SGU Episode 392

This episode needs: transcription, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing!

How to Contribute

SGU Episode 392
19th Jan 2013
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 391                      SGU 393
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
M: Massimo Polidoro
Quote of the Week
No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past at my back.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Links
Download Podcast
SGU Podcast archive
Forum Discussion

Introduction

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, January 13, 2013, 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: How's everyone tonight?

S: Good, how are you, Evan?

R: Super.

J: Good.

E: Fine. Thank you, thank you, fine.

S: Evan, I noticed you stopped your foreign language hellos.

R: That's true.

E: Well, are you saying that I should have kept that up as a regular segment? It was more of like an experiment.

S: No. I just noticed that you stopped.

R: We were just wondering if you ran out of languages. (laughter)

J: Evan, what are you experimenting with now?

E: (laughing) I'm not necessarily experimenting with anything right now, but, Steve, I'm glad you mentioned it. You sort of rekindled my memory on that. Perhaps I will bring that back, or try something a little bit different.

S: I wasn't trying to encourage you, I was just making an observation.

E: Very astute. Nothing gets by you, Doctor.

This Day in Skepticism (1:05)

R: Speaking of segments, this day in history, on January 19, 1915, one George Claude patented the electrodes used for neon lights, which was what allowed him to perfect the neon sign that quickly became ubiquitous.

B: Very ubiquitous. (laughter)

R: Yeah, and for a while he had monopoly on it because he was so good at the neon sign making. Do you guys know what the first neon signs made in the United States were?

J: Yeah, for beer.

E: Eat at Joe's.

R: Unfortunately

B: Open

R: It's way more boring than any of those. Well, maybe not more boring than "Open." Good guess, Bob. But, it was for a car dealership called Packard. So the sign just read "Packard." Boring. But they cost $1,250 each. Quite pricey.

B: Wow.

E: Wow.

R: They were extremely.

B: They must have been a sight, though.

R: Apparently, yeah.

B: I can imagine.

R: People would just stop and stare at them for hours because people were dumb back then. (laughter) Easily amused.

J: Speaking of cool things that cost thousands of dollars, just on a side note, Kingston came out with a one terabyte thumb drive, costs $2,000.

B: Yes. I saw that.

E: Two thousand dollars!

B: Two grand! Oh, my god.

E: Where are you gonna put that thing? Duhaaa. Doh.

J: It's a terabyte, guys. It's a terabyte. I would wear it around your neck.

E: I would lose that in about three days, I think.

R: Easily, yeah.

E: I should not have that device.

B: I would Velcro it to my body. I would not lose that.

R: I can't even have a one terabyte external hard drive because I'll lose it. God forbid. Yeah. Thumb drive gone.

S: Let's get back to neon lights, because I'm more fascinated by those. So do you guys know how neon lights work?

J: Sure I do.

E: Gases.

S: All right, go ahead, Jay.

J: Well, you electricity.

S: Um hm.

E: Very good.

J: And it hyper-stimulates the gas

S: (laughing) Hyper-stimulates!

J: Yes. It stimulates the gas in there, which is neon gas and the particles hit, they hit each other, right, from their moving really fast they hit each other and they produce light when they hit each other.

S: No. Good try, good try.

R: That sounded really good, though.

E: Yeah, it was pretty plausible.

S: The electrical current, which has to be at a very high voltage, it ionizes the gas. It strips an electron out of the outer shell of the neon gas.

J: That's what I said. Yup.

S: Yup. So then you have ionized gas, and with the, electrons essentially get kicked up into a higher energy state. And then, but that's unstable. So when they come back down to a lower energy state they give off a photon of energy, that's how they get rid of that energy and because the electron shells are quantal, right, it's a quantum, you have to go from one very specific state to another very specific energy state. It gives off the exact same amount of energy in each photon and that equals the frequency of light, and so neon gives off, always gives off that exact same frequency of orange-y red light. Other gases of course will give off different energies and they give off different colors. Right.

J: That's right, exactly right, Steve.

E: Argon.

S: Thank you, Jay.

B: That's kind of how a laser works, in a sense. Where you have the population version where the electrons jump to higher levels and then they spit out the electrons when they go back to their ground state. But they're all in the same frequency, though, very very specific frequency, and it's like a collimated beam, so that's what makes a laser light. Similar.

S: Right.

J: So, Steve, are you saying that the electrons rock down to Electric Avenue and then they take it higher?

S: That's exactly what happens, Jay. Now,

B: Oh. My. God.

E: You should write a song about that, Jay.

S: You can tell what gas is in

R: I gotta give that one credit, actually. That was good.

B: Wait, yeah.

R: That was really good.

B: Didn't you just like totally riff off of that?

J: I'm a fan, you know.

R: Credit where it's due.

S: So you can tell what kind of gas is in a neon tube, they're not, of course, all neon, based upon what color it is. So helium, for example, gives off an orange-y white light, neon of course is the orange-red, argon is a violet pale lavender blue, krypton (gotta love krypton) grayish, then a really pretty blue light is given off by mercury vapor. But mercury vapor also serves another purpose. Do you guys understand the difference between a neon light and a fluorescent light?

J: Aboslutely. (laughter)

S: So, this is interesting, too.

E: There's fluoride in the fluorescent light.

S: No. So a fluorescent light is essentially a neon light that has mercury vapor

J: Mercury vapor.

(laughter)

S: As the gas, and it's charged enough so that the mercury vapor gives off ultra-violet light.

R and J: Ultra-violet, yeah.

E: Ultra. Ultra-violet.

S: And then you can coat the inside of the glass

J: Insides (laughter)

S: with a fluorescent substance. The ultra-violet light from the mercury vapor hits that and

J: It hits it, yeah.

S: that fluoresces in whatever color it is. So that you can

B: That. Yeah, that, yeah.

J: That's good stuff right there, Steve.

E: Wow. So a one-terabyte thumb drive. (Everyone pretty much loses it)

J: Yup. How 'bout that, Evan. You could literally put your entire music catalog in your thumb drive and take it with you. Not that you'd need it. But you had it.

B: Wait, wait. How big is your library?

R: You could literally put an entire textbook about neon lights on a terabyte.

E: Fascinating stuff.

S: Multiple.

J: That is cool, though, Steve, and I wanna test you one year from now to see if you remember all that stuff you just read to us.

S: Okay. Do it. (laughter)

B: I can hear Steve talking to Cerie: "Cerie, remind me in three hundred and sixty-three days to look up fluorescence again and neon lights."

E: All I'm hearing is Electric Avenue in my head.

J: All right, so who's the guy that sang the song? Who remembers his name?

E: The Jamaican guy, ummm

R: Yeah.

B: Wink Martindale.

E: Eddie something. Eddie….

J: Oh, you're so close!

R: Eddie Capitan.

J: That song was written by—Eddie Grant.

S: Eddie Grant.

E: Eddie Grant.

J: I almost forgot him.

R: Never heard of 'im.

E: Grant.

B: Is that Amy Grant's brother?

S: Jay, did you know that when you ask a question and nobody has the right answer, that you're supposed to wait a very specific amount of time before you give the answer yourself? You know how long that is?

J: How long is that?

B: Three seconds.

S: Three seconds. That's right. Wait three seconds.

E: That's the courtesy window?

R: I think it depends on how funny we're being about the wrong answers. (laughter)

E: Right.

S: That's true. That's a variable that's often not included.

News Items

Predicting Murders (7:36)

• Minority Report has arrived: Maryland and Pennsylvania using computers to predict future crimes

S: But Jay, you're gonna tell us about predicting murders. But not just predicting murders, predicting murders like in the movie Minority Report. Even though it has absolutely nothing to do with that, but go ahead.

J: So, yes. Richard Berk, who is a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania has developed software that's making predictions about future criminal behavior. Up until now, the way that this was typically done was that parole officers would have the record of that criminal or whoever was committing the crime. They'd figure out, okay, how dangerous is this person, how many times have they committed crimes, and all that. And that person on their own with seemingly not much of a standard would say, okay, I think that they need about this much supervision and they give them, it's like a halfway house type of deal where they're like, okay, you need to live here or you need to come in and check with me every week or every month or whatever. That variable, though, doesn't really help much. And it's not effective. Or so Richard Berk thinks. So what they're doing now is he has taken 60,000 crimes and he did very smart research on them and he was looking into the patterns that exist. What Professor Richard Burke found was that a huge factor in somebody's predictability of future crimes isn't a crime that they committed when they were 30 but it was the crime or crimes that they committed when they were in their formative years, when they were young adult, teenagers. That's a really significant predictor of what they're gonna do for the rest of their life. So, if you're a 30-year-old, the last ten years, fifteen years, according to Berk, are irrelevant. It's much more important to take a deep dive into the person's upbringing and all the things that they did when they were young. Which I found to be very interesting. It speaks a lot about how, you know, I don't want to get into the whole nature versus nurture discussion, but you think if you provide a good household for your children and you steer them in the right direction you could be saving them from criminal life of the future, right? Two states in the United States have adopted this software already. Baltimore and Philadelphia are now using it, and D.C.'s soon to pick it up and start using it as well. He said that his software is replacing the quote unquote ad hoc decision-making and should identify eight out of one hundred murders.

S: That's not a lot.

J: No. But, that's eight more people than what would be predicted by a parole officer. The thing, I'll go back to what you said, though, Steve, one huge thing about this article is how freaking lame the Daily Mail is. Not that I have any expectations from these guys, but, I mean, it's so crystal clear that they're using a famous movie that everybody know, throwing in the title of their article just to get people to read it, and it worked on me.

E: Worked on me, too.

J: Yeah, but this is the media using Hollywood to support their readership and show interest. I found this to be a very interesting article and probably would have read something more clever anyway. It's just laziness on the author in my opinion.

S: Yeah, and there's five pictures from the movie Minority Report in this article.

B: Oh, my god.

S: Seriously, it's in the title, it's all over the article, all these pictures, you know. It has nothing to do . . . in the movie, which would be a good one for us to review by the way,

E: Absolutely.

S: Very good portrayal of near future technology. But anyway, there were three quote unquote precogs who literally predicted a specific person committing a specific murder at a specific time and place, has absolutely nothing to do with what they're talking about here, which is statistically predicting who is likely to commit a murder again, based on some computer algorithm, taking into consideration evidence-based factors. Two totally different things.

J: Yup.

S: You're right.

J: Lame!

S: Very typical, you know. I agree, the lazy science reporters always have to find some movie angle that somehow relates to whatever technology or breakthrough or thing they're talking about. Right, so right, Bob, so every time there's any metamaterial breakthrough, it's

B: Uh!

S: a Harry Potter invisibility cloak.

B: That's their go-to analogy. The comparison. They can't not say it.

E: Do they feel that the audience isn't sophisticated enough to understand what they might be talking about otherwise unless they have some sort of

S: No! It's just cheap headlines.

B: No, they want a hook. It's all about being a hook. They want to hook you in. Something to make you read it. No matter what it takes.

J: Sure. Evan, think about it, they spend $100 million or whatever to make Harry Potter and everybody knows about it and most people enjoy it and like it and they're just throwing it out there, like

R: I think it makes people more likely to read it and less likely to understand it.

S: Right.

J: Yeah.

S: Right.

E: Yes.

S: So what's the point?

E: The opposite effect, yes.

S: Interestingly, the one movie analogy to technology that I think is actually legitimate that I've never seen a news reporter actually make is transparent aluminum.

J: Right.

E: That's right.

S: There have been several companies or whatever, researchers that have come out with some form of something that's based on some aluminum alloy that's transparent and hard—it is freakin' transparent aluminum from the Star Trek movies and they never make that analogy. I don't understand that.

R: I guess 'cause nobody saw those movies.

S: I guess not.

J: Yes, we did. (laughter)

B: The Voyage Home, that's like, probably like, hugely popular.

R: Was that the one with the whales?

S: Yup.

E: Yes.

R: Yeah, I like that, that was my favorite.

J: There you go, all right.

E: There was a lot to like in that movie.

B: G-e-e-ek (laughter)

R: Oh my god, I'm such a geek.

S: The other thing that struck me about

E: Wasn't directed by William Shatner. That's a great thing to like about that movie.

S: The other thing that struck me about this article, and it wasn't mentioned in the article—this is the kind of thing, kind of analogy they should have made—is this is saber metrics, right? This is Moneyball. You guys see the movie Moneyball?

E: Yes. Great movie

S: That would have been the better movie to tie this to. So this is the same thing. Instead of a Gestalt gut feeling using parole officers and judges, whatever, to say, yeah, is this guy likely to be a criminal again or not, they use an algorithm based on evidence of predictive factors. That's the perfect analogy to Moneyball where instead of using scouts and coaches and owners to see who's the really talented player out there, they use actual statistics to predict their effect on the chance of winning games.

R: Yeah, but that wasn't a science fiction movie. That was something that's already happening, so maybe it's not as big of a draw. 'Cause it's not like oh, here's something that we only dreamed of ten years ago in the movies, but now it's real. You know. So I think that that's why

S: Yeah, I know, but they're going for the cheap headlines, even though it is

R: Yes.

S: It is confusing and it actually distracts from the actual content of the science. I'm talking about making an actual meaningful analogy to something else that helps people understand and put it into context.

R: Right.

S: Which is what they're not doing.

J: Yeah, but Steve, they're going by the Rotten Tomatoes rating. Okay?

Lead and Crime (14:49)

• America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

S: The next news item is one that we got perhaps the most emails about in the last couple of weeks. Have you guys seen the Mother Jones article on the connection between lead and crime rates?

J: Yeah. I'm really happy we're talking about it because I'm not crystal clear on what the truth is here.

S: So this is an interesting one. Not the first time a reporter has done a deep dive on this, where they looked at the research over the last twenty years, looking at the association between lead exposure in the environment and crime rates. And specifically, lead in gasoline, because that was responsible for a major peak in environment lead which was then banned in the U.S. and most countries, and then subsequently declined. So we have this nice curve, this nice mountain, right, on a graph, where in the late 1930s, early 1940s, you have the introduction of leaded gasoline, which was introduced to reduce pings and improve performance in big cars. That peaks around 1970 and then early 1970s it was phased out and then banned, and so it falls way off. That graph look remarkably similar to crime rates throughout the country, but shifted by 23 years. There are a number of researchers now who claim that this correlation holds up really well, no matter how you look at it. You look at it state-by-state, even city-by-city, and in other countries, that this correlation between the introduction and removal of leaded gasoline is shifted 23 years from crime waves, later on. When I was first asked to review this article, obviously I approached it with typical skepticism, but, especially this kind of thing, it seems a little simplistic, blaming something as complex as crime on one environmental cause and just the whole notion of the environmental cause of problems like this is very attractive to the media, but they tend to be overblown, these kinds of things. But, I have to say, I looked into this as deeply as I could and independently went through the published literature, as much of it as I could, and it seems to be a fairly strong consensus that there actually is an association. What we do know is that lead definitely is a neuro-toxin. It causes acute lead poisoning. It's fairly easy to identify it cause seizures and encephalopathy. It may be harder to detect chronic lead poisoning, which definitely exists and causes a decrease in IQ. It's been associated with a decrease in executive functions, so you get symptoms like ADHD, which itself is associated with higher crime rates, criminality, inability to modulate one's behavior, higher aggression. So you end up-- and the effect is greater on boys than girls, which is also mirrors the crime situation. So you end up with a lot of men who-- and this is especially hits lower socio-economic groups, both because of just geography, just where they are, but also there are studies which show that people in a lower socio-economic group don't have the resources to get diagnosed and treated for lead toxicity so they're more likely to have the adverse effects from it. So you have this perfect storm, low socio-economic group, low IQ, high aggression, leads to crime. One question that remains though, is what is the, if there is a contribution to crime from lead, what is it? What is the percentage? And it kinda depends on how you look on it. The one review article that I read cited the figure of 20% of crime at its peak, like around 1990s when the crime peaked, so about, again, 20 or so years after leaded gasoline peaked. At the peak it may have been responsible for as much as 20% of crime that was going on in this country.

J: Wow.

B: Wow.

S: Yeah, which is significant. But still it means 80% of crime is not related to lead. It's due to other things. But you could also look at it as what was the contribution of lead to the increase and subsequent decrease in crime over this period of time, and those estimates vary widely, but hover around 50%. I think the article itself in Mother Jones was pretty good, and it was by Kevin Drumm. He did mention all the usual caveats that you should mention, that this is correlational data, it cannot establish cause and effect. These kinds of studies are horrifically complicated. There can always be factors out there that we're not accounting for. Lead exposure may just be a marker for something else that we're not even, that we don't know to even control for at this point in time. So you can't really prove that it's the causative agent here. And this seems to be the consensus of all the researchers that I read. So the other question, then, is, is there anything that we need to do about this now? If this is all from leaded gasoline and it's already been banned

E: Yeah, what about all the other lead in the environment that we. . .

S: Yes

J: Like lead pencils.

E: It's all around us. Well, you know.

S: Or lead D&D figures (garbled) mentioned.

E: There's that. There's lead ammunition.

S: (laughs) Yeah. That kind of lead can be very dangerous. So one primary source of lead is lead paint, which was also banned. But old buildings may still have it. Especially on window sills. So leaded windows. Lead is sweet, so young toddlers, young kids, may lick it or put it in their mouth, and it's sweet, so that they may eat it.

E: Yeah, those Chinese toys.

S: yeah, Chinese toys.

E: Watch out for those.

S: Anyone renovating an old house, it's not like asbestos, you know. You're renovating, it's banned, there's no new source of it but if you're renovating an old house you may actually increase the exposure to the lead. And so that needs to be taken into consideration. It needs to be done properly. By contractors who know how to deal with that. The other issue is, and this is probably a harder issue, is lead in the soil. 'Cause all that lead that we put into the air in that lead gasoline went somewhere, and eventually just settled in the soil and now it's still there. But cleaning up lead from soil would be a much bigger problem.

B: Yeah. Huge.

E: Ooo. We need a microorganism that will eat the lead and turn it into

S: Gold! (laughter) Yeah, no, I thought of that, too, Evan. We need bacteria that will eat up the lead.

B: Or nano machines.

J: Well, how much is out there, Steve, do they even have an idea?

S: Yeah, it's a lot. It's enough that it probably is still affecting people. And I just read two reports, both of which concluded that for every billion dollars we spend getting lead out of the environment, there will probably, it will probably save society ten billion dollars. Time times as much, or more

B: Whoa!

E: Wow.

S: later on, if you're talking about the cost of crime, and all the negative consequences of

R: It's a shame that we're normally so poor at making short-term sacrifices for long-term benefits like that. See global warming.

S: Yeah, right.

J: So, Steve, is the lead that's out there in the dirt, I mean is this why I'm having differences with my f'ing boss? (laughter)

S: It could be, Jay, I don't know, are you eating dirt?

E: But if you do it in such a way so that you concentrate on the higher population areas, right, you get more bang for your buck.

S: The most bang for your buck.

E: Rate of return. So, that should be looked into.

S: Yeah, interesting. While I was researching this, I also researched a lot about the role of lead toxicity in the fall of Rome. Have you guys ever heard that?

B: Whoa.

J: Yeah, well, that was from their containers, right? They were drinking wine out of lead goblets and containers.

E: Oh, and they went mad?

B: I thought it had to do with guys with beards or something.

E: They went all Caligula.

R: Guys with beards?

S: So, as you might imagine, it's more complicated.

B: Barbarians?

(laughter)

R: I'm like, their beards had lead in them?

(laughter)

S: Are you talking about the Vikings with the Scottish accents? Those guys? Yeah, I can't remember now, but an author even wrote a book about blaming the fall of Rome on lead toxicity.

E: What, they used it in the pipes for the water that they uh,

S: So that's one, one thing is that they did make pipes out of lead. That's where the term "plumber" comes from. You know, Pb is lead. The root is for lead.

B: Holy crap.

S: But, here's the thing. Romans at the time knew that lead was poisonous.

R: They were just super dumb. They also had vomitoriums, fyi.

S: They did.

E: So those were handy.

S: But a lot of water pipes were made out of terra cotta, specifically to avoid too much lead. The water running through too much lead. And they had the slaves, of course, do all the lead mining, so they would live horrible short toxic lives.

J: God, I didn't even know, I had no idea that they knew.

E: That's how they knew.

J: I thought that the whole thing was that they had no idea.

S: No, they knew. And they just thought that in the small amounts that they were getting it probably wasn't a problem.

B: Wrong!

S: But it was. They did have leaded wine, and had lead additives in the food, again, maybe for the sweetness.

E: Sweetener.

B: I'll take my wine unleaded, please.

S: Unleaded wine. But I did read an article calling into question the scholarship of that claim that it was a deliberate additive. And they concluded that from contemporary writings, that they probably were just storing wine in various containers, lead, bronze, something else, and lead was just really easy to work with. It was a by-product of their silver minings. They had lots of it. So it was probably not a deliberate thing. It was just they were storing wine in these lead containers and, hey it kind of made it taste good, too. And then they actually specifically mentioned Caligula, Evan, it's funny you mentioned his name. The Roman aristocracy may have had a progressively lowering of their IQ over the years, and that may have contributed to the fall of Rome. But again, like with crime, the fall of Rome is a complex historical event. You can't blame it on any one thing. And probably impossible to tease apart now what contribution lead toxicity made to the decadence and fall of Rome.

E: Right. One thing led to another. (laughter) I thought that's where you were going, Steve. I really did.

(garbled)

B: Nice.

Biggest Thing in the Universe (25:27)

• Biggest Thing in Universe Found—Defies Scientific Theory

S: Well, Bob, you're gonna tell us about the biggest thing in the universe.

B: Yes. An international team of astronomers based in the U.K. claimed to actually have discovered the biggest or largest known structure in the universe, and no, it's not Jay's shoe collection. It's a cluster of 73 quasars spanning a staggering 4 billion light years. Four billion! That's, does anyone know how many millimeters that is? (laughter) I do. It's 38 octillion millimeters, in case you were wondering. So, you guys, I don't think we've ever really dove deep into quasars. I'm sure you guys know what they are. They are pretty amazing things. They're essentially young active galaxies who central core is feeding its super-massive black hole at the center at such a rate that it turns itself into pretty much the most powerful luminous and energetic thing in the universe. You can imagine this titanic swirling accretion disk around this super-massive black hole, and because there's a huge gravitational gradient, there's lots of friction, so things get really hot, so it spews out all this radiation that we can easily see from billions of light years away. Pretty amazing. Quasar stands for Quasi-Stellar Radio Source.

E: I didn't know that.

B: I think we first thought it was a type of star since it seemed kind of point-like and there was no obvious extension beyond that, like you'd see in a normal galaxy, and that's because the core is just so bright, it just outshines the rest of the galaxy.

S: Yeah, and at first, we didn't know that they weren't in our galaxy. They could have been really close.

B: Right. They were so redshifted, they had no idea what the hell they were looking at, and then when they accounted for the redshift, they said oh my god, there's so much expanding space-time between us and these things. It shifted everything, it redshifted everything so much; they had never seen anything redshifted that much. These are actually a thousand times brighter than the Milky Way, so they're just

E: Wow

B: incredibly, incredibly luminous. So this discovery raises a couple questions. One's a little silly, one's serious. First of all, one of the first things I thought, if it's so big, why haven't we seen it until now? (laughter) And, I didn't actually find a great answer to that, but I suspect it's kind of subtle. We're only talking about 70-some-odd quasars. We're not talking about a huge number of objects here. But second, and most important, 3 billion light years, or 38 octillion millimeters, is so big for a structure it's making scientists reconsider one of the most basic ideas about space, and that's the cosmological principle. And that means that if you examine the part of the universe that you're able to observe, then that's a good enough sample to be confident that that's what the rest of the universe looks like. So, and that has held us well for many generations, but now, now I'm not so sure how valid that is. This thing is so big, in fact, that it seems to me like it'll have to be reconciled with the cosmological principle. And calculations they did based on this principle and some other theories suggest that the biggest structure should only be about 1.2 billion light years across. So this thing is much bigger than it really should be. So it seems like a very interesting opportunity to learn something new about this.

S: Bob, I know the answer to this, but this is bigger than even the biggest galaxy supercluster. Is what you're saying.

B: Well, that's actually my biggest pet peeve with this, is that, I just had a problem with biggest or largest when describing a structure, because, I don't have a huge problem with it, but to me "longest" would kinda be more appropriate. 'Cause, to me, I still think that superclusters are the biggest structures. Superclusters are essentially clusters of clusters of galaxies. And up until now, at least they were considered to be the biggest things ever found. And they can, these things are incredible. They can have thousands or perhaps a million galaxies, I found in the Universe Today website. A million galaxies in them, like the Virgo supercluster that the Milky Way is in. So, now granted, they're usually not much bigger than 250 million light years across, which is only, what, about a sixteenth of the length of this quasar grouping. But we're comparing 73 bright galaxies to hundreds of thousands, or perhaps a million. So I guess the word "biggest" is ambiguous. But still, it's amazing, over 4 billion light years across. I'm just kind of surprised that there's a gravitational influence between all of these. I didn't calculate the spacing between, the average spacing, what they would have to be. And it's kind of complicated, it's not a line, of course, it's kind of this complicated structure. Somewhat complicated. But still, that's an amazing size, and it's so big it's actually bigger than we thought things could get, so it's fascinating to see. It'll be fascinating to see what comes out of it.

Million Dollar Challenge (30:11)

• Defending the Million Dollar Challenge

S: So, Evan, more people are attacking our beloved million dollar James Randi paranormal challenge.

E: Yeah, the latest one is by a fellow named Steve Volk. Anyone ever heard of Steve Volk.

J: No.

R: Nope.

E: No. 'Course you haven't, because he writes about the paranormal. And he floats along unnoticed in the paranormal soup that's out there with thousands of other like-minded authors. He's a free-lance writer, journalist, and he's made appearances on radio shows, usually in the Pennsylvania area, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and he was recently on Joe Rogan's podcast

J: Oh-ho-o. Of course.

E: Yeah. He's been on Coast-to-Coast. So, I don't know, so maybe a few people have heard of him. But in any case, he wrote a book about the paranormal, and it's called Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Paranormal and Couldn't.

B: How hard did he try?

S: And he failed, yeah.

E: He saw a ghost as a kid and he hasn't been regular ever since. That's the gist of the book. And if you think about it, it's kind of an argument from ignorance, right? "So, I can't explain it, therefore it must be the paranormal."

B: Exactly, exactly.

E: Yeah. Well. And Mr. Volk has a blog called Steve Volk: The Generalist. And let's see, on January 9, he posted a blog titled The Joke of the James Randi Challenge: In Defense of Sheldrake. He dubbed Randi the "cranky elf of the skeptical movement."

R: I think Randi would accept that, actually. (laughter) The cranky elf of the skeptics. Yeah, I think he would like it.

E: Volk wants to let us know that he wants to address in this blogpost what is likely the worst least credible thing that Randi promotes, which is his long-running challenge in which he vows to give $1 million to anyone who can prove paranormal claims in a controlled test. He says the challenge has been muddled by the very boundaries of science allowing Randi-ites, I guess that's us, Randi-ites to say paranormal claims don't hold up to scientific scrutiny while conceding, when pressed, that the challenge isn't science. I think Volk entirely misses the point here.

S: Yeah.

E: The challenge is an effort to design a statistically sound protocol for any given extraordinary claim which greatly minimizes bias and/or fraud.

R: He seems to want the challenge to, the million dollars to be given to anybody whose results are statistically significant in a scientific sense. Like if you were to do this, and publish it in a journal, that should get the million dollars. But he forgets the fact that the whole point in the challenge is to find proof that the paranormal exists, and that proof needs to go beyond a reasonable doubt, which is why the test protocols, which are agreed upon by those parties before they move forward, and there have been, plenty of people have applied to take this test who have agreed to these protocols, yes, I can do this with the regularity stated in the protocols.

S: Let's take a look at this another way. Like if you want to use a p value of .05, which is a traditional cut-off for statistical significance in a scientific publication, that means Randi would be giving a million dollars to every twentieth applicant

R: Yeah.

S: of the million dollar challenge, which is obviously not practical. So essentially, what Volk says is in order to demonstrate a paranormal abilities and equating this to, this is why he invoked the name of Sheldrake, the kind of psi experiments of Sheldrake or Dean Radin or Daryl Bem, that in order to demonstrate that to the threshold that the million dollar challenge is using, you would need to conduct years of research and thousands of trials. Again, completely missing the point. The point of the million dollar challenge is not to conduct publishable scientific research, not to look for subtle effects that would require lots of trials, and it's not just trying to point the way to future research where we publish preliminary findings or findings with, where one paper in and of itself, even if you use a .01 or a .001, a one in a thousand chance, that can't be the ultimate cutoff used to dole out a million dollars. And, Rebecca, what you said is right as well, it's very telling of the examples that Volk gives to support his points. So he, for example, is whining about the fact that the preliminary test is usually set to a one-in-a-thousand threshold, and the final test is set to a one-in-a-million threshold. So if you're gonna win the million dollars, there's a million-to-one chance that you'll do it by chance alone. Although, Banachek is considering lowering those thresholds a little bit, like to one-in-a-hundred or one-in-a-hundred thousand, which is still, no one's ever gonna get that by chance. But in any case, he makes a claim that an applicant demonstrated their ability to statistical significance and yet still failed the challenge, and then he gives a link to an example of that. What he linked to was this study that was actually conducted by Richard Wiseman. He never mentions the fact that it's not Randi doing these studies. And the threshold for that test was set at fifty-to-one. Fifty-to-one, which is like right in the middle of statistical significance for a publishable study. And she failed to reach the fifty-to-one threshold. Further, this was the girl with the x-ray eyes, who claims a hundred percent accuracy.

E: That's a great point, Steve. The claimants, and Volk misses this entirely, they are often claiming these huge, high rates of success: eighty percent, ninety percent, one hundred percent. So can we keep it in that context of what the claimants are actually saying they can do compared to the kind of tests that JREF works, you know, to devise with these claimants?

S: Yeah, often the thresholds are set much lower than what they claim they do every day.

B: Hey, guys. There's another side to this coin, though. Don't forget it's not just a matter of weeding out statistical anomalies. One of the things that Randi is probably one of the best people at is weeding out fraud. Something that publishing science is not necessarily designed to do because it's relatively rare, and eventually, it'll come out. The fraud will come out, even if you get it published and peer-reviewed, it'll happen. So that's another aspect to this that I think is a really great reason that warrants such intense P values.

J: It's a big wham fest. Like the guy thinks that Randi's holding back the money and skewing results or putting people up to poor tests to show that they're wrong when they're right or they have, that they don't have the ability to do these things. But he clearly can't even make an assessment on what's happening because he doesn't get it. And he can't make an assessment on what the people are displaying, what their claim is versus what the test is. He doesn't get that protocol at all. He doesn't get that there has to be a protocol and it has to be difficult or you're not proving anything.

S: Right. And the final thing is, he's trying to say that they're muddying the line, the borders of the definition of science. It's like, no, the definition is fuzzy in this application. The JREF, the million dollar challenge, is using scientific methodology to muliple trials, proper blinding, statistical analysis, in order to evaluate these claims. But it's not doing a rigorous scientific study, the kind of thing that would get published. That's the difference. So it is scientific methods, but it's not scientific research. It's evaluating a specific claim. And the thresholds are set not only to minimize the chance of somebody winning a million dollars by a lucky guess, but also to make sure, to minimize the false negative, to give them the chance of properly demonstrating their powers. You come up with some threshold that balances those two. And the claimants agree to it ahead of time. They think they're gonna win. They believe that they can do this. They even give them a dry run half the time, say, yeah, my powers are working, this is great, this is gonna work, and then boom, it doesn't work. So what it really is demonstrating is that the powers that the claimants are claiming, the applicants are claiming, vanishes under proper observing conditions because they're not freaking real. That's what it's demonstrating. Not scientifically proving anything. It's just demonstrating that phenomenon, the self delusion of these people. They all have their post hoc excuses for why it fails, it's all lame. But, and it is a publicity stunt. The guy's saying "Oh, this is just a publicity stunt." Duh. Yes, this is a publicity stunt. (laughter) This is demonstrating quite clearly for the public that these people can't do what they say they can do. That's what it's doing. It's not doing scientific research. But, you're right, Jay, it's a wham fest, that's all it is.

E: Call a whambulance.

Turkey Bans Evolution Books (39:12)

• Turkey's science state council halts publication of evolution books

S: Speaking of which, Rebecca, how's evolution teaching going in Turkey?

R: Not so great.

E: But it's Turkey.

S: The one country that has a greater belief in creationism than the U.S. Right?

R: Turkey is, of course, the home of the Atlas of Creation by Adnan Oktar. Beautiful, absolutely beautifully done books, if you can ever get your hands on one I highly recommend it. Filled with ridiculous inaccuracies.

S: Isn't that the book that showed like a fishing lure as a real specimen.

R: Yes. I believe I've got the right one. I apologize if it's the wrong one, but, yeah.

J: They showed a fishing lure as a what?

S: As if it were a real insect or something.

R: Yeah, there's a series of photos showing animals that they claim haven't evolved at all, and one was a fishing lure.

E: (laughing) Did they have a rubber ducky? (laughter) Look at this duck!

S: Some good scholarship

R: One of those blow-up clowns. (laughter) Yeah, so, bad news out of Turkey. The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, its very large organization that was originally formed as a council to guide the Ministry of Defense. So it's very large now, more than 2,500 researchers work at fifteen different research institutes and centers. They also have a publishing arm, and up until recently that publishing arm carried books on all kinds of scientific disciplines. But recently books that involved anything to do with evolution and Darwin are suddenly listed as out of stock, and apparently they have no plans to restock them. So it has now become incredibly difficult, apparently, for people in Turkey to get their hands on books by people like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, James Watson, Alan Moorehead. These are all banished.

S: Yeah, it's unfortunate, and the thing is, of course, it feeds on itself, this kind of ignorance, because if people growing up in Turkey cannot learn about evolution they'll grow up not knowing about evolution. And be more receptive, of course, to creationist ideas. I think that that's happened to some extent in this country as well. Especially in parts of the country where the teaching of evolution is not popular. Guess what. People don't understand the theory of evolution, so why would they object when politicians and preachers tell them that evolution is bunk. They don't know enough to counter creationist arguments.

R: None of news reports I read involved school textbooks, although admittedly some of those links were, in those articles were originally in Turkish and I was struggling through Google Translate. But in the recent past they have had some nutso things in Turkish text books that are actually given to kids. Things about how Charles Darwin was Jewish and using that as the basis for anti-semitic attacks on him. Like actually in books that Turkish children receive. This news story is about books that adults would be reading, but it doesn't look good for kids either.

Quicky With Bob: Apophis Update (42:31)

• Apophis asteroid: Large space rock 'will not hit in 2036'

S: All right, well before we go on to Who's That Noisy, I would like a Quickie With Bob.

B: Ooo. Thank you, Steve. This is your Quickie With Bob. Apparently even the potentially real doomsday scenarios are dropping by the wayside, even those based on science. Scientists have concluded that the asteroid Apophis will not hit the earth. Not only in 2029, but also not in the, its 2036 fly-by, which is very nice. If you may remember, way back in 2004, when we first heard of Apophis, scientists were saying that there was about a 2.7% chance it would hit Earth in 2029. As often happens, though, when you find a new asteroid or comet, new data that scientists examine, even if it's from an old archive that everyone forgot about, can give you critical new data to further refine projected orbits, and this is exactly what happened with Apophis when the scientists ruled out 2029 a little while back. Still, though, 2036 was still potentially a big problem, especially if asteroid passed through the so-called p-hole, which we've mentioned, which is the location near Earth, which would have given Apophis just the boost it needed to come back around seven years later and hit us with the equivalent of about a half a gigaton of force, which is not an extinction-level event, but still not a good day at all. That would have been pretty nasty. So most recently, scientists have combined the older data with this most recent fly-by data from earlier this month, and they determined that there is less than one-in-a-million chance of Apophis hitting the earth in 2036. So it is, can be very confident in saying that it's not gonna happen. One surprise for me was that Apophis was actually twenty percent bigger than they had thought. The albedo, or the coefficient of reflectivity, of Apophis was not what they expected and that skewed their size estimates.

S: Yeah, so it's inherently dimmer, which means it must be bigger to be giving off the amount of light that we're seeing.

B: It's going to be the closest approach of an asteroid the size of Apophis ever. 19,400 miles away. That's actually within the orbit of satellites and there's some concern that some satellites can be destroyed. Thanks for listening, guys. This has been your Quickie With Bob, and I hope it was good for you, too.

S: All right, thanks, Bob.

Who's That Noisy? (44:40)

• Answer to last week: John of God

This section is in the middle of being transcribed by banjopine (talk) as of {{{date}}}. To help avoid duplication, please do not transcribe this section while this message is displayed.

Interview with Massimo Polidoro (47:20)

• Massimo Polidoro, director of the Italian Skeptics

Science or Fiction (1:00:13)

Item number one. A recent study finds that subject's memory for Facebook posts were significantly greater than for book entries or faces. Item number two. New research finds that some children diagnosed at a young age with autism may outgrow the diagnosis entirely. And item number three. A new study finds that graphic cigarette warnings have minimal effect, and are no more effective than text-only warnings.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:16:53)

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past at my back.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announcements

NECSS (1:17:18)

• NECSS - Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism

Podcast UFO (1:18:00)

• Podcast UFO #33. Skeptic, Evan Bernstein

References