SGU Episode 340

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Introduction

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, January 18, 2012, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,

B: Hey, everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson,

R: Hello, everyone.

S: Jay Novella,

J: Hey, guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening. Bob, it's good to have you back.

B: (hesitantly) It's kinda nice to be back.

S: Kinda nice.

R: How was Disney World?

B: Disney, the Magic Kingdom was awesome. I've gone so many times, I'm never tired of it. Three times, Pirates of the Caribbean, and we hit Haunted Mansion twice.

E: Bob, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, they now wave to you instead of you waving to them.

J: Yeah, right?

B: Yeah, they like me.

E: Hey, Bob!

R: (drawn out) Bob!

J: (in a deep voice) Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me!

B: (laughing) Jay.

J: I love that.

This Day in Skepticism (0:00:55)

S: Well, welcome back. Rebecca, tell us about this day in skepticism.

R: I would love to, Steve. I was originally going to talk about how on January 21^st, 1799 Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccination was introduced. However, we talk about that all the time.

J or S: (0:01:13) (In an Indian accent) All de time.

R: So, all the time.

E: Ach, it's so . . . ach.

R: So, instead, I thought I would go with, on January 20, 1885, LaMarcus Adna Thompson patented the first roller coaster. Now, he never claimed to have invented the roller coaster, but he was definitely instrumental in creating and popularizing them all over the U.S. and Europe. This first roller coaster that he patented was the switchback railway at Coney Island, which had already become a big tourist destination by 1885. And on the switchback railway, tourists would climb a tower and then sit down sideways in the car that carried them 600 feet to another tower. And then the car was switched over to a return track and sent back. Which, okay, isn't the most exciting ride in the world, but for 1885 you have no idea. It was crazy. The design he created was most likely based on a railway in what is now known as Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, known back then as Mauch Chunk. So it was called the Mauch Chunk switchback railway. You can see why they switched it to Jim Thorpe. Mauch Chunk. But the switchback railway there was a nine-mile gravity railroad that was built in 1827 to carry coal from the mines to the chutes. And it was so scenic and fun to ride that it soon became a tourist attraction, and it got to the point where it would carry coal in the mornings and passengers in the afternoon. So, Thompson most likely used that as the template to create the first roller coaster.

S: Interesting.

R: And, you guys might be reminded of the Katoomba Scenic Railway

S: Um hmm.

E: Oh, yeah.

R: Which, yeah, we all rode when we were in Australia, back in 2010. That was also . . .

J: Yeah, that was the thing where I was terrified, remember?

E: Yes, you were.

R: It was pretty scary. And that too was originally built to move coal, so the same sort of thing. That one was built sometime between 1878 and 1900, and it, too, was also turned into a tourist attraction. And, yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's called the world's steepest railway. Although at the time I rode it, I suggested that it could have been called the world's most boring roller coaster, I had no idea that those sort of railways were actually the forerunners of roller coasters. So, yeah, January 20, 1885, the first roller coaster was patented. Thompson later went on to patent a bunch more things, particularly a roller coaster that featured tunnels and scenery, which he called the scenic railway. The next time you ride a roller coaster, you should thank LeMarcus Adna Thompson.

S: I'll do that.

J: I'm never riding that thing again, by the way.

B: Oh, Jay.

R: That was so fun, come on.

J: Yeah, but I sat in front and when they brought us back up the mountain,

E: That was worse than going down.

J: And I was in the front, it was like you're being pulled backwards on a roller coaster and it was like being dangled from a string and them slowly like inching me up the mountain and I was, I can't even think about it, it's ridiculous.

News Items

Ajita Kamal (0:04:14)

S: All right. We have a bit of sad news at the beginning of the show. I don't know if you guys ever met Ajita Kamal? He started an Indian podcast called Nirmukta, or Nirmookta. Yeah, I was on that, he recorded me at NECSS two years ago. I met him. Very nice guy. Very enthusiastic.

R: Oh, he was at NECSS?

S: He was at NECSS, yeah.

R: Oh, I didn't realize that. Maybe I did meet him.

S: And, so, unfortunately, he died recently.

B: Oh, god, how?

S: A young guy. He was born 1978. So he like, in his 30s.

B: What happened, Steve?

S: We don't know. So, he sort of fell off the radar for a few days. Nobody knew what was going on or where he was. And then the word came down that, they actually had to search for him, and they said that they recovered his body somewhere near his residence. There was a formal investigation, but no further details have been made publicly available. So that's all we know; is that he essentially was missing for a short time and then they found his body. So it clearly was . . .

B: Whoa.

S: Well, it doesn't sound like it was natural causes. You know, it sounds like something untoward happened. Very, very tragic, very unfortunate. So, I just wanted to mention that and give our sympathies to his fans in India. And, you know, it's just sad to lose a young enthusiastic skeptic.

R: Yeah.

NECSS 2012 (0:05:40)

S: Well, let's go on to some positive news, some happy news. Jay, NECSS 2012. Give us the skinny.

J: So, guys, NECSS two thousand twelve.

R: I think it's happening in twenty-twelve, if I'm not mistaken.

S: It's happening in twenty-twelve, not . . .

E: Two aught one two.

J: NECSS two thousand twelve. Twenty-twelve. So, yeah, this is our fourth conference on science and skepticism. That's what NECSS stands for, did you know that, Evan?

E: I did, yes. Yes. Our fourth conference that we are co-hosting.

J: It's actually the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism. So we're having that April 21^st to 22^nd, that's Saturday and Sunday, and if you come early, if you come Friday we have a few events that are happening on Friday as well. And you should just go to the website. It's NECSS.org and we have all the information there. You can register on the site, you can see a list of the speakers, and you know we have an ever-growing list. We have a lot of panels happening this year. We have two live podcasts. We have the SGU live recording, and we have a Rationally Speaking live recording, which is always good. Once again we're running the NECSS Student Sponsorship Program. So if you're interested in being sponsored to come to NECSS this year for free, just go to the website, take a look at the parameters that you have to meet. You have to write a short summary. You have to be of a certain age, and a few other things. You have to be able to sing really well. Just come, take a look. Really love to see your applications . .

S: And if you're interested in sponsoring a student, go to the website, too. This year we have James Randi coming back, always a pleasure. Seth Shostak, PZ Myers, who's always an enthusiastic speaker. Kevin Slavin, John Bohannan, Joe Nickell, Brian Wecht, Jamy Ian Swiss is MC'ing again, Julia Galef will be there. She is one of the hosts of Rationally Speaking, along with Massimo Pigliucci,

J: (shouting in background) George Hrab!

S: George Hrab is returning.

J: Geo!

S: Andrew McAllister, Michael Rogers, Ethan Brown, and of course, the entire crew of the Skeptics' Guide will be there to do a live show, to meet our listeners. We'll have a table there. We'll maybe be doing some other special events. We'll be available the whole weekend. And we certainly make a huge effort at these live events to be as accessible as possible, so we hope to see a lot of our listeners there. Go to NECSS.org. Also, if you are a member of the New York City Skeptics or the New England Skeptical Society, essentially if you have donated $25 or more to the NESS or SGU in the last year, then contact the relevant organization for your discount code. You actually get a discount for NECSS. And seriously, at the venue where we're at, we have sold out every time we were there, so if you don't want to miss out on getting a ticket, I would go early and register.

R: Good thinkin'.

E: Fantabulous!

Photographing Black Holes (0:08:28)

S: All right, let's move on. Bob, you're going to tell us how to take a picture of a black hole.

B: Yes, I am.

R: Lo-o-n-n-g exposure.

S: You might think that's an oxymoron, taking a picture of a black hole.

B: Yeah, it doesn't make sense if you know a little bit about black holes, but according to some recent news scientists may soon have a direct image, as Steve said, of the black hole in the center of our galaxy. They're going to be using a virtual telescope as big as the Earth, and they may have, for the first time, a picture of the shadow of a black hole. That's actually something I never heard about, the shadow of a black hole. And I'll get into that later. Scientists are meeting this week, actually, to discuss this project. It has probably one of the coolest names for a telescope project: The Event Horizon Telescope. Obviously, building a real telescope as big as the Earth would be just a tad expensive and time-consuming. It's called a virtual telescope because it uses a common process called interferometry to combine the individual images of many telescopes into one big image. The cool thing is if you have enough telescopes, the resulting image is comparable to the image of one gi-normous telescope as big as the distance that separates all of them. The farther apart that they are, the bigger the actual telescope you'd be replicating. Now, in the case of the Event Horizon Project, they're using fifty radio telescopes around the world that when combined will give us an image as if we had, as I said, one radio telescope as big as the Earth itself. Now it'll be far and away the most detailed picture of the center of our galaxy and the super-massive black hole that's ever been taken. This is no small feat considering that the four million solar mass, super massive black hole is 26,000 light years away, and I think that's approximately 153 quintillion miles, that's really, really far away, even though relatively speaking it's close, it's still a whole bunch of miles. And the black hole itself is about as big as Mercury's orbit. The orbit of Mercury is kinda big, but it's so far away that resolving this thing is kind of like seeing a grapefruit on the moon. As Steve said, you may think, but black holes devour everything, even light. They're by definition invisible. That's true, but we can see the immediate vicinity around it. Dimitrios Psaltis, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Physics at University of Arizona, recently said, "We expect to see the swirling of matter going into the black hole in real time. What we're really hoping to see is how the black hole is fed." Now, it's even better than that, though,

S: Yeah, that makes sense.

B: Yeah, the glowing matter around a black hole should clearly delineate its shadow. Now this shadow is actually the silhouette of its event horizon, which is the boundary in space-time around the hole that once you cross there's no coming back, even if you're traveling at the speed of light. You know, what might we see with such a view? Some scientists have speculated that we could, we might be able to see real-time flaring events occurring near the black hole. We might see actual rotation of the super-massive black hole. We could also examine very closely the accretion disk dynamics. The accretion disk is the disk of matter that is swirling around and around like going down a drain into the black hole. As it gets closer to the black hole, it heats up and emits the radiation that allows us to see this thing. And we also might be able to see extreme relativistic effects that's predicted to be acting on the volume of space around the black hole, which actually has a name. Do any of you know the name of the black hole?

R: Joey.

?: (11:45) Thomas.

B: No, it's Sagittarius A. I didn't know that. So this leads us to Einstein and the test of relativity.

S: Doesn't it always?

B: (laughing) Yeah.

E: Appropriate.

B: This theory predicts that the shadow should be perfectly circular. If it's not, then Einstein's got some 'splaining to do. And we may find that GR, I'm sorry, we may find that general relativity needs some modification. But really though, is there any doubt that this billionth test of his theory will succeed? It would be kinda cool if we found some special case where general relativity fails and maybe get some new physics out of it, but I'm really not holding my breath. But still, there's so much that we can get out of this, I really can't wait to see that first snapshot of a black hole and its event horizon.

J: Bob, do you know how black holes are created?

B: Yeah.

J: That's where God divided by zero.

B: (laughing) Yeah, 'cause you try to do some serious physics inside, you know, within the singularity and yeah, you start dividing by zero and things kinda get wacky. But, just, Jay, do you know how black holes are created?

J: Yeah, I know. I know. (laughter)

S: I just choose not to say right now.

J: Yeah, I choose not to say, but I do know.

E: Yeah, it's something to do with the . . .

B: I'm sure you do know, but did you know that, there's two ways that I'm aware of, to create 'em. One of course is the collapse of giant stars, after a supernova. But also black holes were created after the Big Bang. And the cool thing about that is that the black holes that were created were probably less massive than the minimum required for a star to create a black hole. So you could, so I'm sure the black, the big bang created these black holes with relatively very little mass and chances are they've already evaporated away. 'Cause through Hawking radiation and stuff black holes evap, slowly, very slowly, evaporate over time. And over, you know, many, many billions or trillions of years eventually they'll all evaporate. But some of these, some of those from the big bang I'm sure were so tiny that they've already evaporated.

S: Another way to make a black hole doesn't have to be the remnant of a super-massive star. It could be two smaller remnants that combine together.

B: Yeah, that's true.

S: And then get over the threshold

B: Yeah, two colliding neutron stars. I mean, still they're the by-products of super-massive stars, but, true, there's another mechanism.

S: Or it could be you have, like a neutron star that has a companion star and it sucks off enough matter from the companion star to, again, get over that mass threshold and become a black hole.

B: Yeah, it get, what is it, getting past neutron degeneracy.

SOPA/PIPA(0:14:17)

S: Jay,you're also gonna tell us about the next news item, which has been all over the news as we record this show. Wikipedia is actually in blackout.

J: Yes. So, Wikipedia, Reddit, and there's about, estimated ten thousand other websites that blacked out their pages today in protest

R: The skeptic network

J: to SOPA and Poopa, I mean PIPA. They all showed warnings on their websites and several of them gave links to contact your congressman and everything. And actually it really seems that this effort worked. I mean it really got the word out and we had quite a number of politicians, I think it was up to six last I checked, that actually backed out of supporting SOPA and PIPA. So, the Protect IP Act of 2011, PIPA, and the Stop Online Piracy Act known as SOPA. These are two legislative initiatives that both attempt to deal with the global online copyright and trademark infringement. I don't disagree with the government getting involved in trying to do some policing of online piracy and the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. There's definitely a line that I think they, they would be going too far, like, of course, with these two pieces of legislation. But there's definitely things that can be done that would be positive overall, and, let's face it, if somebody created material, you know, it should not be illegally distributed, especially at a, at a degree where they could put people out of business or when things that big happen, of course I disagree with it, but

S: Yeah, if we're talking about first principles, just basic principles, we want a system in which the freedom of speech on the internet is protected, but at the same time people's intellectual property are protected so that we want there to be an incentive for people to do a lot of work to create content. And people should, do have a right to benefit from their hard, their hard work, and their intellectual property. So how do we balance those two things? How do we balance intellectual property without squelching freedom? I agree that the way that Congress set about doing it, neither of these two proposals so far, PIPA, that's not the way. Whatever the compromise is, I don't think they're anywhere near it.

J: So the way that, and in very simplistic terms, the backbone to the internet is based on something called DNS, and that is the internet's domain name system. So, to give you a quick understanding of how the DNS works, just think of it as your physical address at your home. The postal service delivers mail to you and they know where you live because of your street address, and they use something called zip codes in the United States, which helps localize your neighborhood and everything. But in the end, what it boils down to is a specific address that points to a specific location, and that's how the DNS works on the internet for people's domain names. So what they're proposing is that they would be able to, that people that complain about another person's site and also given very little detail into what the problem is, more of just issuing the complaint, it would give them power enough to knock your website off the internet. They basically would remove you from the DNS listing, meaning that nobody would be able to find your website.

S: They force IP servers, and basically everyone else on the internet not to anything that would allow people to get to you on the internet, so you become invisible, essentially.

J: Yeah, it would affect U.S. internet service providers, domain name registries, domain name registrars, operators of domain name servers, which is a category that includes hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, colleges, universities, non-profit organizations. I mean basically anyone that's part of the domain name system and anyone that has data, addresses, that are stored to point people to where other websites exist. What would happen, if this legislation passed, what would happen? And part of this is things that I've read and part of this is my opinion. But it's believed that it would quickly inspire programmers to write software that would easily get around what SOPA and PIPA are blocking. And what we would see would be something along the lines of easily installed plug-ins to your browser that would just seamlessly ignore the channels that blocked the addresses. So you would get to the sites that you wanna get to anyway, with maybe a little bit more of a delay. That would be like layer one. Then layer two, I think it would be reasonable to say that if things got really bad, then you would find that there would be other ways of navigating through the internet. That other address systems would come up. It would be like the Post Office trying to deliver you something, but there's multiple address systems. Like you might have four street addresses at your single house. Imagine if your street name had three or four names, and depending on who you're talking to you have to give them a different address so they know how to get to you. And it would become, it would become a catastrophic mess on the web.

S: So my understanding, Jay, is that the law would, essentially, force people to break the DNS system in order to get around it.

J: Right. And we would. Every single person that cares about going to websites and that, you know, is a frequent user of the internet, would install free software and just circumnavigate anything that they put in place anyway, because you know what? They would not be able to police it. It just wouldn't be policeable. It would inconvenience a lot of people and then we would just continue to have workarounds to get around it. And you know, it even goes deeper than that. There's really, the devil is in the details here. And it's a really bad devil that I'm talking about. You know, they would even be telling banks and advertising companies and they could not advertise with companies that are blocked. So they would be affecting a lot of online business, and that would have an effect on the economy. And both bills describe procedures that are actually not constitutionally legitimate. Which blows my mind. Think of it like this. So accusations could be made in court and one, without both parties being present. Meaning, that your site could be shut down with absolutely no warning. And this is called an ex parte proceeding. These are proceedings where only one side of the two parties needs to be present.

B: Sweet.

J: So, you could be taken to court and not even know it. And you don't have to be there, and they don't even have to notify you.

S: You'll know it when your site gets shut down.

J: That's right.

R: Yeah, this has, you know, this directly relates to, those of you who are in the U.K., particularly in England, will understand what we're talking about because you already have horrific libel laws. The copyright laws, the copyright threats that would come in through SOPA would be similarly chilling for those of us in the U.S. and around the world, because they would allow people to sue very very easily. We could no longer have an SGU forum, for instance. It would just have to go. Basically, the legality of it would make it impossible to produce content on line.

S: Yeah, it would be so easy to harass sites to silence criticism. All you've gotta do is just make an accusation. It doesn't even have to be legitimate. The person doesn't have an ability to defend themselves. The way the law is written it is completely broken. From a legal point of view. This is mainly coming from a really good article which I recommend, on the Stanford Law Review. So, there's an essay by Mark Lemly, David Levine and David Post. So, you know, these are actual lawyers who know what they're talking about. And they make a very strong case that this is not only unconstitutional, it's anti-constitutional. For reasons, partly the reasons that we stated, that the accused doesn't have a right to defend themselves. There's no due process before draconian measures are taken. So, yeah, I think, I agree with Jay in that I can see Congress's heart may be in the right place, but this is a very flawed piece of, these two proposals are very, both very flawed. They're very similar and

B: They have a heart?

S: The reaction is, of Wikipedia and other sites protesting it I think is appropriate and I think it's hopefully going to at least put it on hold for a while, until we can think this through more thoroughly. This is just too, too rash.

J: Steve, could you imagine how damning it would be? Companies would use this to put each other out of business.

S: Yeah.

J: It would be a race to the finish line. I mean, all a competitor would have to do is drum up complaints about one of their competitors, get their website knocked off the internet, and that, that could shut down a company.

S: Well, could you imagine every crank, quack and charlatan out there who wants to silence criticism of their nonsense? How easy it would be for them to completely shut down the online skeptical movement with those kind of . . .

E: Two seconds.

R: Yeah, and that's why I compare it to the libel law.

S: Yeah.

R: I mean it would be absolutely . . . it would be censorship. It would get down to censorship very easy censorship ________ (0:23:22)

S: Yeah, exactly.

R: The good news is that the protests are working a bit. I think that people are actually calling their, Americans are calling their congresspeople. Internationally people are causing a fuss, and it's sort of having an effect. SOPA was technically shelved.

S: Yeah.

R: That's the Senate's version of it. It was shelved, but not defeated, so it is still lurking, and with PIPA, the most controversial part of it has been removed. Or at least, one of the senators, Senator Patrick Leahy, has agreed to, or has said he's willing to remove it. So, there's that. But people should definitely continue to call their congresspeople to complain and let them know that this is not, this is not good for the future of the internet.

E: One encouraging thing is that President Obama had said that he will not pass this in its current manifestation, or basically any combin, any compromised bill that comes out of these two pieces of legislation in each House. So that's a good sign that our Executive is, as of right now, on our side in regards to this argument. But he kind of left the door open a little bit, too, to say, well, not as is, but if something else comes along that he feels is more practical that maybe he will go with something like that.

R: The other good news from the SOPA front is that good news/just hilarious news, I guess, is that one of the SOPA authors, Senator Lamar Smith of Texas, has apparently violated copyright on his own website. He stole an artist's painting or photograph, an artist's photograph, and used it as the background to his website, and the artist has made a statement saying that he did not give permission for that to be used. So under the rules of SOPA, were it to pass, that artist could make Lamar Smith's website completely unavailable. So.

B: Holy justice.

E: Yeah. Some pigs are more equal than others. So, somehow his website would still be up. That would be my wager.

R: Mmm.

S: Yeah, definitely an issue we have to keep an eye on. And, just as the broader concept, too, of whittling away internet freedom for various reasons, for, you know, security to meter the web, the internet freedom cause is an important one. We're in the, you know, a lot of people think we're in the golden age of the internet right now, and that it's never gonna be as free as it is now. But if we want it to stay that way, it's something that we're gonna have to jealously guard and keep an eye on. You know we talked recently about the hacker web, you know, putting up private satellites, creating sort of an alternate internet essentially that governments can't control. Maybe that's what will ultimately happen. There'll be this black internet, you know, that, where, an underground internet. Hopefully it won't come to that. Hopefully we'll have one seamless worldwide internet, free flow of information, and you know, we'll have to learn to adapt to the implications of that and if we do want to take any measures to limit piracy, which again, I totally agree with, we have to take a really thoughtful, nuanced approach to that. Not this sloppy draconian mechanism that, is just crazy.

E: Coming down heavy-handed on everyone for the sake of . . .

S: Don't you just get this image of these, like, 60+ guys in Congress who have no idea what the internet is. The "intertubes," the system of tubes, these are the people who are gonna make legislation, you know, that's gonna have dramatic effects on the flow of information over the internet, and freedom of speech? I don't know, maybe that judgment is incorrect, but I just, I fear that there's, that they're a little out of touch, that they're just the wrong generation to be making this decision. You know what I mean?

J: Yeah, I agree with you, Steve.

E: I don't think you're wrong at all, Steve. I share that exact same . . .

J: (using a very elderly voice) When I was a boy . . . (laughter)

E: Interslice.

Homeopathic Burn Treatment (0:27:35)

S: One more news item. This one, we talk about homeopathy all the time, but sometimes an item comes up that is just so absurd we can't resist pointing it out. So recently there was an article exploring the homeopathic treatment for burns, for burn injuries. What do you think that treatment is?

J: Fire!

S: Yes.

E: Hot scalding water.

S: That's right.

R: A little bit of fire, just a little bit. 'Cause you know, you have to take some away, for it to be effective.

B: OMG.

S: Yeah, so you actually add more heat to the burned area in order to get the body to heal itself.

E: Huh.

S: Even more, which is, of course, the exact opposite of what you should do.

R: No, that's why they stick hypothermic patients in freezers. (laughter)

S: Right, and when you're having a hypoxic injury, you know, you have too little oxygen to the brain, you should deprive the brain of even more oxygen. That way it'll heal itself. (laughter)

E: Like cures like. If you break a leg, break your other leg.

R: If you get rabies, just have a bunch more animals with rabies bite you.

S: So, I guess, is homeopathy the hair of the dog kind of approach to medicine?

R: Yeah, it is. But not as delicious, I believe. (laughter). In fact, actually that's very astute, particularly for this, for this burn one. Because and you know, as you go on to explain what the burn one is all about it'll become clear to the listeners, but the idea of hair of the dog is if you get drunk, then the next day if you're starting to experience a hangover, if you have a little bit of whatever you were drinking the night before, that's supposed to cure the hangover. When in fact what it probably, if it works at all what it probably does is just gets you drunk again and just sort of prolongs, you know, your drunkenness to the point where you don't have the hangover for at least another couple of hours.

B: That's exactly what happens, yeah.

R: So, yeah, you think it's making it better, but in fact you've actually, sort of made it worse.

S: No, you haven't made it worse, you've just delayed your, you just don't notice it for a while.

R: Yeah, so.

B: Actually I think drinking alcohol when you have a hangover is the only surefire cure. (laughter)

R: Well, besides the true homeopathic remedy, drinking a lot of water.

J: It's not really a cure, Bob.

B: Yeah, it's a cure. The hangover will go away. You will be drunk. You're delaying the inevitable, you're just pushing back the inevitable hangover, but it will get rid of your hangover . . .

S: Well, but let's be clear. Let's be clear. It's actually not treating the hangover, the hangover has multiple causes, but the primary cause is

B: Dehydration?

S: Yeah, well it's dehydration, but it's not just dehydration. There's actually breakdown products of alcohol that are toxins. And it's really those, that's what really causes the hangover, and it takes time for your body to metabolize those. So until your body gets rid of the downstream effects of the alcohol itself, that's why you have the hangover. By drinking more alcohol you're just adding more of the substances to your body, so it'll take even longer to metabolize them and get rid of them. It's not treating that, it's just masking it by making you drunk. Too drunk to notice that you feel like crap, and then you'll feel like even more crap when that drunk wears off, so

R: Which is why this is the perfect analogy for the burn thing.

S: It is.

R: Okay, because. So the homeopathic cure for burning is in fact, yeah, this, these homeopaths are saying that if you get a burn you should put it over a flame, instead of running it under cool water, and that that will make it, that'll stop a blister from appearing and it'll heal faster and you'll get smooth skin and it won't hurt as much. And, the thing is, some of those things are right, in a way. That does not mean that it's something good that you should do. For instance, putting an already burned section of your hand over a flame might make it hurt less as it's healing, but that's because you've turned your first degree burn into a second or third degree burn by burning off all the nerves. So, you don't feel anything anymore because you've destroyed your skin much deeper than you had previously. So in much the same way that drinking more makes it seem like it's working, the next day you're actually making things horribly worse. Terrible idea. Don't burn your burns!

S: Don't burn your burns, yeah.

J: It seems so intuitive, doesn't it? (laughter)

E: Homeopathy is like a 250-year-old running joke.

R: Yeah.

E: In which they're trying, you know, just, trying to compound the ridiculousness on top of more ridiculousness to the point, you know, where will it end?

R: They're like trolls.

J: You know this is one of those examples where people actually hurt themselves, and they'll like it because it's reinforcing their fantasy.

S: It certainly creates the impression that there's no practical limit to the degree to which people can believe in nonsensical things. Just because it's wrapped in some, you know, feel-good ideology, or just because somebody's claiming it. Or because they are overly impressed with anecdotal evidence or placebo effects and they just don't understand how easy it is for us to deceive ourselves, and therefore when they hear a story, "Oh, somebody did this and they felt better. Really? Well it must work!" That's as simple, sometimes, as it gets.

Who's That Noisy? (0:33:14)

S: Evan, bring us up to date on Who's That Noisy?

E: Yes. I must play for you last week's Who's That Noisy to refresh all of your memories out there. Now, remember we were looking for a theme for last week's Who's That Noisy, and here we go!

Tweeting birds. Electronic toy music. Piping sounds.

E: We had some very, very interesting guesses this week. Many of them were wrong. Only one was correct.

S: Only one correct answer.

E: Only one correct . . . but that's all you need. You only need one.

S: So it's easy to determine which one was the first.

E: (laughs) It was a, you know, a series of, three distinct noises. One apparently not having much to do with the other, but, what they all have in common is that those are . . . clocks! Those are noises that actual clocks make. Those are their alarms, in a sense. The first clock you heard was care of the National Audubon Society, it's their bird clock, in which there is a bird at each hour position on the clock, and when that hour strikes, you get the bird tweet. And in this case, we heard the robin. Steve, you knew that was a robin, right?

S: Oh, yeah.

E: The second one was a little clip from the La Crosse alarm clock. It's this red, sort of lit up, obnoxious looking clock that plays a lot of different tunes and the light flashes red in sync with the tune that it's playing. The third one is the world's only steam-powered clock, that resides in Vancouver, and on every hour it plays a little whistling tune. So I clipped a little piece of the whistling tune, stuck it there at the end of the noisy. The world's only steam-powered clock. Fascinating. Ashley, a listener from Waukesha, Wisconsin, correctly guessed. So, she must have been to Vancouver at some point, and that was perhaps the giveaway. And saw the clock or heard the clock. In any case, she's the winner. Well done, Ashley. Oh, other guesses included science fiction movies, UFO communications, someone said that these were all noises from Disney productions or Disney movies, cell phone ring . .

S: So I think everybody, everybody related that third one to the Close Encounters noise.

R: Yeah.

B: Yeah, it's the first thing I thought, too.

E: And now, this week's, brand new, fresh off the presses Who's That Noisy?

(noisy background; man says:) There's no such thing as a psychic"

E: That's it.

S: Okay, thanks, Evan, that's interesting.

Quickie With Bob (0:35:43)

R: I demand a quickie with Bob!

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Voiceover: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. You can also check out our other podcast the SGU 5x5 as well as find links to our blogs and the SGU forums. For questions, suggestions and other feedback please use the contact us form on the website or send an email to info@theskepticsguide.org. If you enjoyed this episode then please help us spread the word by leaving us a review on iTunes, Zune or your portal of choice.

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