SGU Episode 846
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| SGU Episode 846 |
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| September 25th 2021 |
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| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire. |
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| Show Notes |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...
B: Hey, everybody!
S: Cara Santa Maria...
C: Howdy.
S: Jay Novella...
J: Hey guys.
S: ...and Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening, folks.
S: So guys, I have an update on my solar panel situation.
B: Say it. Say it.
J: Finally.
B: Can you give us... It exploded. Your solar panels had a total existence failure.
S: Yeah, right? So if you remember, I had to have my solar panels temporarily removed to do some work on the chimney and it's taking months and months to get them put back on and of course the whole system is down while they're doing this. So finally, I did hear from the company. Now what happened was a listener of the SGU who works at Sunrun, who works at the solar company, Guy Henry, hooked me up. He said, hey, I work for the company. He's not like big up in the company, but he works for the company. He said, I'll see what I can do. I'll send this up the chain and see what happens. And it all worked out.
C: Yes.
S: He told them the horrible experience I had. And so the charitable interpretation of everything is that there was a legitimate transition from Vivint to Sunrun and our account was literally in transition from one to the other. So that kind of explains some of this horrific service that we were getting. And it does seem that Sunrun does have their stuff together a little bit more as a company. Guy Henry works in the San Diego area and as a favor to him, I'm going to plug him. So if you need solar in the San Diego area, seriously, the company, at least now, they've been very responsive once we hooked up with them and not Vivint. You can email him. So it's Guy.Henry@Sunrun.com if you need solar in the San Diego area.
C: So what's the latest for you? Like what's going on now with your panels?
S: So they made an appointment. They actually kept their appointment.
C: Nice.
S: They came to the house and they found the panels. The guy said, yeah, we found the panels. They were right over there.
J: What do you mean they were right over there. Like where?
S: He said, he said it wasn't hard to find them. So it kind of implies that whoever was looking for them previously wasn't really looking or didn't know what they were doing. And so anyway, they installed the panels and then they weren't working because something was broken in the meantime. So but then they came back like just two days later, which was today, and they fixed it. So now we're actually producing electricity from our roof for the first time in like six months or seven months or so.
E: So what a shame you missed the whole summer, you know?
S: I know we missed the summer. I know. But at least they're back and they're working now. So you know, again, thanks to Guy for helping me out with all this and to Sunrun for finally making this work. But of course, you shouldn't have to have a social media presence in order to get satisfaction like this. You know what I mean? Like what would have happened if I didn't have a podcast? Would I still be waiting for my solar panels?
C: Probably.
E: Probably.
S: But hopefully the problem now is fixed with this transition to a new company. And I do I do want to emphasize this is a kind of a quirky thing. I shouldn't put anybody off of getting solar on their house because the bottom line is the way this company works, there's no money down and there's really no risk. They just use your roof and then you get electricity for 20% cheaper than the grid. That's it.
C: Oh, so your roof is just like a daisy chain on the grid.
S: They're just using my roof. They own the panels. So I at some point if I want to, I could buy them and then I own the electricity. But you know, for now it's just, do you want 20% cheaper electricity? Sure, plus I feel good because it's it's green energy, especially now that we have an electric vehicle we definitely want, this is good timing.
B: So you'd like the Green Lantern then?
S: We wanted the, we wanted the solar power back online when we to, to recharge our EV.
C: Do you guys do time of use meter stuff too? Is that part of it? That they have a time of use meter on your electrical things?
S: Yeah. Totally. Oh, totally.
C: Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.
S: And, and they also, a lot of states do this. They charge you a peak demand vig.
C: So you get a discount on lowest demand, but you also pay more for peak demand.
S: You pay more. Yeah. That you pay, you pay a premium for your peak demand. So peak shaving becomes really valuable. And I haven't done it yet because I was going to do it, but I put it on pause until my solar panels were actually working.
J: Well, how does that mean, Steve?
S: But I'd love to get a, I'd love to get a battery backup both for just to get me through outages, but also to peak shave, because then if you, you don't have to pay that premium on peak usage, if you're reducing your peak demand by using your battery power.
E: Yeah. Tap your battery instead.
C: When are we going to be able to use our cars as that? Because that would be cool.
S: You can.
C: We have a giant battery.
S: We haven't done this yet, but.
C: I think it like voids the warranty though at a certain point.
S: No, they don't care.
E: It lessens the life.
S: We haven't explored this yet, but it's an option on the computer in the car. So it has an option for run my house on this and it has another option for camping, you know? So it's, it's all the software anyway is sort of already has the built-in functionality to be used as a battery backup for your home or as a battery for your camping or whatever.
J: Is that bad for your battery? No, not at all.
C: Yeah. Why would, yeah. I mean, that's so cool. I love that.
S: We took our first long trip in the, uh, in the EV and the Tesla this last weekend. And it was fine, you know? We went, yeah, it was, we charged it all the way up to full the night before and then we would drove to Philadelphia. So we were down to maybe 20 or 30% of our battery at that point. And then we drove around the city and then we drove to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, like another 45 minutes away. So we were pretty close to empty at that point. The hotel we were staying at said that they had EV charging stations, which is a bit of an exaggeration because they had one, right? So they had one but luckily it was available and we recharged our car to full overnight. So then we were full up for the home trip. And then we also, we didn't really absolutely need to do this, but we stopped at a service station on the way home and we said, let's just see how the whole thing works cause we just wanted to make sure that we know we can do it if we, when we need to. So we, they had Tesla stations there. So, for the Tesla station, the one at the hotel was a generic one. It wasn't Tesla. So we had to like download an app and pay for it through the app, but for the Tesla, we just plug it in and it knows it's us. It's not, it's not free forever. We're still getting the, like initially you have a credit, like when you buy the car, you get a little credit for a while, but it just, so it's coming off of our credit, I guess, but like we didn't have to do anything. It just, we just plug it in and it, it obviously knows that it's our car and it charges it automatically to our account. And here's the thing. We stopped at a rest stop, we went to the bathroom, we got some snacks, we came back and then it was 15 minutes later, we had put another 150, whatever, 200 miles into the car and we left. The whole thing took less time than if we had filled up the car with gas.
C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause you're already, you're just there doing your thing, going pee, whatever, and you're not breathing those fumes.
B: I like the fumes.
S: That's probably the situation in which you're going to we would need to fast charge on the road. It's cause we're doing a long trip. It's probably going to be at a rest stop. So even a short rest stop was enough to basically top off the car.
C: Yeah. And I think my, my DC fast charge, cause I don't have a Tesla, I have a GM, I have a Chevy, but my DC fast charge is about 80% full in 20 minutes time. So think about the things you could do in 20 minutes. You just stop when it's time to eat and then it's like, well, that's, it takes longer than that to eat.
S: Right. But even a bathroom snack run was enough.
C: Yeah. Yeah. It's so cool.
S: And there was a long line at, at the pumps. So we were like, so long, suckers.
C: Yeah. That is one of the probably perks of East Coast charging versus West Coast charging is that we have the long lines at the charging station.
S: No, yeah. There was plenty of availability. And then of course, just making, having many more charging stations available is necessary. I see why. Because when there's a, when there's enough, like if there was, if the one at the hotel was in use that would have been inconvenient.
C: Oh yeah.
S: You would have had to find one somewhere.
C: Especially because some people have bad charging. What do you call it? I keep wanting to say rhetoric. That's not the right word.
S: Etiquette.
C: Etiquette. Thank you. Yeah. Like hygiene, that's not right either. Kind of right.
S: But you know, with, with enough charging stations, it really is a non-issue.
C: Oh, for sure. It's just like, I mean, I think people were, were having the exact same concerns when the gas cars came on the line and there weren't enough places to hitch your horse and oh no, there's only the one, the one gas pump or the one attendant and there's a wait.
E: One watering trough.
C: Of course. Like you're going to, the infrastructure is going to grow in lockstep with the product.
S: Yeah. Yeah.
What’s the Word? (9:12)
- Word_Topic_Concept[v 1]
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S: All right, Cara, you're going to do a what's the word this week?
C: Yes. Okay. So I'm going to ask, and I already know the answer. I have a feeling that three of you are going to say, you've never heard this word before. And one of you is going to be like, of course I know this word. The word is pudendum, pudendum.
J: Never heard it.
C: I feel like I'm a spelling bee.
S: That's where the sun don't shine.
C: It's where the sun don't shine. And I had never heard of it. I asked my dear friend who is also a physician and he was like, of course, the pudendum. It's, he said the same thing. It's like down there.
B: It's the front of where it doesn't shine, not the back.
C: It's also evolved over time into the female where the sun don't shine. And this is where things get really interesting. Okay. So pudendum, it really ultimately comes from, it was the Latin word for vulva. Now we usually would say vulva. Vulva is the inner and outer labia, the clitoris and the pubic mounts. It's all those things together make up the pudendum. But we probably, or Steve, I should say, is probably more used to hearing about the pudendal canal, the pudendal nerve, the pudendal artery, pudendal blocks, which numb the pudendal nerve. So these are all the things that lead to the pudendum, feed the pudendum. But now here's the interesting part. When it comes to anatomy, by and large, although lots of things are named for people, which confuses the hell out of a lot of anatomy students, medical students, things of that nature, by and large, anatomy is named for what it is or what it does. So there's a great article in the New York Times, by the way, that I'm pulling this from by Rachel Gross, where she's talking about kind of the whole history of this. And so she cites the flexor carpi ulnaris, a muscle in the forearm that bends the wrist. It's exactly as it sounds, it's flexor carpi wrist, ulnaris, ulna, right? It's exactly what it says it does in the Latin. So she's like, okay, there's a student named Draper, Alison Draper. She's an anatomy student or she's a medical student at U of Miami. She's in her first year. She's all excited. And she loves Latin. And she's like, oh, I love looking up what all these things mean. And so she's like, oh, pudendum, pudendal, this is a fun word. What does it mean? I'm going to look up the Latin roots. And the Latin word pudere, which is the root for this word. Can anybody guess what it is? Steve, if you've read this, I don't want to hear from you.
B: To do or make?
C: To be ashamed.
J: Wow.
E: Oh. Getting the whole morality angle into this.
S: The part that you should be ashamed of.
C: This is one of the most loaded medical terms possible. And we've all kind of talked about hysteria, although hysteria is a case of like a backward term. Hysteria actually comes from the Greek root, which means womb. It was later that we said, oh, this is a crazed problem with the womb, which is leading to these women acting bizarrely and acting having like uncontained emotions. So even the word hysteria at its core just means womb. It's become this terrible thing because the womb itself was thought then to lead to women to acting crazy and uncontained. And that's why that was the thing.
S: There's actually a theory about a wandering uterus, have you heard of that?
C: A wandering, yes, exactly. Her uterus is wandering around in her and it's making her act very bizarrely. And so I'm not saying that that is benign. It's not benign at all. It's terrible. And the word hysteria is very laden and very sexist. But it became sexist, whereas this is the opposite. It was named in a sexist manner, right? There was, it was sexist to name this part puderi. But the interesting thing is when you dig way back, early on 16th century, it was gender neutral. There was a, I think, a mascularis or masculinus and a feminaris or something like that. So it used to mean like the genitals of men, women, and even in animals. And so you see this in really old medical illustrations. But then you start to see a change where, okay, in 1895, you would anatomical textbooks officially recognized this region, like I said, so up until 1500s, up until about 1895, you'd see it referring to both men and women. And then kind of in the early or part of the last century, I have to say, in the earlier part of the last century, you started to only see pudendum femininum. And then eventually, it was simplified to pudendum and it was only listed in women. And there was no equal and opposite in male anatomy books. So even though it may have started as this idea of like sex being shameful or the genitals being shameful, it evolved into this idea of female genitals being shameful. And that is how it has persisted to this day.
S: Although to clarify that, that's for pudendum. But for pudendal, like the pudendal nerve, the pudendal artery, that is gender neutral. That is.
C: Yes.
S: And that leads to again, in the article you're referring to-
C: Some tense arguments about whether those words should remain.
S: A discussion about whether we should change these words or not and that's all pudendum. Okay, you kind of got us there. It's you're saying the women's private parts are shameful. But the pudendal is kind of gender neutral or sex neutral. And so maybe we can that one's not so bad.
C: Ultimately, that's what Terminologica Anatomica, which is like this, this textbook that is the decisions made are run by the International Federation of the Associations of Anatomists. I mean, there are all these like important people involved who are arguing back and forth. What do we do? What do we do? Often, and many of them influenced by the writings of this first year medical student, which I think is incredible. They ultimately decided, okay, I think we can get rid of the word pudendum, but we just can't get rid of pudendal. It's funny that you mentioned what you mentioned, Steve, because I love how the writer said, where is it? There's the fighting, blah, blah, blah. It was getting heated. Everybody was saying, okay. And then she said, women were getting hysterical. And then there was a medical article in 2019, talking about the upcoming publication of the new version of Terminologica Anatomica, that said pudendum would no longer appear as an official term. But it said that the pudendal artery canal and nerve would remain relatively unchanged, quote, because the use of the word pudendalus in terms for structures present in both sexes cannot be interpreted as sexist. And I love that the writer said right after that. In other words, if the shame was spread equally, maybe it wasn't so bad. And really, it comes down to a more puritanical and moral conversation about how we view sex at all. You know, and yes, it is very sexist and very laden. Sure, I mean, I heard you guys gasp when I told you the root of this word. But this idea and then of course, there are all these other people that are cited in the article, an anatomist from South Africa named Beverly Kramer, who's like, this is not a reason for perpetuating the use of incorrect or offensive terms, just because people are used to using them, and they don't want to change course. There are always going to be people who push back, but ultimately, we should be able to evolve language to keep up with our times. And of course, this is not benign, as we know, and this is an important point that was made. The outcomes of medical treatment of men and women are different. And you know, it's been a very, very persistent and pretty horrific problem for quite some time. Well, for all of time, actually, I should say. And it persists to this day. And so when the very words that describe who we are, are laden, there are downstream negative effects of that, perceptual negative effects.
S: And just to add one thing, just to be maximally charitable. So in terms of retaining the pudendal name, pudendal nerve, pudendal artery, it's not just because we're used to it. If you change the name, you render all pre-existing scientific literature obsolete.
C: And this is not an example where there is a second name, like it's only the pudendal artery. Like there's no other word for it.
E: No A-K-A.
S: Yeah. Sometimes we have to do that. Names change. But then there's an asterisk for the forever from that point forward. So there is a practical scientific reason to try for continuity in the literature.
C: And that's the argument, right?
S: It's not just, this is what we've always said, is that there is a, yeah, there is a literature continuity argument, which I think is valid.
C: It is valid. But I think the question becomes like, at what point do we overcome it? Because there are definitely examples in history. And one good example that was mentioned was, do you know the name of the speculum? It's actually called the Sims vaginal speculum. It's a common name. So men, I mean, you guys all have kids, so you probably know. But maybe people who are listening don't know that a speculum is the tool that gynecologists use to open up and observe the cervix. Not every, but most people listening who have vaginas have encountered a speculum. But it was named for this dude named James Marion Sims, who is a gynecologist from the South and a slaveholder who basically made all his discoveries by experimenting on enslaved women. And so for good reason, the medical established woman is like, let's not call it the Sims speculum anymore. Like if we think about that with hysteria, like we used to literally diagnose, like Steve, you'd have, like back in the day, you'd have a woman patient come in and she's like, I don't know, man, I've had these headaches and I've been had these mood swings and it looks like a case of hysteria.
S: Yeah.
C: What the? It's bananas. Yeah.
S: I mean, yeah, whatever. Culture changes slowly. But I think these are good changes. And I'm always a little conflicted in that I think, yeah, all of this is good. Recognizing, not just thoughtlessly perpetuating names, like there's a big to do within the birding community about changing bird names that were basically names, like native birds that were named by scientists from other countries who were essentially colonialists or whatever.
C: And like those birds already had a name.
S: Yeah, they already had a name. Like some European guy named it and now it's his name. And it's like the same thing. Like, there's how many birds named Stellars, whatever how many birds does this guy get to name? But in any case, I also think balancing that against scientific continuity. But also I think sometimes it's okay to recognize the historical origin of something without endorsing it. Like isn't it curious that the pudendal nerve is named, it has this curious history? And if it's not being overtly used against one sex, then maybe it's, you could say it's on the balance. It's not that bad.
C: It's an interesting argument.
S: But yeah, it gets tricky.
C: Yeah, it's tricky. But I think the important point here, and what she actually alludes to in the article, which is so interesting, is that this girl, who's a girl, woman, who is a first year medical student, I say girl, because she's probably got like 20 years younger than me. But she's a first year medical student. And she's going, okay, this is an interesting word. It doesn't, like, it doesn't grok, I'm gonna, I'm gonna look it up, I'm gonna figure out what it means. And then she goes, Oh, my God, shame, what is happening? And so she tells her anatomy professor, did you know? And he's like, I literally had no idea. I never thought to look it up. And that's not even a privilege. Yeah, that's not a privileged perspective. That's just why would you look everything up? But that's the important point here is that we, we don't even know. And so bringing it out into the light means now people are grappling with it. And it reminds them of this past and this kind of shady history in medicine that women, not just like it's over, are still grappling with.
S: It's critical that we own our past, because it does inform our present. Absolutely. Even if we are in the process of moving beyond it, it still is very helpful to know because otherwise-
E: How can we learn from our mistakes?
S: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it is a good way to learn and to move forward by understanding, like really understanding like how horribly sexist the world was and still is in many places.
C: And that's the important part, too. If we ignore how horribly sexist it was, it's a lot easier to ignore how horribly sexist it continues to be. And as we start to uncover things and make our peace with the fact that this is us, this is who we were, and it's who we continue to be, only then can we say, I don't want this to be who I am and I want to affect change. But until we do that, it's really easy to just go, I don't know what it means. And that's the point. Yeah.
S: All right. Let's move on to some news items.
News Items
Whitest White (22:22)
S: Jay, why are you talking about a white, a really white paint? What's the big deal about this? This paint is really white.
J: Before we discuss the light side of the force, I want to talk to you about the dark side of the force, if you don't mind. Just because I think contextually you'll appreciate how powerful Darth Vader was compared to Obi-Wan. I will continue. Okay. So I'm sure most of you have heard of Vantablack, right, Bob?
B: Yes, I love it. So much.
J: If Bob could paint a room, well, he can't paint Vantablack, but if Bob could coat a room in Vantablack, he would do it with a smile on his face. This is one of the blackest blacks ever made because it absorbs 99.965% of the light that hits it. And this is done by using incredibly small carbon nanotubes. And real quick, the light hits these nanotubes, it gets trapped within the nanotubes and the light can't escape. And that's why it's so black, because no light is reflecting out of this, or a very, very small amount of light is reflecting off of this thing. And then MIT came out with a black that absorbs 99.995, which is better than Vantablack.
B: Vantablacker.
E: Super vacuum.
J: So that's really awesome. And MIT created their black specifically so it could be used in optical and space science applications. So we have this ability to make something that is incredibly black, absorbs an incredible amount of light. And artists around the world who recognize just how powerful these black treatments can be, there was quite a stir about who can use it and who did end up being able to use Vantablack and the other blacks that MIT made. So without getting into all those details, because that is a completely different story, I'm telling you now, I recommend that you look into it. Look up Vantablack and the drama that was created around it. You'll definitely find some articles about it and what happened. And I think you'll be entertained by that. I brought up these ultra black creations because now a lab at Purdue University has created the ultimate white, this white paint that is the whitest paint in the world. It's as white as white has ever been created, ever, right? Think about that. They set out to do this, not to fight Vantablack, but to fight-
C: I wish that were partially right.
J: How cool would that be? They had to have a fight. But this is, they created it to combat global warming and to save energy. That was what they started the research to do and they ended up with this white paint. So what is white? Let's talk about white. Humans perceive white when light stimulates all three types of color sensitive cones that are in our eyes. These are cells that are found inside the human eye. They need to be very near to or equal amounts of light and they have to have a high brightness. White surfaces reflect more light than any other color. And we've talked about Earth's albedo. Remember the reflectiveness of the Earth's surface? I think this goes back a few weeks now. This is how much light is reflected by the Earth. This is why as global warming reduces our planet's snow and ice coverage, for example, less light is being reflected back into space, which what? It further warms the planet. This is horrible.
C: It's also why, Jay, in California, I want to say recently, because the newer requirement is that you actually have solar. Like I think houses built after certain residential homes built after X date have to have solar. But previously, they needed a white roof. It was like it was against building code to put like a dark roof on a house, at least here in Southern California, because it's not energy efficient. Here in Southern California, it's the opposite where you guys live.
S: Well, for us, it's-
C: You want more heat.
S: Well, we want heat in the winter. We want cool in the summer. We get both.
E: We need a smart material that changes from season to season.
J: Yeah. Steve and I were just talking about this. Like if we used white in the summer, that would be great, but then it wouldn't help in winter. I would love to read a study about what those different... If you were able to change the color of your roof, how much of an impact it would actually have. So with Cara's help, we have now established that white surfaces reflect light and they can have a cooling effect, right? So that's where we are with white. So wearing white clothes, for example, is cooler, will produce a cooler temperature on your skin than wearing black because black will absorb the energy from the light while white will reflect some of that energy back and away from you. So the researchers at Purdue set out to make a coating that would be really reflective. In doing this, they also found that the coating ended up being incredibly white. So they didn't say, hey, let's make a white paint. They said, let's make a coating that is very reflective and that would help cool buildings and things like that. But it ended up that when they did the research and they figured out the best, most effective thing that they could, it ended up being white.
B: So I think you could have guessed that though. But go ahead.
J: Sure. But I mean, they weren't going into it saying we're creating white paint. That's the point here.
B: Right. Not like Vantablack, right. It's like, yes. Right. I got you.
J: The paint that they created reflects 98.1% of solar radiation and it remarkably also emits infrared heat.
S: Well, everything does, but the key is from my understanding ...
B: Reflects it.
S: I want to say though that the big caveat here is we're going mostly off a press release with this. Although I did read the actual study. There is a study as well, but I haven't seen a lot of other scientists commenting on it. So yeah. I'm very interested to see how this will play out in practice and with review, et cetera. But the study seems legit though. The study does seem legit.
J: Yeah. So they're saying that the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, right?
S: Yeah. That's the critical part.
J: That's the critical part.
S: You can go over that balance part where it's emitting more in infrared than it's absorbing because it's reflecting so much of the light that hits it.
C: And is that not the case for like regular white?
B: No. No, not at all.
J: Not to this degree. There's special paints.
C: Oh, like solar paints, like intentionally for that express purpose.
J: Yeah. They can reflect 80 to 90%. This reflects 98.1%, which is a lot more.
B: Right. But the important thing is though, is that because it could do such a high percentage, that it can cool below the ambient temperature. That's the critical takeaway.
J: Of course. Yeah.
C: That's amazing. I want that on my roof. Sometimes I burn my feet on my roof.
E: Yeah. Right?
C: That sounds great. By the way, my roof is also a deck. I'm just walking around up there for no reason.
J: It's also-
E: I thought you fiddle up there.
J: It might seem obvious because we're talking about paint here, but it has this legitimate, if the research is correct, of course, Steve did, it was smart for him to say that because we are going off of what the researchers wrote here, but this is done using zero power, right? It's not plugged in. It's not using power, which is fantastic.
S: Passive cooling, they call it.
J: So most commercial white paints get warmer when they're exposed to sunlight, not cooler. And this one does get cooler. The Purdue team study shows that painting buildings with their paint reduces temperatures inside the building by 4.5 degrees Celsius compared to outside.
E: Wow. That's enormous.
C: That's good.
J: And they wrote a statistic saying like, if you painted a thousand square foot roof with this paint, that it would be as if the building was air conditioned. Yeah. So the paint itself has a very high concentration of a compound called barium sulfate. It essentially is nanoparticles, right? And these nanoparticles are different sizes deliberately. This is the science in here. Each particle size will scatter light from different light frequencies in the spectrum. So when sun hits it, the sunlight isn't just one one frequency of light. It's lots of frequencies of light. And this paint is able to reflect all different kinds of frequencies of light because of the size of these nanoparticles. Very cool. Very smart. This is called spectral scattering. And this paint does this very, very well. So I'm going to click right into the bad news because there is bad news. I did dig up some bad news about this, Steve.
E: It's highly toxic.
J: So the bad news is-
C: It's full of lead. Oh, no.
J: The second you open the paint can, you die because the fumes will kill you. Sixty percent of this paint is made of barium sulfate. And it takes a lot of energy to dig up raw the ore. It's just it means that with today's technology, mining the ore needed to create this paint comes with a huge carbon footprint, which sucks.
C: And we can't make it synthetically?
E: And it doesn't offset the benefits of-
J: No, it doesn't, Evan. And Cara, I couldn't find anything about it. I was trying to read up on it. But apparently barium sulfate is not easy to come by. It takes a lot of energy to get it. Now, who knows? In the long run, maybe if the paint lasts a long time, it'll- Over time, it'll-
S: Yeah, you have to calculate the payback time what that would be. How long would you have to have this paint on your roof? The other thing, though, is that they mentioned is that what happens to anything that's white?
J: It gets dirty.
S: Dirty very easily. Yeah. So the maintenance-
E: Oh, it's effectiveness.
S: The moment that you paint that roof, it's going to start collecting dust or whatever. And so, yeah, there'd have to be some regular maintenance on it as well.
C: I wonder, though, if this kind of proof of concept doesn't then open up the door to finding other substrates that can help get to there. You know what I mean? Like, now that we know that it works with this rare thing that we probably shouldn't be mining out of the earth, maybe we can find something else that does this.
B: There is. There already is something that will cool below ambient temperature, and the researchers found it even before they made their paint. But it was created from multilayer nanostructures, not unlike Vantablack, but, big problem, too expensive, way too expensive. And in terms of expense, this doesn't seem very expensive. They saw an estimate for a cost that was 600 rupees per liter, which I did a conversion to United States dollar, and that was $8, $8 a liter. So I was like, that doesn't seem as horrific, anywhere near what I thought it was going to be.
S: Yeah. It's actually not that rare, and it's not the cost, it's just the carbon footprint of mining and everything.
B: Right. Right.
S: That's the problem, not the actual cost.
C: Which, because we don't calculate in, Steve, the externalized cost.
S: Yeah. It's externalized. But if you're saying, we're doing this to reduce cooling costs and maybe reduce energy use, and they also say, in addition to that, this increases the albedo of the planet. You know, if you had like every rooftop covered with this, that energy gets reflected back into space. And so, but we do have to count that against the carbon footprint of doing it in the first place over the lifetime of it, et cetera, et cetera. You got to do the lifetime analysis.
B: And also for context, Jay said that a thousand square foot roof area painted with this would result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts, which is a lot. And they said that that's more powerful than the air conditioners used in most houses. So I did a search, because how big, how much is a thousand square feet in terms of the average roof? You know, I was like, if it's a lot bigger or smaller, that changes your attitude a little bit. So I've actually found the average residential roof size in the US is about 1700 square feet. So more, more than would be needed to get the 10 kilowatts of cooling power. And a lot of houses actually have two and 3,000 square foot roofs that are pretty damn big. But the average is 1700. That's a big house. But a 1700 average is far above what what they're saying with a thousand square feet. So that's cool. But only four degrees, Jay? That doesn't-
E: 4.5 centigrade?
B: I mean, my my central area has to do a lot bit more cooling than four degrees.
C: That's what I was going to say, too. So what's-
E: Celsius, by the way.
C: I still feel like that doesn't take into account how hot it is in your house. Like oh, it does the work of this air conditioner. Yeah. If it's like already kind of nice outside.
S: Well, it just means your air conditioner would have to work less hard and it would accomplish your goal with less energy. That's what that means.
C: Exactly.
S: It may not get you all the way to a comfortable temperature, but it'll be much easier to get there and stay there with less electricity.
C: Well, and the funny thing is, as we often talk about these kind of new technologies to help with our carbon footprint, there are things available to us right now. Like, is your air conditioner 40 years old?
S: Yeah.
C: Is there a more energy efficient version that you could upgrade to right now that would really help you?
S: Is your refrigerator 15 years old?
C: Exactly.
S: Refrigerators really should be replaced every eight to 10 years to keep them maximally efficient.
E: Oh, I've had one six years now.
S: There's weird things that you wouldn't necessarily think of that are really important to the overall efficiency. Like, if we talk a lot about EVs and cars and whatnot like the biggest thing you could do to maximize your efficiency of your car is keep your tires properly inflated. Like the number, the amount of gasoline that's burned in the world because of insufficiently inflated tires is massive.
E: It's crazy.
C: And in your house, it's making sure that you have good seals on your windows. Like a lot of houses are just really drafty and poorly sealed. And it doesn't matter how much you crank your air con, I mean, or it doesn't matter how good your air conditioner is and how efficient it is if all of it's blowing out the windows.
S: Right. And LED bulbs over incandescent, huge difference, you know. Yeah, there's a lot of little things. But again, none of this absolves the bigger issues like we got to convert away from fossil fuels, etc. But still, it's good just to be aware of like the low-hanging fruit, the simple things we could do that really do make a difference. Not everybody has to run out and buy an EV right now. You just inflate your tires and have a huge effect.
C: And some people, you can just go paint your roof. And it actually really does make a big difference if your roof is paintable. Or just white. It's a good step in the right direction.
S: Yeah, yeah. All right. Thanks, Jay.
Using AI to Find New Materials (36:27)
S: Bob, tell us how we're going to use artificial intelligence to change the world to find new materials.
B: Yes. Researchers have created a new AI tool that works with humans to discover new classes of materials. This is recently published in Nature Communications by researchers from the University of Liverpool's Department of Chemistry and Materials Innovation Factory, led by Professor Matt Rosensky. Okay. People often leap ahead and focus on what like on what lone artificial general intelligences might do, right, in isolation. And I would never do that, of course. But in the near future, it looks like the collaboration between AI and humans can be extremely, can be an extremely productive relationship, especially when it comes to Cara's third favorite topic of all time-
C: Material science.
B: Material science. Yes. Material science drives so much of our culture, right? Steve, Jay, writing that book about the future of material science, and we went over the history. It's like it is our culture. It is everything. Without it, we would not be anywhere. We'd be nothing like what we are right now. So what would life be like without materials developed? For example, in the 80s, that composed lithium-ion batteries, right? No lithium-ion batteries. Things would be everything electronic seems to run on it. What would we be using? Sure, we'd have a something that could do a similar job, but probably not as good at all. What about metamaterials and what they're capable of now and their mind-boggling potential? All material science. So finding new functional materials, though, especially whole new classes of materials, is beyond horribly difficult. It's so very hard. And think about it. The periodic table of elements is huge. How many ways can they be combined? Now before I give you some of those numbers, all those ways are often described as chemical space, right? All of the possible chemical substances, chemical space, or chemical space. So some upper estimates of that number of all possible molecules are near 10 to the 180. 10 to the 180.
C: Oh my God.
E: That's a big number.
B: Yes, lots. Now it's an upper estimate, but even if they're wrong by many orders of magnitude, it's still gargantuan. The number of small organic molecules is around 10 to the 60. Now here's another one. The number of inorganic and organic substances that we've cataloged is what? 10 to the 8.
E: 80.
B: 10 to the 8 that we have cataloged, that we know, that we have written papers about. 10 to the 8.
C: It's still a really big number, but not nearly as big.
E: Gosh, it's intestinal by comparison.
B: It's like an ant compared to Jupiter, so yes.
C: But it's a big ant. It's just Jupiter's that much bigger.
B: It's a great ant, but it's-
E: Those ants on Jupiter are pretty big.
B: So 10 to the 8, those are the substances that are in the CAS database, which CAS is a division of the American Chemical Society. But that's it. The tiny scratch on the surface of what is possible. So how do you even begin to look for new materials, especially new classes of materials, when there's so many, so many possibilities? I mean, historically, scientists look at existing materials and they make tweaks, right? So lead author Roszynski said, to date, a common and powerful approach has been to design new materials by close analogy with existing ones. But this often leads to materials that are similar to ones we already have. Right. Makes sense. You're making a little tweak. It's not going to be a radically new thing. So the tried and true techniques work well, and we've done well by them, but they're slow, they're complex, and they're not optimized to find fundamentally brand new types of materials that could really change the world. So now, if you randomly traverse the huge chemical space or material space, if you will, it could take you a million years, right? Without finding that one thing you're looking for, something truly, truly revolutionary. So Roszynski says, again, we therefore need new tools that reduce the time and effort required to discover truly new materials, such as the ones developed here that combine artificial intelligence and human intelligence to get the best of both. So now the AI end of this new tool is it's a neural network that the researchers created uses unsupervised machine learning to infer hidden patterns in chemical knowledge, or chemical knowledge, patterns that can lead to stable combinations of elements. Now the tools that they developed, I liked some of the papers I read on this. They like saying they could do what no human can do. This AI tool is far beyond what people can ever do. And in this case, I mean, sure, but what it does is it essentially encompasses the information of something like hundreds of thousands of known materials. It basically puts it in RAM, right? It throws it in there, it puts it all together in its head, and it looks for the relationships between them, constantly going through and vetting the relationships between all those hundreds of thousands of known materials. So based on those relationships, the AI can then identify and rank combinations of elements that have a higher chance of forming functional materials, right? So that's what the AI does. It gives you a list. Here's some interesting what they call phase fields or combinations of elements that can do something that hasn't been explored, and chances are that these are going to be functional and potentially very, very interesting. So that information then, that rank list is then passed on to the other side of this partnership, the human experts, and then they use the AI rankings as a guide to assess these unexplored areas of chemical space in a very specific, strategic way. And then as you can imagine, and this potentially ramps up the efficiency by orders of magnitude, saving money and time, potentially years or decades or more of research potentially when once this is tweaked, I can imagine this could potentially save we might be able to find things that we never would have found otherwise, we never would have stumbled upon it, because it just didn't make sense that a material could be so helpful and so functional without having the AI kind of determine it. So do you want a proof of concept, Jay? This new tool-
J: Absolutely.
B: This new tool already discovered four new materials, including a grouping of solid state materials that conduct lithium. Now if you know about that, yes, such materials-
E: That's important.
B: Right. It's very important, Evan. Such materials are likely going to be very critical for the development of solid state batteries. I mean, how often do we talk about EVs and batteries? I mean, it's almost every week, we at least mention it.
C: Already talked about it once today.
B: Exactly. So solid state batteries, I think, and a lot of scientists think, and probably all of us think, have a solid future, so to speak. They're going to be something that's clearly coming hopefully soon, and it's going to change things in a dramatic way. So now solid state batteries will have a solid electrolyte, which gives it a much higher energy density and much less risk of blowing up in your face and catching on fire and all that kind of nasty stuff. But higher energy density, I mean, that's it. That's the holy grail of battery tech. We need more, greater and greater energy density, get to 4, 5, 6, 8, imagine 800, 900 miles on a charge. Or what I'm waiting for, a cell phone that can last, how about a couple of days, three days, or a week on a charge? Or one full day would be nice, iPhone. So these solid state batteries might do to modern batteries what thumb drives did to CDs. I mean, right? I mean, it potentially can be revolutionary. And this AI-human partnership may have discovered a new material that could be, could contribute to that eventuality. We shall see. But I think this type of partnership between the AI and human experts, especially for searching through huge spaces, chemical spaces, material spaces, other types of spaces, even AI spaces potentially, can be extremely fruitful, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes of it.
S: Yeah. This is one of those like when technology builds on technology.
B: Exactly. Yeah, you reach a critical threshold and things can happen much faster than you ever thought they could.
S: Yeah. A technology feedback loop. Yeah, totally. And I agree. I always think material science is the game changer.
B: Oh. Yeah.
S: Like we do the best we can with the materials we have. When you introduce a new material into the game, it literally changes things.
B: I mean, look at graphene and metamaterials and these other ones that we found. I'm sure we haven't fully determined what contributions things like graphene can make, but I think it's...
S: Well, Bob, we just go with... Look, in the past, look at when once aluminum became readily available, how much stuff can we make out of aluminum?
B: Oh, my God. Right?
E: Yeah, and plastic. Oh, bad choice.
S: But plastic, for all its downsides...
C: Plastic does save lives.
S: It's amazing.
C: It also murders seabirds, but it saves so many lives. Saves so many lives.
S: Fiberglass and just carbon fibers. I mean, so many things that are already massively in use that really changed industries.
B: Latex.
S: Yeah. All right, guys.
Philosophy and Science (45:29)
S: I recently was pointed to this article. It's basically an anti-vaccine, COVID is a myth, all that thing kind of pushback, right? So the pushback was framed in a very anti-generically anti-science way that I thought would be helpful to talk about. Framed as science is just philosophy was kind of the approach that they were taking, which is an insult to both science and philosophy.
C: I know. Why is the word just in there? Like, that's an unnecessary term.
S: All right. So this is how they set it up. I'll quote from the article. So if you first, and I've encountered this in many contexts, a lot of times, science deniers use this one-two punch, right? So the first setup is a straw man about what people who are pro-science are saying, right? And here's the straw man. Now I'm quoting from the article. The second consequence of quote unquote following science is that it reinforces one of modernity's most enduring myths, that science is a consistent, compact, institutionally guaranteed body of knowledge without interest or agenda. What this myth conceals is the actual operation of the science as multiple, messy, contingent, and tentative as they necessarily are. So you guys are all having the same reaction. That's nonsense. That is a straw man.
E: That's not right.
S: I mean, yeah, right? I mean, this is we—
C: Yeah, that's not what anybody claims science is, first of all.
S: Right. That is a cartoon, a childish cartoon that no scientist and certainly no skeptic would endorse. We spend the whole time talking about how contingent and tentative science is.
E: Self-correcting.
S: And it's messy and it's not well—
C: And it's done by people.
B: And it also, by the way, delivers the damn goods.
S: Right. So but the thing is, they see they set up the straw man so they could knock it down, right?
E: Sure.
S: But of course, we recognize this as a straw man, as a cartoon, that the nuance in the middle is that, yeah, science is a human endeavor. It's extremely messy. It has a lot of blind alleys. It gets a lot of things wrong. But because it's self-corrective and because it's a community effort where the the errors are kind of averaging out over time, it can grind forward. It can progress towards an increasingly accurate and useful prediction of reality, right?
C: And not just that it can, but it does. I mean—
S: It historically has.
C: Yeah. Exactly.
S: We sent a probe to Pluto, and it got there, and it sent us back incredibly high-resolution pictures close up of Pluto. That only would have worked if all of our models about gravity and chemistry and the rocket equation, all of that would have to be correct in order for us to get back pictures of Pluto. Or when I say correct, meaning that they're an accurate and reproducible and reliable prediction of how reality actually works. However—and this is something else that is usually part of the straw man—is that, you know, we recognize that science—and scientists recognize science is not a literal description of reality. It's just a testable model. You know?
C: It's a method.
S: We prefer the models that have been accurate and that make accurate predictions. And remember—so the whole shut up and calculate thing, right? Specifically referring to quantum mechanics, a physicist—you know, again, it's often attributed to Feynman, but he may not have said it, but—do you think that quantum mechanics is how the universe actually works? And the response was just shut up and calculate. Meaning that that's an unanswerable and not a very productive question, and that's not how science works. We don't know if any of our theories are actually how the world actually works. That science can't really tell us that, because that would require some kind of metaphysical certitude that science doesn't have. Rather, science just has theories, which are like models that are testable, can be proven wrong, and have survived numerous attempts at doing just that, and they make accurate and precise and reproducible and reliable predictions. But at some point, there's no practical difference between this is an accurate model of reality and this is reality. We get pictures of Pluto, you know?
C: For sure. It's almost the same as if you were to ask yourself about your own perceptual process.
S: Yes.
C: Like, we know it's a model. We know that there are little hiccups. We know that we're sort of like always looking into the past a little bit because of the amount of time that it takes for light to move and for our—you know, but for all intents and purposes, we know—and there are distortions. There are times when it's highly distorted in certain psychological disorders or in certain altered consciousness. But for the most part, for all intents and purposes, we can trust it.
S: Yeah. Right. We treat it as if it's reality.
C: Exactly.
S: But you need to know—this is the analogy that breaks down—or it actually doesn't, because this is how science works, too. We know it's an approximation where it breaks down around the edges. When science breaks down, we have to know, like, where science is an approximation and how it will tend to break down. We have to know about perceptual illusions and how our constructive perception will break down. Same thing, right? But if you're a science denier, an anti-scientist, or whatever, you're trying to push some agenda that is in conflict with the prevailing science, then you create the myth of the myth, right? The myth that—of scientism—
C: Yeah. Then you point to the optical illusion. You go, eh, it's not really moving, so you probably can't see. And it's like, no, that doesn't compute.
E: We worship at the altar of science.
S: All right. So then they follow up with—so, yeah, this myth that scientists have is incorrect. No, the myth is what you just said. Then they follow up with something like this. So here's now a direct quote. As a layperson unqualified to judge the technical issues—you could stop right there, but we'll move on—I have concluded only that there might be a legitimate question here, and one that must necessarily remain open until time and experience can settle it. What is he talking about? It doesn't matter. He's talking about—particularly he's talking about the vaccines and COVID, but I've heard that exact line about global warming, for example.
C: Can you read the line again? Just like—
S: As a layperson unqualified to judge the technical details, I have concluded only that there might be a legitimate question here, and one that must necessarily remain open until time and experience can settle it. So this is—
C: So that's like a politician going, I'm not a scientist.
S: I'm not a scientician, but—so this is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or denial. This is the I'm just asking questions, or the C-lining in social media, which is constantly—well, we don't—how do we really know that? And you know, we have to remain open. It's basically creating this false dichotomy where you could never get to any practical conclusion. And also, just the fact—what he's referring to here is the fact that scientists are debating some technical details about the vaccines or whatever, which of course is always happening. So in other words, so you understand how this is working together? It's like scientists pretend that science is this monolithic, institutionally guaranteed, completely reliable thing, when in reality it's messy. And here we have two scientists disagreeing, so who knows what's really going on, or what the real conclusion is. I'll choose to believe what I want to believe, or I'm just asking questions, or—and it's always to prevent acting on the science, right? That's always—you know, whatever we do, let's do nothing about global warming, right? Whatever we do, do not force me to get vaccinated, or to not have vaccine mandates, or anything that would encourage people to get vaccinated.
C: You're right. But it always is when—well, I say almost always, and I guess almost is the operative word—when we've talked about this before, Steve, on the show, this idea of risk analysis and how passive risk is more appealing to people. And this seems to be an application.
S: Well, it's less objectionable than direct risk, yeah.
C: Yes, yes. And so this seems to be an application of that. It's always like, well, the jury's still out, so I don't think I need to act yet. And it's like, until—I do think until it's like politically or agendally convenient. But yes, there are many examples where it's kind of like, well, until the scientists make up their mind, I'm going to not do the thing.
S: Right, but they set the threshold at this impossible metaphysical certainty.
B: At some point, you've got to put your dime down, and it's not hard to make that decision very often. And this is annoying. Who is this guy? Who's his jerk?
E: I'm going to look him up.
C: Also, this guy's not a philosopher, right? Because if he were a philosopher, he wouldn't be saying it's just another—yeah, okay.
S: Yeah, so this is David Cooley writing for First Things, which is kind of a religious-based, you know, blog. And yeah, I also think it's Canadian. But again, it doesn't matter, to be honest with you. It's like, this is generic science denial 101, you know? It's you set up the straw man, and then you say, but really, who knows what's going on? But he also, he goes to the philosophical underpinnings of science, which not everybody gets there. So that's the next piece I want to get to. And it's always like the idea that the science is out or the jury's out, but then some people go far as, well, science doesn't really know anything, right? What is science anyway? It's just philosophy. It's just opinion.
C: What does that even mean? Like, as if philosophers don't know anything? Like, what?
S: Yeah, basically.
E: As if nothing's knowable.
S: So let me read to you his—you know, this is just one sort of comment about—as that sort of, I thought, encapsulated his opinion. He writes, modern science during the first half of its 400-year career was called natural philosophy. Michael Faraday, who died in 1867, still called it that. And that is still, in many ways, its proper name. Recognizing science as philosophy allows us to see that, like any knowledge whatever, it is a creature of its tools, its techniques, and its initial assumptions. Einstein's famous remark that the most surprising and mysterious feature of the world is that it is comprehensible at all points to the most basic assumption on which physical science rests—that the world corresponds to the concepts which we have available for grasping it. No, it doesn't. That is not an assumption—
C: Our models of the world correspond to the tools that we have.
S: Not even that. Not even that our models correspond, just that they're useful tools for predicting future observations and experimental results. He also invokes Kuhn and paradigms and mangles it in the typical way that he does, but, like, science only operates within its own little realm and has no relationship to objective reality. But scientists pretend that their theories are directly describing reality when we don't know a condition. So it's all wrong. It's all muddy. So first of all, trying to say just because science was called natural philosophy doesn't mean that it's philosophy.
B: Diddly.
S: Yeah, that's a genetic fallacy, if you're keeping your scorecard. But so here's the thing is, science rests upon the philosophy of science.
C: Sure.
S: But it's special in that it is, at its core, it's empirical. It tests its ideas against reality. And now, of course, so does philosophy. Philosophers will test some of their ideas against reality. They will do empirical tests of their ideas when they can. That's just not necessarily the core of it. Philosophy is also, on the balance, it's more about internal consistency and thinking through and being logical and consistent, all that stuff. When you can test it empirically, you do, whereas science has to be internally consistent and logical. But at its core, it's about testing against reality. So it's a different emphasis.
B: Right. And testability is the key.
S: It's key.
B: It's key. And many people will say that if it's not testable, then it's not science.
S: Right. It has to be not only testable, but falsifiable.
C: But that's also a false dichotomy that somehow, like, if we can test it at science and everything else is philosophy.
S: That's what I'm saying.
C: Yeah, the way that this guy is describing, like, there are aspects of how we make sense of it. There are epistemologies that utilize science and there are logical positivist epistemology. But you can be a scientist who works as a scientist and does science, who sees the world through a million different philosophical lenses. It's not like an either or thing.
S: Yeah, it's the difference between sort of operational naturalism and philosophical naturalism. Science does not require you to believe anything about the ultimate nature of reality, only that you act as if we can understand reality and that what we can know is empirical, is facts that we can test and observations that we can make, et cetera, et cetera.
C: We test what is testable according to our tools, and then we make inferences based on that.
S: Right. And science is agnostic towards anything outside of those methods. The other thing is this fight, this philosophical discussion was fought 200 years ago. And this guy lost. He lost 200 years ago and is not even aware of it. This came up in the Kitzmiller case about intelligent design and evolution, where, again, they played the exact same ploy, that the intelligent design people were playing this exact same game against evolution and the judge wasn't buying any of it. He's like, no, you guys lost this fight. You lost this fight 200 years ago. Science is empirical. You can't just make up your own facts or your own philosophy. You can't just say that it's not tested against reality or has no relationship to reality or whatever. It's not, quote unquote, just philosophy, and that's their just, not mine, I'm not buying the false dichotomy. But it's still, this argument just doesn't go away. It just does not go away.
B: No, it never will. It never will.
S: It never will. It's too useful as a rhetorical device. It's wrong. It's completely wrong on many ways.
E: But it sounds impressive to those who don't know better.
C: You're so right. It sounds impressive.It's easy to get lost and to go, I don't know, I mean, I think you make some good point. Like this is not, this is such a common, it's a pseudoscientific approach, right? It's like, let me sound like I know what I'm talking about for long enough that eventually people give up and then they just believe me.
S: And what's interesting, when you point this out to people and like in the comments to my blog post about this, there are people who then deny this, right? They deny the existence of the FUD the fear, uncertainty, and doubt approach. It's like, yeah, that's actually part of FUD. Denying that it exists is part of it. Because the whole point is that you're just, you're essentially trying to get to this point where you're saying, who really knows? We can't really know anything. It's all opinion anyway. It's all paradigm.
E: All relativistic.
S: You can't really verify anything. Yeah. It's all relative. Scientists pretend like they know everything, but they don't. It's like, no, they don't pretend that and you're an idiot and none of what you're saying is true.
B: And you're an idiot.
C: And also you're undermining our relationship with reality. Like that's the scary thing, is that this is way more pernicious than just trying to like, I don't know, wedge in some sort of religious dogma or some sort of third rail issue and say, well science doesn't really know when the heart starts beating and therefore abortion, like, which is where you often see these arguments come in. But it actually, it's so much more pernicious than that because it makes you go, well, if we can't ever really know anything, or if we can't really ever know everything, do we really know anything?
S: Yeah. That's what it is. It's like, we don't know everything, therefore we know nothing, essentially, from a practical point of view. And again, I like using medical analogies because I think people can relate to them. It's like, let's say the doctor comes to you and says I'm 80% sure you have cancer. Here are all the reasons why I think your symptoms are due to cancer, but I'm not 100% sure. So I say we do nothing and let's just see what happens. Would you be happy with that?
C: So maybe it's tonsillitis and it's like, wait, what? But it's in my foot, you know?
B: Well, how about, Steve, how about not 80%, how about 98% sure? Yeah. Right? I mean, that's what it is often, something on that level.
C: You're right. Like with climate change, with, yeah.
S: Yeah. And our friend Phil Plait had a great analogy to an asteroid hitting. If astronomers around the world are saying, yeah, we're 95% sure this asteroid is going to hit the Earth in 20 years. Would you be arguing about the 5% or do you think that we should do something about it now or wait till it's too late? You know?
B: That's a great analogy. We would have to launch those rockets now if we're going to push it out of the way. But the longer we wait, the harder it's going to be to do anything about it. And we don't have to wait until we're 100% certain. You can argue like, well, what does scientists really know when it's all just philosophy? There's an asteroid coming towards the planet yes, we may 5% chance it may actually miss us. But how about we act as if it's the risk versus benefit here is to let's do something in case it's going to hit us.
C: This feels like a New Yorker cartoon, like I could see a New Yorker cartoon where two people are just like, I don't know while the asteroid's like literally coming towards their heads.
S: Right. Right, right. Anyway.
Belief in Ghosts (1:03:17)
S: Evan.
E: Yes.
S: Amidst all of the crap that's going on in the world, more people are believing in ghosts?
E: More.
S: Didn't we slay this dragon 20 years ago?
E: Oh, gosh.
B: Hydra.
E: If only. And the reason that this is coming up is, well, I discovered there's a new podcast out there. It's produced by CNN of all places.
C: Oh, God.
E: Yep. They have global reach in their various formats. Two billion people. Yep. Roughly a quarter of the planet. Two dozen branded networks and services and podcasts are one of their many mediums. So they have a new podcast. And I sat at my computer today and listened to it. Episode one of their latest podcast called Margins of Error. The title of this episode is How the Paranormal Became, Well, Pretty Normal. And the show's host, his name is Harry Enten. His official title at CNN is Senior Data Reporter. So in their 22-minute debut episode on the statistics-driven podcast, according to CNN, Harry is looking at what statistics can tell us about Americans' skyrocketing belief in ghosts. So I'll walk you through the highlights of the podcast. I'm going to condense 22 minutes into a few minutes for you. He starts by taking a visit, a site survey, out to Clinton Road in West Milford, New Jersey. Now, some of our listeners may be familiar with this, those who follow the paranormal lore. It's legendary in ghost lore as Dead Man's Curve, a spot under a bridge where there's supposedly the ghost of a boy who, if you throw coins down below that bridge, the coins will be tossed back to you. The ghost of the boy is going to toss the coins back to you. Yep. So Harry goes there, he throws three coins, because three is a lucky number, that's what he says, and he waits to see if the coins get chucked back at him. So that's how it starts, and then we come back to that at the very end. The show will then cut to the first clip of an interview with a colleague at CNN, whose name is Chase Masters. Now, Chase is in the camp of ghost belief, in which we are given the first statistic brought up in the podcast. A recent survey says that ghost belief is at 50% in America. So 50% of those polled say that they believe in ghosts. Chase Masters, in this interview, says, why only 50? I'm surprised that it's not actually more than that. The next shared statistic is that Americans' belief in ghosts, and all these polls and things are based on Americans, so this is not worldwide, these numbers come from American polls. American belief in ghosts has skyrocketed 400% since the late 1970s. 10% in the 70s, 50% now, in 2020. That's the second statistic we're offered. Now we're four minutes into the podcast, and Harry introduces Lisa Norton, who's the author of a book called Ghosts, a Haunted Story. And her book, I didn't read the book, obviously, I didn't have time, but I read a blurb about the book, and here it is, direct from that blurb. Morton asks the most direct question, what exactly is a ghost, and examines related entities such as poltergeists, wraiths, and revenants. She asks how a ghost is related to a soul, and she outlines all the different kinds of ghosts there are. That's a little piece of, so you have an idea of Lisa Norton and where she stands on all this.
B: Norton!
E: Harry considers her an expert on the subject of ghosts. However, he doesn't really talk about any statistics in here. It's more like a three or four minute promotion for Lisa Norton and her book. So we're at the seven minute mark, seven minutes into 22 minutes. Next guest, Justin Nathaniel, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Religious Studies. And the next statistic pops up in this discussion with him. In America, 40 years ago, you had 7% of the population who basically said that they did not practice religion or have deep religious convictions. 25% today, 25% in 2020. So that's a pretty significant jump, 70% to 25%. And Harry asks Justin about a possible correlation between ghost belief, that rise, with religious activity decrease over that same time. And Justin replies by suggesting that, well, yes, but no, service attendance is down, right? Less people going to synagogue, less people going to church on Sundays, but other access to religious mediums is up through technology, through books, websites about general spirituality. So in a sense, general spirituality is on the rise, same as ghost belief, even though other things that Americans consider to be more traditional religious practices, like going to church, are, in fact, decreasing. As we're getting towards the end of the podcast here, he throws in a few more statistics. In the late 70s, 10% of people believe in ghosts, today it's 50%, which I mentioned before. And then they talk about ghost belief and friendships, and I thought this one maybe was the most interesting of the statistics. In 1990, people who said they had five close friends or less was 35%. In 2020, people who claim they have five close friends or less, 60%. So more people feel they have fewer close friends as compared to 30 years ago. For those who, in 1990, believed they had zero close friends, 3%, in 2020, it was expressed as 12%, zero close friends. And they're tying that into trying to make an analogy there between that and people who are looking for something else. If they are having fewer close friends, they'll turn to something like ghost belief as a means of satisfying their needs to connect to something if it's not actual people.
C: It's a pretty tenuous connection. They're just literally making up that there's a connection between those things.
E: I know. I know. So at the end of the show, okay, so you're 20 minutes into the 22 minutes, he's back at Dead Man's Curb. He's been standing there for 15 minutes. No coins get thrown back at him. So that's it. There it is. CNN's latest and greatest offering to their two billion person potential audience. So a couple of thoughts I have on the show that I've listened to it now. This is bad in a lot of ways. International media companies, they do some things better than others. They do a lot of different things, okay? And sometimes they get science right and sometimes they're absolutely abysmal in things. Now they're bound to disappoint as often as they are to satisfy. But I think this one's particularly low. Super low hanging fruit. Hey, you want to get ratings? Are you looking to reach 50% of the United States market of people? Throw ghosts out there. Hey, 50% of people in America is expressively even ghosts. So what do you do? You make more content about ghosts. So really lower than low hanging fruit in a certain sense. Now again, you're a new podcast and you want to have a strong opening. You want to grab as many people as possible. But if you're going to do it and you're using paranormal and pseudoscience and things that are unscientific or arguably even anti-scientific, if that's going to be your content, then I'm sorry. You're doing damage there. You're doing cultural damage. I think you're doing intellectual damage. You're doing a disservice to people.
S: It's just bad journalism. He didn't tell the real story.
C: It's not even journalism.
S: He didn't tell the actual story. He didn't inform his audience about anything. It was all very superficial.
E: Very superficial. He didn't cite any studies per se. He didn't say the Journal of this sort of psychological research had these sorts of more interesting perhaps statistics on things. These going off of general polls, which are to a degree OK. You can make certain points based on polls. But I would rather see scientific studies quoted as far as if you're going to be promoting a podcast about statistics, that's what I wanted to hear. I wanted to give it a fair shake to see exactly how he was going to come out on this and exactly how he was going to present it. So I think it was weak. The statistics part of this, weak overall. That's their main selling point. That is what this podcast is being billed at. And finally, the question that we as skeptics ask, where is the skepticism? OK? A dash of pseudo skepticism, 10 seconds out of 22 minutes by that author who believes in ghosts. I'm sorry. That does not count. Where was Joe Nickell brought in or other people we know who've done these kinds of investigations? Ross Blasher, Kerry Poppy, Ben Radford, Celestia Ward, Pasquale Romero, so many names. That's just off the top of my head and not even including us. We could have added so much perspective onto this subject, made it so much more interesting and given him a total different way, more meaningful way to interpret these things. And it's like they're deliberately excluding us from this particular conversation when we are, in our own right, paranormal experts in this field.
C: It also feels like they're deliberately blurring the lines between journalism and entertainment without any verbal distinction. And that's really dangerous.
E: Very dangerous. Very dangerous, I think.
C: It's scary. Like when people hear that it's a news outlet that's putting something out, I think you need to be very, very clear that this is from our opinion pages or that this is like like there's a reason that it says opinion really large on an opinion page. So as not to be confused with with reporting.
S: Yeah. Journalists believe that they could treat stories like this as fluff. This is like if you're reporting on the dog show or something, that that's it. They don't have to do real journalism. And so they don't.
C: But a good journalist does real reporting even at the dog show. Honestly.
S: They don't think they need to. So they don't tell the real story. They just tell this is just really fluff for the rubes. That's what they think.
C: That's so sad.
E: Yeah. That's right. And as we've talked about many times before in our 16 year history of doing this, it's not just CNN doing this. It is other major media organizations that also fall into this trap, the National Geographic's out there, History Channel and so many other entities just do fall into this unfortunate trap because they're trying to get the ratings. It's a disservice.
B: And it's going to kill us all.
Who's That Noisy? (1:13:49)
S: All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time.
J: All right, guys. This week, I played this noisy.
[plays Noisy]
Any guesses, guys?
E: Yeah, that is Toontoos, the driving cat from Saturday Night Live.
C: It's definitely an animal.
S: So definitely a baby animal.
C: Or an animal that sounds like a baby human saying the word hi.
E: Or a bird imitating a baby animal.
J: All right. So let's get into it. So Paul Gibson, Paul. Oh, no, I'm sorry. It's Paul Gibson. And then his email address started, he says, my guess is a penguin chick interacting with the parent. Longtime listener from Concord, North Carolina. So oh, and he says, love the show and all the hosts, especially Cara.
C: Aw. Thanks, Paul. Something, Paul?
J: Yep, he just says it. Just says it. Cara's a straight up. Just like that.
S: What are we, chopped liver over here?
C: Sorry, guys.
J: Yeah, what's happening? It was just a podcast? So all right, guys. Is this a penguin? No, it is not. Have I heard a penguin? Maybe.
E: Yes, sounds like Burgess Meredith.
B: Pronounced penguin.
J: I don't even remember at this point. It's very likely I've heard penguins, but I don't think they sounded like that. But I don't know. But this is not correct. I will have to listen to penguins. I'm sure there's different kinds that make different noises and all that. It's very complicated. Penguins very complicated. So we're going to move on to William Baer and he wrote, hey, Jay, checking in from Pittsburgh here. I believe the noisy this week is a gray parrot or bud gray-gar. Bud gray-gar.
C: You did not prepare to read that word at all.
J: Bud gray-gar. Bud gray-gar sounds like a guy I went to college with. My friend, Bud Gray-gar Bud.
C: Heywood.
J: Yeah. Right?
B: Heywood.
J: Is it a gray parrot or a Bud Gray-gar imitating the noise of a house cat companion? These are not correct guesses. William, thank you very much for trying. That is not correct. Monty Hickey. Hey, Jay, first time guessing. It sounds like a sea lion cub. My guess is it's annoying its mama.
E: No sea lion.
C: Oh, cute. Yeah. Good sea lioning.
J: I don't know. I never heard a sea lion make any kind of noise like this. Again, I have to listen again to see if I can find that.
C: I thought that they'd bark.
J: Yeah. I don't know. This is more of a purring noise.
C: It's more like a meowing.
J: Then here's the funny guess of the week that I must be missing something. Kenny Armand wrote in and said, long time, first time, I think it's a Furby doll with low batteries.
B: Oh, my God. That's awesome.
C: Those things were so scary.
J: Yeah. Furbies.
E: They blinked their eyes, didn't they?
C: They're just like possessed.
J: If anything on the planet would actually be actually possessed, it would be a Furby.
C: Exactly. Yeah. It's like, I don't even care what kind of crazy stuff is happening with AI, just don't put it in a Furby.
B: Oh, my God.
C: We're all going to die.
J: And then he goes on to say, P.S., congrats to Cara on achieving her recent education goals. I found Cara. I found SGU because of Cara going on Joe Rogan's podcast way back when the SGU inspired me to go back to school and study gerontology.
C: Cool.
J: Look, my conclusion of this is that Joe Rogan actually did do something good. This is proof that Joe Rogan actually was involved in something that turned positive.
C: That there was a time, that a stopped watches right twice a day, right?
J: Exactly.
C: Took me a second on that.
J: All right. So we have a winner. And I will say that this winner, along with so many other people guessed this correctly. It was a thing on the internet last week. I missed it. I usually check for that to see if the noisy is a thing because a lot of times people go, oh, that's a little noisy.
S: Jay, over the weekend, Julia pulls out her iPhone like, guys, look at this. And she shows us the video. I'm like, that's our noisy from this week. It was all over the place.
J: I try. I mean, look, I am on Reddit. I am a daily Reddit user. Bob's a daily Reddit user. He and I both didn't pick it up.
C: Well, I wonder if you were like right ahead of the curve, like you got it right before it went viral, but then there's like a delay. You record on a Wednesday.
J: It wouldn't surprise me. I have my finger on the pulse of reality. It's very common that I'm getting involved in things that become big, famous things. All right. So anyway, Jay Brooks writes in, this week's noisy is a cheetah meowing and purring. I saw this adorable video on Reddit. Bob, he saw it on Reddit. You and I missed it.
B: Oh, boy.
J: All right. So there's two cheetahs here and I thought that this was going to be difficult and that's why I even put in the growl at the end. I don't know. Maybe it was too, definitely too easy. Too many people got it. It was my mistake and I think it's interesting. They are adorable guys. When they're meowing.
E: Until they grow up and bite you.
C: Cheetah are not adorable. Cheetah are heinous.
B: Heinous?
C: I do not find cheetah to be good looking animals.
S: I do. They're gorgeous.
C: They're like wrong cats. They're like mongoosey. Everything about their proportions is weird and off.
B: Wow.
C: Give me a leopard any day over a cheetah.
S: Oh, yeah.
B: I'll give you that.
C: Oh, yeah. I love it.
J: All right. So anyway, this noisy was sent in by a listener named Kyria Oriel. I did get an email from her husband thanking me for playing the noisy. Apparently, these guys are very excited about that. So thank you for sending that in, guys. It's really cool. Look, I appreciate it when people send me in noisies because it helps, right? It helps me. So please keep doing it. I really do appreciate when you guys send those noisies in and Evan loves it when you send in quotes. So please do that for us. It helps very much.
E: Amen.
B: Don't send anything to me.
J: Never. Never. Because Bob will start emailing you at like three in the morning. It gets really awkward.
B: I don't know when we'd start talking about the nude pictures. That's a joke. That's a joke.
New Noisy (1:20:06)
J: So Bradley Philpot sent me in this week's noisy. Check this out.
[clank then a high pitched whirring, which cuts out, followed by a mechanical whine/growl of lower pitch]
I mean, it sounds like a monster at the end. This takes over. I don't know. You tell me. You can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org with your guess and or with a cool noisy that you heard.
This Day in Skepticism (1:20:40)
J: Steve, a few announcements before we move on.
S: Yeah.
J: So this is something that the SGU audience might be able to help us with is that Steve and I are looking for information about corporate events. I know that sounds very general, but what we would like to do is actually speak to someone who works in corporate events. If you are a corporate event coordinator, if you have a very, very good understanding of that industry and how it functions, we really could use your help with another project that we're working on. So please email us at INFO@theskepticsguide.org. If you have your finger on the pulse of how corporate events work and how do you find the talent that you're looking for, how does it work? Email us. Thank you. In case you didn't know, guys, the Denver extravaganza is sold out. We are now, we are literally overbooked. We are that sold out. I have people waiting for tickets. We have two other things happening in Colorado in late November. We have the Denver private show, and then we have the Fort Collins private show. These are two very different shows. One because one of them is having a lot of people coming and the other one is not having a lot of people coming. And as the as we all on the SGU know that the show somehow magically changes depending on how many people were performing in front of it. It's very interesting. So the bottom line is both of these shows are going to be a lot of fun. Tickets are still available, although the Denver private show is close to being sold out. Please do go on to our website. That's theskepticsguide.org/events where you can see the information for those two shows. It is not too late to get tickets for either of them, but the extravaganza is sold out. You can still buy tickets for NECSS. We have people that have been buying them and watching the conference afterwards because it's all recorded online and we decided to keep it up a little bit longer. And we have some interesting news coming about this most recent NECSS and what we're doing. We're actually going to be restreaming some of that content with more dialogue. We'll give you all the details very soon, but that's coming soon. If you buy the ticket, you'll have access to all of that. And finally, guys, if you enjoy this program, if you think that what we are doing is valuable, if we have entertained you, if we have changed the world in a way that you find agreeable, please do consider becoming a patron of ours. We could use your support. The more support we get, the more that we can do, as an example, like the live stream that we do on Friday. We are in very deep discussion with everyone on the show about continuing to make that happen and making it a permanent fixture. We're actually even talking to our audience, our live stream audience about it, getting their feedback on what they think. So these are things that we offer the public, but we also offer extras to our patrons. So we really would appreciate it if you would consider becoming one of our patrons. You can go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide for more information.
S: All right. Thank you, Jay.
Questions
Question #1: Aultera ((1:23:37))
S: Quick question. This one comes from Spencer Stinson, who writes, Hey, all love the show and haven't missed an episode since a colleague turned me on to your book back in 2016. Hmm. Our book came out in 2018.
E: It's a typo.
J: You know, Steve, COVID makes people's sense of time just go.
S: Yeah, I guess so. All right.
C: Oh my gosh.
S: Anyway, Spencer writes, I've never come across this one before, but the local moron mill in my town is peddling these and they don't even require electricity. So then I question what the actual use of the USB plugin is. Anyways, I had a good laugh on this one and thought I would share. So this is the Aultera, A-U-L-T-E-R-A, not to be confused with Altera without the U, which is the company in the game series Subnautica. Very good, by the way. Anyway, the Aultera whole car USB neutralizer. So yeah, this is exactly as dumb as you think it is.
C: Wait, does it neutralize USB or is it a USB plugin to neutralize something else?
S: Yes, it's a USB plugin that neutralizes EMF.
C: Oh, of course.
J: Of course it does.
S: Right. So they say that there's no electricity and, quote, neutralizes all electronic devices that are being used in the automobile, which made me question what about the electronic devices that are being used by the automobile? I wonder if it neutralizes those too. So this is just the EMF fear-mongering nonsense and also the pseudoscience of claiming that you can do something like shield you from all electromagnetic frequencies with some little device, which is nonsense. And of course, if it were doing that, your cell phone wouldn't work and probably electronics in the car would be having some problems. How is it doing it? Some kind of magic. They don't really get into the details. They're just counting on their would-be customers being completely scientifically and technologically illiterate that they would have no idea what any of this is actually referring to. But yeah, products like this are just as predatory, in my opinion. Products like this. This is just pure nonsense.
E: How the hell did this earn a patent?
S: Is it patented? I don't know.
E: It says on the label it is. I think they're lying.
C: I mean, it's not a whole lot of integrity here, is there?
S: Yeah, that's true. Well, we talked about that before. The patent office doesn't require you to have an actual working device that's based on science. Just has to be unique or whatever. There are criteria there. But actually, functioning isn't apparently one of them anymore. All right. Let's move on to science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:26:20)
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | |
| Science |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| ' |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There's a theme this week. It's another accidental theme. It's just three news items that happen to have something in common. And the theme is speed, which will become obvious in a moment. Here we go. Item number one, researchers have developed a method for inducing carbon capture using hydrate crystals that is 3,000 times faster than the best current method. All right. Number two, researchers have created an optical switch that operates up to 1,000 times faster than the fastest commercial transistors and possibly uses the theoretical minimum of required energy. And item number three, engineers have created the fastest drone in the world, able to achieve 450 miles per hour or 725 kilometers per hour. Bob, go first.
Theme: ___
Item #1: ___[5]
Item #2: ___[6]
Item #3: ___[7]
Item #4: ___[8]
Bob's Response
B: Let's see. Number one, researchers have developed a method for inducing carbon capture using hydrate crystals 3,000 times. I hope that's true. I want that to be true. 3,000. Hmm. I don't know. Let's go to two. Optical switch 1,000 times faster than the fastest theoretical minimum required. Oh boy. That's just, I mean, I hope that's true too. But I'm skeptical of that one. It's theoretical minimum, 1,000 times. Hmm. Let's try three then. I'm not having good luck here. Engineers have created the fastest drone in the world, 450.
S: Now, let me clarify there. I hope I don't need to clarify this, but just for everyone out there, obviously a drone could be ambiguous. Obviously, I'm not referring to military drones, which are basically jets. I'm referring to drones where they have the four blades whatever, like the modified helicopters. Those kind of small.
J: A quadcopter.
S: Yeah.
E: Quads.
S: Yeah. It doesn't necessarily have to have four blades, but you know, drones like that, not the unmanned aerial vehicles.
C: Right. Right.
S: Right?
E: Weapons.
S: Because you'll say, oh, but yeah, but this drone could go at Mach 2. No, I'm not talking about those. Yeah.
B: Okay. So I'm going to believe that. That's fast, but I'm going to believe that. The hydrate crystal, I'll believe that as well. But the optical switch, a thousand times three orders of magnitude faster than the fastest, that's quite a leap. Not impossible. Theoretical minimum, that's, I mean, that's, I guess that's possible too, but that's always a little wary of claims like that. So I'll say that's fiction.
S: Okay. Cara?
Cara's Response
C: I'm probably not allowed to ask how fast like an airplane flies, right? Because I feel like the fast drone, I mean, are there like commercial ones that are really fancy? Because I've watched those drone races before where the people were in like the VR headsets and they raced them. And I assume those are the fastest ones on the market. And those aren't going as fast as like an airplane, they're going as fast as like a really fast car.
E: Jeez. They better not. It's a safety hazard.
C: Well, and there's that, but I don't know if there's, if that's built in. So that's why this one is getting me because I thought this is how fast airplanes fly. And that's why this one is sticking in my craw. But Bob said that he thinks that the trend, you said the transistor one, right?
B: Yeah. Oh, no.
C: Not the carbon cap.
B: Yeah, right.
C: Oh, you said carbon capture?
B: No, I said the optical switch.
C: I think or hope, I'm hopefully thinking that the carbon capture is science. Are you swaying me, Bob, on the, I don't know anything about how fast transistors are or what a theoretical minimum is, but this does say researchers have created an optical switch that operates up to it. So this isn't like a commercial forward it's happening in the lab. I don't know. I still don't think a drone can go as fast as a plane, except for the military ones, which you specifically said this was not. So I'm going to say that's the fiction. God, unless planes are way faster.
S: Okay, Evan.
Evan's Response
E: Well, yeah, I'm kind of leaning towards Cara's way of thinking here. If you're going to go 450 miles per hour in a, in a, with the aerodynamics of something that resembles one of these quad drones, how can you possibly achieve that? You would, wouldn't you have to change the entire look of this thing? Although I, granted, I don't know how all drones look, I mean, but don't you have to have a ton of like a fuselage and how do you, how would that work? How would that physically be able to go through the air that quickly if it, if, if the quadcopter kind of thing is in my mind, I don't see how that could physically penetrate the air to the point of 450 miles per hour. But Bob also brings up good points here about the transistors, a couple things here, a thousand times faster. So that is it's a kind of a round number, easy to sort of say, I just bumped this up. It's 10 times faster, but it's really a thousand times. So that could be, and the theoretical minimum of required energy, it's only a theory, therefore, what do scientists really know therefore? Yes. Thank you. So it's close. It's close, but I, like Cara, I'm just not wrapping my mind around the drone and how it could possibly go 450 miles per hour unless it's totally changed, totally different than a design I have in my head. So I think I'll go there and say the drone, fiction.
S: And Jay.
Jay's Response
J: All right. The first one about the carbon capture using hydrate crystals.
C: Say that again, Jay. Hydrate crystals.
J: Hydrate.
C: Hydrate.
J: Hydrate. Hydration. The hydrate crystal is 3000 times faster than the best current method 3000 times faster. It sounds like a lot faster, but I'm not that like blown away. Like I don't think that that's impossible. I think that sure that they could have found a method to capture the carbon 3000 times faster. So I'm going to say that's science. The second one here about the optical switch that operates up to a thousand times faster than the fastest commercial transistors. I'm really curious to learn a lot more about this and the optical switch. I would imagine it would start even at operating at a thousand times faster. They could probably even get it faster than that. So I'm not even that blown away by that. And then I'm going to go with Cara and Evan on this because the one about the drone going 450 miles an hour. All right. First, I do understand the drone is incredibly small, right? There's not a lot of mass there. So how hard would it be to push that amount of mass to go up to 450 miles per hour? I just don't think that a drone would have enough energy to do that. And I don't think that it would be able to, to from a stability perspective, I just don't see how, how it could handle it. Now I will say since I'm going last, I will say that I recently, very recently saw a video of a drone being tested that was flying.
B: Yes. I think I sent it to you, Jay. That thing was flying. It might not, it probably was doing 450, but that thing was booking.
J: It was, it was insanely fast, but it was also, it was very small. It was about the size of it was probably like 10 by 10 inches by 10 inches, say roughly.
E: What? Going for? No.
B: Well, how long was it going for 450?
E: How much energy can that thing generate to go that fast?
J: I mean, I know.
E: It wouldn't need to hit it for more than a second to fulfill the-
J: It went freakishly fast. It did. But I don't think that was 450. 450, Bob, I think would be, it would make what we saw look like it was nothing because that is incredibly fast.
B: You could be correct, but I think that video swayed my answer on this, but yeah, you could be correct. I wouldn't be surprised. So I think that was a fiction.
Steve Explains Item #1
S: All right. So you all agree with the first one. So we'll start there. Researchers have developed a method for inducing carbon capture using hydrate crystals that is three times, a thousand times faster than the best current method. You all think this one is science and this one is science.
B: Yes.
C: Yes. That's so great.
S: But it's not, it's not as great as you think because it is great, but I was very careful with the wording. It's the method for inducing carbon capture using hydrate crystals. So the, it's the induction that's 3000 times faster, not necessarily how it proceeds once it's been induced. So in other words, you're not going to be capturing 3000 times the carbon that you would with the current method. So this is using a method of carbon sequestration and it could also be used for desalination. It's using a gas hydrate, so you have to basically, it's like water, but it's got to be at high pressure. Although it could be at room temperature, which is good ambient temperature, but they said that you have to use high pressure, but it could take hours to days for the nucleation to begin. And what the new method is, is using a magnesium based nucleation site essentially that is almost instantaneous. So it takes seconds instead of days. That's why it's 3000 times faster, but that's to induce nucleation, right? Induce the carbon capture. It's not like the whole process beginning to end is 3000 times faster.
B: Well, how much faster does it make it? I mean, what's the, what's the benefit here?
C: Is fast the important point here?
S: Well, yeah, because it's, the bottom line is it's, we need to capture carbon on an industrial scale in order for it to be of any use. So speed is you need to, needs to scale up. It needs to happen. It has to be efficient, cost efficient, energy efficient, et cetera. And it has to happen fast. And if you're waiting days to get the process started, obviously that's not good. So this definitely is a good proof of concept and this could be incorporated into using this method for carbon capture. You know, again, whether or not this will be, this will happen on any kind of industrial scale that will be useful remains to be seen. But this is sort of an incremental advance using this particular method to capture carbon. So it was, it was a, it was a nice advance.
Steve Explains Item #2
S: Okay, let's go on to number two. Researchers have created an optical switch that operates up to 1000 times faster than the fastest commercial transistors and possibly uses the theoretical minimum of required energy. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science and this one is science. Sorry, Bob. Kind of good, bad news for you. It's yeah, you got it wrong, but this is cool.
B: Yeah. Tell me about it.
S: And this wasn't Cara's correct. This is in the laboratory. This is not like a product you're going to be buying next week. This is a proof of concept in the lab, but they're using a photonic switch. It was able to, in the laboratory, they were able to achieve 1 trillion operations per second, which is up to between 100 and 1000, up to 1000 times faster than today's top notch commercial transistors. Not necessarily the fastest potential transistors, just commercial transistors, as it says, that's still extremely fast. So how could they say that it's the theoretical minimum of required energy if it's a photon based switch?
B: Well, one photon.
S: Exactly. They were able to make it happen with one photon, so you can't get less than one.
B: So one lower energy photon, perhaps.
S: So yeah, they're saying that, yeah, this is a proof of concept demonstration or proof of principle. And so not, not ready for primetime yet, but, but very, very cool. Yeah. These are the kinds of things that 10, 20 years from now, you will be some iteration of it down the road. We'll we'll be on our desktop or whatever we hope is what keeps driving things forward. Very, very cool. And yeah, this is part of sort of the bigger science of transitioning from electron based computing to, or electronics to photon based because it, because it does use much, much less energy. And there's significant potential advantage there. And it's also much, potentially much faster. So we'll see.
B: They can occupy the same space. They don't interfere like electrons do.
S: Yeah. Yeah. I'm very interested in how long it's going to take before like I have a computer on mydesk that's a photon based.
B: Oh God, Steve, I've been reading about him for 30 years.
S: I know. I know. That's why, that's why. It's like fusion, right? It's always 30 years.
B: Yeah.
Steve Explains Item #3
S: All right, here we go. That means that engineers have created the fastest drone in the world able to achieve 450 miles per hour 725 kilometers per hour is the fiction and fiction. Yeah, it's way too fast. So the fastest so the actual news item is pretty cool, but I had to make one the fiction. It was the smallest drone, not the fastest drone. And it's not really a drone. It's a it's a winged microchip. It's the smallest ever human made flying structure. But flying is it's not like powered flight. It's more like those maple tree seeds where they spin around and slow their descent. That's what they're doing. It's they just they they spin around.
B: Wow, it does that at 450 miles an hour. Cool.
S: No. And it could because they're so small and they're so light and because they're microchips, this could suspend them for a long period of time in the air. So this could be used-
B: To travel long distances.
S: Yeah, you drop a bunch of these and you could be used for capturing information either in a weather formation or whatever.
B: Smart dust.
S: Yeah. So the you know, I had to look around to try to what's the fastest drone I could find just to make sure I first of all, I stayed below the sound barrier, I didn't want to break the sound barrier with these things.
B: Because that because that would be silly.
S: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's 700 and something miles per hour. So I figured, all right make it clearly faster than any drone can currently fly but less than the speed of sound.
B: What was the fastest?
S: The fastest I could find was about 168 miles per hour.
E: Wow, that's still damn fast.
S: Yeah, so this is about three times about three times as fast. There are racing drones that are just wicked fast. That's what you were referring to, Cara, these racing drones. But yeah, they're going 150, 160, 170 miles per hour. Jay, the one you and I saw had to be near or a little bit more than that. That thing was just so nuts. And the acceleration was so fast.
C: But they still look like helicopters, not like planes.
S: Yeah, although there are some that are very sleek. I saw one, the Prometheus is the brand name. And it's got like one rotor in the front, two in the back. So it's got a kind of a more of a sleek triangle shape. And they said it could fly up to four hours on one charge. This is like high-end commercial drone. This is not like a racer drone or a personal one you would own personally. So the high end of this technology is getting really sophisticated. Although this one, they said its speed was 50 miles per hour. So it wasn't really built necessarily for speed.
C: But even when we think about the high flying, like the military drones, they look like little planes.
S: Oh, yeah, those are planes.
C: They don't look like little helicopters because helicopters aren't as fast.
S: I had to clarify that. You didn't think of the drone as a drone strike. They're actually technically called unmanned automated UAVs. Yeah, they're only colloquially called drones. But in any case, yeah, I was talking about the Copter drones. And yeah, they're wicked fast. They are wicked fast. But yeah, 450, you're right, that's a commercial jet. I mean, commercial jets can get up to 600, you know.
C: Oh, really?
S: Well, that's like at the low end of a commercial jet kind of speed. And I think we talked about that not too long ago, maybe a year or two ago about the fact that commercial jets kind of peaked in speed like 50 years ago. And the ones we have today are pretty much still going as fast as the ones were 50 years ago. Well, they kind of it's because you know, it's a physics limit that they hit, where in terms of their return on investment, like they're going as fast as they can go without really fundamentally redesigning jets or spending a lot more on fuel or whatever. And you really need supersonic jets to push past the speed of sound.
B: We had them decades ago. It's ridiculous.
S: Yeah, that's a separate question.
B: I'm living in a bad movie.
S: The practicality of supersonic jets. We may get them back in our lifetime. They may come back. It would be nice.
B: Well, yeah, there's been some advances because the sonic booms were always a deal breaker, right? You couldn't fly at the speed like over land. It was kind of ridiculous. And they really seemed it looks like they've really tamed that to make them so, so tiny that they can fly over land. So yeah, so hopefully before too frickin old.
S: Yeah. Also, range was an issue. And that, I think has also been improved. So these are just very limited routes for like the Concorde. Concorde was great, but had very limited routes. But yeah, newer versions that are on the drawing board would be more useful. So hopefully, I would love to take imagine going up Mach three or four to from New York to Sydney, you know.
B: Yeah, but not at six grand per seat.
S: Yeah. Well, cost is going to be an issue.
E: More than that.
B: Yeah, more than that. That's probably generous.
S: Yeah. Well, we'll see. I mean, also, the industry knows that they'll have to make it cost competitive to some extent, for it to be commercially viable. All right. Good job, guys.
J: Thank you.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:43:32)
The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire.
– Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer.
S: Evan, you got a quote for us?
E: Yeah. This quote is about the brain. "The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others. Their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself with an ever changing score and repertoire." Oliver Sacks.
B: Oh, Sacks rocks.
C: I love Oliver Sacks.
E: I know. And Cara had you in mind with this one.
C: My favourite-
B: Mistook his wife for a hat.
C: I don't want to word it that way, dead science writer. It's a horrible thing to say. But he's my favorite science writer who's no longer with us. And my favorite living science writer, Mary Roach, I just interviewed this morning.
B: Cool.
C: Full circle.
E: There you go.
S: Very nice quote. It's a little dated in one specific-
E: Oh, which part?
B: Hundreds?
S: No, the modules.
B: Yeah, hundreds of them.
S: It assums that the brain is an assemblage of these specific modules that has a specific function.
E: Oh. No repetition, right?
S: Well, it's not the repetition. It's actually it's networks of modules. And modules have different functions depending on what other modules they're networking with at any moment. So it's more complicated even than what he's suggesting. It's networks. It's a kind of a mishmash of networks of modules, not just specific modules with specific functions.
E: At the time he was alive, was that the thought behind it?
S: It was one of the models. Yes, that was popular at the time he wrote that. But I think now, whatever it is, 15 years, 20 years later, I think we would take a more nuanced summary that's somewhere in between the network model and the module model.
E: I don't think he would argue with you at all, Steve.
S: No, just again, I hope the science has been updated in the last 20 years, neuroscience. But that's the only thing I would point out. The general idea, though, it's like there's multiple different mental functions all sort of working together like an orchestra that's conducting itself is a pretty good analogy. All right, guys, well, thank you all for joining me this week.
B: Sure, man.
J: You got it, Steve.
E: Thank you, Dr. Steve.
C: Thanks, Steve.
Signoff/Announcements
S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.
S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.
Today I Learned
- Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference[9]
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Notes
References
- ↑ yahoo!news: Scientists created the world's whitest paint. It could eliminate the need for air conditioning.
- ↑ ScienceDaily: New AI tool accelerates discovery of truly new materials
- ↑ Neurologica: Science is not Just Philosophy
- ↑ CNN Politics: What statistics can tell us about Americans’ skyrocketing belief in ghosts
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes publication: title]
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes publication: title]
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes publication: title]
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes publication: title]
- ↑ [url_for_TIL publication: title]
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