yes, I'm having less pain, that doesn't necessarily mean you're having less pain. It just means that you're reporting that you're having less pain.

'''S:''' And you might think, well, what's the difference?

'''S:''' Well, we don't know.

'''S:''' That's kind of the point.

'''S:''' We only can know what we know in a clinical trial.

'''S:''' We can't.

'''S:''' There's no pain-o-meter.

'''S:''' We can't know how much pain someone's actually in.

'''S:''' We can only know what they tell us.

'''S:''' And if they're biased to tell us they're having less pain because they think that they're getting a treatment and they want to believe that it works and they want you to get the answer that you want or whatever, then that doesn't mean it's actually helping them.

'''S:''' So the most common way that we try to evaluate whether or not somebody really is in reduced pain or not, regardless of what they're saying, is to look at other markers of pain.

'''S:''' A big one is are they – how much pain medication are they taking, rescue pain medication, right?

'''S:''' So if you're doing a treatment to reduce headaches and they're telling you how many headaches they're having, how bad they are, et cetera, that's one thing.

'''S:''' But you could also track how much headache medication they're taking.

'''S:''' Like if they're still taking just as much ibuprofen as they were before, even though they're telling you they're having fewer and less severe headaches, they're probably not.

'''S:''' They're probably still having just as much of a headache burden as they were before because – as measured by their use of medication.

'''S:''' Now, that's not a perfect measure either.

'''S:''' That has confounding factors there as well.

'''S:''' But it is just another window into that question.

'''S:''' When you look at outcomes that are not subjective, like you're looking at outcomes like do people's lung function improve or do they survive longer, none of that happens.

'''S:''' Like the placebo effects do not make people live longer.

'''S:''' It does not improve their lung function.

'''S:''' Whenever you try to look at those hard and fast outcomes – Right.

'''S:''' Only subjective measures.

'''S:''' Just the subjective stuff, right?

'''S:''' And I don't worry about the subjective stuff in terms of placebo effects.

'''S:''' In any case, my approach as a clinician is that these – the positive psychological aspects that sometimes get rolled into placebo effects, that's just part of good bedside manner.

'''S:''' That's part of a good therapeutic relationship or a therapeutic alliance with your patient.

'''S:''' That's all good.

'''S:''' It's not really placebo.

'''S:''' It's just part of the therapeutic interaction.

'''S:''' Yes, it's part of the placebo effect as measured in clinical trial, but it's not really the – I believe this is a real treatment so I'm having a positive effect.

'''S:''' It's that I'm having a positive interaction with somebody who cares about whether I'm feeling good or not.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' It's actually one of the desired – I don't – what's the opposite of a placebo effect?

'''C:''' A nocebo.

'''C:''' No, that's not what I'm asking for.

'''C:''' Sorry.

'''C:''' It's one of the variables, the actual variables that's measured in like psychological intervention.

'''C:''' It's not considered a placebo effect at all.

'''C:''' It's considered an active treatment effect is how well you get along with your therapist and how much you trust them.

'''C:''' It's just because we don't measure it that way in drug trials.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Drug trials are – and that also gets to what is the purpose of the trial.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Not all trials are efficacy trials.

'''S:''' An efficacy trial, the word efficacy has a very specific operational definition.

'''S:''' It's not the same thing as effective.

'''S:''' It's not the same thing as does it work.

'''S:''' It means is there a specific effect from an active treatment.

'''S:''' And in order to make – in order to know that, you have to control for all other confounding variables.

'''S:''' And that's why we do randomized placebo-controlled double-blind clinical trials.

'''S:''' That's the only way to control for all other possible confounding factors.

'''S:''' So you can isolate the efficacy of the active treatment you're studying.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Just the drug.

'''S:''' Well, it could be other things too.

'''S:''' It doesn't have to be just a drug.

'''S:''' Right, right.

'''C:''' But I mean whatever it is you're studying.

'''C:''' In this case, we're talking about a drug.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' But there are other things that go into effectiveness other than efficacy.

'''S:''' And you need other kinds of research to address those questions.

'''S:''' And there, you know, the definition of, quote, unquote, placebo is different.

'''S:''' And things that we would consider a placebo as part of an efficacy trial are just part of the therapy.

'''S:''' Right, like going to a community clinic.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''S:''' So when you're talking about the overall effectiveness of the interaction, you know, of the medical or psychological interaction.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I know it gets complicated, but it just – this is just one of those times where you can't just boil it down to a simplistic definition because you lose all of what's actually happening.

'''C:''' And I'm glad that we took the time to specify that because I'm afraid that this is what often gets lost when we – like another name that logical fallacy might be when people write in and they're like, well, I read that therapy doesn't work because when you compare this therapy to that therapy or this therapy to that therapy, the outcomes are different than when you look at these drug trials.

'''C:''' And it's like, yeah, because it's not a drug.

'''C:''' And when we do randomized controlled placebo driven trials for psychotherapies, we have to do so much like different variable detection.

'''C:''' Like it's a way different RCT setup when you're doing psychotherapy.

'''C:''' Totally.

'''S:''' I agree, Cara.

'''S:''' And it also cuts both ways.

'''S:''' So meaning that when you're doing – so looking at whether or not cognitive behavioral therapy is effective, again, not efficacious, but effective, then it's a different kind of question.

'''S:''' And you may not really care as much about, you know, which aspect of the therapeutic interaction is contributing to the overall effect.

'''S:''' You really want to just know, is the person better at the end, you know, of the interaction.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' And when you do try to parse it out, yeah, you could say, yeah, it turns out that like the empathy of the practitioner is a much bigger factor than whatever method they choose to use.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' You know, the method they choose to use is not the biggest factor in terms of the outcomes.

'''S:''' Although a lot of the other sort of less tangible things turn out to be more important.

'''S:''' That's okay.

'''S:''' But so I would say that's okay and that's in the context of psychological interventions.

'''S:''' It's fine.

'''S:''' But my one caveat is, but then don't make efficacy claims.

'''S:''' Just make effectiveness claims.

'''S:''' And why that's important is because when people inappropriately make efficacy claims, right, so you can't inappropriately criticize them for not doing efficacy trials, but they can't inappropriately make efficacy claims, that's when you get to people thinking that eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is a thing.

'''S:''' I know.

'''C:''' It's dangerous.

'''C:''' It's like you should really just be talking about effectiveness.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It's not, there's no efficacy to EMDR, but maybe, but sure, could it be part of this nutritious breakfast where it's, you know, it's part of the therapeutic interaction.

'''S:''' Yes, the purple hat.

'''C:''' There's some effectiveness.

'''S:''' Sure.

'''S:''' But don't start to come up with some bizarre neurological explanation for the efficacy of EMDR when you've never demonstrated efficacy to EMDR.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' It's going the other way.

'''S:''' You're confusing effectiveness with efficacy.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Agree.

'''C:''' 100% agree.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Okay, good.

'''S:''' We agree.

'''S:''' Yeah, we do.

'''B:''' We really do.

'''B:''' Guys, I zoned out a second.

'''B:''' Could you just repeat all that?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' What was the thing about the thing you said?

'''E:''' Purple hat.

'''E:''' Purple hat theory.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''C:''' Oh, purple hat.

'''C:''' Google it.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' All right.

'''S:''' Let's go on with science or fiction.

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:19:28) ==

{{Page categories
|SoF with a Theme = 
}}
{{SOFinfo
|theme = Weird foods

|item1 = In Cambodia a popular delicacy is deep fried tarantula, a custom that arose out of necessity during the lean times under the {{w|Khmer Rouge}}.
|link1web = https://www.thetravelpocketguide.com/news/fried-spider-cambodia/
|link1title = Regional delicacy: Fried spider in Cambodia
|link1pub = The Travel Pocket Guide

|item2 = Rhododendron honey is an expensive treat in Northern Australia, where the low levels of toxins are considered to add a unique and spicy flavor.
|link2web = https://www.webmd.com/first-aid/rhododendron-poisoning
|link2title = Rhododendron poisoning
|link2pub = WebMD

|item3 = Corn smut is an invading gray fungus that is considered a scourge to corn growers, but eaten as a delicacy in Mexico.
|link3web = https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/24/433232707/scourge-no-more-chefs-invite-corn-fungus-to-the-plate
|link3title = Scourge No More: Chefs Invite Corn Fungus To The Plate
|link3pub = NPR

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction =Rhododendron honey
|science1 = deep-fried tarantula
|science2 = Corn smut delicacy

|rogue1 =Evan
|answer1 =deep-fried tarantula

|rogue2 =bob
|answer2 =Rhododendron honey

|rogue3 =jay
|answer3 =Corn smut delicacy

|rogue4 =cara
|answer4 =Rhododendron honey

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = y
|win = 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''E:''' It's time for science or fiction.

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake.

'''S:''' And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

'''S:''' We have a theme this week.

'''S:''' The theme is weird food.

'''S:''' So these are things that people actually eat.

'''S:''' Okay?

'''S:''' You got to listen to all the details.

'''S:''' It's not just the food itself.

'''S:''' There are other details in each of the items.

'''S:''' Okay, guys, ready?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Here we go.

'''S:''' In Cambodia, a popular delicacy is deep fried tarantula, a custom that arose out of necessity during the lean times under the Khmer Rouge.

'''S:''' Item number two, rhododendron honey is an expensive treat in northern Australia where the low levels of toxins are considered to add a unique and spicy flavor.

'''S:''' And item number three, corn smut is an invading gray fungus that is considered a scourge to corn growers but eaten as a delicacy in Mexico.

=== Evan's Response ===

'''S:''' Evan, why don't you go first?

'''E:''' Cambodia.

'''E:''' How is this a popular delicacy if it arose out of the necessity of the Khmer Rouge?

'''E:''' You know, that's a bit weird.

'''E:''' That's the category.

'''E:''' Yeah, weird.

'''E:''' But this is – oh, gosh.

'''E:''' But look, if you ate something out of that kind of necessity – like I reckon back to when I've read stories and watched documentaries about the Civil War and what the soldiers were – had to eat to sort of survive during wartime.

'''E:''' And it was like twigs and leather from shoes and things like that.

'''E:''' So I don't know that it would – something like eating a tarantula arise out of that and become like, oh, hey, wait.

'''E:''' These aren't so bad after all.

'''E:''' So that one is a little creepy.

'''E:''' The next one about the honey in northern Australia where low levels of toxins are considered to add a unique and spicy flavor.

'''E:''' Does honey have toxins in it?

'''E:''' I don't know enough about honey per se.

'''E:''' Is it the fact that it's rhododendron?

'''E:''' I know what a rhododendron plant is, but rhododendron honey.

'''E:''' I have a feeling that one could be right.

'''E:''' You know, Australia is an interesting place with a lot of interesting animals and plants.

'''E:''' So I think that one is right.

'''E:''' The last one about corn smut invading gray fungus considered to be a scourge to corn growers.

'''E:''' But eaten as a delicacy in Mexico, yeah, that one could be right.

'''E:''' Obviously, corn is a very big part of the food and culture and everything in Central America.

'''E:''' And the fact that a fungus – there's probably several fungi that arose from corn.

'''E:''' So the fact that they then were able to turn into some kind of delicacy, I don't really see a problem with that one.

'''E:''' It's the tarantula one I'm having the real issue with.

'''E:''' I mean, but it's so kind of out there and disgusting.

'''E:''' That kind of could be the gotcha one.

'''E:''' But I don't know.

'''E:''' I'm still going to go with the tarantula one as the fiction.

=== Bob's Response ===

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

'''B:''' Yeah, there's really not a lot to go on here. I mean, what the hell? Who knows? For some reason, the spider, the tarantula one seems right. Like there are some cultures that would eat that. So I'll just go with that one as science. The gray fungus, who knows? The one that kind of just rubbed me just a little bit the wrong way. Maybe it was just the way you read it, the rhododendron honey. So what the hell? I'll just say that's fiction.

=== Jay's Response ===
'''S:''' Okay, Jay?

'''J:''' Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at the honey one and I'm thinking there's so many different varieties of honey that, you know, why not?

'''J:''' You know, like that one doesn't really surprise me.

'''J:''' The deep fried tarantula has shock value to it.

'''J:''' That's the one where I'm, you know, I could see where Steve would make that up just because it's like, what?

'''J:''' You know, you can't wrap your head around that.

'''J:''' And the third one, I would love to think that Steve came up with the term corn smut.

'''J:''' Oh, gosh.

'''J:''' But I just don't know if people would actually eat fungus.

'''J:''' Like, you know, he didn't talk about it if it's prepared in any way.

'''J:''' I'm going to go with, I'm not going to pick the spider because I think that's the obvious one.

'''J:''' I'm going to go with the corn smut as the fake.

'''J:''' Wow.

'''J:''' All right.

'''E:''' All right.

'''B:''' Nice.

'''B:''' Well done, Steve.

=== Cara's Response ===

'''C:''' Okay.

'''C:''' So let's go with some, let's use some reasoning that's going to end up being either wrong for the right reason or right for the wrong reason.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''C:''' The tarantula one was the first one that I thought was going to be real.

'''C:''' So that one sticks out to me just out, Southeast Asia, very common to eat very large insects, especially street food on sticks, on skewers, fried, crunchy.

'''C:''' That like really doesn't, that one's not weird to me at all.

'''C:''' I have so many pictures like in my Instagram feed of friends who are traveling in Southeast Asia eating like scorpions and things like that.

'''C:''' So I don't know.

'''C:''' That one doesn't bother me at all.

'''C:''' Tarantulas, they're big.

'''C:''' They're probably got a lot of.

'''B:''' They're arachnids like the scorpions.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah, exactly.

'''C:''' And then so, okay.

'''C:''' The rhododendron honey, expensive treat in Northern Australia.

'''C:''' So there is an expensive honey called Manuka honey that is kind of tastes like medicine.

'''C:''' That's a little bit like woo woo, whatever, but it's also kind of tasty, but it's not dangerous.

'''C:''' This thing about there being toxins in honey is worrisome to me.

'''C:''' Like, Ooh, it's unique and spicy.

'''C:''' Wait, but there are toxins in it.

'''C:''' I don't know about that.

'''C:''' That one bugs me.

'''C:''' Corn smut and invading gray fungus.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''C:''' It's invading.

'''C:''' It's great, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's dangerous and people eat fungus all the time.

'''C:''' Fungus is a huge part of our food group.

'''C:''' And I could definitely see that maybe this one has like a yummy corn flavor.

'''C:''' Corn is eaten all over Mexico.

'''C:''' Everyone loves smut.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah, exactly.

'''C:''' Yum.

'''C:''' So that one doesn't bug me as much.

'''C:''' I think it's the rhododendron one that bugs me only because it's like toxic.

'''C:''' I don't usually eat packaged toxic food unless maybe it's like, I don't know.

'''C:''' It's an expensive treat, not on grocery shelves, but I think I'm still going to go with that one as the fiction.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' Okay. So I guess we'll take these in order.

'''S:''' Number one in Cambodia, popular delicacy is deep fried tarantula, a custom that arose out of necessity during the lean times under the Khmer Rouge.

'''S:''' Evan, you think this one is the fiction.

'''S:''' Everyone else thinks this one is science.

'''S:''' And this one is science.

'''S:''' Sorry, Evan.

'''S:''' What, KFT?

'''E:''' What are we talking about?

'''E:''' Yeah, KFT.

'''E:''' KFT, no way.

'''S:''' Yeah, so they originally started eating them because they were starving.

'''S:''' And they said, well, what can we eat here?

'''S:''' And they just would start collecting tarantulas in the forest because they're big, like as big as your hand.

'''C:''' They're huge.

'''C:''' They're a food source.

'''S:''' Yeah, so fry them up and then choke them down.

'''S:''' Then they became a delicacy.

'''S:''' They liked it.

'''S:''' Chew them back up.

'''S:''' And now they basically breed them.

'''S:''' You know, they breed them in these pits.

'''S:''' For food.

'''B:''' Yeah, they breed the tarantulas for food.

'''B:''' You can go to restaurants.

'''B:''' That's not even an apocalypse food.

'''C:''' Do they spice it or anything?

'''S:''' I'm sure they do all kinds of things to it, sure.

'''E:''' So even though this is right, it's wrong.

'''C:''' You guys, you have such an aversion to eating bugs.

'''C:''' It's so funny.

'''S:''' If you visit Cambodia, like you have to do this.

'''S:''' You have to go to a restaurant.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' That's probably why I've seen so many pictures and things.

'''C:''' It's like a tourist trap.

'''C:''' That's why I'll never go.

'''E:''' Yep, not going there.

'''S:''' Thanks.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' All right, let's go to number two. Rhododendron honey is an expensive treat in northern Australia where the low levels of tokens are considered to add a unique and spicy flavor.

'''S:''' Bob and Cara, you think this one is the fiction.

'''S:''' Yeah, it is.

'''S:''' Jay and Evan, you think this one is science.

'''S:''' And this one is.

'''S:''' Say it.

'''S:''' The fiction.

'''B:''' The fiction.

'''B:''' Yay.

'''S:''' Cara, high five.

'''S:''' So rhododendron honey is a thing.

'''S:''' And it's also called mad honey.

'''S:''' I love it.

'''S:''' Because you're not supposed to eat it.

'''B:''' Asposed.

'''S:''' It's bad.

'''S:''' It'll make you really sick.

'''S:''' Every part of the rhododendron is toxic.

'''S:''' You can't eat it.

'''S:''' It's one of those things you should never eat.

'''S:''' And if bees happen to be making their honey from rhododendron pollen, it's toxic.

'''S:''' And people can accidentally eat rhododendron honey.

'''S:''' And when they do, they will get very, very sick from it.

'''S:''' Including becoming delirious.

'''S:''' Mainly it affects your stomach.

'''C:''' Do people do that then, like on purpose?

'''C:''' Because they're dumb.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I don't know that anyone's doing it on purpose.

'''S:''' Everything I've read, it's always an accidental thing.

'''S:''' So it causes confusion, upset stomach, general weakness, and other symptoms.

'''S:''' Fun.

'''S:''' Because in the ancient times, it was called mad honey.

'''S:''' People knew about it.

'''S:''' So not usually fatal, but apparently you really do not want to eat this.

'''C:''' It's like getting bitten by a bullet ant, right?

'''C:''' Like you don't die, but you want to.

'''C:''' But you want to.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' So I chose northern Australia because rhododendrons are native to northern Australia.

'''S:''' And in case that came up.

'''S:''' And they eat lots of things with low levels of toxins.

'''S:''' People eat lots of toxic foods.

'''S:''' But they just do whatever they have to do to make sure the toxin levels are low enough that they can eat it.

'''S:''' You like the puffer fish.

'''C:''' I try not to.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Personally, I try not to as well.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' All of this means that corn smut is an invading gray fungus that is considered a scourge to corn growers.

'''S:''' But eaten as a delicacy in Mexico.

'''S:''' So, yeah, if you're growing corn in the U.S. and you see this gray fungus on your corn, you're screwed.

'''S:''' You can't sell the corn and it could destroy whole crops.

'''S:''' But in Mexico, they turned a bad thing into a good thing and said, well, let's eat it and see what it's like.

'''S:''' So apparently it's delicious if you're the sort of person who likes mushrooms, which I'm not.

'''S:''' But it tastes like a tasty mushroom apparently.

'''S:''' Yum.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' But instead of like on the corn cob, there are these huge gray, you know, growths, you know, coming out of it.

'''S:''' It looks disgusting.

'''S:''' But they, yeah, they prepare it and they don't eat it raw.

'''S:''' They cook it up and mix it in with whatever, put it on your taco, put it in your quesadilla.

'''S:''' It's all good.

'''S:''' Question.

'''B:''' Nothing goes to waste.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Who says scourge and who says scourge?

'''B:''' I say scourge.

'''E:''' Me too.

'''S:''' Scourge.

'''S:''' It depends on the context.

'''B:''' But does it?

'''C:''' I just say scourge.

'''C:''' Your context is wrong.

'''C:''' I say scourge.

'''C:''' You say scourge.

'''C:''' Interesting.

'''B:''' I just looked it up.

'''B:''' Saw scourge.

'''B:''' Just throwing it out there.

'''B:''' Scourge.

'''S:''' It's easier.

'''C:''' Scourge.

'''S:''' All right.

'''S:''' Good job, guys.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:30:45) ==

{{qow
|text =
|author = 
|lived = _birth_year_-_death_year_ 
|desc = 
}}


'''S:''' Evan, do you have a quote for us?

'''E:''' I do.

'''E:''' A quote suggested by listener Rick from Dayton, Ohio.

'''E:''' Thank you, Rick.

'''E:''' He says, I'm a long-time listener but first-time quote giver.

'''E:''' Here we go.

'''E:''' Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds and fanatics.

'''E:''' It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal.

'''E:''' A quote from Cassius Jackson's Kaiser, who was a mathematician from the early 20th century, United States, and wrote apparently a lot of books about mathematics and helped found the American Association of University Professors, among other academies that he was involved with, including the American Mathematical Society.

'''E:''' So there you go.

'''E:''' There are no absolutes.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Except for that.

'''S:''' Right, yeah.

'''S:''' Certainty is a problem.

'''S:''' I've really had to discipline myself not to say things like, I'm sure about this, or you'll never convince me this is not true.

'''B:''' Yeah, caveat.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I mean, obviously, it's a little bit hyperbole.

'''S:''' They're just turns of phrase.

'''S:''' But it's good not to fall into that pattern.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a bad habit, basically, if you're doing that.

'''S:''' And it's incorrect.

'''S:''' Yeah, and it's a good habit to discipline yourself to, in both words and thought, to always caveat things with appropriate levels of skepticism and say things in a more scientific manner.

'''S:''' You'll notice scientists never say, never speak of certitude.

'''S:''' They always talk about possibility and probability and things like that.

'''B:''' Yeah, which can make it frustrating, but that's science, baby.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' I know, and it gets exploited a lot.

'''S:''' I know the anti-vaxxers always will make hay out of that when scientists say things in appropriate scientific fashion.

'''S:''' Within the statistical power of the data, we're not seeing any effect.

'''S:''' And I've had anti-vaxxers, both in writing and verbally, say, the only thing that's acceptable is zero risk.

'''S:''' It's like, well, that doesn't exist in life.

'''S:''' It doesn't exist.

'''B:''' Yeah, so you get out of bed, why?

'''S:''' Yeah, you can't eat anything then.

'''S:''' Nothing you eat, drink, do, don't do, whatever has zero risk.

'''B:''' Yeah, don't take a bath or go down the stairs.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Yeah, or drive your car.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Yeah, right.

'''E:''' Being alive is risky.

'''S:''' Right, absolutely.

'''B:''' It's ridiculous, yeah.

'''B:''' Absolutely.

'''S:''' All right, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''S:''' Thank you, Steve.

'''B:''' You got to see this.

'''S:''' Sure, man.

== Signoff/Announcements () ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

{{Outro664}}{{top}} 
== Today I Learned ==
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* Fact/Description
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== References ==
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}}

SGU Episode 934

2023-06-15T14:16:17Z

Ralsettem: /* Introduction, SGU's 2024 eclipse plans, Pride Month */

{{Google speech|episode}}
{{900s|934|episodebox}}
{{Editing required
|transcription = y
|proofreading = 
|formatting = y
|links = y
|Today I Learned list = y
|categories = y 
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{{UseOutline}} 
{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 934
|episodeDate = {{900s|934|boxdate}} 

|verified = 

|episodeIcon = File:934 globular cluster.jpg

|caption = Globular clusters are very dense, spherical clusters that contain between around 100,000 and 1 million stars.

|bob =y
|cara =y
|Evan =y
|qowText = The plural of anecdote is not data.<ref group=note>Here's an article: [http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data/ Don't forget: The plural of anecdote '''is''' data.] "The purpose of this point is to preserve the true meaning of Raymond Wolfinger's oft-misquoted aphorism." </ref>
|qowAuthor = attributed to [https://erikaengelhaupt.com/about/ Erika Engelhaupt], freelance science writer
|downloadLink = {{900s|934|download}} 

|forumLinktopic = 55087.0 
|}}

== Introduction, SGU's 2024 eclipse plans, Pride Month ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Thursday, June 1st, 2023, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening, everyone

'''S:''' Jay is off tonight.

'''C:''' We miss you, Jay.

'''C:''' I'm missing you already.

'''C:''' Just other stuff that's more important than us.

'''S:''' Yeah, other stuff.

'''E:''' Things happen.

'''S:''' So guys, we've been getting a ton of response to our announcement that we're going to be at the Eclipse next April in Dallas, which is really exciting.

'''S:''' You know, there's so many people are going to be there.

'''S:''' It's going to be a lot of fun.

'''S:''' Now, a lot of people are asking us, like, where are we staying?

'''S:''' But here's the thing.

'''S:''' It doesn't really matter where we're staying because we're not doing anything there.

'''S:''' We just found rooms, you know.

'''S:''' If you're going, just find a room wherever you could find it.

'''S:''' Man, it was hard to find rooms, right?

'''S:''' Cara and Jay were like, they were double teaming it and going back and forth.

'''S:''' And then Cara, you eventually found the hotel with the rooms available.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' And we're staying, you know, sort of below Dallas because I think the idea is that- Meaning south.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Not underground.

'''C:''' The southern outlook.

'''C:''' We're staying in the tunnels below Dallas.

'''C:''' The underground.

'''C:''' We're staying just south of Dallas in the burbs.

'''C:''' Basically, I think the idea, right, is somewhere on that axis between Dallas and Waco.

'''C:''' Because that's where we're going to get, like, the longest totality.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''S:''' So we're going to find an open field somewhere, right, to watch the eclipse.

'''S:''' Ooh.

'''S:''' We should ask.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' If anyone has an open field somewhere between Dallas and Waco, let us know.

'''S:''' We'll definitely let everyone know where we are going to be during totality so we could have a gathering of skeptics.

'''S:''' But then, of course, we're doing a separate, you know, private show the weekend before the eclipse.

'''S:''' So there's that as well.

'''S:''' And once we have details on that, and that will be at a specific location, we'll give that to you.

'''S:''' So we'll let you know where the private show is going to be.

'''S:''' We'll let you know where we're going to be viewing the eclipse.

'''S:''' There's no point in letting you know what hotel we're staying at.

'''S:''' I'm sure there's no rooms left by now.

'''C:''' And also, it's like, just book what you can.

'''C:''' I know DFW is big.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Book what you can.

'''C:''' Don't worry.

'''C:''' We're not going to be in Fort Worth.

'''C:''' You know, book in the kind of Dallas to south of Dallas area.

'''C:''' And you should be golden.

'''E:''' And we had to spend some extra time because we're a large group of people coming.

'''E:''' So we needed an exceptionally large amount of rooms.

'''E:''' But take what you can get.

'''E:''' Even if you all can't, if you're traveling with a group, you all can't stay together at the same hotel, you're probably just going to want to grab what you can.

'''E:''' A room here, two rooms over there.

'''E:''' Or go camping.

'''E:''' Yeah, or go camping if possible.

'''E:''' But don't underestimate how many people from around the country, certainly, if not the world, will be descending on Dallas, which will be one of the main cities for this eclipse.

'''E:''' Because Texas, frankly, has one of the best chances of there being no clouds.

'''B:''' Except I will be there.

'''B:''' So everyone bring your umbrellas.

'''B:''' Bob.

'''B:''' But book now, really.

'''S:''' You should have booked two months ago.

'''S:''' But book now.

'''S:''' It is really late.

'''S:''' You're already late if you haven't booked yet.

'''S:''' Oh.

'''C:''' Something else just came up.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' But something that I forgot to say because it triggered when you were like, it is June 1st.

'''C:''' And I was like, it is June 1st.

'''C:''' So happy pride, everybody.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah.

'''C:''' Happy pride.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Starts today.

'''B:''' Sweet.

'''B:''' Happy pride in Florida.

'''C:''' I mean, lock your doors there.

'''C:''' Who knows who might be busting in.

'''C:''' I've got all of my accoutrements at work to support.

'''C:''' I've got my Say Gay shirt and my We Say Gay sticker.

'''C:''' Nice.

'''C:''' Nice.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' I've got my Trans Kids Rule stickers on my badge.

'''C:''' And it's like, I'm still seeing patients who are in the LGBTQI community.

'''C:''' And in Florida especially, yeah, I feel like they need all the support they can get.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' You might not have too many more of those in the future, unfortunately.

'''B:''' I was reading just today that there's like a mass exodus.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Because, I mean, can you blame them?

'''E:''' Well, right.

'''E:''' People secretly fete the state level for all sorts of things.

'''E:''' For many personal reasons, for tax reasons, and so many other reasons.

'''E:''' The fact that people move from state to state because of reasons like that is not really unusual.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' But especially in states where they're unable to get affirmative care because it's literally against the law, yeah, you're going to see some reactions to that.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' And there are other laws as well that have recently been passed by certain states that are either banning certain things or putting limited on certain practices having to do with health among other things.

'''C:''' So yeah.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' You do.

'''E:''' You have to sometimes seek relief at the state level.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Show your support this month, folks.

'''C:''' It's important.

'''C:''' It's important for people to feel safe and be seen.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' People should be free to live their life as themselves.

'''S:''' 100%.

'''S:''' You know?

'''S:''' Right?

'''C:''' I mean, come on.

'''S:''' I know.

'''S:''' The idea that people don't...

'''S:''' Duh.

'''S:''' I mean, what's ironic in US politics is that the people who are most loudly crying liberty seem to be the most willing to take other people's liberty away.

'''S:''' 100%.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Look in the mirror.

'''S:''' Always look in the mirror.

'''S:''' There is a massive disconnect there.

'''S:''' It's like, yeah, I totally agree.

'''S:''' I'm down with you on liberty.

'''S:''' Liberty for everybody.

'''S:''' You know?

'''S:''' Liberty for yourself.

'''S:''' Oh, you're a libertarian.

'''S:''' Liberty, well, you know, I don't want to get into politics, but you know, I don't...

'''S:''' Too late.

'''S:''' Liberty is obviously a very important principle.

'''S:''' I don't elevate any single principle to an absolute because you have to balance them against a lot of other legitimate principles.

'''S:''' But liberty is absolutely an important and valuable principle.

'''S:''' It's one of those things where you value it when you lose it, right?

'''S:''' When you have it, you take it for granted.

'''S:''' And when you lose it and you realize, oh, you know, the freedom to just exist is really important.

'''S:''' Oh my gosh.

'''S:''' And you take it away so quickly.

'''E:''' And also recognize it in the context of the entirety of humanity and civilization.

'''E:''' You realize it is so fleeting and it is so minuscule as far as how much time people have had to actually embrace liberty.

'''E:''' It's like a blip on the map.

'''E:''' It's more of an anomaly than the natural state.

'''E:''' It's special.

'''S:''' Do not give it away lightly.

'''C:''' No.

'''C:''' I don't know, but nobody's giving it away.

'''C:''' It's being taken from them.

'''S:''' So I might.

'''S:''' I mean, I'm talking about the people who are taking it from others.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' It may not come across that way.

'''S:''' When you take other people's liberty away, you are giving your own liberty away.

'''S:''' That's the thing they don't realize because you can't have it both ways.

'''S:''' When it becomes possible to take that liberty away, you've made it possible for yourself as well.

'''S:''' And this is one of the things that comes up commonly throughout history in American politics is that when people get in power, they immediately forget that they will not always be in power.

'''S:''' You know?

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' You have to behave when you're temporarily, very fleetingly, you have control of those reins, you've got to remember you are not going to have them for long.

'''S:''' And you want to keep the infrastructure in place that will protect you when you're back again in the minority.

'''S:''' And that's at the state and the federal level.

'''S:''' And when you forget that, that's when really bad things happen.

'''B:''' Dare I say, do unto others, I guess.

'''C:''' I know.

'''C:''' The golden rule of what?

'''S:''' Yeah, which comes from Greek enlightenment, by the way.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' Guide and principle.

'''S:''' Let's get on with some science.

{{anchor|quickie}} 

== Quickie with Bob (7:56) ==
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'''S:''' Bob.

'''B:''' That's what?

'''S:''' Give us a quickie.

'''B:''' All right.

'''B:''' Here's another quickie with Bob.

'''B:''' Brain stimulation in the news from Reinhart Lab at Boston University.

'''B:''' Steve and Cara, I've been curious to get some feedback from you at the end.

'''B:''' Specifically, I'm talking about transcranial alternating current stimulation or TACS.

'''B:''' This involves using a brain cap with electrodes to deliver harmless oscillating current at specific frequencies to specific regions of the brain.

'''B:''' I wasn't really aware of this technique.

'''B:''' The goal is to nudge neurons to fire more rhythmically to alter brain activity.

'''B:''' What's the goal?

'''B:''' This is based on research that suggests that neurons communicate better when firings are coordinated and conversely, that neuropsychiatric illnesses show problems with such rhythmic patterns that this could potentially treat.

'''B:''' Studies in the past show that this does alter a mental function, but some other studies show that the current was too weak to have really any real effect on mental function.

'''B:''' This is where this latest meta-analysis comes in.

'''B:''' It used 100 studies, good quality studies that were published and combining 2,900 people altogether who had participated in the 100 studies.

'''B:''' Based on this meta-analysis, the researchers concluded the following in their paper regarding this technique.

'''B:''' We found modest to moderate improvements in cognitive function with TACS treatment that were evident in several cognitive domains including working memory, long-term memory, attention, executive control, and fluid intelligence.

'''B:''' We also noted improvements in cognitive function separately in older adults and in individuals with neuropsychiatric illnesses.

'''B:''' I saw one interesting demo of this technique, absolutely anecdotal.

'''B:''' It was with the science reporter who went through the process of this TACS procedure and he said that he really didn't feel anything except when it was done, it was like a slight tingling and he said that for hours afterwards, he felt very, very clear-headed and they did a test with him and he basically had to look at the second hand of a clock.

'''B:''' Imagine the second hand of a clock.

'''B:''' He had to watch that second hand and whenever it skipped a second, it would go like for example from the 10th second to the 12th instead of the 11th, he would have to hit the space bar.

'''B:''' It was mind-numbingly boring and horrible because it was just a monotonous crappy little thing but he tried it and when he was done, the guy said he hit half of them.

'''B:''' He missed half of those little missed ticks.

'''B:''' So then he underwent the procedure and he got every one.

'''B:''' He said he was able to focus much, much better than previously.

'''B:''' Of course, this is one guy.

'''B:''' This is anecdotal but this meta-analysis dealt with many more, 2,900 people and it actually seems pretty compelling to me based on this meta-analysis and even some other studies and who knows what kind of applications this could have.

'''B:''' And yeah, so that's it.

'''B:''' I wanted to lay that out there and see what you guys say.

'''B:''' This has been your Quickie with Bob.

'''B:''' Back to you, Steve.

'''E:''' I have a quick question though.

'''E:''' Does the effect wear off after the amount of time passes?

'''B:''' Yeah, it's like a few hours.

'''B:''' One guy compared it to like twice as effective as caffeine and it lasted twice as long.

'''C:''' Bob, how is this different from TDCS?

'''C:''' You said this.

'''C:''' So I'm really familiar with transcranial direct current stimulation.

'''C:''' This is alternating current?

'''B:''' Yeah, it's alternating current and the goal is to have the neurons coordinate their firings because that supposedly can help with mental function if it's coordinated.

'''B:''' Neurons communicate better apparently if they're more in tune with each other.

'''S:''' But this is between specific brain areas that are involved with like memory.

'''C:''' Yeah, they target.

'''C:''' And TDCS usually is targeted as well but it seems to have a more of a lasting effect.

'''S:''' So Bob, when you said you were going to do the brain stimulation thing as your Quickie, I thought you were actually going to do a completely different study that I heard about that just came out.

'''B:''' Another study.

'''B:''' Was it TACS?

'''S:''' No.

'''S:''' It was done on epilepsy patients who have electrodes implanted in their brain.

'''S:''' Oh no, no.

'''S:''' The link, yeah, the link I sent you was.

'''S:''' I know.

'''S:''' I eventually read it and go, oh, this is a completely different study than the one I thought you were going to do.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''S:''' Oh, okay.

'''S:''' And they did the same thing basically.

'''S:''' They stimulated, essentially synchronized these two specific locations in the brain and the task that they gave the subjects was they would show them pictures of a celebrity and their pet.

'''S:''' And then they had to remember which pet went with which celebrity the next day, right?

'''S:''' And they did the stimulation before they went to sleep or it might've been during while they were sleeping.

'''S:''' And then the subjects who had the stimulation did better on the task the next day.

'''S:''' They remembered, they consolidated their memory overnight more effectively.

'''S:''' Oh, nice.

'''S:''' So it's still a modest effect.

'''S:''' It's like, yeah, it works, but we don't know how sustainable it is.

'''S:''' We don't know if there's a long-term downside effect.

'''S:''' It might down regulate something in the long term.

'''S:''' So too early to get excited about it, but it's a proof of concept kind of thing.

'''S:''' At this state, it's definitely interesting, but you just never know how these things are going to pan out.

'''S:''' True.

'''S:''' Like hacking the brain is tricky business.

'''S:''' It is.

'''S:''' It's never as simple as we hope or think.

'''B:''' I was surprised though that there is something there.

'''B:''' This is not just like marginal.

'''C:''' There's something there, man.

'''B:''' Why does that surprise you?

'''B:''' I don't know, because a lot of times when something that gets me excited, when I read the details, it's like, oh no, it's bullshit.

'''E:''' It's a good first reaction though.

'''E:''' Synchronization of neurons.

'''E:''' I mean, so that must have played out in other experiments as well or in other studies that have been done prior to this showing that this is likely a good positive effect.

'''B:''' Oh yeah.

'''B:''' They did the first meta-analysis in 2016 and even that one was favorable.

'''B:''' The reason why they did it again was because since then, of course, there's been many, many more high quality studies that they wanted to throw together into a meta-analysis.

'''B:''' It still looks even more promising than it did in 2016.

'''B:''' There's definitely something there.

'''B:''' Right, but who knows what long-term effects might be or how useful it's going to be.

'''B:''' Some people were saying that they expect in the future that doctors will be prescribing this for people with ADHD potentially and Alzheimer's.

'''S:''' Here's my quickie sense of where we are right now.

'''S:''' Quickie with Steve.

'''S:''' Go, Steve.

'''S:''' I think that this sort of brain stimulation, neuromodulation as we call it, and we did a talk on neuromodulation at Nexus a couple years ago.

'''S:''' We're at the infancy of this whole approach and it has tremendous promise because the brain is an electrical organ.

'''S:''' This is another way to functionally alter the way the brain functions.

'''S:''' It's going to be a lot harder than, again, we think or we hope.

'''S:''' I think the low-hanging fruit is going to be modifying unhealthy states.

'''S:''' Boosting a healthy brain is always going to be a lot trickier because if it were that easy, evolution already had millions of years to tinker with it.

'''S:''' Why wouldn't it have done it already?

'''S:''' Usually we're dealing with trade-offs.

'''S:''' I bet you there's a trade-off somewhere.

'''S:''' That would be my gut feeling.

'''S:''' Again, if you have ADHD, if you have some kind of a functional issue, then you might be able to compensate for it with this kind of thing.

'''S:''' I think that's where the real strength is going to be, not boosting healthy function.

'''C:''' That's the thing that I think is so important to remember about neuromodulation, like when we talk about TDCS or TACS, is one of the arguments, one of the fears around these kinds of things, maybe not the fears, but the skepticism around these things is like it's a panacea, right?

'''C:''' It's like, oh, it just is like stimulate any part of the brain and it gets better.

'''C:''' It doesn't work that way.

'''C:''' I think at first some people are like there's kind of an over skepticism, which is fair, right?

'''C:''' A reasonable amount of skepticism that says, well, you can't just like zap anything and see improvement, but that's like saying you can't just take a drug and see improvement.

'''C:''' Drugs are specific, you know?

'''C:''' Neuromodulation is specific.

'''C:''' The frequency is specific.

'''C:''' The magnitude is specific.

'''C:''' The location is specific.

'''C:''' And all of those things actually change its effect.

'''C:''' And I think we have to remember that.

'''S:''' You have to think about this as pharmaceuticals, right?

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' That's what I'm saying.

'''S:''' Neuromodulation.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' You can't say like drugs work.

'''S:''' What does that mean?

'''S:''' Which drug?

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' What does that mean?

'''S:''' For what indication, you know?

'''S:''' And without side effects, you know?

'''S:''' So it's the same thing.

'''S:''' It will, if you target the right, as you're saying, Cara, you target the right part of the brain with the right frequency, you could increase or decrease its functionality with effects that may be positive, may be negative, whatever.

'''S:''' We got to sort all of that out and the long term effects of overdriving these neurons, you know what I mean?

'''C:''' It's not like- And we already do this with magnets and it works.

'''C:''' We know that TMS is as effective or sometimes, and sometimes safer than ECT.

'''C:''' We know it works for certain psychiatric conditions.

'''S:''' That's like a one time reboot, not a continuous thing.

'''C:''' It's amazing.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' It's amazing.

'''C:''' And so we already know, but TMS is intense, right?

'''C:''' It's almost like a knockout effect.

'''C:''' This is like a little bit more subtle and potentially more specific.

'''C:''' So there's, yeah, there's so much possibility here.

'''C:''' But I don't think we should- It really is.

'''B:''' It is exciting.

'''B:''' And I tell you, I bet you the army is going to be seriously looking at this.

'''B:''' I mean, you've got people that are like controlling drones or whatever that have to look at a computer screen for hours looking for like, say, a person of interest or whatever they're doing.

'''B:''' This is the kind of thing that this, from what I've seen, it will help.

'''B:''' Right now, they could do it and it will help.

'''C:''' Agree.

'''C:''' But we also have to remember that like there are other avenues to the exact same thing.

'''C:''' And it's really interesting to look at a meta-analysis and look at a before and after effect in a within subjects model.

'''C:''' But like, has it been compared to, I don't know, Adderall?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Like, is Adderall more effective?

'''C:''' You know what I mean?

'''C:''' Like, we already have Adderall.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''C:''' And we already have all of its efficacy testing.

'''E:''' And let's face it, there are a lot of physical limitations to hooking up an electrode cap to your brain.

'''E:''' You know, it's not exactly like swallowing a pill.

'''B:''' They're pragmatic.

'''B:''' Conversely, I could also say you're not ingesting, you know, chemicals in your body continually.

'''C:''' It's true.

'''B:''' It may have a different side effect profile.

'''B:''' Right, exactly.

'''B:''' It could be.

'''B:''' And who knows?

'''B:''' It could be minimal and like, holy crap, we're not seeing any side.

'''B:''' Or it could be like, holy shit, look what happens after a month of doing this every day.

'''E:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''E:''' You become a super villain.

'''E:''' I see dead people.

'''S:''' All right, let's move on.

== News Items ==

'''S:'''

'''B:'''

'''C:'''

'''J:'''

'''E:'''


''(laughs)''
''(laughter)''
''(applause)''
[inaudible]

{{anchor|news#}} 
=== Harvesting Energy from Air (18:49) ===
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'''S:''' So this is one of those, again, one of those news items where I'm like, I pretty much have to talk about this this week.

'''S:''' So the headlines, this hit national news in the US.

'''S:''' I love headlines.

'''S:''' Harvesting energy from the air.

'''S:''' Woohoo!

'''C:''' I don't know if you guys heard about this.

'''C:''' Oh, I saw that.

'''C:''' Yeah, I saw that trending everywhere.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's like, OK, we got to look at this.

'''S:''' And it's a good example of how to think about and evaluate these kind of news items when they hit.

'''S:''' So let's talk about the science itself first.

'''S:''' This is a study which was, it's kind of a proof of concept study where they created a nanopore structure, like a layer.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' And what they were able to demonstrate, and this phenomenon has been demonstrated before, but they were able to demonstrate that they could do this with any physical material.

'''S:''' The material is not important.

'''S:''' What's important is the structure at the nanoscale, right?

'''S:''' So it comes down to if you have this device which has a thin film and a, with these pores that are less than 100 nanometers, and they're at a certain size, a water molecule can squeeze through, but the different layers of the film have different amounts of electrical charge on them.

'''S:''' Basically, you could think about it as like stripping the electron off the water molecule.

'''S:''' It creates a differential charge and you could generate a small current.

'''S:''' So basically, it just sits there soaking in water from the air and generating electricity, basically, from the humidity.

'''S:''' Does that make sense?

'''B:''' Wow.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Okay, keep going.

'''S:''' Now, of course, you can't just report that as science news.

'''S:''' You have to say, what could it be used for?

'''S:''' And anything that generates electricity, you're going to talk about it as if we're going to be running our civilization off of these.

'''E:''' Right.

'''E:''' Or am I just running my feet in socks over the carpet and getting a carpet shot kind

'''S:''' of level of electricity. And I think one of the main authors here, author Jun Yao, is contributing to a lot of the hype.

'''S:''' Probably innocently, but I think it's still, the hype is originating in the article itself, not just the reporting.

'''B:''' Is it passive?

'''S:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It's just there's air molecules, water vapor in the air.

'''S:''' Bumping up against it.

'''S:''' Bumping up against it, yeah, producing electric current.

'''S:''' And he said there's a tremendous amount of energy in the humidity, in the atmosphere of the earth.

'''S:''' We could be- Vacuum energy.

'''S:''' Tapping into that energy.

'''S:''' And he said that if you stacked, you should be able to stack these on top of each other.

'''S:''' He said if you stacked a billion devices of these little nanoport things into, it would basically take up the size of a refrigerator and it would generate one kilowatt of power.

'''S:''' So this is, of course, the claim that everyone runs with now, right?

'''S:''' So imagine if you had a refrigerator sized device in your home generating a kilowatt of power.

'''E:''' You could just put it in there.

'''E:''' You can tap into and use, right?

'''S:''' Well, yeah, that's not the issue.

'''S:''' Tapping into it and using it is not the issue, Evan.

'''S:''' You can absolutely do that.

'''S:''' It's generating a kilowatt of power.

'''S:''' And the average American home uses how much power do you think?

'''S:''' Far less than that.

'''S:''' Far less.

'''S:''' No, 1.2 kilowatts.

'''S:''' A little bit more.

'''B:''' Oh, really?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' I must be thinking of petawatts.

'''B:''' Definitely less than petawatts.

'''S:''' Good save.

'''S:''' Good save.

'''S:''' So, but we could draw three to five kilowatts at peak demand.

'''S:''' All right, so kilowatts is power, not energy, right?

'''S:''' Energy is like the amount of electricity you're consuming.

'''S:''' Kilowatts is how much power you need at any one moment, right?

'''S:''' Like if you have a 40 watt bulb, you're running 10 40 watt bulbs, that's 400 watts you need to make those bulbs go.

'''S:''' You do that for an hour, that's 40 kilowatt hours, you know?

'''S:''' And that's energy.

'''S:''' So at any way, so how could you power your home with this?

'''S:''' Because it's like constantly generating electricity, but your demands are going up and down.

'''S:''' So you would probably- Store it.

'''S:''' Yeah, you'd probably need to like include a battery or you would need to have some overcapacity so you could produce more energy at peak level and then they turn themselves off when you don't need the power, whatever.

'''S:''' Some combination of those things would be necessary.

'''S:''' Or you're hooked up to the grid, which kind of defeats the purpose to some extent, but you could use the grid as a backup.

'''S:''' Like if you have solar panels today, you could just hook up to the grid.

'''S:''' Yeah, same idea.

'''S:''' Or you could be off the grid with battery if you have enough batteries to store it, et cetera.

'''S:''' So it could work and it certainly could displace a lot of power generation if these things were efficient enough.

'''S:''' So there's a number of questions and I found that the reporting did not answer all these questions, right?

'''S:''' Some of them just mentioned, some experts say that it might not scale up, right?

'''S:''' That was like the most skepticism I found in the mainstream reporting.

'''S:''' It's like, yeah, the whole scaling up thing kind of is the deal killer here in my opinion.

'''S:''' Because think about it, where's all that water going and how is it getting regenerated, right?

'''S:''' So if you had one of these things running in your home, would this dry out the air in your home?

'''S:''' Right, yeah.

'''S:''' And how long would it take for that to happen?

'''S:''' And then of course it would stop generating electricity and you'd be living in the Sahara Desert.

'''S:''' So what I could not find anywhere was an analysis of how much energy exists in your home in humidity, right?

'''S:''' You'd be able to run it at one kilowatt for how long?

'''E:''' Yeah, it's still a limited amount, whatever that humidity level is.

'''S:''' Yeah, right.

'''S:''' There's not an infinite amount of water.

'''S:''' Now these things might work better outside, you know, rather than- How about in your pool?

'''S:''' Yeah, so it's got to be in the air.

'''S:''' I think it's got to be in the air.

'''S:''' Air, okay.

'''S:''' It's got to be water vapor, not just water.

'''S:''' You have to think about where's the energy coming from?

'''S:''' I guess like the sun evaporates the water into water vapor.

'''S:''' There's a little bit of that energy in the electrons on the water vapor and it's harvesting that to generate a tiny amount of current.

'''S:''' So I think it possibly could have some utility.

'''S:''' It's not going to be powering our civilization.

'''S:''' I just don't see how that's going to work.

'''S:''' But it may be a great self-powered dehumidifier.

'''S:''' You know what I mean?

'''S:''' Put one of these things in the oven and just run itself and pull water out of the air.

'''S:''' And it may be able to generate electricity in certain small niches.

'''S:''' But I just can't see like every home having one of these things.

'''S:''' Just doesn't make any sense.

'''B:''' Well, don't you need the answers to those questions before you can come to that conclusion?

'''S:''' Yeah, we don't know.

'''S:''' We don't know.

'''S:''' I mean, I just ... But think about it, Bob.

'''S:''' How much energy could be floating around in the air in your house?

'''S:''' You know what I mean?

'''B:''' Yeah, but if it's a kilowatt-

'''S:''' Bob, it's not a kilowatt. He's just saying theoretically if you stacked a billion ... He's just multiplying what he was able to generate in the lab times a billion without making any mathematical evaluation

'''B:''' of how- Oh, he has no small scale models of this?

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' But you're generating a tiny amount of electricity.

'''S:''' I'm just saying, he said, oh, if we had a billion of these, it could generate a billion times as much electricity.

'''S:''' But he is assuming that the humidity is not a limiting factor.

'''S:''' But that's the deal killer assumption, in my opinion, in terms of scaling up.

'''B:''' Yeah, his next step is to build one that's as big as a college refrigerator.

'''B:''' What can that do?

'''C:''' Also, a mini-fridge, yeah.

'''C:''' I mean, maybe this is a stupid question because this is not obviously my forte, but can you assume that it's just linear?

'''C:''' That if you just times it by a billion, that its output is times by a billion?

'''C:''' No.

'''C:''' Yeah, I wouldn't think so.

'''C:''' No, you can't assume that.

'''C:''' And I don't even mean without a rate-limiting step.

'''C:''' Let's say that there was enough humidity by some form of magic.

'''C:''' You still can't assume that it's linear, can you?

'''S:''' No, because the thing is, how much water is moving through this system at any given time?

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' So it's not just the presence of the water in the atmosphere, it's also the movement of the water.

'''S:''' So is he saying there's a billion times as much water vapor available moving through this system?

'''S:''' You know what I mean?

'''S:''' How would that work?

'''C:''' And also, will the system break down when you're up to that amount?

'''E:''' Yeah, a couple of those layers go kaplooey.

'''E:''' What happens to the system?

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''C:''' I don't know.

'''S:''' There's a lot of assumptions there.

'''S:''' There's a lot of assumptions.

'''S:''' Just saying, you're going to stack a billion of these things together is ridiculous.

'''S:''' You cannot scale like that.

'''C:''' I know.

'''C:''' You can't scale anything like that.

'''C:''' I know.

'''C:''' I'm trying to think of all the things in my house where I'm like, oh, that's good.

'''C:''' Let's see what happens when I do it a billion times.

'''S:''' And also, even if it theoretically could work at usable scales, again, remember, we're talking a billion times with this guy who's able to do it in a lab, then you still have to answer questions of what's the cost per kilowatt hour of electricity from this?

'''S:''' Is it ridiculous?

'''S:''' That's the bottom line, basically.

'''S:''' And what would be the energy and carbon necessary to make the thing?

'''S:''' And what's the payback time on that?

'''S:''' Do you have to run this thing for 100 years before you make back the energy you put into making it in the first place?

'''S:''' I don't know.

'''S:''' I'm just throwing out made up numbers.

'''S:''' I'm just saying, until we see that kind of analysis, we have no idea if this thing is viable or not.

'''S:''' But the thing that, for me, again, the deal killer that no one even brought up in any of the reporting I saw on it was, is there that much moisture in the air to multiply this by a billion?

'''S:''' And would the throughput be enough?

'''S:''' I mean, just because you could stack a billion of these things on top of each other doesn't mean it's going to work.

'''E:''' Some places on the planet, maybe, and others, probably not.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Yeah, but even that maybe is, I don't know.

'''S:''' I mean, we could be orders of magnitude off from that.

'''S:''' I mean, that's the thing that I'm saying.

'''S:''' Maybe it turns out that you could only stack 100 of these things on top of each other, or 1,000.

'''S:''' I don't know.

'''S:''' We could be several orders of magnitude off what this guy is calculating.

'''S:''' And even if we're one order of magnitude off, think about that.

'''S:''' Then you're only making 100 watts with a refrigerator-sized device.

'''S:''' You would need 12 of them, yeah, to be 12 refrigerators of machinery to meet the average needs of an average person.

'''E:''' Yeah, it's like having UNIAC as your computer in your house.

'''S:''' It's not going to happen.

'''S:''' It very quickly gets out of control.

'''B:''' Yeah, I mean, I would like to see some more research on this.

'''B:''' Yeah, yeah, totally.

'''S:''' Totally.

'''S:''' To answer some of these questions.

'''S:''' All right, so here's the other thing, though, to get to the positive end.

'''S:''' Bob, we talk about this a lot in our book, about how to evaluate new technologies.

'''S:''' Oftentimes the application that a technology is initially created for or imagined for turns out not to be the thing that it's good for.

'''S:''' But if it does something interesting, somebody might come along and say, you know, it sucks as a source of energy.

'''S:''' You're not going to be running your home off these things, but we could do all this cool stuff with it.

'''S:''' And that is just really hard to predict.

'''S:''' You know, because you're trying to predict the creativity of millions of people, you know, somebody coming up with a great idea about how to exploit it.

'''S:''' So we'll see.

'''S:''' It's the kind of thing, like maybe it works at a scale that it could function in some way.

'''S:''' Like, you know, self-powering certain remote devices, for example.

'''C:''' It's running off the moisture.

'''S:''' In certain locations.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's fine.

'''S:''' Or again, as a dehumidifier, maybe it would be great for that.

'''C:''' The world's biggest dehumidifier.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Or maybe moisture harvesting on Tatooine.

'''S:''' Who knows?

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Or Arrakis.

'''S:''' I got that reference.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Did you get the Arrakis reference?

'''S:''' No, I did not.

'''S:''' That's doomed.

'''C:''' Got the first one.

'''C:''' That's doomed.

'''E:''' You guys went too deep.

'''E:''' A bridge too far there.

'''S:''' By the way, part two of Dune's coming out, I think, in December this year.

'''S:''' Can't wait.

'''S:''' Can't wait.

'''S:''' I loved the first part.

'''B:''' Yeah, we'll have to sit down to even watch the first one again on a big 4K TV.

'''S:''' I've already re-watched it.

'''S:''' It was actually better the second time than the first.

'''S:''' Oh my God.

'''E:''' Cara and I want to see it too.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Sure we do.

'''S:''' Cara, you're always welcome to nerd out with us, Cara.

'''C:''' Always.

'''C:''' Thanks.

'''S:''' Open invite.

'''S:''' Love it.

=== Breakups and Hindsight Bias (30:41) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://phys.org/news/2023-05-break-ups-hindsight-bias-romantic-relationships.html
|article_title = Can we really foresee break-ups? Hindsight bias in the evaluation of romantic relationships
|publication = UW-Eau Claire
}}

'''S:''' All right, Cara, tell us about hindsight bias and romantic breakups.

'''S:''' What do these things have to do with each other?

'''C:''' Well, I love social psychology research.

'''C:''' I'm just going to put that out there.

'''C:''' And I love a good, just clean, beautiful study that kind of helps maybe offer just a little bit more insight into a phenomenon that we know exists and that we're curious about.

'''C:''' Human behavior is bizarre and fascinating.

'''C:''' And when we can figure out an interesting way to sort of take something that we all kind of know happens in the real world and systematize it, I think it's quite interesting.

'''C:''' We've all been in this situation before, right?

'''C:''' Where we had a breakup and then after the fact, we're like, how did I not see this coming?

'''C:''' Or like, oh, so many red flags and it's so obvious.

'''C:''' Or like, especially we see this with our friends.

'''C:''' Think about a time when you have a friend who had a breakup and then it's like, I told you that was going to happen.

'''C:''' I knew that the writing was on the wall.

'''C:''' And we're so confident about it.

'''C:''' And so the question is, is that confidence coming from data or is it coming from a hindsight bias?

'''C:''' Do we know it now because we know it or did we know it all along?

'''C:''' And so the researchers came up with a kind of interesting study design.

'''C:''' They basically, and they did this twice, mostly with college students, but also, actually not mostly, with some college students and also with community adults.

'''C:''' So they really wanted to look at, you know, which I appreciate because most of these studies are only done with college students, assuming that they are representative of the general population, which they are not.

'''C:''' And so what they did is they basically offered a bunch of people a vignette, a little story about a couple.

'''C:''' And the story was a really balanced story.

'''C:''' It basically had some positive traits and some negative traits.

'''C:''' And they counterbalanced how they introduced the positive traits and the negative traits.

'''C:''' And then in the control group, immediately after they had them read the study, they gave them two different scales.

'''C:''' One of them was asking where they expected the couple to be in six months.

'''C:''' Basically, like they will have a breakup or they will still be together or it's hard to say.

'''C:''' And then the other scale was basically their level of agreement.

'''C:''' So like a Likert scale, right?

'''C:''' A seven point scale asking about like, is their relationship unstable?

'''C:''' Are they a good fit for one another?

'''C:''' Do they have a lot in common?

'''C:''' Should they date other people?

'''C:''' Do the negatives outweigh the positives?

'''C:''' Do the positives outweigh the negatives?

'''C:''' Right?

'''C:''' So that was the control group.

'''C:''' Basically, they read the vignette and they immediately rated it.

'''C:''' But in the two experimental groups, they told them what happened.

'''C:''' In one of the group, they said, and now they're still together.

'''C:''' In the other group, they said, and then and now they broke up.

'''C:''' And then they gave them those scales to rate.

'''C:''' Basically, you know, how, but the scales were slightly changed for them.

'''C:''' It was sort of like, how confident were you that they would break up?

'''C:''' How confident were you that they would be together?

'''C:''' And what do you think they found?

'''S:''' Oh, yeah.

'''S:''' I mean, people would be very confident of the outcome that they knew happened.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' But here's something that's kind of interesting.

'''C:''' There was a big, obvious outcome in hindsight about a breakup.

'''C:''' There was not an obvious hindsight bias about staying together.

'''C:''' So it was asymmetrical.

'''C:''' The staying together and the control group were equally strong.

'''E:''' Do you think that's math?

'''E:''' In other words, because probably I would assume statistically there are more breakups than there are people who wind up staying together.

'''E:''' Just as a pure mathematical expression.

'''C:''' No.

'''C:''' 100 percent.

'''C:''' I don't.

'''C:''' I think it's it has every I mean, I could be wrong, but talk to me a little bit more about your thought.

'''C:''' Because the idea here is not that they were guessing whether they would break up or not.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' That was only in the control group.

'''C:''' The idea here is they were told whether they broke up or whether they stayed together.

'''C:''' And then they were asked how confident they were that that was going to be the outcome of a neutral scenario.

'''E:''' In suggesting that they break up instead of suggesting that they're going to stay together.

'''S:''' It doesn't matter how common it is in the real world, Evan.

'''S:''' This is an artificial situation.

'''S:''' No, I.

'''S:''' Yeah, they're given a neutral scenario and half the time they were told they were breakup, half the time they were told they would stay together.

'''S:''' And then people were way more confident that they were.

'''E:''' I suppose I suppose what I'm saying is if a person is aware of that math that goes on, you know, if they're going to think that ahead of time, does that play into their calculation about what they're.

'''C:''' But the calculation.

'''C:''' Sorry, I'm just going to be really clear about this because I think that might be what we're missing.

'''C:''' The calculation is not whether or not they would break up or stay together.

'''C:''' The calculation is how confident they were that they were going to break up or stay together.

'''E:''' But can that math influence someone's confidence level level of confidence in that decision that they're making?

'''C:''' You're kind of OK.

'''C:''' This is actually really a complex question.

'''C:''' But what I'm what I think I'm hearing is a almost like a negative variable.

'''C:''' It shouldn't make a difference between the two groups because they have the same information.

'''C:''' So the background rate of togetherness versus break upness, I don't think would make a difference.

'''E:''' You don't think people have a predisposition to assume breakup rather than get together just because.

'''C:''' But again, we're not asking them if they're if we're not asking.

'''C:''' I think I'm going to break up.

'''C:''' I'm not expressing myself.

'''S:''' So Cara, Cara, would it have biased the results if people have a baseline assumption that most couples are going to break up?

'''S:''' Then they hear the couple broke up like, yes, I figured that I was very confident that was going to happen.

'''S:''' If they heard they stayed together, they're not as confident because they most couples break up.

'''S:''' Right. So it's just a breakup bias, not hindsight bias.

'''S:''' That makes sense.

'''C:''' Let's see what the control group said, because I think that's going to tell us.

'''C:''' Right. Yeah. No, 100 percent.

'''C:''' It can't be because there was no significant difference between the group that was given either no information and the group that said they stayed together.

'''C:''' So there wasn't a breakup. Only the breakup group.

'''C:''' Yeah. It was only the breakup group that that showed that hindsight bias.

'''C:''' That's so there was no breakup bias and there was no hindsight bias when they stayed together.

'''S:''' Got it. OK. Right.

'''S:''' That's why we do controls.

'''E:''' What a clever way to design a study.

'''C:''' I know. This is why I love social psychology. It's so fascinating.

'''E:''' It's super clever.

'''C:''' It's clever and it's also something that like a college student can do.

'''C:''' Like all you've got to do is dream it up and then it's actually not that hard to run a study like this.

'''E:''' No, no. But I don't know that I would have been able to even conceive a study like this on my own without the help of a lot of other people.

'''B:''' Inconceivable.

'''B:''' That's because you don't have a PhD in psychological research.

'''S:''' Right. Right.

'''S:''' Is that why? I don't know. I better get one of those.

'''S:''' That's what people learn when they get PhDs is how to design clever studies like this.

'''C:''' And thinking along these lines. So here's a quote from the researchers.

'''C:''' As individuals update their knowledge and use newly acquired outcome information to make sense of experiences, they may forget or reinterpret thoughts and predictions they previously had.

'''C:''' OK, obviously that's hindsight, right?

'''C:''' Quote, thus memory might be reconstructed with more weight placed on the negative elements of the relationship.

'''C:''' Likewise, aspects of the relationship might be reinterpreted to make sense of the outcome.

'''C:''' After a breakup, for instance, what was previously interpreted as constant attention and affection may be reinterpreted as neediness of an overbearing partner.

'''C:''' Similarly, differences in beliefs that were previously interpreted as opportunities for perspective taking and negotiation may be reinterpreted as insurmountable barriers.

'''C:''' So we like we live our life with a frame and that frame is always being updated, hopefully.

'''C:''' But that frame is very much constructed based on our own experiences, our past, our history, our culture, all those lovely things.

'''C:''' And our frames shift when we get new information.

'''C:''' And that doesn't just apply to our right now frame or our future frame.

'''C:''' It applies to our past frame. We rewrite history all the time.

'''C:''' And it's why I'm always when I work with clients, we talk about this a lot.

'''C:''' It is very, very hard to remember past suffering.

'''C:''' You can sort of remember it cognitively.

'''C:''' You're like, I remember I was in a state.

'''C:''' I remember I wasn't getting out of bed.

'''C:''' I remember I wasn't eating.

'''C:''' I remember that was a really hard time of my life.

'''C:''' But it's really hard to empathize with the feeling, to put yourself back in that feeling.

'''E:''' I suppose unless you kept a diary or something, you would have had to do something like that.

'''C:''' No, even doing that, even doing that, putting yourself in the emotional frame is very hard.

'''C:''' It's kind of like think about the last time you were sick.

'''C:''' Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Yeah.

'''E:''' Yeah, right. I can think about it.

'''S:''' You can think about it, but you can't feel sick again.

'''S:''' Do you think it cuts both ways?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Do you think extreme pleasure is the same thing?

'''C:''' Exactly my question.

'''C:''' I do think so.

'''C:''' I think it's actually, I don't know, this is pure speculation, but I think it's evolutionarily beneficial for us.

'''C:''' Yeah, I agree.

'''C:''' To not be able to take that frame again because otherwise we wouldn't, it'd be really hard to grow.

'''C:''' And it would be really hard to satisfy the issues.

'''C:''' And I think our fear would become paralyzing.

'''C:''' We need an ability to have new hope, to reset our frame, to be able to look towards the future in an open way.

'''S:''' Cara, mothers would never have a second child.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''C:''' So many things wouldn't happen.

'''C:''' Good point.

'''C:''' Oh, my God.

'''C:''' Just think about literal predators and prey relationships.

'''C:''' You wouldn't leave your nest again.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' It just doesn't make sense evolutionarily if you can continuously go back into that frame.

'''C:''' The problem is we color these things.

'''C:''' We color them based on new information.

'''C:''' And I face this a lot when I'm working with clients who are dealing with a lot of, like, the portions of their depression and anxiety are colored by a lot of regret.

'''C:''' And they're colored by a lot of negative self-talk about past decision-making.

'''C:''' They'll be like, oh, I was so bad at making that decision.

'''C:''' I ended up in this bad relationship.

'''C:''' I should have seen the signs.

'''C:''' I should have whatever.

'''C:''' And it's like, or maybe not.

'''C:''' Maybe there were no signs for you to see.

'''C:''' Yeah, right, right.

'''E:''' Do they do that?

'''E:''' Do they also express some of the positive things that they experienced as part of that?

'''E:''' Or they concentrate more on sort of those negative thoughts?

'''C:''' Are you talking about my patients?

'''C:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Oh, well, I'm treating people for depression and anxiety, not for happy.

'''C:''' Yeah, so they don't.

'''C:''' So you've got to remember that, too.

'''C:''' There's a bias there.

'''C:''' Like, somebody who is actively depressed or somebody who is dealing with an anxiety spiral has these intrusive thoughts very often that are cycling.

'''C:''' But there may be this bias for negative emotionality that is also, again, evolutionary.

'''C:''' We need to protect ourselves from suffering.

'''C:''' We don't need to protect ourselves from happy and from joy.

'''C:''' We want to go towards it.

'''C:''' But we're not going to survive as species if we go towards suffering.

'''C:''' That's dangerous for the fitness of the organism.

'''C:''' So I think there's some interesting, I don't know, there's some interesting stuff there.

'''C:''' But I like this study because any time I come across a social psychology study that I can actually bring into the therapeutic space and I can literally say to people, the evidence show that we do this.

'''C:''' We have very good experiments that show that this is a bias that we have and this is how it can affect us.

'''C:''' It weighs a lot more with clients, I find.

'''C:''' So yeah, super interesting.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's helpful.

'''S:''' It intellectualizes it a little bit.

'''S:''' I do think that hindsight bias is a subset of the confirmation bias in a way.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's just you're looking behind instead of forward.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It's just you're searching for information that confirms what now is your assumption about what is true.

'''S:''' Like if they broke up, oh yeah, that's right, they had this fight three weeks ago.

'''S:''' And I thought, you know what I mean?

'''S:''' You look for things to support the outcome.

'''C:''' And this is why in like from a forensic perspective, you have to separate witnesses.

'''C:''' And you've got to make sure that witnesses aren't exposed to biasing data.

'''C:''' Yeah, it contaminates their statements.

'''C:''' Like the minute they have more information, they're going to completely re-narrate their old information without even knowing they're doing it.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' All right.

'''S:''' Thanks, Cara.

=== AI Seance (43:06) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://futurism.com/ai-seance
|article_title = AI Company Says It'll Perform a Seance on Your Dead Loved Ones
|publication = Futurism.com
}}

'''S:''' Evan, are we going to be able to talk to our dead loved ones using artificial intelligence?

'''S:''' What a good question.

'''E:''' And if you read this article that I happened to cross at futurism.com, you might think maybe.

'''E:''' Well, so are you guys familiar with the concept of grief tech?

'''S:''' You mean like the Black Mirror episode?

'''S:''' I don't know.

'''E:''' No, I didn't see that.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah, Steve.

'''E:''' I think of the same thing.

'''S:''' The Black Mirror episode where they basically reconstruct somebody mentally from all of their social media presence.

'''C:''' Oh, right.

'''C:''' It's just like a trained AI.

'''C:''' It's only trained on one person.

'''E:''' Technology designed to be used by people who are experiencing grief as the result of a person having died.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' So you can chat bot with your dead lover or something.

'''E:''' Right.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''E:''' So when you're listening to technology, it effectively captures and recreates things like images, voices of the departed in order to help.

'''E:''' Thoughts, opinions, writings.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''E:''' A whole set of data that can be included in this.

'''E:''' And the idea is that it helps the bereaved cope with what is often these overwhelming feelings and emotions that are related to that person's death.

'''E:''' So it's an algorithmic version of a person's, like you said, Bob, writing memories, recollections, also capturing vocal recordings, still images, moving images, all cobbled together to present back to the living people who can then interface with this algorithm.

'''E:''' So it goes just beyond the images and sounds to reflect on, you know, like you normally have.

'''E:''' It's actually technology that you could, quote, unquote, speak with.

'''E:''' Interactive.

'''E:''' Right.

'''E:''' It will answer back to you.

'''E:''' But the person who died, okay, is they were actually communicating with the living in some way?

'''E:''' No, of course not.

'''C:''' No, the living is communicating with the person who died.

'''C:''' It's not.

'''C:''' It's the other way around.

'''C:''' Right.

'''E:''' The technology is simply putting the information that the data is what it's fed in order to craft responses that make some level of sense or some level of meaningful connection to the people that are interacting with this technology.

'''E:''' And in recent years, there have been several startup companies in this grief tech industry.

'''E:''' And they've been looking at various ways for, well, marketing it as a viable service.

'''E:''' And one of those companies in particular is using generative artificial intelligence as its backbone for their product.

'''E:''' So much so that they've named their technology Seance AI.

'''E:''' Oh, God.

'''E:''' Right.

'''E:''' And as the headline of this article reads, AI company says it will perform a seance on your dead loved ones.

'''E:''' And here's a direct quote from the creator.

'''E:''' We're trying to make it sound as magical and mystical as possible.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''E:''' It's still it's they're deliberately marketing in this way.

'''S:''' But is it like a wink and a nod?

'''S:''' Is it transparent?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Is it just a cute name?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It's just like we're simulating the experience of having a seance with your dead loved one.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Correct.

'''E:''' So they're not directly implying that this is a real seance occurring and something magical is occurring.

'''E:''' Right.

'''E:''' It's marketing.

'''E:''' It's just it's a skin that they're basically putting over.

'''E:''' But again, their technology is called Seance AI.

'''E:''' It's a product of AE Studio.

'''E:''' The creator's name is Jaron Rocks.

'''E:''' And it's powered by OpenAI's Application Protocol Interface API.

'''E:''' In this article, Jaron Rocks says that he likens his product to an AI generated Ouija board for closure rather than means of immortality.

'''E:''' He says it's essentially meant to be a short interaction that can provide a sense of closure.

'''E:''' That's really what our main focus is here.

'''E:''' It's not meant to be something super long term.

'''E:''' In its current state, it's meant to provide a conversation for closure and emotional processing.

'''E:''' He says you can think of it as like a digital psychic briefly summoning a digital representation of the deceased so that the living can have one last conversation with them.

'''E:''' And he says that for short conversations, I think it feels decently human.

'''E:''' But it falls apart a bit when you start to pick up on repetitions.

'''E:''' It's following a pattern.

'''E:''' It doesn't know exactly what's going on.

'''E:''' So there's the acknowledgement saying that this thing is limited.

'''E:''' And it really in only short bursts, apparently, it has, I guess, the desired effect.

'''E:''' But it doesn't take much data to make or essentially make, pull in the information about the person.

'''E:''' You need the deceased name, age, cause of death, a short list of personality traits that the user can adjust to suit their loved one, plus a snippet of text from the deceased, along with the deceased relationships to the users and other.

'''E:''' That's the information.

'''E:''' Once that information is given, the computer screen apparently puts up this animated flame and burning and greets the user while the chat bot loads.

'''E:''' So, you know, kind of give it that mystical sort of feel to it.

'''E:''' So here are my two main points about this.

'''E:''' Number one, I don't like it.

'''E:''' I don't like when people have tools of actual science and they're using pseudoscientific terminology as marketing.

'''E:''' I don't know.

'''E:''' I see it as wrong.

'''E:''' Seance, magic, mysticism, psychic, Ouija, all that is part of the skin that they're putting on this.

'''E:''' And those, you know, we know these are words and the actions used by unscrupulous people all throughout history.

'''E:''' And I don't know.

'''C:''' There's not like a component that there can't be a component of kitsch that's just fun.

'''C:''' That like people who don't believe like when I was a kid, we would play like light as a feather, stiff as a board.

'''C:''' Like I didn't believe any of that.

'''C:''' It's just fun.

'''C:''' Like ghost stories are fun.

'''C:''' I don't think ghost stories are necessarily irresponsible.

'''C:''' But I don't know.

'''E:''' Are they taking advantage of people's dispositions, maybe either towards the supernatural and kind of maybe blurring some lines about what might be reality versus fantasy here?

'''E:''' I don't know.

'''C:''' I feel like at a certain point that you just have to put the responsibility on the human, on the consumer.

'''E:''' I suppose so.

'''E:''' But certainly this company is tapping into the people's thoughts about these kinds of things and the fact that they believe that things like Ouija Happens, psychics are real, mysticisms.

'''B:''' Yeah, I mean, I would think it would tend to reinforce those pseudoscientific beliefs.

'''E:''' Maybe, but I don't know.

'''E:''' I don't like it when – I just – something rubs me the wrong way when it's being incorporated and used with something that's legitimately scientific.

'''E:''' So that was my initial issue kind of with it.

'''E:''' But I thought more importantly, more importantly, my second issue with this, technology like this, does this pass ethical tests?

'''E:''' No.

'''E:''' I mean I know what it is to be – we all know what it is to be bereaved.

'''E:''' And there are – and we know also that there are industries that take full advantage of these raw emotions.

'''E:''' And I think it's kind of disgusting when I think about it.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's an exploit.

'''C:''' I think even more than that, and I know that this is going to sound a little callous.

'''C:''' The real ethical problem here is not so much the living.

'''C:''' It's the data of the dead who didn't give that permission.

'''C:''' And we've seen this with real complicated ethical questions around like actors kind of utilizing or around – it was the Pepper's Ghost thing.

'''C:''' It was Tupac.

'''C:''' You guys remember the whole thing, Pepper's Ghost of Tupac?

'''C:''' And it's like is the estate giving permission for this data to be utilized in this way?

'''S:''' Yeah, that's an interesting – it does crack open that can of worms about who owns your digital essence once you die.

'''C:''' And then can they just do with it what they will?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Like the moment you die, can somebody use you in a movie, like use your voice, your image, your persona?

'''C:''' I mean right now they can't.

'''C:''' That's the thing.

'''C:''' Ethically they can't.

'''C:''' Somebody has to do okay in order – Exactly.

'''C:''' So how does that change if we're talking about somebody's voice?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Well, I guess if you're the significant other, you basically are in control, right?

'''C:''' That's only if you're the legal significant other.

'''C:''' Yeah, right.

'''C:''' But that's not –

'''S:''' That probably might be the situation.

'''C:''' It's going to be a portion of the users. But I think a lot of users would be people who are like just kind of knew the person.

'''C:''' And also ultimately I think we're assuming that this seance experience is one of deep kind of reverence and one of like these are like bereaved people who are really crying and who are really like wanting to reconnect with their dead loved one.

'''C:''' I think a huge use of this is going to be like kitschy, a huge use.

'''C:''' And at that point I think the exploitation is – kind of happens at a whole other level.

'''S:''' And I don't think we can assume this is a positive thing.

'''S:''' I could see how this could be counterproductive to the grieving process.

'''C:''' But I also don't think we should assume that it is only that either.

'''C:''' That's why I say I think the voice is on the user.

'''C:''' No, I agree.

'''C:''' It needs to be studied.

'''C:''' It needs to be studied.

'''C:''' And I think we have to allow end users some amount of personal responsibility in their choices.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' We do.

'''C:''' Like maybe somebody is – like the Black Mirror episode I think is a good proxy.

'''C:''' The person who – in the episode who like purchased this package knew what they were doing.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' They wanted their companion.

'''C:''' Bought their tickets.

'''C:''' Like the feeling of the companionship back.

'''C:''' They knew that it was an AI and they wanted it anyway.

'''S:''' And it blew up in their face.

'''C:''' And it did blow up in their face.

'''C:''' But that's also Black Mirror.

'''E:''' So there are other companies out there, Cara, that are taking that directly into consideration.

'''E:''' There's one particular company.

'''E:''' It's called Hereafter.

'''E:''' And what it is, it allows the person before they die to submit their things and say, yes, you can use this.

'''E:''' Here's my information and I'm giving you permission.

'''E:''' You have to – they have to specifically state it, that you're using this information, that you're going to create something after I'm gone that's going to be this AI generated stuff.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' That could deal with that part of the issue, the permission of the person.

'''C:''' Like as if I would ever trust that.

'''C:''' I'm sure it says, to be used however we want in perpetuity.

'''C:''' Like, hey, I'm OK.

'''C:''' Show up.

'''C:''' Hello, I'm gone.

'''E:''' But you should buy a Coca-Cola.

'''E:''' Exactly.

'''E:''' Oh, God.

'''B:''' It's interesting though to speculate on extrapolating this into – at some point in the future if, for example – now imagine certain future scenarios.

'''B:''' It doesn't seem unreasonable to say.

'''B:''' Now imagine your social media presence in the future becomes even more dramatically embedded into your life.

'''B:''' Or how about this?

'''B:''' Or how about you've got yottabytes of hard drive space?

'''B:''' You could essentially record your entire life.

'''B:''' You've got a recorder on you 24-7 for decades.

'''B:''' Oh, my gosh.

'''B:''' I don't remember that.

'''B:''' So imagine the training material for a future computer that can train on –

'''C:''' These could be very good, have very high fidelity.

'''B:''' Orders of magnitude more. Everything you've said or written.

'''B:''' Oh, my gosh.

'''B:''' I mean it could probably create a simulacrum of the person that died to a surprising degree.

'''C:''' I think even now, to be honest, Bob, I think if – and I hate to bring this up because it's so tragic and dark.

'''C:''' But like if a younger person died now.

'''C:''' The child of a parent, right?

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' Like somebody – or not even that.

'''C:''' I literally just mean the amount of training that a digital native has is wildly different than ours.

'''C:''' We were there for the transition.

'''C:''' But kids today were born on social media.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' And so you think about their entire life is documented on – and obviously some people are heavier users than others.

'''C:''' But I bet you their AI would be significantly better.

'''E:''' Because of more information.

'''E:''' Yeah, there's just more training information.

'''C:''' More available data.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It's an interesting thought.

'''S:''' After Perry died, I had this thought.

'''S:''' So much of my interaction with him was online, right?

'''S:''' We were playing video games, podcasting, whatever.

'''S:''' We would spend a lot of our time just interacting with each other digitally.

'''E:''' Yeah, especially when he got ill and couldn't get around much anymore.

'''S:''' Especially when he was physically ill, yeah, and couldn't get around.

'''S:''' I'm like if a really good digital simulacrum of Perry could fill a significant chunk of our social interaction.

'''S:''' What would I think about that?

'''S:''' Because obviously it wouldn't be him.

'''S:''' But it would just be like an AI talking in his voice basically.

'''S:''' What would that be like?

'''S:''' I don't know, but I thought about that a lot after Perry died.

'''C:''' Yeah, and I think that's a good example of why this sort of complex question about value judgments is important.

'''C:''' Because I think it's up to you if that would be healthy for you.

'''C:''' It's not up to anybody else to tell you if that's a healthy thing that would be important for you in your life.

'''C:''' I think it's up to you and maybe your therapist.

'''C:''' But when it comes down to it, I think that it's a very difficult – it makes us go, ew, and so we immediately go to bad.

'''C:''' Or it makes us go, cool, and we immediately go to good.

'''C:''' But no, it's going to be very, very personal.

'''C:''' Yeah, I guess so.

'''E:''' I just hope some people wouldn't get bogged down by it in a sense that prolonging their period of grief and not being able to overcome it.

'''E:''' And move on, yeah.

'''E:''' Yeah, and be able to move on quickly enough.

'''E:''' But like you said, Cara, each person is unique.

'''C:''' And also, who are you to say that somebody should move on at a certain time frame?

'''C:''' I agree.

'''C:''' Everyone agrees differently for sure.

'''C:''' It's a big set of questions.

'''C:''' There are some people culturally who – culturally, they're not to move on.

'''C:''' And they are to grieve for years.

'''C:''' Or if it's past a certain age, they are not to find another partner.

'''C:''' Or if it's – it's just really – our values are our own because of our frame.

'''C:''' And a lot of this is about value judgments for sure.

'''E:''' Yeah, important to remember, definitely.

'''E:''' Yeah, yeah.

=== Monster Stars (56:43) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.sciencealert.com/signs-of-monster-stars-10000-times-our-suns-mass-found-at-the-dawn-of-time
|article_title = Signs of Monster Stars 10,000 Times Our Sun's Mass Found at The Dawn of Time
|publication = Science Alert
}}

[use template <code><nowiki>{{10tothe|##}}</nowiki></code> for various powers of 10 bob mentions]

'''S:''' All right, Bob, tell us about Monster Stars.

'''B:''' Oh, okay.

'''B:''' Doing that, are we?

'''B:''' Is that right? Okay.

'''S:''' Yes, we're doing your news item that I told you we were going to do.

'''B:''' James Webb, guys, in the news has made yet another fascinating discovery.

'''B:''' This time, it found new evidence that could solve the mystery of globular clusters, which would mean that the early universe had stars far bigger than anything we could observe now, what the researchers are calling celestial monsters.

'''B:''' This comes from the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

'''B:''' Lead study author Corinne Charbonnel, astronomy professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

'''B:''' Okay.

'''B:''' So this starts off with globular clusters.

'''B:''' I don't think we've discussed them much on the show as far as I can remember.

'''C:''' I love globular clusters.

'''C:''' They're my favorite thing to stargaze.

'''C:''' Oh, wow.

'''C:''' Cool.

'''C:''' Good for you.

'''C:''' Awesome.

'''C:''' They're the prettiest things through my telescope by far.

'''B:''' Oh, excellent.

'''B:''' Globular clusters are not in fact what you find stuck under Jay's desk.

'''B:''' I wish Jay were here.

'''B:''' Right.

'''C:''' We don't quite have the same ring when we're talking about them.

'''B:''' They are soroidal collections of stars, little star clusters that could have tens of thousands or even millions of members.

'''B:''' They're ancient, 10 to 13 billion years old.

'''B:''' They could be crazy old.

'''B:''' And they orbit the halo of galaxies, most spiral galaxies and the core.

'''B:''' They orbit around them.

'''B:''' Our Milky Way has about 180 globular clusters around it.

'''B:''' So you may need to update your mental image of the Milky Way to incorporate them if you want to be more accurate.

'''B:''' One of the biggest mysteries about globular clusters is that the individual stars often have incredibly different proportions of elements like nitrogen to oxygen or carbon to oxygen.

'''B:''' And that's weird when you think about it because all the stars in a globular cluster formed around the same time from the same dense patch of gas and dust.

'''B:''' So you'd expect that there would be more uniformity and there isn't.

'''B:''' So one theoretical explanation for this involves a special type of star called the Wolf-Rayet, stars that continually eject gas into space including the nitrogen that had been created.

'''B:''' But these researchers were looking at a different support of a different theory.

'''B:''' A more interesting one in my opinion which came – I think it was from 2018 that the variable ratios of these elements were caused by a new type of star that could only really exist in the dense early universe and they're these so-called super massive stars.

'''B:''' So what the hell are these guys?

'''B:''' How come I never heard of these before?

'''B:''' And how big could they have actually been if they existed?

'''B:''' How big are we talking here?

'''B:''' So let's start with our sun.

'''B:''' Our sun, it's about 333,000 times the earth's mass, about 2,000,000 kilograms if that helps.

'''B:''' So yeah, it's big.

'''B:''' It's a lot.

'''B:''' It's a lot of mass there.

'''B:''' But that's nothing compared to the far end of the spectrum of the heaviest stars that we've documented like a star with a very boring name, R136a1.

'''B:''' That star is the biggest we have detected.

'''B:''' It has 300 solar masses, 600,000,000 kilograms, a lot of stuff there.

'''E:''' Is that the word you're saying?

'''E:''' A million.

'''E:''' It's between octillion and decatillion.

'''B:''' So it's big.

'''B:''' It's as massive as they get as far as we can actually directly see.

'''B:''' Now, if these searches are – if these researchers are correct though, some of the earliest stars billions of years ago were far more massive than even R136a1.

'''B:''' They weren't 300 solar masses.

'''B:''' They theoretically – they believe that they were potentially 10,000 solar masses.

'''B:''' That's 10 decillion kilograms.

'''B:''' That's a lot.

'''B:''' Decillion is 10 to the 34.

'''B:''' Huge.

'''B:''' 10,000 solar masses.

'''B:''' There's nothing like that that we have ever seen at this point in the evolution of the universe.

'''B:''' So, okay.

'''B:''' Maybe it existed.

'''B:''' Maybe it didn't.

'''B:''' Let's see what the scientists have to say about it.

'''B:''' They believe that a star that big could have potentially formed in these huge dense clouds of gas in proto-globular clusters, these clusters of stars that were not quite globular clusters yet but they're just kind of proto-globular clusters.

'''B:''' When the universe was young and a lot closer together, stars would have collided a lot more frequently, building up to this massive, massive 10,000 solar mass size.

'''B:''' That's the idea.

'''B:''' But if you've got a star that big, you're going to have a core that's a lot hotter, right?

'''B:''' They think this would be five times hotter than our sun at the core.

'''B:''' It would take a core that hot to reproduce those weird element ratios, carbon-nitrogen to oxygen ratios that we see in modern globular clusters today.

'''B:''' So now their model has an unusual name.

'''B:''' It's called the SMS polluter model, supermassive star polluter model.

'''B:''' So this is the theory that in the early universe, supermassive stars would form in these early globular clusters and then explode in hypernovas, not supernovas but hypernovas, which sound fascinating.

'''B:''' Those hypernovas would then pollute or enrich, depending on what term you want to use, enrich or pollute the gas in the young globular clusters with those elements.

'''B:''' So then some of the descendant stars that we see today, like say in our globular clusters, some of those stars would then have those high ratios of nitrogen to oxygen that would then solve this globular cluster mystery.

'''B:''' So that's the idea anyway.

'''B:''' That's the theory.

'''B:''' So to find – start again.

'''B:''' To find evidence to support this theory, the researchers used the powerful infrared cameras on the James Webb Space Telescope to look at one of the oldest galaxies that we know to find more direct evidence of supermassive stars.

'''B:''' And this galaxy is GNZ 11, and that fit the bill very well, 13.3 billion light years away from Earth, very distant, very – one of the oldest or youngest galaxies that we have found.

'''B:''' The light left that galaxy when the universe was far denser and only 440 million years old, just a baby universe.

'''B:''' So they looked at the light.

'''B:''' They looked at the elements that they can find based on the light and they found – they had two major takeaways from these James Webb observations.

'''B:''' There was a high proportion of nitrogen and an extremely high density of stars.

'''B:''' So lead author Corinne Charbonnel said regarding this, she said, the strong presence of nitrogen can only be explained by the combustion of hydrogen at extremely high temperatures, which only the core of supermassive stars can reach.

'''B:''' So they believe that it's likely that they are observing – they're actually observing in this galaxy young globular clusters, which potentially still actually have supermassive stars inside or at least it did right when the light left 13 billion years ago.

'''B:''' I mean they didn't – they obviously didn't directly observe them, but they did detect all that excess nitrogen that could have been created by the cores of those superstars.

'''B:''' So that's kind of where we are right now.

'''B:''' So how are we going to get farther with this, these observations?

'''B:''' So to prove that these supermassive stars really existed and solved and really finally solved this globular cluster mystery, they need more observations obviously.

'''B:''' They need to look at more distant globular clusters.

'''B:''' But to me, that's all secondary.

'''B:''' That's like, oh yeah, that's kind of interesting.

'''B:''' To me, the very fact that these supermassive stars actually could have existed is really the more fascinating thing.

'''B:''' I'm just trying to wrap my head around 10,000 solar masses.

'''B:''' What would a star that big be like, right?

'''B:''' What about its solar wind?

'''B:''' What's the solar wind like?

'''B:''' Or how about this?

'''B:''' Imagine the coronal mass ejection from a supermassive star at 10,000 solar masses.

'''B:''' Wow.

'''B:''' Or even a hypernova.

'''B:''' I mean I've never done a deep dive on a hypernova before.

'''B:''' How would that be different besides the obvious than a supernova?

'''B:''' I don't know.

'''B:''' But those are the questions that I want answered even more than this little mystery.

'''B:''' These stars to me is the real thing that is really interesting about this and I want to just try to find out some more about it.

'''B:''' Fascinating stuff.

'''S:''' I would say 10,000 solar masses.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' So what color are they?

'''S:''' Plaid.

'''S:''' Interesting.

'''S:''' What's their life expectancy?

'''S:''' Do they burn up in a million years?

'''B:''' Oh, they must burn out quick, right?

'''B:''' You're absolutely right.

'''B:''' Two million years.

'''B:''' That's why we're dealing with what happened after they existed.

'''B:''' Because you think, oh, there's so much more hydrogen there.

'''B:''' It would last for billions or trillions of years.

'''B:''' No.

'''B:''' They burn so hot and so fast that the biggest stars, even that exist today, they only live maybe a couple hundred million years.

'''B:''' And here's our sun that lasts, what, 10 billion?

'''B:''' So, yeah, the bigger you are, the faster you live.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' And then the red dwarfs can live for trillions of years.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah.

'''B:''' They're just crazy.

'''B:''' They're just so sedate.

'''B:''' Like, just burn a little bit.

{{anchor|followup}}
{{anchor|correction}} 
== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups ==
=== Correction #1: Which Attenborough (1:05:49) ===

'''S:''' All right.

'''S:''' Let's go on to the questions and emails.

'''S:''' We're going to start with a correction.

'''S:''' So I think roughly 3,000 people emailed us to tell us that Richard Attenborough and David Attenborough are two different people.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Yep.

'''E:''' The strategic social engagement experiment we did totally worked.

'''E:''' Absolutely.

'''E:''' Are they brothers?

'''S:''' Yes, they are.

'''S:''' I mean, the thing is, I knew that.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' It was just a brain fart.

'''S:''' So I'm trying to remember it because I didn't have time to go back and listen to it.

'''S:''' So the quote that you gave us was from Richard Attenborough?

'''S:''' Yes.

'''S:''' And did you say Richard Attenborough?

'''E:''' What I had done?

'''E:''' No, I'm sure I said David Attenborough.

'''E:''' You said David.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' So I triggered the whole avalanche.

'''E:''' You triggered it.

'''S:''' It's your fault.

'''S:''' I just want to be clear.

'''E:''' No, no.

'''E:''' Wait, are you kidding?

'''E:''' Steve, this is the most engagement we've had on any topic ever.

'''E:''' I mean, our numbers are off the charts here.

'''E:''' This was deliberate.

'''E:''' They used to call these Easter eggs, right?

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Or you'd publish an article or something.

'''S:''' That's how we're spinning it now?

'''S:''' 100%.

'''E:''' Steve, Steve.

'''E:''' That's the ticket.

'''E:''' Steve, I'd like to talk to you over here away from the microphone for a second.

'''E:''' No, that's fine.

'''E:''' So yeah.

'''S:''' So you gave a quote from Richard Attenborough, said it was from David Attenborough, and we all reacted as if it was from David Attenborough.

'''E:''' Right, because why would you have that immediate thought in your head?

'''E:''' Look, this is – I've gotten this confused in the past too.

'''E:''' I don't think it detracted from any – it didn't detract from anything.

'''E:''' It was simply incorrect.

'''S:''' UK listeners lost it.

'''S:''' But again, the quote was about what, the Yeti or something?

'''S:''' Yes, that's right.

'''S:''' It certainly makes a lot more sense that an actor would believe in Yeti rather than a naturalist believing in Yeti.

'''E:''' So I do feel a lot better about that.

'''E:''' And in the context of the other two people that were in the clues, they were all scientists

'''S:''' as well.

'''E:''' Yeah, exactly. So right.

'''E:''' But obviously, people knew what it was.

'''E:''' But hey, I love giving people the opportunity to come on and correct us all day long on something like that.

'''E:''' Again, it's all – It's all good.

'''S:''' It's all good.

'''E:''' When engagement goes up, that is good.

'''C:''' Also, like we are people.

'''C:''' You know what I mean?

'''C:''' There are so many times where I'm like, come on.

'''C:''' People are like, that was not the appropriate encyclopedia.

'''C:''' It's like, yeah, because I said that.

'''E:''' I don't think any of the emails we got were like harsh.

'''E:''' No, no, no.

'''E:''' Trying to – Skating or – It was just having a bit of fun.

'''C:''' I hope that's true.

'''C:''' I know it's kind of hard to tell.

'''C:''' That's how I took it.

'''C:''' Yeah, I know it's kind of hard to tell in tone.

'''C:''' But like there definitely was an overarching like, are you kidding me?

'''S:''' Well, there was an angle to this of you Americans screwing up our British iconic heroes here like Richard Attenborough and David Attenborough, both icons of Britain.

'''S:''' So Evan, as penance, you have to eat scones and tea every day for a week.

'''S:''' Yeah, but you need to pronounce it scones.

'''C:''' Can I do it too?

'''C:''' You got to pronounce it scones.

'''S:''' Scones.

'''S:''' Scones.

'''S:''' Yeah, scones.

'''E:''' And you have to – And English breakfast tea.

'''S:''' Eat a cookie and call it a biscuit.

'''S:''' Biscuit.

'''C:''' They don't call it English breakfast tea.

'''C:''' They just call it breakfast tea.

'''C:''' But I'm not in England.

'''C:''' I'm not in England.

'''C:''' Go get some – What is it?

'''C:''' PG Tips?

'''C:''' Is that – Yeah, go get some PG Tips.

'''S:''' You have to watch a whole soccer match and call it football the whole time.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''E:''' Steve, I'm not sure this punishment fits the crime.

'''C:''' I'm also not sure we're not going to get more emails now after this exchange.

'''E:''' We got to get an appellate court decision on this?

'''S:''' There is no appeal.

'''E:''' Wait, what?

'''E:''' What's this?

'''S:''' There's no higher authority on this podcast.

'''C:''' Tyranny.

'''C:''' Tyranny.

'''C:''' How about if you watch Ted Lasso?

'''C:''' OK.

'''E:''' That I could do.

'''E:''' I actually played the Ted Lasso board game with my Which Game First co-host.

'''E:''' But you haven't watched it yet?

'''E:''' No, I haven't watched it.

'''C:''' It's really good.

'''C:''' It's amazing.

'''C:''' It's really good.

'''C:''' There you go.

'''C:''' Do you watch the last episode, Cara?

'''C:''' I don't know.

'''C:''' It's the most recent one that I watched, the last last?

'''S:''' No, the last episode, last night, is the final episode of the series.

'''S:''' Of the series finale.

'''S:''' Of the series finale.

'''E:''' This I know.

'''C:''' I just didn't know it was last night.

'''C:''' So no, I have not watched it.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' It was a good out.

'''C:''' I won't say anything else.

'''C:''' I was like, was the penultimate episode the last last episode?

'''C:''' Because that was like disappointing.

'''C:''' OK, that makes more sense.

'''S:''' It's hard to end a series well, and they were successful.

'''S:''' I'll just say that.

'''S:''' But it was a little bit of a disappointment.

'''C:''' And they just did it too with Barry.

'''C:''' Two series finales in two weeks.

'''C:''' I didn't see the series finales of Barry yet.

'''C:''' So sad.

'''E:''' I'm going to call him Tim Lasso so we get more emails from people.

'''E:''' Yeah, there you go.

'''E:''' See, you do it on purpose.

'''E:''' You get engagement.

'''S:''' All right.

=== Question #1: Trees and {{Co2}} (1:10:52) ===
<blockquote> Hi, I’m a recent listener to your podcast and I have a question for your panel. In the 5/29 issue of the New Yorker Magazine, an article on trees questions the wisdom of mass tree plantings as away to combat global warming. Specifically, it says that although the world’s forests absorb around 16 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, they also emit 8 billion tons. I know that some carbon dioxide is emitted due to respiration at night, but these numbers still seem way off. Can this be true? The online version of the story is dated 5/22/23: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/29/what-we-owe-our-trees What We Owe Our Trees: Forests fed us, housed us, and made our way of life possible. But they can’t save us if we can’t save them.] by Jill Lepore – [listener's name]</blockquote>

'''S:''' One more email.

'''S:''' This comes from Jill Lepore.

'''S:''' And Jill writes, hi, I'm a recent listener to your podcast.

'''S:''' And I have a question for your panel.

'''S:''' In the 529 issue of the New Yorker magazine, an article on trees questions the wisdom of mass tree plantings as a way to combat global warming.

'''S:''' Specifically, it says that although the world's forests absorb around 16 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, they also emit 8 billion tons.

'''S:''' I know that some carbon dioxide is emitted due to respiration at night, but these numbers still seem way off.

'''S:''' Can this be true?

'''S:''' The online version of the story is dated 522, what we owe our trees.

'''S:''' Forests fed us, housed us, and made our way of life possible.

'''S:''' But they can't save us if we can't save them.

'''S:''' All right.

'''S:''' Well, thanks for the question, Jill.

'''S:''' So yeah, you know, this – we've talked about this a few times.

'''S:''' You know, I think the planting a trillion trees, you know, just talk global warming thing.

'''S:''' Is this plausible?

'''S:''' Does it work?

'''S:''' How do trees help with global warming?

'''S:''' So trees are a carbon sink.

'''S:''' They're a pretty huge carbon sink in the world.

'''S:''' A single tree will store, I think it's a ton of CO2 over their 40-year lifetime.

'''S:''' It depends on the type of tree and et cetera.

'''S:''' So yeah, they can store a lot of CO2.

'''S:''' But it's hard – I don't know what exactly figure they're talking about in terms of emitting the 8 billion tons of CO2.

'''S:''' I've never heard that before.

'''S:''' Because, well, they do emit CO2.

'''S:''' And also, are you counting the death of the tree?

'''S:''' Because it releases all of its CO2 eventually back into the atmosphere once it dies and decays or burns or whatever, however it meets its end.

'''S:''' Unless it gets fossilized and buried or something, you know, the chances are some of that CO2 is going to get back into the atmosphere.

'''S:''' And if you, like, build a house out of it, that will delay it for a while.

'''S:''' But it's still eventually going to get – you know, again, unless it gets sequestered under the ground, it's going to get released back.

'''S:''' It's not so much that trees are removing CO2 from the air, like permanently.

'''S:''' It's that the amount of CO2 in the system, a certain percentage of that in the carbon cycle is going to be in trees.

'''S:''' And if we're cutting – if deforestation reduces the amount of carbon at any one time that's stored in trees, so more of it is in the atmosphere, that's a bad thing, right?

'''S:''' And what we want to do is reverse the deforestation so a larger chunk of the carbon cycle, of the total carbon store is in trees.

'''S:''' And this is only going to be a temporary measure.

'''S:''' It's not like they're continuously going to store CO2.

'''S:''' At some point, they're going to reach a steady state.

'''S:''' Regardless of what you think about, like how much in, how much out, whatever, at some point, they've got to reach a steady state.

'''S:''' And then they're no longer pulling additional CO2 out of the atmosphere.

'''S:''' But just a large chunk of the CO2 will be stored in trees.

'''S:''' Does that make sense?

'''S:''' So, you know, we could say like over the next 40 or 50 years, we might be able to, you know, store an additional 40, you know, million tons or whatever of CO2 in trees or it might be a billion.

'''S:''' And that will mitigate, you know, some of the CO2 that we're releasing into the atmosphere.

'''S:''' But it's just a temporizing measure.

'''S:''' Still useful.

'''S:''' Again, the whole – the game is – I think it's easy to lose sight of this.

'''S:''' The game is minimizing peak warming.

'''S:''' That's the goal is to minimize that peak warming we have before we start to turn things down again.

'''S:''' And everything we do that keeps CO2 out of the atmosphere reduces that peak warming a little bit.

'''S:''' So it's – yes, it's only a temporary measure.

'''S:''' It's only a partial measure.

'''S:''' But it will be one more thing that could contribute to it.

'''S:''' If we – first of all, we have to stop deforestation, right?

'''S:''' That's like the big thing.

'''S:''' And we should be looking for opportunities to, you know, plant as many trees as we can.

'''S:''' And it's going to blunt that peak warming to some extent.

'''E:''' Have we talked about the artificial trees as well?

'''S:''' I mean, carbon sinks.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' You're making a tree that, you know, you can't absorb a lot of carbon.

'''S:''' But they're like thinking of trying to design an artificial tree that could store like per volume a thousand times what a tree stores or a million times the CO2 or whatever, some ridiculous amount of CO2.

'''S:''' Hopefully without a footprint that would require that much.

'''S:''' Then you bury it.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' So they put it under the ground.

'''S:''' Then you're sort of permanently taking the CO2 back out of circulation.

'''S:''' That would be a more permanent – that's sequestering CO2.

'''S:''' You know, that's like permanently removing it from the carbon cycle as opposed to just having a greater proportion of it stored in biomass at any given time.

'''S:''' So it's still useful, just not a panacea.

'''S:''' It's not going to fix the course.

'''S:''' Right.

'''E:''' No single solution here.

'''S:''' Right, right.

'''S:''' All right, guys.

{{top}}{{anchor|sof}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:16:02) ==

{{SOFinfo
|item1 = A newly published clinical study finds that a daily eyedrop can partially reverse myopia (nearsightedness) in children.
|link1web = https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/fullarticle/2805504
|link1title = Efficacy and Safety of 0.01% and 0.02% Atropine for the Treatment of Pediatric Myopia Progression Over 3 Years
|link1pub = JAMA Ophthalmol

|item2 = A study conducted during the pandemic shutdown finds that over the short term reducing pollution increases global warming.
|link2web = https://www.su.se/english/news/measurements-reveal-the-impact-of-air-pollution-on-climate-and-health-in-southern-asia-1.651602
|link2title = Measurements reveal the impact of air pollution on climate and health in southern Asia
|link2pub = Stockholm University News

|item3 = Researchers report the production of an organic solar cell with a record-breaking efficiency >19%, which is close to commercial silicon solar cells.
|link3web = https://www.pv-tech.org/hong-kong-polytechnic-researchers-develop-record-breaking-organic-solar-cell/
|link3title = Hong Kong Polytechnic University researchers develop record-breaking organic solar cell
|link3pub = PV Tech
|note3 = The reference article here was not given in the show notes, but seems to line up better with the SOF item.
|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = eyedrops reverse myopia
|science1 = Less pollution, more warming
|science2 = efficient organic solar cell

|rogue1 =Cara
|answer1 =Less pollution, more warming

|rogue2 =evan
|answer2 =Less pollution, more warming

|rogue3 =bob
|answer3 =eyedrops reverse myopia

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win =y 
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''


'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake.

'''S:''' Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

'''S:''' You guys ready?

'''S:''' Just three regular news items.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''S:''' No theme or anything.

'''S:''' Kerry, are you with us?

'''S:''' Is there a theme song?

'''C:''' I am.

'''C:''' All right.

'''C:''' I'm going to make a noise.

'''C:''' I'm going to make a noise so you don't call on me.

'''E:''' Is that how it works?

'''B:''' That's my tactic.

'''E:''' Yes, Bob is the most quiet.

'''E:''' Let's see how well that works for you.

'''S:''' All right.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' All right, here we go.

'''S:''' Item number one.

'''S:''' A newly published clinical study finds that a daily eyedrop can partially reverse myopia, nearsightedness in children.

'''S:''' Item number two.

'''S:''' A study conducted during the pandemic shutdown finds that over the short term, reducing pollution increases global warming.

'''S:''' Item number three.

'''S:''' Researchers report that production of an organic solar cell with a record breaking efficiency greater than 19%, which is close to commercial silicon solar cells.

'''S:''' All right, Cara, go first.

=== Cara's Response ===

'''E:''' Lead the way, Cara.

'''E:''' Show us the path to the truth.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''C:''' Myopia in children with an eyedrop?

'''C:''' That's your lens shape and hyperopia.

'''C:''' Not presbyopia.

'''C:''' That's aging.

'''C:''' That's the muscles.

'''C:''' But the actual lens shape.

'''C:''' So could an eyedrop make it back to your lens and like flatten it?

'''C:''' And I like that you said just myopia.

'''C:''' You didn't say hyperopia because it probably only works in one direction.

'''C:''' Maybe.

'''C:''' A study, okay, during the pandemic shutdown, the short term, reducing pollution increase.

'''C:''' What does that even mean?

'''C:''' That's what?

'''C:''' I don't like this one.

'''C:''' I'll look at the last one.

'''C:''' I'll come back to it.

'''C:''' Production of an organic solar cell with a record breaking efficiency of greater than 19%, which is close to commercial silicon.

'''C:''' Solar cells only have a 19% efficiency?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' That's shit.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''C:''' Well, so I guess the idea is that if they were made out of organic materials, they were like garbage before and then they figured out how to make them less garbage.

'''C:''' I don't know.

'''C:''' Sure.

'''C:''' Oh, the eyedrop bugs me.

'''C:''' I mean, that would be amazing.

'''C:''' And then, okay, let me just read this one more time out loud.

'''C:''' A study conducted during the pandemic shutdown.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''C:''' Got it.

'''C:''' Finds that over the short term, okay, got it.

'''C:''' Reducing pollution increases global warming.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''C:''' So there's less pollution.

'''C:''' We're talking about, when you say pollution, that's a very general term.

'''S:''' Yeah, from energy production and stuff like that.

'''C:''' But you're talking about like pollution in the air.

'''C:''' You're not talking about like plastic on the ground.

'''C:''' In the air.

'''C:''' Okay, okay, okay, cool.

'''C:''' All right.

'''C:''' So.

'''C:''' I guess I should say air pollution.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' So people aren't doing as much and they're not driving, they're not doing, you know, whatever.

'''C:''' So there's less air pollution.

'''C:''' And then we saw a spike in global warming.

'''C:''' Although, like, how many other variables are they thinking about there?

'''C:''' I don't like that one.

'''C:''' I'm going to call that the fiction.

=== Evan's Response ===

'''S:''' Okay, Evan.

'''E:''' Oh, boy.

'''E:''' Cara, thank you.

'''E:''' You kind of answered a question for me in regards to the eyedrop question here.

'''E:''' How exactly it reverses it and specifically in children only.

'''E:''' I imagine, is that because the eye is still kind of developing, like everything in children are?

'''E:''' Like, why wouldn't this work in non-children?

'''E:''' So what's going on in a developing, growing eye?

'''E:''' I guess it's a growing eye.

'''E:''' That an adult otherwise couldn't benefit from it.

'''E:''' That's the only thing I'm not exactly understanding on that one.

'''E:''' Doesn't mean it's wrong.

'''E:''' Then the pandemic shut down over the short term, reducing pollution, increases global warming.

'''E:''' Why would it increase?

'''E:''' Why would it increase?

'''E:''' Pollution, air pollution, something in the air acting as a barrier for the sun.

'''E:''' The sun, there's more sunshine getting through because there's less crap in the air to stop it.

'''E:''' Maybe.

'''E:''' I don't like that one either.

'''E:''' I'm kind of leaning on kick with Cara on that.

'''E:''' And then the organic solar cell.

'''E:''' Yeah, I think researchers report the production.

'''E:''' Sure, they produced it.

'''E:''' I don't know that they have a full panel ready to bring this into production.

'''E:''' Probably on some very tiny scale maybe this is probably true.

'''E:''' So I suppose, Cara, since you did not steer me wrong, I think with the eyedrop one I'm going to join you in saying about the pandemic shutdowns and pollution increase and global warming fiction.

'''C:''' Going first is so much responsibility.

'''S:''' And Bob, if they follow you like lemmings, Cara, that's on them.

'''S:''' That's true.

'''E:''' I would have gone with the eyedrop one probably as fiction.

'''S:''' And I know the lemmings thing is a myth, but we use it anyway.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''B:''' It's a figure of speech now.

'''B:''' It might be a myth, but I'm no damn lemming.

'''E:''' I hope we get 800 emails on lemmings.

=== Bob's Response ===

'''B:''' I can see that if you reduce pollution that the climate would have a bizarre kind of counterintuitive react, temporary reaction of increasing global warming.

'''B:''' That doesn't shock me.

'''B:''' There's probably some obscure reason that makes that make sense, which I don't know.

'''B:''' But it just kind of feels like I bet you that's what's happening there.

'''B:''' And then the organic solar cell with – yes, it's about time that the organic variety of solar cells had its day in the sun, so to speak.

'''B:''' So I'm just going to go with that because why not?

'''B:''' Which means that the eyedrops reversing myopia, reversing?

'''B:''' I don't know, man.

'''B:''' That's just kind of –

'''S:''' Partially reversing. Partially reversing.

'''B:''' But still a partial reverse is still a reverse.

'''B:''' I'm not buying that one.

'''B:''' I'll say that's fiction.

'''B:''' It's a piece of a reverse.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Okay.

'''S:''' So you all agree with number three, so we'll start there.

'''S:''' Researchers report the production of an organic solar cell with a record-breaking efficiency greater than 19 percent, which is close to commercial silicon solar cells.

'''S:''' You all think that one is science, and that one is science.

'''S:''' That is science.

'''S:''' Cool, man.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''S:''' Yeah, that was the easy one because I couldn't find anything else.

'''S:''' What are you saying?

'''S:''' It was a tough week, man.

'''S:''' I went through everything this week.

'''S:''' Anyway, but it's still cool.

'''S:''' I want to talk about it.

'''S:''' So yeah, organic solar cells, they are cheap and flexible, and they're great, but their efficiency is much lower than silicon solar cells.

'''S:''' We've been in the 10 percent range.

'''S:''' I remember maybe a year ago, we were like, oh, we're getting to the 14, maybe 15 percent range.

'''S:''' Meanwhile, silicon solar cells are broken 20.

'''S:''' They're at like a 22 percent now.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' So they keep getting better.

'''S:''' They're probably going to top out at around 29, 30 percent, and then we will need perovskite or something else to get into the low 30s, and that's probably pretty much going to be it in terms of that basic technology.

'''S:''' But who knows?

'''S:''' We'll find some way to get whatever, push beyond that.

'''S:''' But the question was, can we get the organic solar cells high enough that they can be commercially in the range with the silicon solar cells?

'''S:''' So yeah, this is now the record.

'''S:''' This is, of course, laboratory proof of concept, but again, just a year or two ago, we were talking about 15 percent, 19 percent, a great improvement.

'''S:''' And again, it's putting you in.

'''S:''' I mean, just a year ago, that's what your commercial silicon solar cell would have been, right?

'''S:''' It would have been 18 percent, 19 percent.

'''S:''' So it's right there now in the range with commercial solar cells.

'''S:''' And again, they're cheap and flexible, man.

'''S:''' These are printed by plastic.

'''S:''' So if this pans out and can scale and industrialize and et cetera, this could be huge to the solar industry.

'''S:''' That's cool.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I've been following this very closely because this is what we're waiting for like this to pop, really.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' All right, let's go back to number one.

'''S:''' A newly published clinical study finds that a daily eyedrop can partially reverse myopia, nearsightedness in children.

'''S:''' First, Carol, let me just correct a couple of things that you said.

'''S:''' So myopia, nearsightedness and farsightedness has nothing to do with the lens.

'''S:''' It has to do with the shape of the eye and the cornea, not the lens.

'''C:''' And the lens.

'''S:''' The presbyopia is the stiffening of the lens.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's the ability.

'''C:''' It's not the lens.

'''C:''' It's the inability of the lens.

'''S:''' The lens can change shape, right?

'''S:''' The lens is flexible and can change shape.

'''C:''' Right, but I thought that the idea was that if it can't fully round up or it can't fully flatten out.

'''C:''' That's presbyopia.

'''C:''' No, but that happens with time, with age because the actual muscles.

'''S:''' Yeah, but that's not what causes nearsightedness and farsightedness.

'''S:''' It's the shape of the eye and the cornea.

'''S:''' And so that's the idea is the drops would be changing the shape of the cornea, not the lens, in order to counteract myopia.

'''S:''' But Bob is correct.

'''S:''' This one is the fiction.

'''S:''' Yeah, baby.

'''S:''' Because what this does is it slows the progression of myopia in children.

'''S:''' Which is nice.

'''S:''' It doesn't reverse it.

'''S:''' Oh, okay.

'''S:''' The drug is atropine, which causes the pupil to dilate.

'''S:''' Not sure if that's what the effect is coming from, but it works.

'''S:''' And what's interesting is that we're having kind of an epidemic of childhood myopia.

'''S:''' Really?

'''C:''' Not really sure why.

'''S:''' Screens.

'''S:''' Is it, yeah, just increased eye tests?

'''S:''' So it's probably neither of those things.

'''S:''' Actually, interestingly, the number one hypothesis is the lack of sunlight.

'''S:''' Is that kids are not spending as much time in the sun.

'''S:''' They're indoors too much.

'''S:''' Yeah, because we're not totally fully behind.

'''E:''' No longer in agricultural society, right?

'''S:''' Whatever.

'''S:''' But maybe it's a combination of all those things, but that's the one that I read about the most.

'''S:''' And there's like so many grade school kids wearing eyeglasses.

'''S:''' It's a real generational change.

'''S:''' It's palpable.

'''C:''' Sorry to interrupt, Steve, but according to the NIH, and the NIH is National Eye Institute, nearsightedness happens when your eyeball grows too long from the front to the back, or when there are problems with the shape of your cornea, or when there are problems with the shape of the lens.

'''S:''' All right, so it's all of them.

'''S:''' But I think the lens is by far the least likely of those.

'''C:''' You're probably right.

'''C:''' Yeah, I think you're probably right.

'''S:''' Because again, because the lens is supposed to be able to change shape.

'''S:''' Right, the lens does round up or flatten out.

'''C:''' That's what that is.

'''B:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''B:''' So you're both fighting for Steve's a little bit more right.

'''E:''' No, that would have totally changed my answer.

'''S:''' No, but the point is it does work on the cornea.

'''C:''' Well, no, actually his treatment works on the cornea.

'''C:''' Yeah, if I had said cornea, it would have been even more believable.

'''S:''' Yeah, right.

'''S:''' You almost talked yourself out of it by focusing on the lens.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's right.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''C:''' Because I was like, how is it going to reach the lens?

'''C:''' But if it was just worrying about the cornea, that's right.

'''S:''' You were almost famously again right for the wrong reason.

'''C:''' Right for the wrong reason.

'''C:''' You're challenged.

'''C:''' It happens.

'''C:''' So this is cool because basically even the – it's fiction, but it's only technically fiction.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' But I think reversing is a big deal.

'''S:''' It's a totally different ballgame than just slowing the reverse.

'''C:''' I agree, but partially reversing is very confusing.

'''C:''' Yeah, you two partially.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I know that, but it's a different direction.

'''S:''' Yeah, but the kids still got even more myopic over time, just not as much as the kids who didn't have the eye drops.

'''S:''' Right.

'''B:''' Like slowing down aging is one thing, but reversing aging, that's a horse of a different

'''S:''' color. I thought that was a big enough difference to justify a fiction.

'''C:''' Yeah, you're right.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Okay.

'''S:''' And then that means that a study conducted during the pandemic shutdown finds that over the short term, reducing pollution increases global warming.

'''S:''' That is science.

'''S:''' Any of you want to take a stab at why that is?

'''E:''' Okay, let's think about that.

'''E:''' The stab, which is probably wrong, was that there's less material to reflect the sunlight.

'''E:''' You are correct.

'''S:''' Oh, hey, there you go.

'''S:''' So what material?

'''S:''' Fine particles.

'''E:''' Which fine particles?

'''E:''' Some of them?

'''S:''' Some particles.

'''S:''' The ones over there?

'''S:''' The ones that are ...

'''S:''' Some particles like CO2, methane trap the radiating heat, right?

'''S:''' It's a trap.

'''S:''' The sun will shine through them and the heat will be trapped.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' It's a trap.

'''E:''' So the sunlight.

'''S:''' The sun's going to shine through them, but it's not going to reflect the heat.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' And so you're going to have to find some other way to do that.

'''S:''' And so the sun's going to shine through them and the heat will be trapped.

'''S:''' And so you're going to have to find some other way to do that.

'''S:''' But then the ground warms and radiates away infrared, but it traps the infrared.

'''S:''' I was wrong for the right reason.

'''S:''' But other particles reflect the sun as it's coming in.

'''S:''' It increases the albedo.

'''S:''' And that would, yeah, so that has a cooling effect.

'''S:''' And the particles that have the cooling effect have a shorter half-life in the atmosphere than CO2.

'''C:''' So this is an interesting situation where there is an effect and then another effect.

'''C:''' And then we removed the masking effect.

'''C:''' It's exactly what they're calling it.

'''C:''' It's a masking effect.

'''S:''' There's a masking effect from some of the pollutants.

'''S:''' And so if you would just like immediately cut off any pollution, not only would we have some warming because the CO2 would continue to have an effect for 10 or 20 years, but we would lose the masking effect from the reflecting particles and we would get some warming from that.

'''S:''' It would be unmasked.

'''S:''' So there's actually more of a greenhouse effect than we're feeling because it's partly masked by these reflecting particles and that would go away.

'''S:''' And so there would be an increase in warming over the short term as those short-term molecules went away and we're no longer blocking some of the sunlight.

'''S:''' So the article just says aerosols are the ones that reflect the sunlight.

'''S:''' That's not very specific.

'''S:''' Yeah, aerosols.

'''S:''' Sulfur dioxide is one.

'''S:''' So sulfur dioxide has a masking effect on the warming.

'''C:''' Interesting.

'''C:''' How dare you, Bob, with your smarts.

'''C:''' Oh, I just left out.

'''E:''' Bob going last.

'''E:''' I see what happened here.

'''S:''' Hey, he had the courage to break from the crowd and I'm happy that he was rewarded for

'''C:''' that. I agree.

'''E:''' I'm not as impressed.

'''B:''' Evan is correct because I happened to literally five minutes before Science or Fiction, I like, holy crap, I didn't even look at any news.

'''B:''' I quickly scanned some and that was one of them.

'''C:''' Like, that was okay.

'''C:''' Oh, boo.

'''C:''' Amazing.

'''C:''' Come on.

'''C:''' It's cool.

'''B:''' You know, that's like once in 50 weeks.

'''B:''' Like, oh, look, I actually read it.

'''S:''' All right.

{{anchor|qow}} 

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:30:25) ==

{{qow
|text = The plural of anecdote is not data.
|author = attributed by listener to Erika Engelhaupt
|lived = 
|desc = freelance science writer
|note = From a post by the Quote Investigator titled [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/12/27/plural/ "The Plural of Anecdote Is Not Data"], "The earliest strong match known to QI appeared in an article by Kenneth Kernaghan and P. K. Kuruvilla in the journal “Canadian Public Administration” in 1982." [[#Notes|(Also see Note 1)]]
}}


'''S:''' Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' Great job, Bob.

'''E:''' All right.

'''E:''' So this week's quote comes from a suggested by a listener, Andy from Jacksonville, Florida.

'''E:''' Karen, you're in Florida too.

'''E:''' What are the odds?

'''C:''' Yes, Florida is quite big.

'''C:''' Jacksonville is nowhere near me.

'''E:''' And he described this as an interesting quote.

'''E:''' He says, in her book, Gory Details by Erica Engelhaupt, she says this quote, which is discussing sham or fake medical treatments.

'''E:''' Here's the quote.

'''E:''' The plural of anecdote is not data.

'''S:''' Now, is he saying that she's the source of that quote?

'''E:''' That's where he pulled the quote from because he.

'''S:''' That may have been where he pulled the quote from, but I doubt that she's actually the origin of that.

'''S:''' I've heard that quote so many times from so many people.

'''S:''' I bet you that's not the original.

'''S:''' You want to do you want a different quote?

'''S:''' No, it's fine.

'''S:''' This is fine.

'''S:''' So tracking down quotes can actually be tricky.

'''S:''' We can't you just can't assume that that's correct.

'''C:''' So I'm sure that quote is as old as modern null hypothesis testing.

'''C:''' I've always you know, you guys know that I've always struggled with that concept.

'''C:''' Which one?

'''C:''' Because although I think that it is it is correct in context, it is also wildly incorrect in context.

'''C:''' And you and I, Steve, have argued about this.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's definitely context dependent.

'''C:''' Right.

'''C:''' Because because to some extent, data is the plural or data are the plural of anecdotes.

'''C:''' Like sometimes that's what data are is collecting a lot of different accounts or experiences or self-report statements or you know, whatever and then compiling them and then making sense of them.

'''C:''' So I think but the whole context of the quote is that we have to study things systematically, but it's ignoring the fact that we can study anecdotes systematically and that would become data.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's just a different kind of data.

'''C:''' Yeah, right.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly.

'''C:''' Like I what I worry though, is that sometimes people who are like these really intense logical positivist purists, they hear like you see this with this like angry kind of like intense skepticism and you hear them go like the plural of anecdotes not data.

'''C:''' Like you hear it thrown around a lot and basically they use it to minimize personal or even not even just personal to minimize human perspective.

'''S:''' Yeah, no, I agree with that.

'''S:''' It's like also like people say like absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

'''S:''' Yes, it is.

'''S:''' It absolutely is.

'''S:''' But it all depends on how much you've looked for the evidence.

'''S:''' It doesn't prove absence.

'''S:''' It's evidence of absence.

'''S:''' It's not proof of absence, but it's you can't boil down scientific thinking to these aphorisms, these quips because they're always context dependent.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' It's helpful to understand.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' So the way I look at it, I think a better summary for me of the role of anecdote in science is that anecdotes are a great way of generating hypotheses.

'''S:''' They're not a great way of testing hypotheses.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Because they're not controlled.

'''S:''' It's observational.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's observational, which is fine.

'''S:''' Observational science is hugely important.

'''C:''' It's a start.

'''C:''' It exists.

'''C:''' I wouldn't even say it's a start.

'''C:''' No, it's just a different kind of science.

'''S:''' It's a different kind of science.

'''S:''' It has its own strengths and weaknesses.

'''S:''' That's it.

'''C:''' Yes.

'''C:''' And this is something that I've been more passionate about lately because I'm doing like a phenomenological study right now.

'''C:''' And this is the first time in my life I've been like dedicating a ton of my time to a different way of looking at data because I'm so used to doing clean, easy, I don't want to say easy, but super clean science.

'''C:''' And there are different approaches and it's not just like we start with those and then eventually they become a randomized control trial.

'''C:''' The vast majority of things on this planet cannot be studied with a randomized control trial.

'''C:''' And I think that's the point that we sometimes forget to have a conversation about.

'''C:''' It's the gold standard, but just because it's the gold standard doesn't mean it's always possible or even ethical.

'''S:''' Right.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' We don't have a double blind placebo controlled trial that shows that smoking causes cancer because you can't do that.

'''S:''' You can't do that.

'''S:''' You can't do that.

'''S:''' So Evan, the quote investigator gives the earliest reference of that quote to 1988 professor of psychology and primatologist Erwin S. Bernstein writing in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

'''S:''' That's just the earliest incident that he could find, but it may not be the first utterance of that phrase exactly.

'''S:''' But he gives older references of like the same idea being said in slightly different ways.

'''S:''' Different ways, yeah.

'''S:''' So anyway, it definitely predates the source that we were given.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' I'm not surprised my namesake came up with it.

'''E:''' No, you're wrong.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' So yeah, I usually will...

'''S:''' When I see something like that, I know that's a popular quote or especially if it's attributed to somebody who like every quote...

'''S:''' Mark Twain said whatever.

'''S:''' Mark Twain.

'''S:''' I don't care.

'''S:''' Never believe.

'''S:''' Use the force, Proto.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I always...

'''S:''' The quote investigator is a good resource to...

'''S:''' That's cool.

'''C:''' I had never even heard of that.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' And sometimes you don't even...

'''S:''' The answer is we don't know.

'''S:''' It's just too old.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Especially the quote, my name is Mark Twain.

'''B:''' I would suspect even that one was not right.

'''S:''' All right.

'''S:''' But it's a good quote, though.

'''S:''' I mean, it's a provocative.

'''S:''' Oh, 100%.

'''S:''' It's a thought provoking.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Well, look at that.

'''C:''' It's a conversation starter, that's for sure.

'''C:''' Totally.

'''C:''' And here we are at the end of the show.

'''E:''' More nuanced than I thought.

'''S:''' Yeah.

== Signoff (1:35:57) ==

'''S:''' All right.

'''S:''' Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''S:''' Sure, man.

'''S:''' Thanks, Steve.

'''S:''' Thanks, all.

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 

{{Outro664}}{{top}}
== Today I Learned ==
* Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference<ref>[url_for_TIL publication: title]</ref> 
* Fact/Description
* Fact/Description

== Notes ==
<references group=note/> 
== References ==
<references/>

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