SGU Episode 400

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SGU Episode 400
16th March 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 399                      SGU 401
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Our inner weighing of evidence is not a careful mathematical calculation resulting in a probabilistic estimate of truth, but more like a whirlpool blending of the objective and the personal. The result is a set of beliefs - both conscious and unconscious - that guide us in interpreting all the events of our lives.
Leonard Mlodinow
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Forum Discussion

Introduction

<beep> S: This is Rogue Leader, checking in from Sierra-Golf-Uniform Mission Control. I need a news item status report, please identify.

E: Echo Three to Echo Seven. Han, old buddy, do you read me? Uhhh, I mean, Steve, this is Rogue Four, copy?

R: Yeah, Rogue... Five? here, I guess? I don't—I don't know, I'm here. Why do we have to talk like this, Steve? Steve?

<beep> S: This is Rogue Leader, Rogue Five. Call me Rogue Leader. Can you please identify? That means use your code name. Over. <beep>

R: Yeah, I'm refusing your stupid order. Over.

B: This is Rogue Mandelbrot. Over.

<beep> S: Rogue Mandelbrot, I don't recognize your callsign. Use your issued designation. Over. <beep>

B: (exhales, indignant) This is Rogue Two. If any of the other Rogues want to call me Rogue Mandelbrot, feel free; it's much cooler than friggin' Rogue Two.

<beep> S: Rogue One, come in, Rogue One. Do you copy? Over. Has anyone talked to Rogue One recently? <beep>

R: You mean Jay, right? Is Rogue One Jay? We have names already, Steve. I seriously do not understand this.

J: This is Rogue One. I copy. I'm at 42,000 feet coming in over San Diego.

<beep> S: Rogue One, are you go for a news item? <beep>

J: Roger that, Rogue Leader. I'm covering the death of Duane Gish. Over.

B: Over what, his dead body?

<beep> S: Cut the unnecessary chatter on this frequency, Rogue Two. What is your news item? Over. <beep>

B: I'm talking about carbon nanotubes and solar panels and new battery technology.

E: Are they charging those new batteries with solar panels made out of carbon nanotubes? How cool!

<beep> S: That's a negative, Rogue Two. No one wants to hear about any news items on those topics from us ever again.<beep>

R: Rogue Two should push that idea out the airlock. Over.

<beep> S: Rogue Four, will you give me a news item status update, please? <beep>

E: Uhhh. Roger that. I've got plants talking to animals.

<beep> S: That's a negative on that one, Rogue Four. <beep>

E: I've got latest paranormal belief statistics from the United Kingdom.

<beep> S: That's a negative too.

E: I've got bee venom killing the HIV.

<beep> S: Mmmm, nope. Over.

E: Uhhh, 3D printing replaces 75% of a man's skull.

<beep> S: That's a negative on that one, Rogue Four.

E: Uhhh. (exhales) How about people can live to be 150 years old?

<beep> S: That's a go on that last one, Rogue Four. <beep> Rogue Five, I still need a status report on your news items. Over. <beep>

R: Yeah, I wanna talk about a sloth that got its makeup done. Uhhh, on a TV show. It's great.

<beep> S: A sloth on a TV show. Over. <beep>

R: Yeah, it's like—it's a sloth that they brought in from the zoo, and they put it in a makeup chair and they put makeup on it. That's what I'm gonna talk about.

<beep> S: Maybe we'll put that on the back burner there, Rogue Five. <beep>

J: Rogue One to Rogue Leader, come in.

<beep> S: Rogue Leader here. Go ahead, Rogue One. <beep>

J: Permission to fly my ship into Rogue Two. Over.

<beep> S: That's a negative, Rogue One. Cut the shit. Over. <beep>

R: This is overdone. Over.

E: (As Sean Connery) I'll take Rogue Four for a thousand. Over.

J: Oh yeah? Over.

<beep> S: We are ready to go with Mission 400. <beep>

(rocket launching)

(theme music)

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

This Day in Skepticism (6:54)

• March 16, 1912: Historical badass Captain Lawrence Oates sacrifices himself for Scott's Terra Nova Expedition in the most badass way possible.

S: Well, we do have a great show for you, our number 400. We're gonna start, as we usually do, with This Day in Skepticism. Rebecca.

R: Yeah. Alright, let's set the stage, you guys. It's early 1912. You are part of the Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole, an effort led by Robert Falcon Scott.

S: Wait, wait. I thought Terra Nova went back in time to the time of the dinosaurs.

R: No, that was just a terrible short-lived TV show.

S: Oh, that's right.

R: Is that still on?

B: No.

R: No. Can't be. Yeah, okay. So, you arrived at the South Pole in December of 1911, only to find that the Norwegians beat you to it by a solid month. So you turned around and you march back, only to find horrific weather, scurvy, other illnesses, injuries and diminishing food supplies. And come March, one person is already dead, and if the rest don't make it to safety soon, everybody's going to die.

S: And that's when The Thing attacked, right? 'Cause they already killed the Norwegians. (laughter)

R: Yeah, yeah. That, I think, did happen in the recent Thing adaptation, but I'm not positive, because much like everyone else, I didn't watch it.

B: I don't know what it is, but it's weird

E: unintelligible) – the rest of the world, nobody saw it.

R: So, Captain Lawrence Oates, who was on the team to handle the ponies, had become weak and ill and frostbitten, and he told everybody else "Go on without me." And they refused.

E: They said "Alright."

R: So on the morning of March 16, 1912, Oates got up and walked out the tent, never to be seen again. And before he left, he said "I'm just going outside and may be some time." Thereby giving English folks for the following century the best possible thing to say when going out for milk during a particularly bad rainstorm. So his sacrifice was awesome, but ultimately all for naught, since everyone else in the party died twenty miles later. But it was still pretty badass.

S: So, how do they know he said that if everyone else died?

R: They kept diaries. You dummy.

S: They wrote that down, before they…?

R: Yeah, and in fact, according to Oates's diary, he loathed Scott.

S: Yeah, I remember reading that.

R: Despite his sacrifice.

E: He mother-fracked him up and--

S: Although, he also said at one point that, maybe I'm just in a bad mood because I'm in friggin' Antarctica.

R: Right. Maybe it's the frostbite talking. (laughter) But I feel like the person leading us is incompetent.

E: Maybe it's the slow embrace of death talking here. (laughter) This suuuccckks!

R: I think you could forgive him for being a little cranky.

S: Worst expedition ever.

R: It really was, like, oh, can you imagine, you know, embarking on this grand expedition that will very likely cost you your life and you make it. You make it to the South Pole, only to find out that some Norwegians beat you there. Ouch! And then dying on the way back. I mean, that part sucked, too.

J: Right before the guy dies, he's like, this really sucks! (laughter)

S: But they had that exploration spirit.

R: They did.

S: That excelsior spirit.

B: Excelsior!

E: Yeah, that

R: For whatever's that worth, which is exactly nothing.

S: So they got that going for them.

B: Which is nice.

S: Which is nice.

E: That's a nice footnote.

News Items

Meteorite Fossils (10:23)

Astrobiologists claim meteorite carried space algae

S: Bob, on a much happier note, though, you're gonna tell us about life on meteorites. Maybe even alien life, or maybe not.

B: So here's the news story. The first nanosecond you read it, you're thinking, holy crap, I mean, is this, could this be possibly true? How awesome would that be? Some of the titles were: Astrobiologists find ancient fossils in fireball fragments; another one was: Astrobiologists claims meteorite carried space algae. And, but then you think, well, if, really, if that were true, right, that would be the news item of the century, at least, if not the millennium. And people, everyone would be talking about it. It'd be all over the internet, which it wasn't. So, you know, I'm thinking, well, what the hell is really going on here, 'cause I'm used to these news items that seem pretty awesome but clearly aren't. But that is the claim that's being made by scientists at Cardiff University in the U.K., and it all started with this fireball that blew up over a Sri Lankan province called Polonnaruwa on December 29, 2012. I didn't even hear about that one. I looked at some of the police reports that came out of that. People were claiming that they were burned by meteorites and that they were, there were fumes; these weird fumes that even caused someone to pass out, apparently, and had to be taken to the hospital. And right there, that's gotta raise some skeptical eyebrows because

S: Because (unintelliglble)

B: Yeah, meteors generally are not hot. (laughter) They're travelling in space and they're close to absolute zero, so a brief little journey, fiery journey through the atmosphere isn't gonna make that much of a difference, and it conducts heat very well

R: Yeah you definitely need to preheat those first. (laughter)

B: Right. By the time you get there, they are not hot, they are generally pretty cold. And the fumes, the whole thing with the fumes is silly. I just think of these weird science fiction movies from like the '50s and the '60s where a meteor hits and they're hot and they've got these weird alien fumes coming out. Just like, just those two things right there, whoa, what's going on here? So what happened was they found, allegedly, they found 628 of these little meteorite fragments that allegedly came from this meteor, and they sent it off to Cardiff University. And the scientists there were studying it. They used electron—

R: That's where Dr. Who is. (laughter)

B: That's right.

S: He's called "The Doctor." He's not actually called Dr. Who. (laughter)

R: Thank you for stopping that flood of emails.

B: We'll still get 'im. So, they're looking at these little bits of meteorite and they find fossils of algae deep inside. Specifically, they were diatoms. I think that's how that's pronounced.

S: Diatoms? [long o]

B: Diatoms? Really? Specifically, these are single-celled plantlife. All over the planet. The cell walls specifically for these are made of silica, so it's kind of interesting. So what came from this was the declaration by these scientists that life on earth must have had some extraterrestrial origins, so-called panspermia. And, I think that seemed a little bit, you know, jumping the gun a little bit. But the science fails here are pretty, pretty big. There's so many red flags. And signs that, yet again, it's just way too premature to go to public with something like this. I keep thinking of cold fusion and other similar things where these guys just, they just like totally jump the gun and did not do their due diligence.

S: Two things, Bob. Two things. First of all, I confirmed it is diatoms [long o], thank you.

B: Okay.

S: This is worse than being premature. This is bad science. These guys did a crappy job.

B: Exactly, and now I'll go . . .; I'll explain why it was actually, not only premature, very bad science. One of the key things they should have done, but maybe one of the first things they should have done, is to show that these things came from a meteorite. Without a shadow of a doubt, or as conclusively as can be done. They didn't even really even do that, let alone show that it came from the one from Sri Lanka. Now I think that they looked at over 600 and only three of them did they say came from a carbonaceous chondrite, which is a type of meteorite, but in the opinion of many, they didn't even do that to a sufficient degree. So that, that was key. You have to show like, hey, this is from a meteorite because these diatoms are everywhere. They're all over. They're all over the place. You can't just find them, find these fossils and say "looks like it came from a meteorite. So therefore, panspermia." Blah, blah. The other big thing that they totally blew was the whole concept of contamination, which is a huge, huge problem. And they did not seem to take that seriously enough at all. They were saying that the fossils inside were too deep inside the rocky fragments. And, but the thing is, that doesn't matter. If they even just consulted somebody who's familiar with this stuff, they'd say that doesn't matter. The tiniest little crevice or crack these guys can get into. You could crack it open and find something in the very, very middle of it, but it doesn't matter 'cause they could still get in there. It doesn't mean that it's ancient and been accreting around these fossils for a millennium and thousands of millions of years. So related to that, they didn't consult with the experts in the relevant fields. Bring in a meteor expert. If you're gonna convince the world that you found life from another planet, algae, no less, similar to Earth's algae, you've gotta cross all your t's and dot all you I's. Bring in some experts; consult with outside labs. Don't do this all on your own because you just look really silly, especially when, you know, the overwhelming probability that people are just gonna say "no, you're just way off and here's why. 1-2-3-4."

S: Bob, how'd they get this published in a peer-reviewed journal?

B: Ah, there you go. I call this section the "Journal of Doubt." They published it in the Journal of Cosmology. I mean, we've mentioned this before. It's not a respected journal. They're known to have very, very loose submission guidelines.

S: It's a rag.

B: Absolutely. They published a paper in 2009 about the meteor with a fossil-like cyanobacteria in it. I mean, this is like the same journal. And I think the same people that actually trying to push this stuff. So, there, right there, another huge, huge red flag. Don't go to the Journal of Cosmology. Sounds kind of authoritative, maybe. But if you know anything about it, it's not. Also, another interesting point that should be considered I think is one of the co-authors, Chandra Wickramasinghe, was the first guy to actually propose, that I'm aware of, to propose this whole idea of panspermia, back in 1981, and from what I could gather, a lot of skeptics claim that this guy is somewhat fanatical about this. I mean, alright, it's your idea, of course it's gonna be your pet idea, and very protective of it, but apparently this guy's really got some blinders on when it comes to this, and he often, or has been shown in the past, to ignore evidence that's contradictory. Which is just really human nature, but, and this is what science and critical thinking are designed to protect against. When you insulate yourself from the process and procedures of real science, you run the risk of being laughed at sometimes, and having people call it tabloid science because you just have not done your homework. This has happened before with this guy, and with this Journal. But a lot of people, I wonder if a lot of people are thinking that we've been invaded by algae. So I'll close with my favorite title from Red Orbit. It was "Algae From Outer Space? It's Probably Just Bad Science." Exactly.

S: Probably.

E: Wow. Prophetic.

R: Thank god, 'cause it'd be like Day of the Triffids but more boring. (laughter)

J: Guys, when bad science like this comes out, to me it smacks of people wanting to believe in something. There's a lot of conclusions that they could have jumped to that weren't so crazy or so wonderful, for lacking a better way to describe it. 'Cause it is pretty wonderful and amazing.

S: Well I mean, I think it's reasonable to assume that that's the base line. Every scientist wants their theory to be true; wants to find something interesting and important, and we just assume that that's the case, that everyone's biased. But the point is to design rigorous studies so that you minimize the effects of that bias and you rule it out as much as possible. And that's when, if you haven't done that, of course your bias comes through.

B: That's what science is designed to protect against.

Duane Gish Dies (18:46)

• Duane T. Gish dies

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Acupuncture Meta-Analysis (26:04)

• Revenge of the Woo
• Another Acupuncture Meta-Analysis – Low Back Pain

Quicky With Bob (44:14)

• Astronomer discovers closest star system to our sun

News Items Continued

Live to 150 (46:46)

• New drug being developed using compound found in red wine 'could help humans live until they are 150'

Who's That Noisy? (54:44)

• http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,45351.0.html
• Answer to last week: Yvan

Science or Fiction (58:08)

Item number one. A new study finds that those infected with HIV have no increase in mortality if they are well controlled on medication. Item number two. Recently published research finds that screening colonoscopy did not increase survival. And item number three. Engineers have built a self-healing integrated-circuit chip able to repair itself and resume function even after significant damage.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:11:26)

Our inner weighing of evidence is not a careful mathematical calculation resulting in a probabilistic estimate of truth, but more like a whirlpool blending of the objective and the personal. The result is a set of beliefs - both conscious and unconscious - that guide us in interpreting all the events of our lives.

Leonard Mlodinow

Announcements

NECSS 2013 (1:12:42)

• April 5th-7th 2013

References