SGU Episode 52

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SGU Episode 52
July 19th 2006
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 51                      SGU 53
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
SGU Forum

Introduction

Voice-over: 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, July 19^th, 2006. This is your host, Steven Novella, the president of the New England Skeptical Society. With me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hello!

S: Evan Bernstein...

E: Good evening, everyone.

S: And back from her whirlwind tour of Europe, Rebecca Watson...

R: Hello again, everybody.

S: Rebecca is jet lagged, but still and also lost her luggage on a train to somewhere. But managed to crawl her way back for the podcast tonight.

R: I did. I put forth great amounts of energy and money just to get back here in time to do this podcast.

S: Well, we appreciate it.

E: I know that feeling.

R: As you should.

S: No, no skeptical encounters in Europe you were telling me.

R: Not really. Although we were, I went to a wedding while I was out there with Sid Rodriguez from the Skeptics and the Pub. And we did encounter an interesting couple who we were talking to them about a lot of different pseudoscience claims. And they have a lot of weird beliefs. And we kind of managed to talk them out of a few, I think, without causing too much disruption to the wedding ceremony.

S: Oh, good work.

R: It was pretty well done, I think. And mostly thanks to Sid. He's very good at the, about being very nice while completely destroying people's world views. It's inspiring.

B: That's a good talent.

R: It is.

S: Well, in the news today is Bush's first video of the new stem cell bill. I've talked about stem cell research in the United States in the past and how Bush basically was a executive order essentially banning federal funds for stem cell research except for embryonic stem cell research, except for the lines that were already existing. And it's become increasingly clear over the years that these existing lines are inadequate. The Senate, correctly, I think, although largely in response to public pressure, put together a bill essentially to override that, to approve federal funding for embryonic stem cell research with some common sense and political but meaningless restrictions. And Bush vetoed it. What you said he was going to do. I don't know, and that was just today, so at this point, I don't think there has been time yet to have another vote in the Senate to try to override the veto. I don't know if the vote exists. Any of you have heard anything about that?

E: I heard they do not have the number of votes necessary to override the veto.

B: Did you guys hear that at Bush's post veto shindig, he had a, there was apparently a lot of kids, a lot of babies and kids that they brought there that were adopted as an embryo before they were thrown out in these fertility clinics, just like to just to drive home that sea. I'm doing the right thing here. Look at these.

R: Wait, he had a post veto party?

B: Well, some sort of gathering, whatever it was.

E: A political show certainly it was.

R: Carl Rove last week said that the reason why Bush's vetoing the bill is because recent studies show that researchers have more promise from adult stem cells than from embryonic, which is just utter shit. It makes no sense. It's completely wrong.

S: It's totally wrong. I mean, embryonic stem cells are the most totipotent cells that there are. It is certainly possible that we may be able to derive stem cells from adult sources in the future that do everything we need them to do, but that's not where we are right now. Right now embryonic stem cells are the best. We just don't know where the research is going to go. That's the whole point. That's why it's called research. We don't know the answers yet. The most insane thing about this whole thing is that what we're talking about is using embryos that are going to be thrown out.

B: That's where it was down to Steve. In some quotes he was saying how these are people and their value is matchless and all this stuff. I'm thinking if these are people, why isn't he outraged that these embryos are being thrown out routinely?

E: Exactly.

B: Why isn't that outraged and why isn't he outlawed? Why does he permit it?

S: He would never get away with shutting down fertility clinics. You start telling people that they can't have children. I think that's politically untenable. They just pretend that that issue doesn't exist, basically.

E: Cherry picking.

News Items

Precious Bodily Fluids (5:00)

• www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/7/18/100645.shtml?s=ic
  

CDC fact sheet on Fluoridation

S: There was in the newsmax.com, which is an online rag in my opinion, they published an article New Warnings About Fluoride. Basically, trying to say that there's new research that shows that the fluoride that we're getting in our drinking water is unsafe. They're quoting an article that was published in Prevention Magazine, which is another dubious publication. There's really nothing new in all this. This goes back to the Precious Bodily Fluids comment in Dr. Strangelove. It's still as crazy as when it was said in the movie. The fluoride that we're getting in the water is well below the safe limit. It's possible that we're getting more fluoride from other sources these days, so maybe we don't need to put as much in the water. You could quibble about little details like that. There is zero evidence that there is any real health risk from the fluoride that we're getting in the water. There's tons of evidence that it is very effective in fighting tooth decay. There's a small minority, but very vocal, relentless minority of people who just, for whatever reason, do not like this very concept of violating our Precious Bodily Fluids with anything foreign.

E: Here's what they have to offer. They say, these few. There are disturbing studies while not offering conclusive proof. They have linked fluoride to serious adverse health effects, including bone cancer and osteoporosis.

S: And they cite as a resource, Dr. Blaylock.

E: Russell Blaylock

S: Who publishes a newsletter by Newsmax, too. That's an internal matter.

E: I noticed that.

S: He's a total quack. This guy is just selling his own cookie ideas. He publishes his "newsletter", the Blaylock Report, which is just his crazy ideas. He is not, this is hardly a respected source of medical information.

E: He warns the fluoride, maybe linked to retardation in children and numerous cancers. Well...

S: All nonsense.

R: So he must have drank a lot of fluoride as a child.

S: That's one of those issues that will always crop up every now and then.

World Jump Day (7:17)

• www.worldjumpday.org/

S: Tomorrow is a big day, you guys ready for tomorrow?

B: Oh, yeah.

E: Oh yes.

B: I got my jumping shoes ready to go.

S: That's right. The World's Jump Day. Did we talk about this before a year ago on our podcast?

E: We did. We brought it up last summer. I recall when we found it just trolling around the internet.

S: It's already world jump day again. I mean, the year went so fast.

E: It did. It did.

S: This is for those of you who may not have heard. Online organization basically trying to convince as many people as possible to all jump at the exact same time. The idea is that it will push the earth into a more favorable orbit and fix global warming, lengthen our days, which makes no sense and whatever cure would ails you. It's just pure internet mythology.

E: Yeah. Well, I mean, it was like a running joke that sort of part of life of its own and got adopted, I guess, by some people who tried to really figure out if there was some sort of possibility of some promise to something positive to be yielded out of everyone jumping at the same time to try to shift the orbit of the earth.

S: Does anyone really believe this?

R: No, I don't think anybody actually believes this.

S: This just a running joke, right?

R: It was started by a performance artist. It's kind of like a flash mob sort of thing. It's just a fun.

S: And the scientist is a made up character. The scientist promoting this.

E: It's just kind of interesting to see how one little thing, I guess, which was really supposed to be just a joke amongst his peers or whatever turned into a worldwide internet phenomenon unto itself.

B: Guys the physics behind it, pretty interesting. I went to MadPhysics.com, interesting website. The guy did just, what's the expression back at the napkin?

S: Back at the envelope.

B: Back at the envelope calculations. It's, some of it's pretty good. He estimated the amount of people that would, that might be jumping. And he was saying that the mass of everyone jumping would be about trillion times smaller than the mass of the earth, which is roughly equivalent to 2% of the energy released from one megaton of TNT, which is like a modern H bomb. Now surprisingly, the earth, the earth's orbit would be displaced by a little bit by all this, assuming that they're all jumping on one side and not completely cancelling each other out being all over the planet. It does actually move the earth. But unfortunately, it would move it a tiny fraction of the radius of a hydrogen atom. So I think that's pretty negligible.

E: The tsunami that hit last year had more of an effect as far as the movement of the earth than everyone on the earth could ever have by just jumping up and down.

S: Right. We're exploding all those hydrogen bombs you've exploded over the years.

B: You think that would have whacked our orbit many, many times over.

S: It's silly.

Questions and E-mails

Follow up on Neal Adams (10:11)

Dear Dr. Novella,I was absolutely floored by the interview of Neal Adams. While I would not suggest having such a guest on every episode, I do think it was a nice change of pace. I look forward to other such shows. I would almost suggest that a two part approach might be effective. Episode one would be the interview, and episode two would be an analysis of the guests arguments and thoughts.Keep up the excellent work.
–Howard Lewis Hershey, PA

Normally, I thoroughly enjoy your podcasts and they are usually excellent. The last one though, was a real disappointment. Neal Adams was such a crackpot that he wasn’t even interesting. His source of science information must have been people like Velikovsky and Von Daniken. I didn’t hear him say a single thing related to science that was correct. I don’t mind hearing alternate views or theories but Adams was just silly.On the other hand, I really liked the podcast with Steve Mirsky and the one last week with Gerald Posner was great.
–Jim Matthews, Australia

S: Let's go on to emails. We had a lot of response from last week's episode, our interview with Neil Adams. Without a doubt, we had more response to that interview, to that segment than any other interviewer segment on our podcast.

B: Even more than the 9/11 ones, Steve?

S: More than anything else by far, wasn't even close. Many, many passionate responses. We debated before having Neil Adams on. It was, obviously we had concerns about interviewing someone with Neil's beliefs. The interview was difficult. I mean, we was pleasant throughout, but it was hard for us to counter all of the nonsense that he was viewing. So we were concerned about what the response was going to be. Although I thought that it was a very interesting segment. All things considered for me. I thought it's fascinating. Skeptics have this fascination towards pseudoscience, kind of like watching a car wreck on the side of the road. And Neil Adams was like a hundred-car pile-up. But when you get to read two representative emails from different ends of the spectrum of what we received, the first comes from Howard Lewis from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and Howard writes: "Dear Dr. Novella. I was absolutely floored by the interview of Neil Adams. While I would not suggest having such a guest on every episode, I do think it was nice change of pace. I look forward to other such shows. I would almost suggest that a two-part approach might be effective. Episode one would be the interview, and episode two would be an analysis of the guests, arguments, and thoughts. Keep up the excellent work." Email number two comes from Jim Matthews in Australia. And Jim writes: "Normally, I thoroughly enjoy your podcasts, and they are usually excellent. The last one though was a real disappointment. Neil Adams was such a crackpot that he wasn't even interesting. His source of science information must have been people like Velikovsky and Vandanikin. I didn't hear him say a single thing related to science that was correct. I don't mind hearing alternative views or theories, but Adams was just silly. On the other hand, I really liked the podcast with Steve Mirsky, and the one last week with Joe Posner was great." So Jim didn't like the interview, Howard really did like it. I did do a little bit of rough statistics on all the different emails we got, and also we have many, many messages on our message boards about this. And about 85% of the people who voiced an opinion thought that the interview was a good idea. They liked the interview, although about 80% of them described listening to the interview as painful. (laughter) Even though they thought it was educational, they thought it was physically painful for them to listen to it. And 20% said that they wanted to reach through their computer screen and strangle Neil Adams during the interview.

R: So you're saying approximately 70% of our listeners are a masochist?

S: Basically. It was hard not to have a strong reaction to Neil Adams. Now for those who may not have seen that, we do have a notes page for each episode. And it does provide links and more information about each episode. For the last week's episode, Neil was pretty insistent on continuing the discussion. He was unhappy that we talked about him after he was off the interview and wanted a chance to respond to the things that we said. So it's okay, let's continue this in writing. So we've had a number of back and forths, and I'm still posting them, so go back there. There's three exchanges on there right now. So three of his responses and three of my responses, where we get to the nitty gritty of some of his actual claims. Although it's starting to deteriorate at this point, not sure how much farther they will go. I mean, seriously, his responses are starting to get more and more just flat out incoherent. I do think it is what I thought the value of it was, was just seeing how disconnected from reality a belief system can get. Someone who professes to support science thinks he's doing science, but the methods are so flawed. It's really basically cut off from any real connection to empirical evidence, and it just drifts off farther and farther away from reality until he, this guy honestly feels that he has disproved all of modern science, basically. That every working scientist believes things which are profoundly and easily demonstrated to be totally wrong. And he can see all this. Working scientists can't see. That's basically his view. It's just again, it's fascinating.

E: I think it's also necessary, I think, our audience and other people need to see exactly the kind of, forgive me, whacking this. People claim to have his knowledge in science, whereas it's clearly, clearly not. It's almost like a zoo. You go and you see the animals behind the cages, and here we are at the Neil Adams cage. Just look at this animal is coming up with them doing it. You sit back and you just kind of watch it. I just found it fascinating and entertaining, frankly. And I think most of our audience did.

S: Again, most data, though, I certainly understand that it was tough to take. We may have people like that on again, the future, I promise you, we will be few and far between. We try to make sure that there's something interesting to gain from them.

Women in Science (15:36)

How does the Bad Astronomer, et. al. intend to colonise space with manned space flight? Does this presume that all the women will be frozen embryos when the colony is founded, awaiting there first breath of life once all the heavy lifting is done? And if the spacemen have to raise the girls to maturity, wouldn’t that be kind of incestous – pedophilic when they start trying to increase the colony’s population? Yech. And too, if they’re willing to go without female companionship for that long, isn’t it safe to assume that all the travellers would be gay?Maybe I’m stupid, after all my brain has probably been fried by all my years of studying first biochemistry and now engineering. It’s got to be hard on my female brain, especially since apparently I don’t like engineering… (beware the sweeping generalization, my friend. that, more than anything, will feed the arguments of the Believers).My point here is HOW could you POSSIBLY have SERIOUSLY gone from pondering the lack of women in science faculties (by the way, they’re there, they’re just not in positions of power) to using the phrase MANNED SPACE FLIGHT? Yes, yes, fine, so everyone knows you can assume that Man, with a capital, refers to the human race, but really, when you close your eyes and say it, does it really conjure images of men _and_ women? How hard do you have to work to shove even the token woman into that picture? be honest. Do you truly think any young women listening to your podcast are going to automatically see _themselves_ as part of a ‘manned space flight’? (note that I don’t use the capital here, because it isn’t actually audible).And please don’t belittle this issue, words have a lot of power, and each one comes with a dictionary definition, and the colloquial connotations that it gathers during use. Using inclusive language makes an enormous difference.By the way, check your history or cross-cultural studies; there’s no way that in 20,30 or 40 years we’ll be worrying about getting more men into academia, because once a profession becomes dominated by women, the repect it get from society, along with its pay, perks, and power, plummet. How many ‘male nurses’ do you know?Cheers,
–Arleigh Jamieson Vancouver, B.C.

S: One more email before we go on to our interview. This one comes from Arley Jamison from Vancouver, British Columbia. This isn't regards to the discussion we had with Phil Plait, the bad astronomer. I can't read the whole thing and the whole that will be on the nose page, but it's a little bit long. It's going to cut to the chase. Arley writes: "My point here is, how could you possibly have seriously gone from pondering the lack of women in science faculties?" And then in parentheses, she writes, by the way, they're there. They're just not in positions of power. To using the phrase, manned spaceflight. Yes, yes, fine. So everyone knows you can assume that man with a capital refers to the human race, but really when you close your eyes and say it, does it really conjure images of men and women? How hard do you have to work to shove enough even the token woman into that picture, be honest? Do you truly think any woman listening to your podcast are going to automatically see themselves as part of a manned spaceflight? And please don't belittle this issue. Words have a lot of power and each one comes with a dictionary definition and the clinical connotations that it gathers during use. Using inclusive language makes an enormous difference. By the way, check your history or cross cultural studies. There's no way that in 20, 30 or 40 years, we'll be worrying about getting more men into academia because once a profession becomes dominated by women, the respected gets from society along with its pay, perks, and power plummet." Well, good alliteration. "How many male nurses do you know? Cheers, Arley."

E: Wow.

S: So Rebecca, you actually wrote a response to that?

R: Yeah, yeah, just a few things that I noted about AJ. I think she signed herself as. Well, first of all, regarding our addiction, I'm a writer and so I agree that words can be really powerful and one should always consider the colloquial use of word choice and how it might influence your message. And we use the word manned to talk about space flight and it's currently used colloquially to mean populated with humans, which is exactly how we chose to use the word. Whether that word conjures in your mind an image of male or female scientists on the spacecraft is influenced far more by your perception of what a scientist looks like than anything that's actually contained within the word itself. As for AJ's question about how many male nurses we know, I personally only know a few, but that's understandable since the percentage in that profession is I think 5 to 7%.

S: I think up to 8% or something or 9%.

R: Okay. I think that AJ might do well to read up on the history of nursing and why it's a profession that has always been dominated by women. The fact that nurses have always traditionally been women means that her point about profession is losing lust or once they're dominated by women, it doesn't really work. Nursing was never a well respected profession until we relatively recently began educating our nurses. And as an aside, if I told my friends who are nurses about her assumptions that their pay, perks, and power have plummeted, they'd get a really good laugh assuming that they weren't horribly offended. Nurses are actually more in demand than ever right now and a skilled nurse has her or his choice of workplace.

S: And their respect has actually increased dramatically in the last 20 or 30 years.

R: Yeah.

S: It's really dramatically increased.

R: Yeah, because they've become a necessary part of the medical industry.

S: And the culture of medicine has changed. I mean, it was sexist 30 or 40 years ago and it's experienced that the sexual revolution just like every other part of society has.

R: Right, because nursing used to be the job of women to comfort and care for people, but not in any real medical sense. But then as our knowledge of medicine has increased, we've come to need nurses to have that important knowledge as well. So we've educated them to actually be an integral part of the industry.

S: And I just have to disagree with the broader point too about women begin to dominate in academia and medicine, which is happening, is measurably happening, that these areas medicine and academia are going to decrease in power, perks, and pay just because they're a woman in it.

R: It's a completely absurd proposition.

S: Yeah, I don't buy that.

R: Nothing you can point to in the past that shows that is happening and using nursing as an example is just kind of absurd.

S: Officially on the Skeptics Guide, and I know all of us personally, none of us are sexist. We're all feminists, if you will. We all believe in the equality of the sexes and think that. And we stated categorically during that episode that people should have the ability to pursue their dreams, their potential without restriction, without being constrained by someone else's sense of what they should be doing. But however, I personally really think that the political correctness thing gets taken too far. Everyone knows that we're talking about when we say manned space flight. And honestly, the reason why I would say that and not say personed space flight is only because it just sounds silly.

R: Yeah, personed isin't actually a word, so.

S: I guess Arleigh would characterize this as belittling the point, but it's not belittlingly. It's a legitimate question about what the real impact of it is. Do we really need to completely rewrite the English language to erase all of our historical origins? To basically pretend like the history of Western civilization didn't exist the way it did. I don't think that we need to do that in order to achieve equality. That's the difference of opinion about that. It's not belittling.

R: I just think that there are some things that people just choose to be offended. And if you make the decision that you're going to be offended by something you will, and I think there's so much else out there that's still not equal between the sexes that we need to concentrate on fixing that focusing on silly things like certain choices of words that really don't harm anyone, I think that's counterproductive.

S: Right, so you're saying you should choose your battles a little bit better?

R: Yeah, and to be clear, we talk about how there's a difference between the sexes and how men in general have certain attributes that women don't have and vice versa. And that's never to say that specifically a woman can't excel in a certain category, above and beyond what her male counterparts might be able to do.

S: Right, it's not. It's not that it's even about individuals, it's just a statistical statement.

R: Right, we're humans, there's sexual dimorphism, and that's just what happens is just reality.

Interview with Bill Bennetta ()

• www.textbookleague.org
  
  Bill and his team at the textbook league are a watch group organization on the textbook industry. They rate and recommend textbooks. Bill joins us to discuss the sorry state of science textbooks.
  

Science or Fiction ()

Question #1: Researchers have discovered a bacteria that can extract gold from dirt. Question #2: Material scientists have developed a nanofilm that can form tubes 100,000 times stronger than carbon nanotubes. Question #3: Researchers have developed a technique to use microbes to make electricity directly from corn husks.

Skeptical Puzzle ()

Last Week's puzzle:

When is a boomerang a type of dinnerware?

Answer: If the dinnerware is a saucer - when Kenneth Arnold reported the first modern UFO's sighting he described them as boomerang shaped but described their movement as skipping like a saucer. The term flying saucer was coined, and from that point forward the saucer shape has become the standard icon for alien spacecraft.


New Puzzle:

If you are floating in a boat on a pond, and you are holding a 20lb cannon ball - if you drop the cannon ball overboard into the pond will the level of the pond rise, fall, or stay the same?

(Contributed by listener John Maddox)

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society. For information on this and other podcasts, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.

References