SGU Episode 346
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Links
Skeptical Rogues
- S: Steven Novella
- B: Bob Novella
- R: Rebecca Watson
- J: Jay Novella
- E: Evan Bernstein
- GM: Gordon Maupin
Introduction
You're listening to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, February 29th 2012, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.
B: Hey everybody
S: Rebecca Watson
R: Hello everyone
S: Jay Novella
S: And Evan Bernstein
E: Evening, gentleman and lady
This Day in Skepticism (0:28)
R: Happy leap day!
S: Happy leap day!
E: It ‘’is’’ leap day
S: This is the only time that we have recorded a show on February 29th, and it may be a long time before we get an opportunity to do so again.
R: That’s true, yeah, very exciting
E: That’s true
J: So explain to me, leap year, a leap day, what’s happening here?
(laughter)
R: ‘’well’’, ok, so our current calendar is 365 days in a year, however, the way we figure up days does not have anything to do with the way we figure up what makes a year. So, there aren’t actually 365 days that make up one year, there are actually 365 and a quarter days, almost, sort of
E: Almost, roughly
R: Yeah, and so to make up that quarter, every four years, we add an extra day. Of course, that is not true, it is an oversimplification, because every four years we add one day ‘’unless’’ that year is divisible by 100, but not 400, and we do that because it’s not exactly 365 days and a quarter, it’s 365.24…
B: two-two, point two-four-two-two
S: two-four-two-two-two-two-two
R: Good, yeah, so that’s about as close as we can get it at the moment. We can get it closer by, I believe, skipping a leap year every 4,000 years, and then that will put us back on track. But right now, the way we’re doing it now, it is keeping us pretty much on track.
E: I think it’s a pretty good system, all told
R: It is
B: Yeah, it works fine
R: It is, and it’s interesting how long it took us to get there. I mean, the ancient Greeks knew, you know, how many days it took us to go around the sun, they knew, down to the decimals, you know, that it wasn’t exactly 365 days. But, the history of the human calendar is long and arduous, in fact, there are tons of places where, as recently as the 1700s, whole countries have skipped an entire week or two, usually, I think it’s 11 days or so, so that they could catch up to the rest of the world, switching from the Gregorian calendar to the Julian calendar.
B: Other way around?
R: Because of this switch, Sweden in the 1700s actually had a February 30th of 1712. It happened only once, never to happen again, poor February.
J&S together: Wouldn’t it would be cool if you were born on that day
(laughter)
R: Yeah, you never get another birthday
B: Never age, awesome.
E: Stuck in limbo.
S: Did you know that in the Chinese calendar, they have a leap ‘’month’’ that they add every 16 or 17 years?
B: Really?
E: Is it the year of the frog or something?
S: They add an extra month
B: Really? Do you know what that is called?
J: leap month
S: They have a lunisolar calendar, it’s called an ‘embolismic’ month
B: Oh, really, I didn’t hear of that one. The term I came across was ‘intercalation’, which is the insertion of a leap day, week or month. So that would fall under that rubric.
S: Yeah, so this is one of my favorite bits of astronomical trivia: do you know how many times the Earth rotates on its axis in one year.
E: 364 and change?
S: You’ve kind of got the right idea, but,-
B: Yeah, but then there’s a little extra rotation because-
S: Yeah, just the wrong way, 366
E: Oh!
B: Yeah, we actually talked about this
J: Come on, Evan
S: Cos every time- yeah, because as it travels around the Sun, it has to rotate a little bit farther each day, and that adds up to one day. So it actually has to rotate one extra day as it moves round the Sun.
E: Cool
B: Yeah, one thing I’ll throw in, as good as the leap year idea is, and the end of century leap year that Rebecca mentioned, we’re still off by 30 seconds each year. Which isn’t much, but it does add up, and I think the number is 3300 years, in about that time, we’ll be off by a day. So that means the calendar year will have diverged from the solar year by an entire day. So I wonder, if this concept is even around in 3 millenia, will they actually add an extra day then?
R: Actually, I just looked it up, and it was astronomer John Herschel in the 19th century who proposed an extra- skipping a leap day on years that are divisible by 4000.
E: Herschel, good man.
S: Alright, well that’s more than you ever wanted to know about leap year
E: Oh yeah
J: I wish I didn’t ask!
E: It’s also St Oswald’s day, and there’s more
R: It’s also the international day of rare diseases, I believe, which I thought was kind of clever.
J: What, do you hang out with people who have rare diseases and talk about your stuff? What do you do?
R: I think it’s kind of like any other awareness day.
S: Do you know where the national organization of rare diseases has it’s headquarters?
J: Deathville, Wyoming?
S: Nope, New Fairfield, Connecticut
B: What?
J: No shit!
E: Oh!
R: and rare diseases don’t necessarily end in death, so-
S: Yeah, that’s true
R: Just putting that out there
J: Well, just so people know, that’s the town that we grew up in.
S: Alright, Jay, tell us about-
R: Wait! One other thing
(laughter)
S: Oh, god!
R: Quickly, very quickly
E: Very quickly, we can only do this once every four years, folks
R: I just wanted to mention that this year is special because there will also be a leap second introduced on June 30th 2012. We can talk about that closer to then
J: Why don’t they- why leap?
B: I love leap seconds
J: -week, month, year, why don’t they just put them all together? Make it all happen at the same time?
R: Well we’ll talk about it in June
E: Leap time!
News Items
Iceman Genome (6:33)
BBC News: Oetzi the Iceman's nuclear genome gives new insights
S: Alright Jay, tell us about our favorite prehistoric man
J: So you guys know who-
B: Fred! Fred Flintstone
(laughter)
S: He comes from a stone-age family
J: Do you guys know who Oetzi the Iceman is?
B: Yeah
R: Yeah
E: Hootzi?
R: My favorite tattooed ancient dead person.
J: Well, I’ve read a lot about Oetzi recently, and I didn’t know ‘’anything’’ about this guy other than they’d found some frozen dude years and years ago. So here’s a quick one-two. Oetzi the Iceman was the name given to a well preserved, natural mummy of a man that lived about 5,300 years ago. So, Oetzi was found in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy, by two German tourists. He is Europe’s oldest natural human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view of chalculithic Europeans. His body and belongings are displayed in the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bolzano, South Tyrol, and every single word I just said I could have mispronounced, and I’m sorry if I did. He was about 1.65m, or 5’5” tall, he weighed about 50kg, or 110 pounds, so he wasn’t a big guy. And estimated to be about 45 years old, and if you haven’t read about him, it’s actually really cool. The things that they found out about this person that used to live by his corpse is pretty amazing, the scientists collected an incredible amount of information on him by studying the contents of his stomach and analyzing his hair and taking samples of pollen that they found all over him and in the food that he ate and the grains that he was eating. So I dare any pseudoscience to try and collect this kind of data with this kind of accuracy.
S: He is the most studied mummy in existence. I mean he’s been having one hi-tech evaluation after the other over the last 20 years.
J: So what’s happening is, up until recently, they knew little about his genetics, but finally, Oetzi’s full genome has been reported in Nature Communications.[1] So his mitochondrial DNA was found and analyzed in 2008, and although this gave them some information, it was nowhere near the complete picture. In this latest study though, they were able to perform next-generation whole-genome sequencing that revealed a much more complete genetic snapshot, found in the nuclei of Oetzi’s cells, so nuclear DNA is rare and typically less well preserved than DNA within the mitochondria. Albert Zinc from the Eurac Institute for mummies said that
"Whole-genome sequencing allows you to sequence the whole DNA out of one sample; that wasn't possible before in the same way.”
J: They now know that he had brown eyes, he’s type-O blood, he was lactose intolerant, and he was predisposed to heart disease-
S: and he had a fabulous singing voice
(laughter)
J: They found all this stuff out, though, just by- they had this advanced testing that they had on this genome sequencing. They also discovered that he had been infected with Lyme disease
S: Oh!
E: Oh!
J: or the Lyme disease bacterium, and that makes him the first documented case of this infection. Which is pretty interesting. And after analyzing anomalies in his DNA, they found that he was more closely related to modern inhabitants of Corsica or Sardinia. They said that it’s more likely that he’s from those places than from the Alps where they found his corpse. And I was wondering if that means that ‘’he’’ himself traveled from those two islands, which can be found nestled between France and Italy, or maybe his ancestors were from there. But, to continue down that same questioning, they found that some of his DNA sequences showed that his ancestors were likely to have migrated from the Middle East. So, going even further back, they can show where his people came from, and how they migrated. And Zink, the scientist I mentioned earlier said they’re only just beginning the analysis of this new data, and that means that there’s a lot more new stuff on the way that we’re going to find out about him.
S: Did you know that the Iceman has tattoos on his body that correspond to acupuncture points
B: Oh no!
R: That’s why I mentioned that earlier.
S: Yeah, think about ‘’that’’. Think about that cultural contamination though. This is a guy from Sardinia, found in the Alps with ... a tradition that we now associate with the Far East, and this really implies that the whole notion of blood-letting versus acupuncture or whatever, these ideas were just floating around Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and they were all shared, and influenced each other, these weren’t, you know, completely separate ideas that were formed independently in isolated cultures, they were really shared ideas among these cultures.
J: That is really cool. You know that, by studying pollen that they found on him, if you read some of the literature here, they were able to tell what time of year he died, and by the way, he was murdered, they found, I don’t know if you guys knew that he was shot by an arrow.
S: Yeah
B: Yeah
E: Well, murdered, it could, it could be… aggravated manslaughter or something
B: The funny thing is, they were trying to determine his cause of death for quite a long time, and then, just by accident, somebody just happened to notice: ‘oh look, there’s an arrowhead in his back’
(laughter)
B: how did they miss that? They did all sorts of x-rays and MRIs and CAT- they did everything on him, and nobody notices an arrowhead stuck in his… latissimus dorsi
E: In his back, too.
S: It was funny.
J: So I will close this segment with Oetzi has chutzpah!
S: You think so?
B: (laughs)
S: We’re gonna hear more stories about him, I mean, he’s still- what an amazing find. And in 20 years of research, unraveling the information from this one find really is an important window into this bit of our past. Alright, let’s move on.
FTL Neutrino Followup (12:26)
Neurologica: FTL Neutrinos? Einstein Can Rest Easy
S: Bob, there’s an important update about a story perhaps we thought was one of, if not ‘’the’’, news story of 2011: the alleged neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. Tell us what’s going on.<!—include links to other transcriptions→
B: So, yeah, we’ve got another important update on what I call ‘one of the biggest and most unlikely to be true science stories of 2011’
(laughter)
B: And I don’t think this is the last we’re gonna hear of this, but, you guys remember, of course, all the ‘neutrinos traveling faster than light’ hubbub from last Fall. It was such a huge, huge item. It seems now that CERN may have uncovered a maximally mundane explanation for their results. Many online accounts, that I have read anyway, ascribe it to something as boring and apparently knuckle-headed as a loose wire. But, as we’ll see, reality is much more interesting and complicated than that. Just real quickly, scientists at CERN last year revealed that they had spent three years shooting a ghostly beam of neutrinos through the Earth from Switzerland to Italy, and they surprisingly and consistently confirmed that the beam arrived 60 nanoseconds ‘’earlier’’ than it should have, meaning that they were traveling faster than the speed of light. And, of course, this should not merely be hard, but downright ‘’impossible’’ according to everything that physics tells us. And most of the scientists, including the CERN researchers themselves, knew this, and much of the scientific discourse on this topic was concerned with reasonable explanations for the anomaly.
Now, it turns out that CERN has continued to investigate this, and they ‘’may’’ have hit upon the problem. What they recently revealed, however, is not as simple as a loose wire as you have been led to believe if you were kinda perusing the news sites discussing this. That’s actually an insulting description of what they uncovered, don’t you think? I mean, don’t you feel really stupid when you’re messing around with an electrical device and you can’t get it to work, and you discover that the plug wasn’t all the way in. Or worse, it’s not plugged in at ‘’all’’, right? It’s something that happens to everybody now and then. And that’s kind of the image that many of the headlines and news reports are conjuring, it’s like, ‘oh, these stupid scientists, they had a loose plug and they didn’t even know it’. But that’s not really what happened at all. So in reality, it wasn’t a loose plug, but a misaligned optical cable. This cable was really important, it sent critical timing signals to the master clock of the experimental set-up. Through extensive detective work, this wasn’t easy at all, they realized that this timing signal would be delayed by minute fractions of a second if it weren’t aligned ‘’perfectly’’. This delay would then cause a misreporting of the neutrino transit time, making them seem faster than they really are. Actually, they don’t know what happened during the years that they were doing these experiments. They don’t know if this optical cable was actually aligned perfectly or not, so they’re not even sure how much of a factor this is.
But that wasn’t even the only potential problem though, the other was an oscillator that was in that same clock, that kept time before and after these timing signals came in. So you’d have these timing signals coming in from the optical cable to make sure everything was synchronized right, and then you had the oscillator who was keeping time in-between these timing signals that would occasionally come in from the optical cable. So the oscillator, unfortunately, seems not to have been the best of time-keepers, it was running a little fast. Now this would ‘’then’’ make the neutrinos seem to take ‘’longer’’ to reach their destination, slowing down their apparent speed. So what we have then, are these two separate sources of potential error that are in opposition to each other. Also, they don’t yet even know what the magnitude of these errors are. So the result then is that there’s an uncertainty as to what the net effect was, you know, these two glitches could have perfectly cancelled each other out. It’s possible, and that would mean that there must be yet another source of error, ‘’or’’ the other possibility is that the neutrinos can really go faster than light, you know, guess which one is most likely, pretty obvious, I think. So this could, of course, mean that the net effect was to slow down, or speed up, the apparent speed of the neutrinos. So the point is, this anomaly has not yet been fully resolved, and there’s definitely more work to be done to actually find out if these two potential problems actually ‘’caused’’ this apparent increase in speed of the neutrinos. So stay tuned yet again for more neutrino stuff coming down the pike this year.
E: I imagine they’re going to re-align, re-calibrate and re-test, and then come up with new results.
B: Yeah, that’s what they’re going to have to do. They’ve got to fix this, see what happens, and do more tests.
J: It’s a good example of the scientific process, right?
E: Oh yeah.
B: Oh my god, it’s such a beautiful example.
J: They were aware that something weird was going on, they didn’t just say, you know ‘hey, look at this’, and then start making products off of their find. You know, they decided that to retest, and then their testing was replicated in other places, and everything, and the truth comes out.
S: Yeah, the bottom line is, to me, now, the error bars ‘’encompass’’ the neutrinos going at the speed of light, right? The speed that we thought they were supposed to go. It’s now just that it ‘’encompasses’’ the right answer. And until those error bars are narrowed, this is now meaningless. The mystery’s gone unless they fix everything, narrow those error bars, and the answer is outside of the range of what current physics can explain. But this essentially erases the claim of faster-than-light neutrinos.
E: Were they wrong to do the initial reporting?
B: No, I think they had vetted it to such a degree, you reach a point where you’re like: ‘Alright, we give up- not ‘’give up’’, but we’ve done a very reasonable amount of testing and verifying and rechecking and all that’, and it was time to bring other people in and start a wider discussion. And that’s fine.
S: Yeah, I think they handled it exactly as they should. They did everything they could that, by themselves when they were exhausted what they could think of, they opened it up to the broader scientific community ‘’mainly’’ with the notion of ‘help us figure out what we did wrong’. And we’ve talked before about the fact that that this is what ‘’happens’’, this is the process of science. The only thing that’s different now, if anything, is that the media is sort of peeking over the shoulder of the scientist and reporting on the process as it’s happening. So now the public is seeing the sausage being made, right? It’s seeing all the messiness, and they’re being scandalized by the fact that scientists are people who make mistakes, and are wrong, and have incomplete knowledge, and all of that stuff. I- my ‘’hope’’ is that eventually, you know, through the efforts of public education about science, and access to information over the internet, that eventually the public will more completely get it. They’ll get the notion that, Ok, this is what happens. And then the next time somebody announces some law-breaking, you know, law of science-breaking discovery, they’ll be more mature in dealing with that news, and go ‘oh, Ok, this probably didn’t just break the laws of physics, it has to be vetted, you know, it has to go through the ‘meat-grinder’ of peer-review etc. etc. They’ll be familiar with the process and they won’t be so scandalized by it, or easily duped by it.
More on Anti-Climategate (19:44)
The Guardian: Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science
S: We have ‘’another’’ follow up, talking about messy science. Rebecca, on last week’s show, we talked about the Heartland Institute revelations.[2] But we recorded that before some important revelations came to light, so get us up to date on that story.
R: Yeah, there have been a couple of new happenings, none of which changed the central theme of what we talked about last week, but they are important to the story. Just to bring everyone up to speed, what we talked about before was this huge leak of documents from the global warming denialist think-tank Heartland, and that showed they’re anti-science bent and they’re focused on lobbying rather than any kind of education. The documents showed that most of the global warming denialism at Heartland was funded by a single anonymous donor, but there are also several large corporations listed as major donors as well, which I mentioned on the show. For instance, one was oil conglomerate Koch industries, which makes sense, because they’re well known for putting millions of dollars into lobbying in favor of anti-science legislation and the like, because it directly benefits them. But another company mentioned was Microsoft, that has a public stance on climate change that aligns with the scientific consensus. Microsoft has since issued a statement that the $60,000 that they contributed to Heartland were in the form of software licenses, which they give to any eligible non-profit organization. In the statement they released, Microsoft reaffirmed their support for, and I quote “government action to create market-based mechanisms to address climate change”, however, by saying that Heartland was eligible for the software licenses, Microsoft was apparently confirming that they, and I quote again “have a mission to benefit the local community, which includes advancing education and preserving or restoring the environment”. Neither of those is anywhere near to being in line with an organization that we now know funds people to spread anti-science talking points, but, that said, Microsoft is saying that it was just software licenses.
The other news, the bigger news, that came out about the Heartland documents, is that the ‘leaker’ of the documents came forward. Turns out it was Peter Gleick, who is a well known climate scientist who many in our audience know because he’s spoken at several skeptical conferences, like Skeptical. Gleick claimed that an anonymous person forwarded him the climate strategy memo, which I mentioned in my previous report, that’s the one that I was talking about, that Heartland claimed was the only one of the documents that was fake, I mentioned that it was the one with the most damning pool-quotes. Though every fact in that document was verified by the other documents. Well, Gleick received that document and he wanted to verify it, so he emailed Heartland with an assumed name, and he got the other materials, which, as I mentioned, did in fact verify that document. He then sent the entire package to the various climate bloggers and that’s when the whole ‘to-do’ began. Gleick admitted that his actions in acquiring the documents, were the result of a lapse of professional judgment and ethics, and just prior to hus announcement, he resigned as chair of the American Geophysical Union on Scientific Ethics, and shortly after, he requested a leave of absence from Pacific Institute. Since then, scientists, journalists and science popularizers have been engaged in this seemingly endless discussion of whether or not the ends justify the means. Some say that Gleick has lost all credibility as a scientist and as a communicator because he used deception. And, for instance, Eugenie Scott’s organization, NCSE reversed the decision to add Gleick to its board, because of what came to light. But others say that the damage Heartland was doing by secretly funding anti-science promoters whose express purpose is to create fake controversy surrounding established science justifies it. I mean, it appears, at this point, as though the bad press may actually inhibit Heartland’s ability to promote pseudoscience. So, to give you an example of that line of thinking, in an article in the Guardian this week,[3] James Garvey argues that Gleick’s actions are comparable to Ben Goldacre’s use of deception to get his dead cat membership to a body of nutritional consultants. Garvey says that he thinks more climate scientists should stand up against people who misrepresent climate science, just as evolutionists and medical doctors fight equally absurd claims in their domains. So, it’s all up in the air at this point. So I’ll throw it to you guys, do you think that Gleick’s actions were worth it?
S: Well, can I say first of all I think that it’s actually irrelevant to the big issues, the bigger issue, which is: what does this- or are these documents real? And what do they tell us about Heartland? How they were obtained is actually irrelevant to that point.
R: Well that point is settled at this point,
S: Yeah
R: I mean, the documents are real, and you know, I think everybody pretty much agrees that they, maybe not ‘’everybody’’ agrees, but, you know, everybody on the side of the science seems to agree that what we talked about in the last episode still stands.
S: Yes
R: These are damning documents that show a supposed think-tank that’s actually spending all its time and money on lobbying and promoting anti-science talk-points
S: Yeah, I agree, although if you read the comments to [ http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/02/22/the-wedge-documents-of-climate-denialism/ Skepticblog] where we talked about it, certainly the other side is not accepting that, they’re still claiming that that one document is fake, and using that to try to say that there’s nothing going on here, like ‘ignore the man behind the curtain’ kind of thing.
R: Right, but that, to me, is just ignoring facts because, you know, regardless of if that document is fake, you know, and I said at the outset that that’s the one that Heartland was saying is fake, but the facts of the matter are that every statement in that document, every fact in that document is supported by the other documents that we verified.
S: Yeah, exactly
R: So, but, I think the problem is that, with Gleick’s admission that he used identity fraud in order to obtain the documents, I think that is an interesting question of ethics. You know, was he right to do it?
E: Is it kind of like the same as going in to see the faith-healer, but he’s dressing up as someone else and pretending to be someone else in order to get, you know, the expected result. Is it, do you kind of equate it along those lines?
S: I think it’s similar, but that one difference is, Randi is a magician, and Gleick is a scientist. And that’s the issue, as in when you are a member of a profession that relies upon transparency and honesty, doing that kind of thing can compromise your integrity. He should have just not given in to the temptation to do that, and kept his hands clean.
R: Yeah, because, I think the real damage here is that any future statement from Gleick, any promotion he does for the actual science behind climate change will be dismissed by people who feel that they can dismiss facts by saying ‘well, but look what he did, he did this unethical thing, therefore we can’t trust anything he says’.
S: Right, right, this has come up
R: And then he’s damaged
S: This has come up with us doing investigations, you know, how much subterfuge can we use? And we’ve erred on the side of not doing dishonest things because we’re worried that it will affect our reputation for honesty. Even if the ends are- they maybe have some benefit and, again, the documents are what they are. And you could argue that the public ‘’should’’ have access to them. You know, it might have been better for him to just try to publicly persuade Heartland to release this kind of information- I mean, I don’t know, maybe that would be kinda naïve or pointless, but, it ‘’is’’ tricky, it’s unfortunate, but I think that, as a ‘’scientist’’, he shouldn’t have done it, is the bottom line.
R: Yeah, I agree with that. But ‘’somebody’’ had to do it
S: Yeah, but ‘’somebody’’ had to do it, right
(laughter)
E: But nobody else did though.
S: I’m certainly glad I have the information. But that doesn’t mean I agree with how it was obtained
J: Well, in the future, if there’s any scientists out there that need this type of work done, email me
(laughter)
J: It will not hurt my reputation ‘’at all’’. I’m happy to do it, JayNovella@gmail.com, thank you
S: Let me give you another example, in my flood of emails one day I got an email from somebody claiming to be a member of the group Anonymous. This is a group of hackers who, you know, cause mischief in the name of what they consider to be good. And essentially this person said ‘Hey, love the SGU, I’m a member of Anonymous, just tell me…what organization’s website would you like to see taken down?’
B: oooh
E: Gosh
J: Great
E: The internet mafia, in a sense, you’re dealing with at that point
J: (mafia-type voice) you want. Like, their website to have an “accident” or something?
R: Right, I think that’s a really good example, Steve, cos Anonymous did take down Westboro Baptist Church’s website, and I think we can all agree that WBC are horrific people,
S: Yeah
R: But I don’t agree with that at all, it’s a form of censorship, and it shouldn’t have been done.
B: Yeah, there’s a good chance, Steve, that that was just a total set-up, just to see, and potentially publicize, that you might have acquiesced, and agreed to do it
E: Gotcha!
B: and from that angle, it would have been really bad. And if that’s what it is, then this guy, if you want, you can call ‘’me’’ about it, and my number is 1800-eat-shit
S: Yeah (laughs). No, even if we assume that- you’re right Bob, it could have been a set up or a sting operation. But even if it was completely legitimate, I just don’t think it’s the kind of thing that we should have anything to do with.
B: Definitely not
E: I agree
R: Yeah, but in ‘’that’’ case, though, I will say that it does differ, for ‘’me’’, from the Heartland case, because, to me, I don’t even agree with the ‘’ends’’ in that case.
S: Yeah, that’s true
R: You know, the means don’t really matter at that point. But in the case of Heartland, yeah, I agree 100% with the ends
Drug Testing (30:24)
ESPN: Braun's defense raises more questions
S: Alright, well let’s move on. Evan, there’s been some news item recently about drug tests in sports, and you’ve been desperate to get any sports-related news item onto the show.
E: (laughs) I wasn’t ‘’desperate’’
So, you managed to convince me with this one, so tell us about it
E: (laughs) Alright, it’ll be good. There’s been a big brew-haha in the world of baseball this week. Ryan Braun is an outfielder for the Milwaukee Brewer’s baseball team, and he also happens to be the reigning, ‘Most Valuable Player’ of the National League, so this is a big superstar in the sport. This past December, it was announced that Braun had tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug. The penalty for first-time offenders in baseball is a 50-game suspension and subsequent suspension of pay along with that. Now a season’s 162 games long, 50 games, so that’s roughly about 30% of the season and 30% of your salary, in Braun’s case, seven million bucks for the 2012 season, so he stood to lose a lot of money by this. Certainly in his reputation and other things. Braun’s urine samples, they were collected in October of 2011, this was during the play-offs, the Brewers were in the play-offs. And he tested positive for synthetic testosterone in his body.
J: oh
E: A normal adult male’s testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio is about 1:1, and the rules of baseball allow that ratio to be as high as 4:1. But Ryan Braun’s ratio tested at 20:1
B&J: Ohhh
E: Waaay over the limit. Way over the limit. Now, doping and professional baseball have become somewhat synonymous, in modern baseball times which, it’s proved be a big serious problem for the league, which has sort of gone beyond the sport itself, it’s made national and international headlines, you know, Senators and Congress people have been calling committee hearings and so forth, so this really is a big deal. And some of baseball’s biggest players, the last two decades, have failed drug tests. They include Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, and they all hold all these sports records in the league, in home-runs and so forth. I mean, these players are cheating, and to make things even worse, they’re ‘’lying’’ about it. They’re lying ‘’under oath’’ in fact, to judges, congressional panels. But in 2005 baseball adopted the most current set of rules and regulations concerning illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Prior to that, prior to 2005 you got ‘’no’’ suspension, all you would have to do is go seek treatment for your addiction, essentially, to these drugs, that was it. If you get a ‘’second’’ positive test result in baseball, it’s a 100-game suspension, and third time, you’re out, you’re thrown out of baseball forever.
Now, since the implementation of these new rules, every player that has tested positive, has been afforded an appeals process, but in each instance, the appeals process has held up, and those players have been suspended. But in Ryan Braun’s case, he’s the first player that has tested positive to these illegal drugs and has had the suspension overturned by appeal. So what happened here? Why did Ryan Braun’s suspension get overruled? Well, it wasn’t because the samples were incorrectly analyzed or anything, no, his suspension was overturned because two of the three arbiters on the arbitration panel deemed that the ‘’process’’ by which the samples were collected, did not follow standard protocol.
S: A technicality, essentially.
E: A technicality, basically, and, you know, it’s a pretty standard- standard protocol is essential. Let’s just run through this real quick. A professional collecter from a sanctioned drug testing facility is present at the time at collection, along with witnesses and chaperones. Lots of people involved in the process. The player pees in the jars, the jars are handed over to the collector, he ‘’seals’’ them with tamper-resistant seals and puts an identification number on it, not the player’s name, just a test number, the player signs a document then attesting that the sample’s theirs’, that the collection process was all in order and in compliance with the rules. The samples then are sealed in another package and sealed in a cardboard box, all with the identifying marks and tamper-proof seals. So three times these things are sealed. And then they get shipped off to a testing facility in Montreal. So this particular collection with Ryan Braun took place Saturday afternoon, the collector could not get it to a Fedex location in time for the shipment, so he had to keep the samples with him until Monday morning, right? So ‘’that’s’’ the technicality that they called them out on, and even though, yes, ‘’technically’’, you’re supposed to get the samples in, preferably the same day, but it’s just that the timing of it all didn’t work out.
So baseball training camps opened this past week, and Ryan Braun made a statement to the press concerning the overturning of his suspension, and he called the entire system of drug-testing fatally flawed, with characteristics opposite the American judicial system, he claimed he won his appeal because the ‘truth was on his side’, and he was ‘’indicating’’, without specifically saying it, that he was somehow the victim, that ‘’he’’ was the one who was cheated in this process. He’s questioning, essentially, the scientific validity of the process. The science is solid behind it, and basically, Ryan Braun got caught, he basically got off on a technicality. But he’s out there sort of running his mouth, saying the validity of this whole process is wrong. I think it’s reasonable for, certainly fans of the game, and people in general, to take issue with Ryan Braun and his position on this entire issue.
S: But if you have a loyal enough fan-base, all you need to give them is plausible deniability, and they’ll still love you.
E: Yes they will. But not here, we’ll call them out on it.
Your Deceptive Mind (36:02)
Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills
S: Let’s move on. One more quick news item, this is a completely shameless plug for my next course for The Teaching Company (TTC). For those of you who are not aware, a couple of years ago, I produced a course for TTC, they have a series called The Great Courses which are generally college-level courses,12, 24, 36 or whatever 30-minute lectures - audio and video. I did one on ‘Medical Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths: What We Think We Know May Be Hurting Us’, if you haven’t seen that, check it out, and I’ll have the link for this in the show notes as well as on my blog. And since then, they’ve asked me to do a second course which is coming out March 2nd, so it will be out by the time this podcast is up. And that one is on, essentially, it’s on skepticism. The title is ‘Your Deceptive brain’, and it’s all about how, it’s essentially the neuroscientific view of critical thinking. So in the first part of the course, I go over all the ways in which our brains are flawed and how our brains construct reality, that, what we think of as the objective world around us is just this narrative that our brain constructs for us-
E: Thank you, brain.
S: -that is flawed in many ways, based on filtered perception, on-
J: My brain’s not flawed, it’s reality’s fault
E: That’s right, the world- the ‘’universe’’ revolves around you, Jay
S: Right, and then we take all of that flawed perception and our flawed model of reality, and we filter that through our hopes and desires and biases and everything. And lots of stuff that we talk about on this show. Then, of course, on the other end, I talk about how to use critical thinking skills in order to overcome and compensate for all of these flaws and biases. I go through it very systematically. There’s a lot of material in there that I’ve never discussed on the SGU, so even if you’re someone who’s listened to a lot of episodes of the show, there’s definitely new material there. The process that TTC goes through is very good, you know, I’m very impressed with the editing, and they really work with you to develop the material so that it’s really the best version of your lectures that they could be. So, please check it out, I understand they make wonderful gifts. (laughs)If there’s that person in your life that you would like to be more skeptical-
R: Subtle
S: a really good introduction- not subtle at all, a shameless plug, totally shameless plug.
(laughter)
S: Honestly, I think it would be a very good introduction into why we are skeptics, it pretty much lays it out from beginning to end. You know, it’s 24 30-minute lectures, it’s hard- in my ‘’opinion’’, to absorb that information and not be even a little more critical.
E: Are you saying, you don’t get too technical, you don’t, you know, get bogged down in the jargon of neurology and so much, Steve?
S: Oh no, it’s definitely meant to be accessible, I assume no prior knowledge, no technical knowledge on the part of the listener, or viewer - it’s both audio and video. And, I’m not talking to skeptics, I’m talking to a general audience, somebody, people I assume- I start from the beginning and I go through it systematically assuming no prior knowledge. I encourage you to check it out.
J: Where can we get it, Steve?
S: I’ll have the links to- you know, if you look up The Great Courses and Steven Novella, you will find it. My two courses, ‘Medical Myths’ and now ‘Your Deceptive Brain’, but I’ll have the links on the show notes, and on my Neurologica blog.