SGU Episode 365

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Introduction

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday, July 2nd 2012, and this is your host, Steve Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson.

R: Hello everyone.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey guys.

S: Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, folks.

S: And, we have a special guest rogue this week: Daniel Beauley. Daniel, welcome to The Skeptics' Guide.

D: That's very hospitable of you. Thanks a lot.

B: Our pleasure, Dan.

S: Dan, you were kind enough to bid on the guest rogue spot at TAM9 last year, and it only took us one year to hook up with you.

(chuckles)

S: To get you on the show. And we're getting it in just under the wire; this is the show that will come out during TAM while we're hopefully auctioning off the slot for next year. But thanks for joining us.

D: Yeah.

S: So, Dan, tell us a little bit about yourself.

D: Yeah, well, you've had many guest rogues and a couple of the auction winners; a lawyer and author, or I guess, doctor, Ray. And, I'm a working stiff, essentially. I'm one of those telecom guys that might install your phone or Internet service copper or fiber optic.

E: We'll have to talk after the show.

D: Oh yeah? (chuckles)

E: (unintelligible)

S: Yeah, can you hook us up or what?

(laughing)

D: Wrong state.

E: It's not what you know, it's who you know, right?

S: How is fiber optic doing, I mean, do people actually get fiber optic into their house yet?

D: Oh, well, without naming too many companies, I've -- I'm in an area where fiber optic Internet and telephone is available, and meh... there were, of course, some first adopters -- really enthusiastic, and then television on fiber came along and really seemed to push the saleability. And I haven't really kept tabs on all the areas with fiber optic. But, you know, it's popular. It's certainly bandwidth-intensive; you can really put some great speeds on the fiber optic without even taxing the medium.

S: Well, that's what we want.

D: (chuckles) Yeah, exactly. That's what you're --

S: We want bandwidth, baby!

D: Yup, yup.

B: Dan, do you know off-hand what kind of megabit per second you can get download with fiber optic -- I forget what that number is; do you know off the top of your head?

D: Well -- keep in mind that I twist a screwdriver for a living, by and large; you know, crawl under mobile homes and stuff, but as some of the specs that -- as from what I understand it, we use single-mode fiber, so it's a frequency-specific type of fiber; there's a couple of frequencies that travel long and other frequencies of light are attenuated greatly. And so, the frequencies we use can, properly spliced, provide about 2.3 gigabits per second.

S: Aaah!

D: Right?

J: Wow.

B: Oh my God. That's awesome.

D: To a single -- right. And that, of course, is split up somewhat to deliver the typical residential service. So our typical packages go up to about 30 meg on download and 15-30 meg on upload.

B: OK. I'm getting one kilobit a second. So that would be very nice. (unintelligible) I am not kidding!

D: Oh gosh.

J: Dan, one more question about fiber optic: Is it true that you have to limit the bend that you put in a fiber optic cable?

D: Well, yeah, you have to limit it; I mean, that's a relative assessment, but -- I'm a 15-year tech; we've been working with fiber optic for about six years, and even in that time, the bend radius has been going down and down. You could take your typical ballpoint pen and wrap the fiber around it and lose very little -- you'll have very little light loss. Now, fiber likes to be relaxed, so of course we have whatever, you know, 4-inch trays to put the bending fiber in, and that usually keeps it at a very nice radius, but you can really wrap it.

J: That's interesting. Yeah, I guess I'm pulling from very old information then that I have tucked away in my head, that I picked up somewhere, I guess in earlier days, there was a maximum bend that you could do without data loss and all that stuff, but I'm not surprised to hear today that you could just basically do what you need to do with it.

D: Yeah, and there may be some differences in the single- or multi-mode types of fiber, but I'm not aware of what.

This Day in Skepticism (4:38)

• July 14, 1960 - Jane Goodall arrives at the Gombe Stream Reserve in present-day Tanzania to begin her famous study of chimpanzees in the wild.

News Items

UFOs on National Geo (10:13)

National Geographic: Five Good Reasons to Believe in UFOs

This section is in the middle of being transcribed by av8rmike (talk) as of {{{date}}}. To help avoid duplication, please do not transcribe this section while this message is displayed.

Seeing Inside Tissue (32:32)

ScienceDaily: Seeing Inside Tissue for No-Cut Surgeries

GOP Opposes Critical Thinking (39:46)

Neurologica: Anti-Science as a Political Platform

Alternative Chocolate (47:39)

unfiltered perception: Xocai – the nasty tale of a Norwegian chocolate mafia

Who's That Noisy? (57:58)

• Answer to last week: Victor Zammit

S: Well, Evan, get us up to date about Who's That Noisy.

E: First thing we're going to do is tell you who gave the correct answer to the prior week's Who's That Noisy. Remember we talked about the beautiful music we were hearing, which was the interpretation of the gamma ray burst from a video put together by the folks at NASA called the Symphony of the Universe, and we did have a correct answer on that. Asaf Elan from Israel was the first one to guess correctly. So, congratulations, Asaf, well done. Now I will play for you last week's Who's That Noisy.

Some open-minded skeptics, as I am, and others, who are closed-minded skeptics, those who don't accept the afterlife

OK, so who we have there is none other than Victor Zammit.

S: Victor Zammit, yeah.

E: Victor Zammit is a lawyer from Australia who's been a thorn in the side of organizations like the James -- the JREF, James Randi, and he has, well let's just say he has a strong, strong belief in the afterlife, and there's nothing wrong with that. But, he goes a bit further. Not only does he trash skeptics on a regular basis for having their skeptical viewpoints of things, he has a $1,000,000 afterlife challenge. Are you familiar with the afterlife challenge?

S: Do you have to collect it in the afterlife?

R: The first ghost to show up and ask for it, he'll get it?

E: Wouldn't that be easy. (chuckles) He has a one -- he says $1,000,000 is offered to any closed-minded skeptic who can rebut the existing evidence for life after death. Yes. He goes on and, you know, he attacks the likes certainly of Randi and he has some choice words to say about Richard Dawkins and I think even Steve might be mentioned in here, in one of his tirades on his website, which is very difficult to navigate and, let's face it, ugly. Victor Zammit.

S: It's not quite Time Cube, but you know, it's getting close.

E: It's getting close, so.

S: His website design, yeah.

E: Next week we will reveal who guessed correctly that that was Victor Zammit.

S: And what do you got for this week?

E: Here we go. Brand new Who's That Noisy; let's get it done.

(scraping sound)

S: Interesting, interesting.

E: It's an interesting one; we'll see who comes up with the correct answer. info@theskepticsguide.org is our email address, as you must know by now.

Questions and Emails

Space Mining (1:00:27)

S: All right, thanks Evan. We're going to do one email this week; this one comes from Charlie from Frantorp, Sweden.

E: Charlie.

S: Now, he gives his last name, but honestly, I think he's pulling our leg here with these characters. I mean, these are not real letters, right? Charlie K., and he writes:

I listened with interest to your interview about future possible mining of asteroids. There was however a question left unanswered. Perhaps it it something you could talk a little about on the SGU? What is the legal status for space mining? Is it a free-for-all? Can anybody with a rocket and a shovel mine any celestial body? Take for example the hypothetical platimum-asteroid. If a US company landed on one side of the asteroid and began mining and a chinese company (or government) landed on the other side, what would be the legal situation? And let's not forget the american flag that was put on the moon in '69. Does that prohibit the swiss from going there to mine all that cheese that Jay talked about? best regards Charlie

S: Dan, you looked into this a little bit for us.

D: Yeah. Well, I found a couple of articles; in fact, this question is quite timely because there's been a lot of developments lately in the space exploration and private industry... So, there aren't a lot of legal precedents. There is a U.N. treaty; it's an older one, it's 1967. So the 1967 Outer Space Treaty through the U.N. -- and it, I believe, it's been signed -- there are several countries that are signatories -- the space-faring countries are signatories of that treaty, but they're probably signatories, in my opinion, because it doesn't mean much. It is, at best, ambiguous; it both allows basically for unfettered and undiscriminated harvesting of space resources while also saying that you really can't own anything out there -- perhaps you can own the ore if you do mine it, and that is about as far as you can go.

S: Well, there was -- I did find reference to a 1979 Moon Treaty, which forbids private ownership of extraterrestrial real estate. However, that's only been ratified by 13 countries, which is not much at all. So it doesn't really -- and none of them are major space-faring nations. So, none of the people who could actually get into space have agreed that they can't own space -- own extraterrestrial real estate. So, I think it's ambiguous. Probably not going to be an issue for a while, I think... if you can get to an asteroid and mine it, good luck; you have the right to it. It's not like people are going to by vying for the same asteroid, at least not any time soon.

Science or Fiction (1:03:09)

It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. We have another theme this week!

R: God dammit!

(others cheering)

S: This theme is "the oldest". So, three news items about discovering the oldest of something.

D: Phyllis Diller. Sorry.

S: All right, here we go.

R: Well, he's locked in, so...

S: Item number one: Archaeologists have discovered the oldest example of cave art, dating back 40,800 years before present. Item number two: The earliest evidence of copper smelting was recently discovered in Eastern Serbia and dates to 7,000 years before present. And item number three: Archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of archery, a yew bow dating back 7,400 years before present. Well, Dan, as our guest, you get the privilege of going first.

D: OK, these are straightforward. Item number one about oldest cave art, 40,800 years before present. That's old. Obviously, caves can – especially art on stone, can persist, and so I don't doubt that necessarily on the basis of medium. I really have no compelling reason to doubt that, but that is old, that is… So number two, the earliest evidence of copper smelting was recently discovered in Eastern Serbia and dates to 7,000 years before present. Well, OK, I'll leave that one for a second. And then number three, the archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of archery, a yew bow dating back 7,400 years before present. Now archery was Asian in origin, and that falls well within, far as I understand it, the populating of that area. I think I would have to go with the fiction being the earliest evidence of copper smelting. That's the only one that gives me a little bit of a false feeling. So, that's what I'll go, number two.

S: All righty. Rebecca?

R: Yeah, for me it's between the copper and the archery. The cave art, yeah I get that, maybe 40,000 – yeah, why not. They were doing cultural things back then and they could certainly last that long. Copper smelting or archery; archery really, really big right now, so maybe – and Steve, I know you kid likes archery, so maybe archery was on your mind and you decided to make something up about archery. Or maybe that's what you want me to think. You know, I don't care; I'm going to go with the archery one, just... yeah, just because. I think you made it up because I think you like archery.

S: OK. Bob?

B: (exhales) Well, the cave art; I could buy that; that's not striking me as being way out, and like Rebecca, I have a problem with the second two, the copper smelting and the archery.

S: (affected voice) The shmelting.

(laughing)

B: The shmelting. The archery I could see somebody stumbling upon that idea and running with it. Less so the copper smelting though, that just seems a little too far back for me to buy, so I'll... I just think the copper is just too far back; I'll have to go with that as fiction.

S: OK. Jay?

J: Dan, which one did you pick?

D: The copper smelting.

J: And how do you typically do at Science or Fiction?

(laughing)

D: I'll tell you later.

J: See, the guy's almost done with his first show with us and he's already busting my balls.

R: He learns quickly.

D: You got a target on you, brother.

J: (chuckles) All right, so... yeah, the cave painting; I would be shocked if that one is fiction. I remember reading something; I don't know – like, I actually have something in my head that I recently saw, which is the – you know, the red – what were they, I forget what they were using to make their early, early paintings, but they were doing it over their hands; you see all the human hands and all that stuff. The shmelting is... now, does this include a pancake, Steve?

(chuckling)

E: Blintz.

J: 7,000 years, huh? Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't they be able to be smelting 7,000 years ago? And the third one, also found evidence of archery dating back 7,400 years; smelting is a lot more advanced than archery. I'll take (affected voice) the von shmelting for 1,000, Alex.

S: All right. Evan.

E: Well, the cave art 40,800 years B.P. Mmm, I agree with everyone else; I think that of the three is the most plausible one. Copper shmelting or archery. Sorry Rebecca, I'm going to go with the copper smelting one as the fiction.

S: OK.

J: Oh!

D: Oh well.

J: That means you're wrong!

R: I'm not liking my chances here.

S: All right. Well, you all agree with number one, so we'll start there. Archaeologists have discovered the oldest example of cave art, dating back 40,800 years before present. You guys all think that one is science and that one is... science.

E: Oh, thank God.

B: 50-50 now.

S: It was actually 40,700 years. That is – and Jay, I think you did probably read the item. Do you know what the art consisted of?

R: Penises.

S: Close.

J: I just remember it being etchings –

D: It was bunny rabbits.

J: It was really shitty; it was –

S: They were red dots.

J: Oh yeah, yeah!

D: No, no, no!

E: Red dots?

D: Five?

B: Planets. Planets, obviously.

J: They were among other things.

S: It was a star system. It was a star map. Yeah, they were –

(laughing)

S: If you look at the picture –

E: This means something.

S: – it's lots of red dots in kind of a pattern; it's obviously not a natural thing, you know, this cave painting. But the key is, it was using the same red pigment and the same blowing technique that Jay – of the pictures of hands that Jay was referring to. You put your hand on the wall, you blow the paint around it, take your hand away and you got a picture of your hand. So they figured out how to do that 40,000 years ago. This does beat the previous oldest cave art by about 4,000 years, so it does push it back a bit. This was found in Spanish locations, so in Spain.

E: There are caves in France that had very old –

S: Yeah, there's a lot of famous caves in France as well, but this is … same basic –

D: So, this doesn't – this is not like, a startling push-back of the early –

S: Nah, it really isn't.

D: But – yeah.

S: It was 4,000 years.

D: Talk about a long time ago – make-up, or something like that.

S: Yeah, the clam shells with the pigment.

D: Yeah.

S: Yeah, this wasn't surprising, but I had to find three items all about oldest stuff, so. But the other two are the tricky ones. So let's – we'll take them in order. The earliest evidence of copper smelting was recently discovered in eastern Serbia and dates to 7,000 years before present. All of the men think this one is fiction; Rebecca, you think this one is science, and this one is... science!

R: Wooo! Suck it!

S: Good job, Rebecca.

J: Good job.

B: Nice job, Rebecca.

R: Suck it. Suck it. Psychology wins again.

S: You got lucky.

R: It was not luck. It was not luck, sir. It's induction.

B: It's not "Science or Psychology"; it's "Science or Fiction".

R: Psychology is a science, Bob.

S: Once again, you were right for the wrong reason; we're getting there, though. All right, so the oldest example of copper smelting dates back to 7,000 years ago. They found evidence of copper slag, which is what's left behind after you heat up the ore and remove the copper. Ore is an artifact; they also found cast copper objects, so copper was probably – the evidence is that was probably the earliest metal that was smelted. It has a very low oxidation potential, which makes it easy to separate from the ore, so it's easy to smelt, comparatively. Lead, tin, and iron are more difficult; iron, of those metals, is the most difficult. Interestingly, gold has such a low oxidation potential –

J: I love gold!

S: – that it occurs naturally in its metallic form. It's probably true that people were finding and working gold as a metal before the other metals because you don't have to smelt it; you find it as metallic gold. But once you get up to copper, lead, tin, and iron, those exist in ore form – they're bound to other minerals and you have to smelt them in order to get the purified metal out. Copper's pretty good as a tool, certainly better than stone tools for blunt work, but it doesn't hold an edge. Does not hold an edge, so it's not really good for making – well, you can, but it's not really – it's a poor material for like, an axe or a knife. So they eventually discovered how to add tin to copper, creating...

E: Bronze.

S: Interestingly, it was thought – it was previously thought before this find, that the Europeans learned how to smelt copper from the Middle East; that it actually originated in the Middle East and then spread from there. But now the oldest find is in Eastern Europe, so that kind of moves the locus of where it started. It could have been discovered independently, of course, in the Middle East and in Europe, and also, of course, the oldest of anything is always determined by the oldest example that we have of it, which is probably not the true origin of it. You know, just the first example that we've discovered. Which means, going on to number three, archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of archery, a yew bow dating back 7,400 years before present. Now I admit this one was a little tricky, because archaeologists did find a 7,000-year-old yew bow, and that was the article that I was basing this on. And they –

B: What the hell?

S: And it is the –

B: You got some 'splaining to do.

S: – oldest Neolithic bow discovered in Europe. It's just not, by a long shot, the oldest example of archery. That's what made that fiction.

J: Oh, OK.

S: In fact, it's not even the oldest bow.

E: What?

S: Yeah, the Holmegaard bow is a couple of thousand years older. That dates to 8-9,000 years before present, and those were – those are actually – The oldest bows that we've discovered are pretty well-designed and pretty functional; yew is actually a really good wood to make bows out of; it has a lot of good properties for a bow. The Holmegaard bow has a very efficient design; it's a good bow; you could use it today as a reasonably designed bow, and could be made out of a lot of different types of wood that were easily available. Yeah, this was just the oldest Neolithic bow found in Europe, but not the oldest bow, and also, there are other lines of evidence for archery; for example, a cave painting of an archer.

B: Oh, yeah.

S: So that's a painting of a guy holding – obviously holding a bow in front of him, pointing it at an animal.

D: Yeah, it's iconic.

J: Unless the artist was psychic and he predicted the creation of the bow.

B: It was a science fiction cave painting. Come on.

S: And, the oldest evidence, however, which I admit, is not smoking-gun evidence, but the oldest evidence that possibly pointing towards use of a bow, goes back 50,000 years –

B: Holy crap.

S: And that is stone arrowheads. Now, the reason why that's not smoking-gun evidence of a bow is that they could have used like an atlatl to throw the arrows and not –

J: Atlatl.

E: Now you're making up words.

D: Like that Jay, huh?

S: They could have used some other – but they look like they're the size of arrowheads. You know, they're not spearheads, they're arrowheads. But still – that's somewhat indirect evidence. But still other lines of evidence that go back far, like arrowheads buried in the pelvic bone that really probably needed the force of a bow to get buried in there dating back up to 18,000 years ago, evidence of gluing feathers to shafts around 20,000 years ago.

J: Yeah, but don't do that at home.

B: (laughing) Nice, Jay.

S: Right.

R: Well, the important thing to remember is that I won.

D: Yes.

S: The salient fact – the salient fact of this item is that Rebecca won.

R: (blows raspberry)

S: I will point out again, for the wrong reasons.

R: Yep.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:16:07)

S: All right, Jay, what do you got for a quote this week?

J: I have a very awesome quote here and I want you, Steve, to guess who this is. But I will say that this quote was sent in by Ole Hjolmersen. Ole's from Sweden, and he sent in this kick-ass quote and I'm testing my brother Steve with this quote.

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death--however mutable man may be able to make them--our existence as a species can have a genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

S: Yeah, the two people that it makes me think of -- one is Carl Sagan, it's kind of the way he writes. But I think Isaac Asimov comes to mind as well.

J: You know, not bad guesses but you're not quite there. STANLEY KUBRICK!

S: Oh, Stanley Kubrick. Cool!

E: Whoa!

J: That actually was a quote taken from a Playboy interview; he did it in Playboy magazine.

E: So, let's compare 2001 to Prometheus.

(all laughing)

J: Not -- Don't even. Hey, Dan, thanks for joining us. It was a really good time, man.

R: Yeah, thanks, Dan. You did well.

B: Great job!

D: Real pleasure.

J: Dan, I gotta ask you: was it worth it?

D: Oh, yeah. Are you kidding? Ohh. Great.

(laughing)

D: Was it Michael? Yeah, and he said something about the thrill of watching the sausage being made. Yeah.

(laughing)

R: You know, you can tell no one, Dan. No one. How the sausage gets made. They'll vomit, OK?

S: A secret you'll have to take to your grave.

D: Nope; that's the thrill of secrets.

S: All right, well, thanks for joining us, Dan. And thank you all for joining me again this week.

R & J: Thank you, Steve.

E: Doctor.

B: You're welcome.

S: And until next week, which will be our TAM episode, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

References