SGU Episode 96

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SGU Episode 96
May 23rd 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 95                      SGU 97
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
'The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.'
Thomas Jefferson 17431826, American Politician
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Show Notes
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 Wednesday, May 23^rd, 2007, and this is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Rebecca Watson...

R: Hey, everybody!

S: Perry DeAngelis...

P: Right'o.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Happy World Turtle Day to everyone.

S: World Turtle Day.

J: I'll turtle you.

E: It's the slowest day of the year.

J: What the hell are you talking?

E: World Turtle Day began in 2000 and was started by the American Tortoise Rescue, which is a rescue organization in Malibu, California, blah, blah, blah. Turtle Day is celebrated worldwide, especially among those for whom the turtle is a symbolic animal. People such as the turtle-related group known as the Goffles may celebrate Turtle Day in a variety of manners, some of which are dressing up as turtles, saving turtles caught on highways, and racing hares and rabbits.

News Items

Dr. Novella on Skeptiko (1:12)

• skeptiko.com/index.php?id=24
  

S: I just wanted to mention that my interview on Skeptico is up.

J: Yeah.

S: And I think it actually came out pretty well. I don't want to talk about the interview because I don't want to steal a thunder. Just listen to it if you're interested. Skeptico is basically a pro-paranormal podcast. But Alex, the host, does interview a lot of skeptics, and he interviewed me a few weeks ago, and now the podcast is up. And I just have to say that he did give me all the time that I wanted to speak, so he did a very good job as far as that is concerned, so if you're interested.

B: Great interview. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

S: Thanks. And we'll have, of course, the link on the info page.

Scientists Urge NHS to Drop Homeopathy (1:48)

• news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6683489.stm
  

S: We have a very good piece of news coming out of the UK. This is a follow-up to a piece actually we talked about a few months ago. There is a professor, actually a professor of pharmacology, Gustav Born of King's College, London. And he and some of his colleagues wrote an article, I think in October of 2006, criticizing the National Health Service's coverage of homeopathy. And now he has written an open letter to the NHS basically urging them to remove all funding for homeopathy in the National Health Service.

J: Excellent.

S: It's excellent. I have to applaud Dr. Born and his colleagues for standing up for science and reason. Homeopathy, for those of you who may not know, homeopathy is about two centuries old. It's pure pseudoscience. I've always thought of it as the most glaring, worst example of pseudoscience within complementary and alternative medicine. If there was one thing that the scientific community could gang up and eradicate, that would be it. And I'm glad to see that some scientists in the United Kingdom are taking aim directly at homeopathy. Homeopathy is also very, very popular in Europe in general and in the United Kingdom in particular, more so even in the United States. So it makes sense that they would take aim at that.

B: But still, it's not a slam dunk. It's 2007 and it's still around.

S: I know.

B: I can't knock that out.

S: I mean, it's exactly as if we were still bleeding and purging over here based upon the humoral theory. And that was done alongside of scientific medicine. It's exactly the same thing.

E: The royal family employs a homeopath.

J: It is still progress though. I mean, it's in the right direction.

S: It is. And since their criticism last year, according to this BBC report, local funding for homeopathy has been on the way. And apparently, local National Health Service hospitals get to decide where they put some of their funding and some of them have been cutting back or eliminating their funding of homeopathy. But now he's calling for the total eradication of it at the national level. He's quoted in this BBC article as saying, while it may be tempting to dismiss homeopathy expenditure as relatively small across the NHS, we must consider the culture and social damage of maintaining as a matter of principle expenditure on practices which are unsupported by evidence.

J: Exactly.

E: That's perfect.

S: Exactly.

E: Right.

B: Now, Steve, who was Dr. Peter Fisher? He had an interesting quote, clinical director of the hospital.

S: He's a clinical director of a homeopathic hospital in England.

B: Okay.

S: He's a homeopath.

B: He's a homeopathic hospital.

S: Yes. Yes.

B: Because he said that it presents a serious threat to the future of the hospital. I could see if it was a homeopathic hospital.

S: Yes.

B: I could see. But another quote he had at the end was, I think there's a lot of evidence it works when it's integrated within the NHS, the national health system. Of course, when it's integrated into something where it's only a minor cog, then it appears to work when it's just a tiny little thing.

S: When you give it alongside real treatments, patients get better.

B: Right. There you go. Imagine that.

E: Imagine checking into the homeopathic hospital. At least you'll never be thirsty, I guess.

S: Right. It's terrible.

J: Good work, boys.

Boy Whos Parents Took Him Off Chemotherapy Dies (5:04)

• www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8P9G0OO0&show_article=1
  

S: There's another complementary and alternative medicine news item in the news this week. I believe we previously discussed the issue of parents whose 11-year-old boy was diagnosed with leukemia and was placed on chemotherapy, and the cancer had apparently gone into remission after about four months or so on chemotherapy. They then decided that they did not want to continue with the chemotherapy because they were concerned about the side effects of the chemotherapy. They opted rather for, quote-unquote, holistic medicine. They found a holistic practitioner who recommended supplements and a special diet to boost the immune system. The county child welfare officials, when they got wind of this, they actually tried to stop the parents from doing this. They took them to court for neglect, which I think is totally appropriate. The parents won the suit and were allowed to make the decision to take their son off of chemotherapy and put them on this holistic medicine regimen. Now, I'm sad to say that the 11-year-old boy has died of leukemia. About four months after going off chemotherapy and going on the holistic treatment, his cancer came back. The parents then did relent and put him back on chemotherapy, but he didn't, unfortunately, go back into remission and he did eventually succumb to the leukemia, which is very unfortunate. This is going around the news now. I'm glad that the press is doing the follow-up because oftentimes you hear about these stories. You hear about the courageous fight with the powers that be or mainstream medicine or the courts or whatever fighting for freedom, and then you never hear, oh yeah, they died a year later or some time later. For example, we also reported on that poor girl whose mother thinks that her recurrent brain tumor is healthy brain because some psychic quack told them that. I hope we hear the follow-up on that as well because it's important, not that we want to hear sad stories, but it's very important for the public to hear the outcome of these cases. However, at the same time, we have to say that these are anecdotal. These are individual cases, and just because they support what we believe to be true, that these holistic modalities are worthless and the parents should have kept their child on chemotherapy that was working. This anecdote seems to support our position. We still have to recognize it is still just an anecdote. It's one case. It's quirky. You can't really draw any conclusions from it.

E: The boy could have died anyways if he still was continuing the chemotherapy.

S: We don't know.

B: Steve, was there any consensus as to kids this age who have this illness and go on this type of chemotherapy that they should expect to live six months or go into permanent remission with a high probability? I mean, is there any indication or sense of what it might have been if you see them chemotherapy?

S: We can make statistical comments. We can make statistical comments that this is a very treatable cancer. It's one of the ones that has really responded to modern chemotherapy, and in fact, he did respond. He went into remission. Statistically, there's a good chance that he would have done well if he continued with the original chemotherapy regimen. The cancer did recur months after going off of the chemotherapy, so it's a pretty compelling sequence of events, but again, you still can't draw conclusions from an individual case, but the statistics say he would have been much better off if he just stayed on the chemotherapy. In fact, his survival rate would have been about 80% had he completed the chemotherapy regimen and it decreased to 40% by going off of it.

B: Jeez he goes on chemotherapy. He goes into remission, and you'd think, wow, if this worked, I wouldn't care what anyone said. I would stick with what worked.

S: Yeah. I mean, it was a three and a half year treatment plan. I mean, it's a long time to be on chemotherapy.

B: Yeah, that must have been terrible, but still.

J: I bet they were getting their information from another source or maybe somebody else involved that was saying you should take them off, and I wouldn't be surprised if others were involved.

S: That's the thing. We talk about what harm does all this nonsense do, and this is the harm. The fact that there are people who have letters after their name who run institutes who wear white coats who work in a clinic are spouting all of this utter crap and nonsense makes it plausible. When parents are scared, I mean, I do feel for the parents in as much as it's got to be terribly frightening to have a child with a life-threatening disease and to be told that they are going to be subjected to years of toxic chemotherapy. I totally get that. But they get victimized by the con artists and the practitioners out there who don't know what they're talking about, who are not practicing scientific or evidence-based medicine, who are spouting utter superstitious nonsense as if it were authoritative, as if it were legitimate. They're basically victimizing parents and, by extension, their children as well as any sick person when they're at a very vulnerable, vulnerable moment by giving them this sort of that rosy path, the path that looks good and it sounds good and it's festooned with nice pretty words like holistic and it really lures people away with this really pretty-smelling nonsense to horrific decisions, you know? And this poor 11-year-old boy, what did he do? I mean, he's being totally victimized.

J: Now, do you think, Steve, that the parents should get in trouble because of their decision?

S: A court said they have the right to make this decision. You can't hold them accountable now. The court already gave them permission to do this, you know? The courts in this country hugely err on the side of the parents. They really do and it's a shame and a lot of states, and we talked about this before, a lot of states have passed laws specifically shielding parents, enabling them to make these decisions. A lot of it stems from the anti-vaccination movement because the parents want to be able to decide not to vaccinate their kids and then not be charged with neglect, but by extension, a lot of other nonsense sneaks past as well.

J: I think it's a human rights issue, you know that? I think that...

S: I agree.

J: I think that restricting health care from children, or not restricting, but giving the parents the right to deny proper health care to their children is an issue much larger than do the parents get to decide or not. It's absolutely a health issue for the children. I think it shouldn't be in the parents, well, where do you draw the line, right? Where the hell do you draw the line?

R: Well, yeah, that's what I was about to say. That's where it stems from is really the somewhat justifiable fear of the government intruding on your personal life and forcing you to do something that you might not want to do.

S: You mean like with the Terry Shivo case?

R: Yeah.

J: The hard question is how do you shield people from their own ignorance without stepping all over their rights?

S: Yeah. It's absolutely true. We are straying into a political topic here because there is a political choice between freedom and protection always, and there is no one right answer. It's what is more important to you. But I do think it's reasonable, even if it's on a case-by-case basis, for the state, for society, for the legal system to say some things are just beyond the pale. Some things are just so ridiculous that people don't need the right to be able to do this kind of stuff. But I think, obviously, we wouldn't allow parents to kill their kid as part of a religious ceremony, right? I mean, so we do draw lines there. But when is withholding basic health care the same as actively killing somebody?

J: Right now. Here it is. We just read about it.

S: It's a fuzzy line. But you know what? The legal system and the world is full of fuzzy lines. If you're looking for crystal clear lines, then you're never going to do anything. There is a point beyond which the withholding of basic care is the equivalent of manslaughter through neglect, basically.

Scientology in Public School (12:49)

• www.sptimes.com/2007/05/20/Worldandnation/Scientology_makes_it_.shtml
  

S: The next news item that caught my attention this week, Scientology penetrating into the public classroom. The story comes from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Apparently, the region, of course, was greatly affected by Katrina. And afterwards, the Scientologists came into the area, came into this one particular school district and pushing them to adopt a learning program that was developed by none other than L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. They in fact employed celebrity Scientologists like John Travolta and Isaac Hayes to help push this through. This teaching program was developed by L. Ron Hubbard to help people learn the material of Scientology, basically to help them study Scientology itself. But then they made it essentially into its own standalone organization and have been marketing it and pushing it as its own study technology. It's actually been adopted by a lot of private schools, but this is the first time it's been adopted by a public school. This is the Prescott Middle School. The concern here is that this is an attempt by the Scientologists to infiltrate the public school system. The study method is completely separate from Scientology itself, but it is the same methods that would be used in being indoctrinated into Scientology itself. So the concern is that they're just sort of preparing the way for Scientology education. Also, I mean, the claims that are being made for this are just absurd, as you might imagine. Now, here are the techniques. L. Ron Hubbard believed that he had identified specific barriers or hurdles to education. One was what he called the lack of mass, which basically means that people learn better if they have some tangible contact with their study material. The second barrier was trying to teach on too steep a gradient, which basically means that people should learn fundamental ideas and principles before going on to more complex concepts. And then the third was misunderstood words or language, that basically people need to understand the language in order to learn the concepts.

J: That's genius. I mean, God, he made that up on his own?

S: These are hardly breakthrough or revolutionary ideas. I mean, these are really basic, well-understood concepts, and he just is taking this like a lot of self-help nonsense. You just package some very commonsensical, already-known notions with your own little jargon. And then the other element that L. Ron Hubbard added, this is like the pseudoscientific element, is that he believed that there were physiological or physical tells that you could use in order to identify what kind of problem people were coming up with. For example, if a student yawns, then that yawn indicates they didn't understand a word in the previous learning section. So, and then a teacher may ask them, if a student yawns, find your misunderstood, which is just I hate that kind of Orwellian newspeak nonsense. But the school district credulously is spouting that, how wonderful it's working, ignoring the fact that at the same time, they pumped a lot of money into the education system, they've gotten a lot of parents to volunteer their time, they reduced the class size so that there's only a student-to-teacher ratio of five to one, well, of course performance and test scores are up. If you put money into a school district and reduce the student-to-teacher ratio and incorporate parents as volunteers to increase the workforce, of course it's going to have an improvement. But one of the administrators quoted as saying, I don't have to justify this. What I care about is that it is working and making a difference for children. I don't need to care about anything else.

J: There's one quote from the article, Steve. It says, other experts though question the quality of the program, and some church skeptics, skeptical of the Church of Scientology, fret that it is an insidious plan ultimately aimed at promoting Scientology. No duh. Anything that this church does is self-promotion. Do you think that John Travolta and Isaac Hayes flew out there and they're like, we've got to help those kids. I mean, no, not at all.

S: Well, let's go on to your emails and questions.

Questions and E-mails

Science is Made Up (17:27)

Hi, I've been listening to your show for about 5-6 weeks now and I like it very much, and I thought I would take the time to re-iterate something that I find interesting that my friend told me at school. I don't know if you've head this theory before but it might get you thinking.

Basically he said that everything we know is made up. From the words we speak to everything we've learnt from science over thousands of years. I'll use the example of gravity. The fact that someone, somewhere at sometime came up with a theory of gravity then proved it with OUR means of scientific testing, proves that there is one single force that is pulling us downwards, towards the sun etc. But think that, that person completely made up the theory, if you think on a grander scale there could be hundreds, thousands of factors that make up what we call gravity that we just can't see or measure using our senses or the machines we build.

Now I'm not saying that gravity isn't gravity, the result we know (e.g. the gravitational pull), what we can't know for sure is the exact factors that make the end result. Unless we know what every molecule, force, atom (ect) in the universe is, and what it does, we cannot confirm that anything that science tells us is actually what it is.

I hope I've explained this well, if not then sorry for wasting your time.

One last note, Im only 16.

Nick Wild
Oldham, UK

S: First email comes from Nick Wilde in Oldham, UK. First I have to say that Nick Wilde has got to be a fake name.

E: Or a porn name.

R: That's a great name. What are you talking about?

S: Yeah, this kid's only 16.

E: Oh, sorry.

S: You can't, it's like one of those names, you can't hear the name Nick Wilde without thinking of The Adventures of Nick Wilde.

E: And his sidekick.

J: Maybe he's just a really cool kid.

S: Or you have to have a 007 after your name if your name is Nick Wilde. Anyway, Nick writes, hi, I've been listening to your show for about five to six weeks now and I like it very much and I thought I would take the time to reiterate something that I find interesting that my friend told me at school. I don't know if you've heard this theory before, but it might get you thinking. Basically, he said that everything we know is made up. From the words we speak to everything we've learned from science over thousands of years. I'll use the example of gravity. The fact that someone somewhere at some time came up with a theory of gravity, then proved it with our means of scientific testing, proves that there is one single force that is pulling us downwards towards the sun, et cetera. I think he means towards the center of the earth. But think that that person completely made up the theory. If you think on a grander scale, there could be hundreds, thousands of factors that make up what we call gravity and that we just can't see or measure using our senses or the machines we build. Now, I'm not saying that gravity isn't gravity. The result we know. What we can't know for sure is the exact factors that make the end result. Unless we know what every molecule, force, atom, et cetera in the universe is and what it does, we cannot confirm that anything that science tells us is actually what it is. I hope I've explained this well. If I'm not, I'm sorry for wasting your time. One last note, I'm only 16. Well, it's actually a very good question.

J: Yeah, it's actually a pretty cool question.

S: Thank you for sending it in. There's a couple of themes in here. One, it almost sounds like a little postmodern where he's saying that science is just a story that we made up. It doesn't really have any special relationship to the truth. And the other is playing off the theme that, well, since we don't and can't know absolutely everything, does science, in fact, know anything? It is true that we don't know what gravity really is. We can't know, know in the absolute sense metaphysical certitude. There is no teacher's edition to the universe where we get to look up the answers in the back and know for sure exactly what the answer is. But that's not how science works. That's not how it pretends to work. Science works by making predictions, by coming up with a model, a theory of how things seem to work, and then making predictions from that model, and then testing those predictions. What science has is not the truth, it's not the answer, it's not metaphysical certitude. It's just the best model that we have so far, ones that have survived all of the tests that we've put before it, one that has made accurate predictions. And you have to also think, so if we have a theory of gravity that makes predictions, and if all of the predictions it makes turns out to be true, then what's the difference between that and something which is really true? What's the difference between a theory that has perfect predictive power but isn't actually true and one that is true? What's the difference?

B: Yeah, that seems to be one of the bottom lines here, Steve, is that regardless of somebody, some where, some when, just completely made up something, the proof is in the pudding. Does it make predictions that can be tested against reality? Can we put a probe and put it into orbit around Pluto? If our theory of gravity says that this is how you do it, and it works, what does that say? I mean, it doesn't matter if there's a thousand external factors that we can't account for, it works in the domain that we're testing against, so that's all that matters. Everything else is Occam's razor, just slice it off until you have reason not to.

S: Right. Although, again, just to be clear, the theory of gravity didn't exactly predict all of our observations, which is why we ultimately needed general relativity.

B: But you can launch a probe and have it find Pluto just using Newtonian mechanics. You don't need quantum mechanics, or I mean, you don't need relativity to do that.

S: Although, I'm pretty sure, Bob, don't they use relativity calculations now, just to get really, really precise when they're sending out probes and stuff?

B: I don't know. Maybe it depends on what level of certitude you need, but I have read in multiple places that you can launch a probe and have it find the planet just using Newtonian mechanics. You do not need relativity or anything like that for that specific task. That's what I've read.

S: Yeah, that's probably true, but I think that they do do those calculations. I was reading recently about one of the probes, I think it's either Pioneer or Voyager, one of the probes that's pretty far out now. It's just slightly off from where it should be, and in order to get that precise, I think they need to account for general relativity, not just Newtonian mechanics. It's off so slightly that they're having trouble figuring out exactly what it might be. It could be something as subtle as an asymmetry in the heat loss from the probe.

B: It's a big mystery. It's a big mystery.

J: Do you think in 100 years or 500 years, we're going to have even more tightened up the theory of gravity or other major broad stroke sciences like this?

B: Oh, I think so. We'll confirm it to even more decimal places and prove Einstein's and Newton's theories to higher levels of certainty, but who knows what something new might come up, some sort of invoking other dimensions or string theory or whatever that you can't predict.

E: It's certainly not going to go the other direction. We're not going to find out one day that, oh wait, there is no gravity. It's really something totally different. That's not going to happen.

S: Exactly.

R: We'll all go flying in the air.

J: We were wrong. There's no gravity.

S: That's an important point too. I think a lot of people have this misconception and certainly the postmodernists do have this misconception that science progresses or changes over time by just one idea being wholesale replaced by another idea and that's actually not true. Newtonian mechanics is actually still true as far as it goes and general relativity just deepened the theory and now general relativity is true and will always be true as far as it goes, but there's probably a deeper story still. For example, we still need to figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity.

J: Over time they sharpen the knife more and more and more.

E: You working on that, Bob?

S: It's not changing over time, it's deepening over time. That's a critical difference.

J: So to summarize the answer to Nick's question, Nick, tell your friend to just take a chill pill and tell him he's wrong, tell him to listen to the show and become more like Perry. Everything will work out.

R: Yeah, that's great advice. I mean, just the Perry thing.

Legislating Thought (24:41)

I really enjoy your podcast and I never miss an episode. You guys are usually right on the mark with your comments, but I believe you collectively missed the mark (in Skeptic's Guide #93) regarding legislation in Philadelphia that makes it illegal to practice fortune-telling. I agree with you on several points: that generally these are sham artists who take advantage of gullible people, and it is tempting to want to shut them down along with all flim-flammers.

However, and although I haven't seen the language of the legislation in question, I think such a law is seriously misguided, and that it potentially treads on personal freedoms. People do believe in this stuff, after all, and if they are willing to pay for it, who is the government to say they cannot? Is a belief in spiritualism that far from believing in God? Or, for that matter, belief in polytheism, or in Scientology, or say, in the divine nature of chairs (which last time I checked are all perfectly legal in the U.S.)?

Also, one could argue that there is entertainment value in having your fortune told. How is having your palm read any different from going on a ghost tour or even to a Sylvia Brown lecture? Now, I dislike Sylvia Brown as much as the next skeptic, but do we really want the government to legislate the things that people want to believe in?

This reminds me of a previous discussion on your podcast regarding legislation in Europe that makes it illegal to promote the idea that the holocaust never happened. You guys eventually came around to reject this as a singularly bad idea. Well, in my opinion, so is the Philadelphia statute.

George Hulseman
USA/Asheville, NC


Update and article by Joe Nickell
www.csicop.org/specialarticles/fortunes.html

S: The next email comes from George Halsman from Asheville, North Carolina in the USA and he writes, hi all, I really enjoy your podcast and I never miss an episode. You guys are usually right on the mark with your comments, but I believe you collectively missed the mark on episode 93 regarding legislation in Philadelphia that makes it illegal to practice fortune telling. I agree with you on several points that generally these are sham artists who take advantage of gullible people and it is tempting to want to shut them down along with all the flim flamers. However, and although I haven't seen the language of the legislation in question, I think such a law is seriously misguided and that it potentially treads on personal freedoms. People do believe in this stuff after all and if they are willing to pay for it, who is the government to say they cannot? Is a belief in spiritualism that far from believing in God or for that matter belief in polytheism or in Scientology or say in the divine nature of chairs? Also one could argue that there is entertainment value in having your fortune told. How is having your palm read any different from going on a ghost tour or even to a Sylvia Brown lecture? Now I dislike Sylvia Brown as much as the next skeptic, but do we really want the government to legislate the things that people want to believe in? Well thanks for writing in George, I mean we actually got a lot of emails expressing the same basic point of view and they all hit the same two points. They hit the point of why is this different than religion and shouldn't this fall under religious freedom or why isn't this just entertainment and why should the government ban it as a form of entertainment? And again just like with the previous issues we discussed in the news, this does tread a little bit into politics because again it gets down to freedom versus protection or regulation and there is no ultimate right or wrong answer. What do you value more? I think in my response, I emailed most of the people who wrote this to me back just to get their response to the notion of how I perceive this as having to do with fraud. Yeah sure, if this is presented as entertainment and it's clear that it's entertainment and the charge is appropriate to that, the example I gave is if you're getting your palm read by a gypsy at a Ren Faire for $15, okay, that's entertainment. But I don't think that you can meaningfully argue that people who are giving Sylvia Brown $700 for a 20 minute phone interview because they want to know where their missing child is, that they're doing that for entertainment. And again there's a fuzzy line there but I just gave two ends of the spectrum. I think we can agree that the Sylvia Brown example is not entertainment. That I think constitutes fraud and fraud is a line that the law does make. It's fuzzy but the law does make that distinction. The religion one's a little bit harder because you can always hide behind religion but then you have to promote it as a religion.

E: Yeah, they're not claiming it's a religion.

S: Yeah, they're not. They're claiming it as a service. They're selling it as a service. They're not claiming it as a religion. And if you want to go that route then you really have to be non-profit or you can't charge for it. Of course then the way around that is just to take donations. So I agree that one's harder to deal with but at least you have to be honest in how it's being presented. If you're going to hide behind faith and religion then call it that up front. Behave that way. Don't pretend like it's a service that you're selling.

J: This is one of those situations where you can definitely see both sides of the fence. I could definitely see why people would think this is stepping on our rights. People should be able to do it. But at the same time we can't be so blasé about things like this and just let them go. I think it's important to make distinctions like this. It clarifies our reality to a certain degree.

S: Yeah, I agree. The thing is I don't respond well to the argument that we should blame the victim. That the people who are gullible and who buy that, they're just dumb and they get what they deserve. I always have a hard time with that because you could basically say that about anything. You could say that about people who are sold unsafe or ineffective medicines. Well, they're dumb. They get what they deserve.

E: Caveat emptor.

S: There are limits to caveat emptor. I think that blatant fraud is over the line. Interestingly, there's some follow-up to this. I got this from Joe Nickel who is an investigator for CSI, wrote an article about this and he had some follow-up. He actually was involved in a sting operation with Philadelphia Psychics before, so he had kind of an inside scoop on this. Basically, what he found out is a week after the crackdown on the fortune tellers in Philadelphia, one of the fortune tellers got their lawyer to file a request for an injunction and that was granted by the court, so they basically have reversed it already. It only lasted for about a week.

E: Yep. I said that would happen. Looks like I'm the psychic.

S: As a deputy solicitor stated, we felt it was hard to say what kind of evidence might be needed to prove someone was pretending to tell fortunes. So basically what they're saying is that this law, the state law that the Philadelphia police used to crack down on fortune tellers, which basically said that it's against the law to accept money for fortune telling, they said that that only applied to fraud and that because they couldn't prove that these fortune tellers were committing fraud, that therefore the law didn't apply and the courts bought it. I think they also just backed off because it was more trouble than it was worth. So what they're saying is that just because someone's telling a fortune, you don't know that they are consciously lying and that therefore only if they were consciously lying would it be fraud. Again, I'm not sure I agree with that. I think that we can know that what they're doing is fake because fortune telling isn't real and we know it's not real as much as we can know anything scientifically. I think the evidence is overwhelming that these people can't do what they say they're doing.

J: I think it's just lazy to not follow through with this. It's just laziness. We do need to confront issues like this. We do need to push things like this down and educate people about it. What a good opportunity to educate people by having it be a legal issue and people discuss it. But you know, a week later they take it away. I'm ashamed.

S: Yeah. Well, I agree. I agree that there's no perfect answer. The problem is that people are gullible and that people believe in things that are fake like fortune telling and that there are fortune tellers who are either self-deluded. There's somewhere along the spectrum between self-deluded to con artists. That's the problem. There's no perfect solution to that problem because we do have to sacrifice a little freedom in order to crack down on the fraud or we have to allow the fraud to go forth. You know, there's really no perfect option. The only perfect option would be to educate everybody that it was BS and certainly we try to do that, but that's never going to be an extremely effective option, not unless there's a huge change in the culture.

J: I think the law failed here. They failed.

S: Yeah, they failed, but they're in a hard situation.

J: No one said it was going to be easy, you know. That's their job.

S: I agree. But I also think that the laws as written probably were not adequate to deal with the complexity of the issue. And I don't know that there's going to be the political will to really do anything about it.

E: Right. Exactly.

S: Well, we do have an interview this week. So let's go to our interview.

Interview with Gareth Hayes (32:29)

• Gareth is an Australian living in China who gives the SGU a report on pseudoscience in China.

S: We are joined now by loyal listener, Gareth Hayes. Gareth, welcome to the Skeptic's Guide.

GH: G'day, how are you doing?

S: Gareth is an Australian, as you probably could tell. He is currently living in China where he's been for three years and tell us what you do there, Gareth. You're a consultant, correct?

GH: Yeah, I'm just a consultant helping Western companies sort of integrate themselves into China.

S: So your job is to understand and navigate the bureaucracy and the corruption of China basically for companies to get in there.

GH: Yeah, that's about it.

S: So give me an idea what that entails.

GH: Basically, we need to know what the company really wants to get out of coming to China. So a lot of companies that want to come into China, they don't actually need to go there. They just hear all the hype about China, which is all crap and think, oh, we need to go to China because everyone else is.

S: Yeah.

GH: And they just really have no idea what it's actually like.

S: You help them sort out the hype from what's really useful.

GH: Yeah. Yeah. So all these statistics and whatever from China and all the market sizes, the actual market size is much smaller than what the government says because no one's got any money to buy anything.

S: I see. So there's a lot of government propaganda to lure companies there?

GH: Oh, yeah. They're really sneaky how they go about it too. Yeah, the Chinese government is a lot more clever than people give them credit for in a bad way.

B: So, Gareth, do you whisper to these people and say, hey, the market's about a third as big as you think it is?

GH: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we try to tell them what the real story is.

B: Pass them notes.

GH: Yeah. I mean, no one benefits. If we help them sort of come into China and just reap them of fees, then in the end, we just get a bad reputation anyway.

P: Well, Gareth, doesn't the Chinese government object rather strenuously to what you're doing?

GH: They love the consulting companies like us because, well, according to them, we just say good stuff about China anyway, so they're happy. And it's bringing more people into China.

J: So Gareth, you've been there for two years.

S: Three years.

J: Three years. So tell us. Tell us some of these crazy stories. I want to hear something good. What do you got?

S: Now, Gareth, the reason why Jay got you on the show is because we've asked our listeners who are from other countries, because we're all American of course, to tell us about pseudoscience and superstition in other parts of the world. And you responded to that saying that there's quite a bit of this in China. And then because you're a Westerner, and obviously you're fluent in English, that you could bridge the culture gap for us. You could tell us about what's the real hardcore cultural pseudoscientific or superstitious belief of the Chinese. So tell us some of the things that you learned about Chinese superstition since you've been there.

GH: Basically, all of Chinese superstitions come from the those year signs, like every year there's a different animal?

S: Yes.

J: Yeah.

GH: A lot of it comes from there. And then there's supposedly when it's your turn, when your year's up, you get really bad luck that year. So every 12 years, you have a year of bad luck.

S: You have a bad luck on your year, not good luck?

GH: Yeah, it's bad luck.

J: When your year runs out?

GH: No, when your year starts. Say if you're born in a dog year, when the dog year comes back, that's your bad luck year.

J: Oh my god, that sucks.

GH: That entire year is full of bad luck.

S: I'm the year of the dragon, by the way, which is the coolest Chinese year.

J: Bruce Lee was the year of the dragon.

B: I got your beat, I'm the year of the cock.

J: I'm the year of the monkey, I think.

GH: You're meant to wear a red shirt at the beginning of the year.

S: I see.

GH: To fight away the demons or whatever it is.

S: In your experience, does the average person on the street really believe in these superstitions?

GH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And when you question them about it, ask them some sort of analytical questions like, well, is there any actual evidence? I mean, how do you know that you don't just get bad luck every year? They just can't think analytically. It's because of the education system, I think. Chinese just don't really, they haven't learned to think analytically at all, or creativity. Like they can't think creatively either. It's sort of an inbuilt thing, where if someone says that's right, like if their mom says something, that's got to be right because it's their mom, or if their government says something, it's got to be right because it's their government. There's no room for sort of, well, maybe they've got some other motive here.

S: It's very strongly dominated by a deference to authority.

GH: Yeah, yeah.

J: So would you say like in an average day do you see a lot of pseudoscience on the streets? Do you see like people selling snake oil type things? And is it more prevalent, say, than if you walk down the streets of Manhattan?

GH: There's a lot of Chinese traditional medicine shops, a lot of them over here. That's the most widely spread pseudoscience, for sure, the medicine.

J: What's the healthcare like, do you know?

GH: That's pretty bad, yeah. Because 10 years ago, it was all right, the economy was strong enough, people could afford to see doctors, but nowadays, the average Chinese can't really afford to see a scientific doctor. I mean, in Beijing or in Shanghai, where most of the experts are, it's all right, because they send all the money to those cities. But in the other cities, the average person doesn't really, their only choice is a traditional doctor because the real doctors are too expensive.

P: So there's been a significant downturn in the economic state of China in the last decade?

GH: I think so. Well, the standard of living, at least, has gone down, not up.

P: To what do you attribute that?

GH: 10 years ago, they were spending, I think it was about 8%, they had to spend about 8% of their yearly wages on doctor's fees. But nowadays, for the same services, like if you have the same problem, you have to spend more than 100% of your yearly wages.

J: Oh my God.

S: Really?

B: Nice.

S: I'm shocked to hear that. That's really not the impression that I have.

GH: That's not rock solid fact that it's around there.

S: That's your impression, but that's different than the impression that I've had just listening to the media over here, which makes it seem like China is a booming, sort of emerging super economy.

GH: Yeah, I don't think so. They would love you to think that, but it's not.

P: They say, yeah.

B: Wow.

P: It really is how our media talks about China. It really is. It's the next giant economy.

GH: Yeah, it's the hype. It's China hype, and it's also because the people who study China have pretty much been bought by the Chinese government, all of them. There's two types of people who study China, like the economic face of China. That's Chinese who have moved overseas, so they're born in China and they're naturalized Americans. They want to go back and study what's going on and see what the changes are and stuff. They've all got family and whatever in China. If they report bad things, the government will do bad stuff to their families, and the other people who do it are Westerners who learn Chinese and go about it that way. That's a huge investment to learn Chinese. A lot of them have got apartments in China and stuff like that, so the government can have a huge influence on them, too, if they want to. Basically, you can't upset the Communist Party, and that's all the Western media is affected by that.

S: Interesting.

GH: There's a professor from an English university who was fired from the English university because of a bad report on China, because the Chinese government pressured the university to fire him. Otherwise, they wouldn't grant that university access to China.

S: Mm-hmm.

J: Wow.

GH: Stuff like that goes on all the time.

J: Does the government support in any way the pseudoscience that you know of? Do they support it?

GH: They support traditional medicine lightly, because the government has invested in hospitals, and that's an investment to them, and it's also a tax asset to the government. They don't want to push traditional medicine too much. They just want to push it to the amount that people don't feel ripped off by the government, that they can't see a doctor. So they say, well, for you guys, traditional medicine is actually all right.

S: Yeah.

J: Yeah.

GH: You can't afford a real doctor anyway. That just keeps them under control.

J: Yeah. So it's class-based.

GH: Yeah. But in the big cities, they want to push real doctors, because that's where the government makes money.

S: So basically, in China, if you have money, you get Western scientific medicine, and if you don't, you get traditional Chinese medicine.

GH: Yeah. Yeah.

P: And it's for the members who are more equal.

S: We've heard a lot about the Chinese government control of the internet within China. Have you experienced that too? Can you get access to anything?

GH: Oh, yeah. It's a pain in the ass.

B: Isn't it true that we're blocked? Our podcast is blocked?

GH: Your podcast is blocked. Yeah, it is.

B: Cool.

GH: And pretty much anything which is analytical is blocked, no matter what it's analytical of, because they don't want Chinese to learn to be analytical.

B: Yeah.

J: Yeah. Absolutely. So, Gareth, can you have access to porn, though?

GH: Well, yeah, a little bit, but not much.

S: So we can put that on, Jay, you have to put that on our homepage on our website, that we are banned in China for being too analytical.

J: Yeah, we're too analytical for China. That's awesome.

P: But, Gareth, you were able to find your way around that and hear the show, for instance.

GH: Oh, yeah. I've got a VPN connection to the States, which I go directly through there. It's a bit slower, but I can get everything.

J: That's like a tunnel to sanity.

B: Yeah, right?

J: Oh, my God. Gareth, do you have a juicy item of pseudoscience that you've witnessed since you've been there? Something that sticks out in your mind?

GH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, this is not what I've actually seen, but what I've heard off the news over here. There's a diagram made in ancient China, which all the, basically all the Chinese medicine and feng shui and tai chi, all those things come from this diagram, which is basically an octagon shape with the yin yang symbol?

J: Yes.

P: Yeah.

GH: It's an octagon shape with yin yang in the middle and eight characters around the outside, eight sets of characters around the outside. And they sort of base everything on there. So for feng shui, they'll lay out this diagram over the plan for a house and see what rooms fall under what part of the diagram and work it out. Something about that, of how you're going to get good luck, make sure the money part of the diagram doesn't go into the kitchen or the bathroom, because then all the money will run down the drain.

J: Oh, my God.

S: Yeah.

GH: You can get two feng shui experts who would give you completely different results. I've seen that in person.

P: So it's just like America.

J: Yeah, it's like a chiropractic exam.

E: Horoscopes, whatever.

GH: But anyway, everything comes from there. And in the 1930s, there's this professor called Liu, someone Liu, and he claimed to find the 10th planet in the solar system in that diagram. And then we obviously found another planet, because we always find new planets, it's just a trend.

S: Yeah.

GH: As technology increases, they find more stuff. And so it was pretty obvious to him anyway that they were going to find a new planet. So it's a pretty safe bet to say that another planet, and I found it in this diagram. Now, in 2003, a professor called Feng, he made what the media called a ridiculous claim that Liu's discovery of the planet was actually based on pseudoscience, not real science.

J: And the real science was what, though, that they were talking about?

GH: Well, they said that using this diagram was real science, so they couldn't rule out that it wasn't real science anyway. And what happened was, in 2006, I think it was, the wife of the guy who discovered the planet, because that guy died in 1992, his wife took Feng to court for a defamation case to say that Feng defamed her husband by saying this was pseudoscience, not real science. And the court ruled that, yeah, he was defamed. And now, there's a big debate in China about outlawing the word pseudoscience.

B: Oh my god.

GH: So pseudoscience doesn't exist, they're just non-professional scientists.

S: I see.

B: Wow.

S: That's wonderful.

J: That's so stupid.

P: Just outlaw it. There you go. Fixed.

S: Problem solved.

P: Problem solved.

S: We have no pseudoscience in China.

P: Next case. That's cool.

GH: Yeah, and the main argument is that without pseudoscience, there would be no innovation in science.

S: Well, we've heard that before over here, that's nothing new. The pseudoscientists, they're on the cutting edge they're thinking outside the box. And us mean skeptics are trying to squelch their creativity and exploration. That's an old one.

B: And they left a Galileo, too.

J: Does any of the American pop culture pseudoscience get through?

GH: Oh, yeah, yeah. Horoscopes are a big one over here. Really deep, actually. Even my friends say, I'm not, what is it, a Leo, my friends try and pick you out in China, try and pick you out. Oh, look, of course you're a Leo, Leos always do that for some things, I don't know, it's just a whole lot of stuff like that. It's very ingrained.

S: Yeah, I'm a Leo, too, but I always say, but Leos don't believe in astrology, so it's okay.

J: Gareth, do you know, does Scientology exist in China?

GH: They are not really, no. Because the government, it's too much of a big sort of organization, I mean, that's a real organization, that's not a belief.

S: Yeah, yeah. They don't want any competition.

GH: Yeah, yeah. Well, the government is a religion, like, that is the national religion, it's communist.

S: Is that right?

GH: It's not atheist, like they tell us, it's communist. You ask anyone who's like a young member of the Communist Party or something like that, basically everyone gets indicted into the Communist Party when they're about 12, and then they have to swear an oath to the leaders of the party and stuff like that, so it's a religion thing, and that's replaced a lot of the traditional culture, actually.

P: Gareth, is the average Chinese person fed a diet of anti-Western propaganda?

GH: Yeah, they are. It's a subtle, like the movies we produce, they can only see 20 per year of Western-produced movies, and the choices they let through are the bad ones. I mean, the ones that portray Western culture as bad or capitalism as bad. And also, pretty much every time a foreigner appears in a TV show in China, they're bad. It's subtle, right? When you come here, you won't really notice it unless you stay here for about a year, and then you can really see it everywhere. There's a lot of anti-Western propaganda, it's very subtle, but it works. I've talked to a lot of the old people here, above 50, they think that the majority of Americans have AIDS.

S: Really?

P: They think we have AIDS? That's interesting.

GH: And that something like 80% are homeless.

B: Really? Oh, man.

GH: Yeah. They swear it.

J: Wow. What the hell?

GH: Yeah, that's just the propaganda in their time, and now the new propaganda is just, don't trust us because we're bad and we want to take over China.

P: Take over China for what?

J: I just want the fortune cookies, that's it. I don't want anything else.

S: They're portraying it as basically the world against China. The world has always been against China and always will be, and everyone's out to get China. And basically, we're all preoccupied with China. That's what comes up in our daily news, education, it's all about China and nothing else.

P: That's awesome.

J: All right.

GH: No, actually, we don't really care about China. We just want cheap stuff.

J: Yeah.

P: Yeah. It's true.

J: We just want them to build it inexpensively for us.

P: It's true.

J:Or do we?

P: Gareth, do you hear a lot about the impending Olympics there in China?

GH: Oh, yeah. They're like, oh, China has arrived now because we've got the Olympics. And look how good China is now because we've got the Olympics. Basically, it's a huge propaganda thing, the Olympics. It's the biggest thing there is at the moment in China. But before that, there was a meeting with the African nations. It was a big meeting. Did you guys hear about that over there?

J: No.

P: Not that I'm aware of.

GH: It was huge in China. They had the leaders of every African nation come to Beijing and do a big debate. And now China are investing billions of dollars into Africa and whatever. And that was really big. They're saying, oh, look, Africa respects us.

S: I'm curious about the belief in China about some of the conspiracy theories that are popular in the West. What do the Chinese think about 9-11, for example?

GH: OK. Yeah. Yeah. Good question. Bush was in charge of 9-11.

B: I knew it.

P: Confirmation.

GH: Yeah. And Bush and Bin Laden are great old buddies that have been together. They go way back.

S: Bush and Bin Laden?

GH: Yeah. And Bush and Saddam as well.

S: Were buddies?

GH: Yeah.

P: Did they pick up the fact that we hung them?

B: They had a falling out. They had a falling out.

GH: That was just for a public show.

P: Oh, OK.

S: Saddam had to take one for the team.

B: Yeah. Right.

S: Now, is that just the belief of the man in the street that, yeah, of course, the administration was up for it?

GH: That's sort of official media.

S: The media just assumes that that's the case.

GH: Yeah.

S: Really?

GH: They know that Saddam is bad, right?

S: Yeah.

GH: But they also know that Bush is just as bad and they were friends. They think that Iraq was sort of just as good as America before and America was just jealous so they wanted to take it over.

S: Do they not distinguish much among Western nations? Like, is it all just one big morass to them?

GH: Oh, the whole world is. There's China and there's the world.

S: The world outside of China. And they don't really distinguish much between them.

GH: No. They just know it's foreign.

S: Yeah.

J: What do they have? What's their take on global warming?

GH: None. No take.

S: You don't hear about it at all?

B: Not on the radar.

GH: That's something that could affect us in 50 years time, but they've got many things that could kill them tomorrow.

P: I don't think China is a very green country.

J: No. I mean, they're a global warming engine.

GH: In Guangdong province, they painted the side of a hill green.

S: Yeah, I heard about that.

GH: I don't know why.

S: Well, they wanted to make it more green, so they painted it green.

P: Yeah.

S: Problem solved. Incredible.

P: Yeah. Incredible.

J: Gareth, anything else that sticks out that you want to mention?

GH: Yeah. There's a lot of fake research over here.

S: Tell us about that.

GH: Basically, all PhD students over here get their certificate by bribing and plagiarizing. That's just the early, that's just the low down stuff. On the upper end, most of the deans of departments and the leaders of universities, they've all done fake research to get funding. There's not really any real research in China at all. It's very rare to actually get real research. There's a big case in Shanghai, a highly publicized one, about a man who copied a, he pretended to make a new digital processing chip. I'm not sure exactly what it did. Anyway, it turned out it was just a Motorola chip. At the public display with all the government officials, it was the painted piece of metal that they had on display.

S: It wasn't even a chip.

J: Oh, God.

B: How do you know this? How do you know that?

GH: You mean, how do we know what actually happened?

S: Yeah.

GH: This one had a lot of scrutiny because basically it was exposed by one of the students and the government had to do something about it, so they did an investigation and found all this and now he's, I think he could be in jail or at least he's paying back all the research funding.

P: But all the plagiarism that goes on, you said with the PhDs and so forth and department heads, it's sort of known about but just not talked about?

B: Tolerant.

GH: Well, okay, the government released official statistics, right, and those government statistics are really bad over here. They're highly inflated or highly deflated, depending on what they want to say. And they said 60% of PhD students admitted to plagiarizing and bribing.

J: Oh, my gosh.

P: So even the government admitted to that?

GH: Government said 60%. It's got to be about 90%.

S: I'm curious as to why they would even admit to that, though.

P: Yeah, why?

GH: Because someone sort of blew the cover on it.

J: Yeah. Yeah.

S: I mean, how does somebody blow the cover off of it? From what I understand, there's not much of a free press over in China.

GH: No, no, no. It's basically Hong Kong that does this.

S: Oh, is that right?

GH: Hong Kong. And then that filters through to China, and then they sort of have to do something about it. A lot of times they just sort of kill the people who blew the cover.

S: I see.

GH: That's an example. But sometimes when it's too big, they have to admit it. An example is that there was a, you've probably heard about this, there was a benzene spill in one of the rivers, they spilled a whole lot of benzene into it. And they knew about it for two weeks before they said anything. And a lot of people died from it and whatever along the river. And by the time they had to say something, they said it one day or 24 hours before it hit this major city, they said, oh, by the way, there was a benzene spill two weeks ago and it's reached your part of the river, so don't drink the water for the next three days. And it went, the reason they had to disclose it was because it was heading for Russia and the Russians would have detected it straight away.

S: Yeah. Right, right. I know there's a clinic, I can't remember the name of the physician at this point in time, but there's a clinic in China that is treating a lot of Westerners with spinal cord injury and ALS. And it's basically with stem cells. It's basically a complete fraud. But is that something that there is a lot of, is that a high profile clinic, something you would have heard about? You haven't heard about that?

GH: No, you only hear that in Western countries.

S: Yeah. So that's definitely something they are marketing to the West. They're trying to rip off rich, desperate Westerners, but they're not also trumpeting it in their own country as look at this, we've cured ALS with stem cells. You don't hear about that?

GH: I guess they might do it directly to the rich market and I wouldn't hear about it.

S: Yeah, I mean, it's like $20,000 to get this done.

GH: The thing is in China, the rich people are generally all in the government and they don't want to rip off people who are in the government because they'll get executed.

S: Yeah.

P: Right.

S: So this is purely for export.

P: It's a nice safety net. Gareth, are you secure there in China? You never have any fear of your own safety or loss of liberty?

S: Yeah, we're not going to get you killed for talking to you, are we?

P: Or loss of liberty or anything?

S: Because you know, we would feel bad about that.

J: Yes.

GH: But for doing this sort of stuff, well, no one's going to hear it in China anyway.

S: Yeah. Right, because we're banned, right?

GH: The worst that they could do to me is deport me.

S: Yeah.

P: Okay.

GH: And if I end up in jail, hopefully there'll be a big media.

P: Hopefully.

S: Well, we'll talk about it.

P: Gee, we haven't gotten an email from Gareth.

J: No, what happened?

S: Well, Gareth, good luck over there.

J: Yeah. Take care of yourself, bro.

S: We appreciate you talking with us.

GH: No worries.

J: Yeah. Gareth, thank you very much. We really enjoyed this.

GH: No worries. I'll catch you guys later.

S: Bye-bye.

B: Bye-bye.

Science or Fiction (56:43)

Question #1: Scientists have developed a new so-called quasicrystal that is a superconductor at room temperature. Question #2: Scientists are building an enormous telescope partially out of ice crystals at the south pole. Question #3: UK Scientists have developed a lithium crystal capable of storing and releasing hydrogen that they claim will break the critical 300 mile range barrier for hydrogen fuel cell cars.

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, and then I challenge you, the audience, as well as my panel of skeptics, to tell me which one is the fake news item. There's a theme this week. The theme is crystals.

J: Cool.

S: Is everybody ready? Item number one, scientists have developed a so-called quasicrystal that is a superconductor at room temperature. Item number two, scientists are building an enormous telescope partially out of ice crystals at the South Pole. And item number three, UK scientists have developed a lithium crystal capable of storing and releasing hydrogen that they claim will break the critical 300-mile range barrier for hydrogen fuel cell cars. Perry, go first.

P: Number three, hydrogen cell cars.

S: You think that's the fake one?

P: Right.

S: Okay. Bob?

B: A new so-called quasicrystal that's superconducting. You know I'm going to say that's baloney, superconducting at room temperature and it's not on the front page of the damn paper. But I can't pick it now, can I? Because it's too obvious.

E: Yeah, right. Gee.

B: He pisses me off sometimes. Enormous telescope partially out of ice crystals at the South Pole. What kind of baloney is that? I mean, ice in a telescope? None of these are good. Lithium crystal capable of storing and releasing hydrogen.

E: Bob, are you saying all three are fiction?

B: Holy crap.

S: It's always my goal that none of them sound right.

B: One of these is fake, huh?

S: Yeah, two are real.

B: All right. I suppose you could have a crystal superconducting at room temperature, but you can't make it big enough and you're not going to make wires out of it, so maybe that's why it's not going to work. All right. So I'm not going to choose one then. Telescope out of ice crystals. That makes no sense. Ice crystals-

S: Well, it's at the South Pole.

B: Yeah. Global warming, it'll melt in 10 years.

E: Global correction.

B: Let's see. Lithium crystal. All right. But what does that have to do with 300 mile range? I mean-

S: It can store enough hydrogen efficiently enough that you can get that 300 mile range for a fuel cell car.

B: Yeah. With present technology. I'm going to go with... Telescope lens are just too... They have to be too perfect. I don't think ice is going to cut it. I'm going to go... The ice telescope is fake.

S: Okay. Rebecca, go next.

R: Okay. I am going to go with the first item about scientists developing quasicrystals. I'm not sure, but that one sounds like the one for me.

S: Okay. Jay?

J: Well, I'd first like to thank you, Steve. I probably spent four hours reading the news this week, and I didn't read any of these.

B: Well, you learned a lot.

E: Wasted your time and everything.

J: It was totally wasted. Anyway.

B: Jay, do you know how many porn MPEGs you could have downloaded at the time?

J: Bob, Bob, I have more than one computer. I'm always downloading porn.

B: Oh, multitasker. Okay.

J: All right, Steve. I'm picking number one just because of the word quasi, because it reminds me of Dr. Evil, and anything quasi-

S: You don't like quasicrystals. Okay. Evan?

E: I think that the quasicrystal superconductor at room temperature is also fiction.

J: Thank you, Evan.

S: If I recall, Rebecca, Jay, and Evan think the quasicrystal is fake. Bob, you think the ice telescope is fake, and Perry, you think the lithium crystal hydrogen thing is fake. What should we start with? So you guys are all spread across the board this week. I'm just going to go in reverse order. We'll start with the UK scientists have developed a lithium crystal capable of storing and releasing hydrogen that they claim will break the critical 300-mile range barrier for hydrogen fuel cell cars. Now, did any of you guys pick up on the whole lithium crystal, dilithium crystal-

E: Of course. I mean, no. What possibly are you talking about?

J: Don't tell me that you pulled Star Trek bullshit into this.

S: I'm just wondering. Nobody commented on the-

E: Dilithium crystals.

B: No. I totally missed. I am ashamed.

E: Anti-matter warp cors.

S: This one, however, is in fact science.

B: No shit.

S: Yeah. So-

E: That's exactly what the scientists said when they realized it.

S: Hydrogen breakthrough could open the road to carbon-free cars. So what these UK scientists have come up with is a lithium compound that can store hydrogen in its crystalline structure and release it in a way that you can store hydrogen and release it to burn it in a hydrogen fuel cell. This is the stumbling block to hydrogen fuel cell technology. There's no good way to store the hydrogen, at least to store it in sufficient amounts. You can't just compress it. You can't super cool it. If you mix it with other compounds, you have to have it- it has to stay and store it under a wide range of temperature, but also be easily released, but not too easily released, so that you want it to behave exactly like you want it to. It remains to be seen if this quote-unquote breakthrough will pan out, but what they've come up with is a way of storing the hydrogen in this lithium hydride substance. It's crystalline structure, and it looks very, very promising. So we'll see if this pans out.

B: So the term crystal power is going to take on a whole new meaning in the future?

S: I guess so. Actually, they say that it's actually a powder, the actual substance itself, but it has a crystalline structure that stores the hydrogen.

J: So you could be driving your car and this stuff and blowing your brains out and getting high with it at the same time.

S: Whatever. Going in reverse order, the next one is number two. Scientists are building an enormous telescope partially out of ice crystals at the South Pole, and this one is science. What kind of telescope do you think it is?

B: Oh, it's a neutrino telescope, god damn it.

S: It's a neutrino telescope.

J: Wow! You got it, Bob.

B: Of course.

J: Of course, yeah.

B: Holy crap.

J: Of course it's a neutrino telescope.

S: They are drilling holes deep, deep, deep into the ice, and then they're burying the string of detectors down into the ice holes and then filling it back up with water and allowing it to free-freeze. Then they also have the surface detectors, which are also freezing in the middle of—they're getting the water to freeze in such a way that it comes out perfectly clear. And yes, they're using the ice as the neutrino detector, right? So the neutrinos pass right through matter, so you have to have them pass through a lot of it before there's a chance they'll have an interaction. So we have neutrino detectors basically in huge pools of water buried deep underground. This is another approach where they have the detectors embedded deep in the ice of the South Pole. And as neutrinos pass through all these thick layers of ice, occasionally they'll hit something and knock off a gamma ray or whatever, and that will hit the detectors that they have. So it's very cool. Look at the link that I have. It shows really neat pictures of how they're building it.

B: Steve, you could have said neutrino detector instead of telescope.

S: I know, but that would have been too easy.

J: Wait, wait. Can we just rewind for one second? Steve says, what kind of telescope do you think it is? And then Bob blurts out, it's a neutrino detector. What? How did you get that from what Steve said?

B: I've read about it. You've got to isolate it. You've got to isolate it so that the neutrinos, there's no other stray sources of fake signals coming through. And it just hit me that it's, of course, a neutrino telescope.

S: It's good, Bob. You're just a little late with that Eureka. The name of the telescope is IceCube. It's already largely built.

J: Bob, if I had an award, I'd give it to you right now. That was great.

B: Yet still I lost.

J: Who cares?

S: Which means that the quasicrystal superconductors at room temperature is fake. However, the quasicrystals is not the fake part. There are, in fact, quasicrystals. The superconductor at room temperature is the fake part.

B: Yeah, of course. Of course. Quasicrystals exist.

S: Of course. Yeah, quasicrystals exist. The news item that inspired this fake bit of news is that mathematicians have worked out, solved a mathematical problem related to describing the structure of quasicrystals.

B: Because they're ordered and disordered at the same time.

S: Yes, exactly. So they're somewhat ordered, but they're not totally ordered. They're also disordered. Quasicrystals, in fact, do not conduct very well at all. They're not conductors. So they're the opposite of superconductors. So the room temperature superconductor was the fictional bit.

E: Bob I actually chose that one based on your initial reaction to item number, to that one, the quasicrystal one.

S: Yeah.

B: Oh, really?

E: Yeah.

S: But Bob talked himself out of the correct answer.

B: Yep. Son of a bitch.

S: Well, well done, Jay, Evan, and Rebecca.

Skeptical Puzzle (1:06:26)

This Week's Puzzle

Audio puzzle

Recorded by Kom'n Cents

Last Week's Puzzle
Remember me for memory is our finest art.
In Einstein's steady thoughts I shared his greatest mistake in my simple way.
I was worlds apart from those who took me.
Removed from water, through flame I was transfigured to stone.
Leaving the aborning odour of SETI

Submitted by Angus Dorby


Answer: Giordano Bruno
Winner: no winner

S: Evan, do you, can you please tell us last week's puzzle and give us the answer?

E: Last week's puzzle was, remember me, for memory is our finest art. In Einstein's steady thoughts, I shared his greatest mistake in my simple way. I was worlds apart from those who took me. Removed from water, through flame I was transfigured to metal, leaving the aborning odor of seti. The answer is Giordano Bruno.

S: Oh, Bruno.

E: Of course. He wrote the book called The Art of Memory, was an expert on memory techniques. He believed in an infinite steady universe. He was famous for his, he was a heretic, because he believed in many suns and many worlds in the universe, and that there was life on other worlds in those universes, in those worlds.

S: And did anyone win this week, Evan?

E: Nope. Nobody guessed that correctly. And again, this was submitted by Angus Dorby, so Angus, thank you for your contribution this week.

S: Thank you, Angus. Evan.

J: Yes!

S: I understand that this week, there is a special audio puzzle.

E: Yes, there is. All right. So a little backstory for our audience who's not totally familiar with this. So many, many moons ago, I was enticed or convinced or something. I was drunk. And I agreed that one of my puzzles that I do every week, I would do in rap form. And I made that commitment a long time ago. And I did spend some time on it. I did some things. I tried some other things. And I just I could not get it. I absolutely tried and tried and tried. And nothing seemed to be working. I'm just not, just not a rapper.

J: Come on.

E: And it just was not suiting me. So I did the next best thing for you guys. And I scoured the globe. And I found, and I found the world's only, I think, skeptical rap artist.

J: He's great. I know all about him.

E: And we had a conversation. I tracked him down. We had a conversation. I explained what the podcast was and the puzzle and so forth and so on and so forth. He agreed to do a skeptical rap puzzle for us. So I am committing to my obligation for providing a rap for tonight. However, it's not me doing this. It's actually a professional artist who put this together for us.

J: So who is he? Just give us the name and everything.

E: His last name is Kom'n Cents. That's K-O-M apostrophe N. And last name Cents. C-E-N-T-S.

R: I have seen his YouTube videos.

J: Me too.

R: Excellent.

E: So here's...

S: I guess you got to pass since you put so much effort into it, Evan.

KC: You say you relieve stress, only you can perceive the mess that you say is best. Get your mitts off me, this ain't your pet peeve. Wounds and the pains of the day go away. So you say and you pray that one day the BS that you lay won't get your A thrown away into Attica. Ago, 15 years and a score that this whore found the lure on the shore of the farm where the fruit bared no core. That's the story of how a queen bee came up with a fee and a field you can't see. All her drones, they agree. Hear the story they sing with a wave of her wing, though you can't feel the sting. That's her doing her thing. The web that she weaves traps her fly so naive she can take her filthy lies and this earth she should leave.

B: You sounded great, Evan.

E: Compliments. No, that wasn't me. That was Kom'n Cents. I just got done explaining to everyone.

B: All right. All right.

S: That's not your new rap alter ego, Evan.

E: So I left it into the hands of the... I left it into the hands of the professionals.

J: How psyched were you when the guy was like, okay, I'll do it. Right?

E: It took some convincing. He said something about shizzle and bling or something.

J: Oh my god.

R: Well, before we get letters in, let me just say that he is not the only skeptical rap artist before people start writing and complaining. There are plenty of really amazing rap artists out there. And let's not forget good old MC Hawking, first and foremost.

E: Yeah. Can't forget him.

R: There are a lot of them out there, though.

E: So there you go, folks. Break that down, as they say, and come up with an answer.

S: And thanks, Kom'n Cents.

Quote of the Week (1:10:59)

'The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.'- Thomas Jefferson 17431826, American Politician

S: Perry, do you have a quote for us this week?

P: I do. The quote is as follows. "The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism." Thomas Jefferson, 1743 to 1826, an American politician of some note.

S: Thomas Jefferson was definitely a child of the Enlightenment. He was a very cool guy. Well done. Well, thanks everyone again for a good show.

R: Thank you, Steve.

S: Had a good time.

J: Me too, Steve.

E: Thanks you all.

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, 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