SGU Episode 361

This is the transcript for the latest episode and it is not yet complete. Please help us complete it! Add a Transcribing template to the top of this episode before you start so that we don't duplicate your efforts.

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

How to Contribute

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 Monday June 11th 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: Make it so!

This Day in Skepticism (0:26)

June 16 - Captain Picard Day

• http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2009/06/16/captain-picard-day/

S: Why do you say that, Evan?

E: I don't know, why do I say that?

R: Well maybe because today is Captain Picard day, apparently.

B: For real!?

S: Captain Picard Day?

B: Who decided that?

R: Apparently someone on Evan's facebook page decided that.

B: Ah.

E: (laughs) They did. Sent me the link and everything.

J: Ensign Crusher.

E: Shut up Wesley.

R: Apparently there's a Star Trek episode and Captain Picard day is a thing on the episode and it was on stardate 47457.1 which apparently matches up with June 16th but apparently there are also other opinions about what that date would be, like November 4th or January 8th or January 10th so I see this a lot like the...

E: Throw a dart at a dart board.

R: ...a lot like how the creation of the universe happened on October 23rd, you know at exactly you know, which year that was. It depends on how you read the texts, basically. But apparently some geeks think today is Captain Picard day.

E: It's a geeky form of numerology.

S: Is there a specific formula for stardate conversion?

B: There can be, but it varies between various series and movies, so yeah just don't use it.

R: It depends if you're the people's front of the federation or the federation's front for the people.

J: (laughs) the front for the people of the federation.

R: Yeah, it depends which you subscribe to.

E: And you wonder why Leonard Nimoy isn't doing conventions any more. This is the stuff he gets.

S: Well what's supposed to happen on Captain Picard day?

R: Well, you talk about how awesome Captain Picard is.

J: You basically put on the British accent, telling people to engage, to disengage.

E: Make it so.

J: Wesley, you know, you just.

R: You tell Worf he's wrong.

S: But apparently in the Star Trek episode, the Next Gen episode, on Captain Picard day, you're supposed to host school children and show them what Starfleet is like. So we could turn this into a science/skepical thing and we could say on Captain Picard day we teach school children about science and skepticism.

R: We do that all the time though.

J: Yeah I mean we do that every week, Steve.

B: Every day is Captain Picard day.

(laughter)

E: It sort of is. School children though, you know, specifically.

News Items

LiDAR (2:52)

• http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/06/08/lasers-help-discover-lost-city-gold-sought-by-conquistadors-in-1500s/?intcmp=obnetwork

S: Well Jay, tell us about LiDAR and the city of gold.

J: Have you guys ever heard of Hernando Cortez?

E: Uh, Cortez, Cortez.

S: Um, not Juan Valdez.

J: No.

S: Hernando Cortez.

J: Does it make you think of anything, I mean does the last name Cortez remind you of gold maybe?

E: Cortez's gold from Pirates of the Caribbean.

B: Yeah.

J: Right, no...

R: Is that where our history of Spanish conquistadors comes from?

(laughter)

J: Yeah, you have to watch Pirates of the Caribbean.

B: Caribbean.

J: No, but this guy back in the 1500s, he was trying to locate this place where there was supposed to be a lot of gold, it was like an ancient ruin that he was looking for. And that ruin actually is in the Mosquitia region of Honduras, it's called the lost city of Ciudad Blanca. Wow.

S: The white city.

B: The white city.

J: The white city, right.

E: The white city, blanca.

J: Anybody that can speak Spanish will know that I pronounced that horribly wrong. So what happened was, I guess he was looking in the right continent, but he didn't know exactly where it was and the way that they were exploring back then, with the machete going through the woods, walking through the woods, well that's basically the same way that a lot of archaeologists would hunt around in areas like that today and of course that costs a ton of money, there's dangers involved, there's health dangers, there's physical dangers involved in doing that kind of leg work. So what happened was a company came out with a very interesting and a very effective way of being able to look at the terrain that is underneath all of the green growth that most of these regions are completely covered in. So the technique they used is called LiDAR and that means Light Detection and Ranging. The technology is being used to do things like, well they're saying that they would be able to use this technology to map disaster areas or track erosion that's under rivers and shallow parts of the ocean and of course the potential for military spying is there as well. For now though, the archaeologists have their hands on it and other than them, like I said, exploring with machetes and whatnot, this just is very fast and it's very safe to use of course they're flying over in an aeroplane and what they do is they shoot billions of lasers over whatever, like of course depending on the size of the acres they're covering they would be using a lot more but they shoot like I think about 100,000 laser beams a second at the ground.

E: Wow.

S: And you know Jay, they could use that technique to map underwater ruins and they could mount the lasers on the top of shark's heads.

E: (indrawn breath)

J: That's right, and these would actually be frikkin' laser beams.

S: They would be frikkin' laser beams.

J: On their heads, which would be awesome.

E: Be a dream come true.

J: So they shoot the laser beams at the ground and some of them, light bounces back and they can tell how, the distance by how long it takes, and you understand how that works. They can get it down to like about 4 inches or 10 centimetres which is really accurate for this type of technology, it's probably a lot more accurate than they need it to even be to get a good reading out of it. Now this isn't the first time that it's been used successfully, they also used it in 2009 when a team was working on Mayan ruins and they actually successfully used it in a proof of concept it worked very well, and now they're using it on this location, they actually think they've found the ruins and I guess now they send in a crew to get in there and do it on foot, but now they know exactly where they're going. So no gold has been found yet or anything, but proof of concept, it's a fantastic technology, it's very fast, I mean they took, I think they flew over the location for two days and very soon after that when they uploaded the data into the machine it was like yep and here's the ruins and here's the topography, very accurate, and incredibly cost effective, so they're going to be using this a lot more and they're actually, the company that's behind the whole thing is dumping a lot of time and energy into doing research in other areas like I mentioned before about other applications.

R: Interesting. You know, LiDAR is also the name for the animal that's a combination of a Lion and Tidar?

S: Lion and Tidar?

B: Oh boy.

E: Tidar?

R: That was a funnier joke in my head.

B: Yes.

(laughter)

B: One would hope.

R: I've been sitting on that joke for the last five minutes, giggling to myself, but it didn't live up to the hype once I said it out loud, sorry.

S: But you do always need to, when you use any kind of aerial mapping to identify potential locations, you do need to then confirm it on the ground. There's just no way around that.

E: That's true.

S: You don't have to be hunting through the jungle Indana Jones style with a whip and a couple of six-shooters.

R: That is the most stylish way to do it but...

S: Yeah.

R: ...lots of people die.

E: It is, yep and a full orchestra accompaniment.

S: Have you guys seen Prometheus yet, the Aliens prequel?

B: No.

E: No, I have not.

B: Did you?

J: Not yet, I want to see it.

R: No spoilers.

S: I did.

B: You did, how was it?

J: Tell us if it was good, come on.

E: I'm hearing mixed reviews.

S: It was alright. It was not epic.

E: Argh.

R: Well that's a huge disappointment.

S: The coolest thing about the movie was that it featured LiDAR, they had these little devices that would zip around shooting lasers all over the place and 3D mapping the place that they were exploring, it was LiDAR 100 years from now basically. That was the coolest thing in the whole movie.

B: Really?

R: That's sad that that is the coolest thing in the movie?

B: Isn't it that ship?

E: It is kind of sad, yeah well...

Extremophiles (8:30)

http://colorado.edu/news/releases/2012/06/08/cu-boulder-led-team-finds-microbes-extreme-environment-south-american

Moral Behavior (16:04)

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/anonymous-cooperative-behavior/

Neck Manipulation (24:28)

http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1734-bmj-articles-oppose-spinal-manipulation.html

Ghost Train (35:39)

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/06/05/Two-teens-killed-in-ghost-legend-game/UPI-55491338925923/

Questions and Emails

Homeopathic Pharmacists(46:30)

Subject: Pharmacists enthusiastically promoting homeopathy

Message: Dear skeptical rogues, I want to address a topic of utmost importance: the medical credibility lend to non-physicians. Pretty much all German pharmacies sell homeopathic remedies. After gathering an relatively big amount of information about current studies and so on, I wanted to confront some local pharmacists with the ethical question: how to justify selling, what obviously doesn't work? The responses were.. unexpected, to say the least. I went to 4 pharmacies, stating that I'm "interested to learn about homeopathy", setting up a little trap, hoping to get the every-day response to a question like that. All 4 pharmacists I talked to, assured me (enthusiastically), that homeopathy certainly works and that it's a great way to go. They were clear that there is not the least(!) doubt about the effectiveness. ( I was even told that homeopathy was, in fact, real medicine and shall not be confused with nutritional supplements. When confronted with the studies, they avoided to address any argument I made. Instead their responses became, ironically enough, some kind of liquid. I heard some arguments from ignorance, some false dichotomies and constantly moving the goalpost. I don't know about pharmacists in the US, but in Germany they have almost the same credibility as physicians. They sell a big variety of (non-homeopathic, actually real) medicine on own judgment and even tell people what dosage to take. Physicians usually only get consulted by Germans, if the state of health appears to be somewhat critical. Most medicine is sold purely on the pharmacists judgment. Today I discovered how full of crap they really are. I would love to hear your opinions on the topic. Especially regarding the potential risk of people selling medicine while basically believing in magic. If you should read from this mail in your show, feel free to change my wording so the grammar is correct. As you can tell, I'm not a native speaker, although I'm trying hard. Keep up the great work! Toni Michel Stuttgart in Germany PS: The reason I learned about this podcast is my older brother, Andreas Michel. He is a really great guy and a big fan of your show for quite some years now. It would be totally incredible, if you could greet him on the air. I probably wouldn't have to buy him birthday presents for the upcoming years.

Science or Fiction (59:26)

Item number one. Christian Huygens was the first to postulate, in 1678, the particle theory of light. Item number two. In 1695 he wrote a book expounding on his belief in extraterrestrial life. Item number three. He invented and patented the pendulum clock in 1657. And item number four. He designed a basic internal combustion engine fueled by gunpowder.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:14:50)

Science does not aim at establishing immutable truths and eternal dogmas; its aim is to approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at any stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved.

Bertrand Russell's "The ABC of Relativity" (4th revised edition).

Announcements (1:16:00)

J: So guys, we have TAM coming up, that's July 12th and at TAM this years we're doing a poker tournament on Saturday night and you can pre-register for that by going to skeptcspoker@gmail.com, send me your name and make sure I have your current email address and we'll be in touch with you about (inaudible)

S: No I understand Jay, this isn't actually the first TAM poker event.

J: Yeah I there there has been six other Thursday night poker events that people were having before TAM and the organisers of that are not going to be there this year from what I've come to find out today.

S: Yeah this is the first one that the SGU is going to make awesome.

J: Yeah you know we're bringing in other skeptics that are going to come in and sit at the tables and we're going to have prizes and we're doing our own version of this. Please do email us, let us know that you're coming. Saturday night at 11 o'clock.

S: All right, thanks Jay and thank you all for joining me again this week.

J: Thanks, Steve.

R: Thank you Steve.

B: Surely.

E: Thanks, Doctor.

S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.