SGU Episode 950

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SGU Episode 950
September 23rd 2023
A flint used to shape the wooden structure.  Credit: Larry Barham, University of Liverpool
SGU 949                      SGU 951
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
What is at stake is whether our country will follow science or superstitions & quackery.
Alejandro Frank, professor of mathematical physics at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Dr. Cara, Bob, and Liz go to Disney World

Voice-over: 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 Thursday, September 21^st, 2023, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Dr. Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: And today is the day where every skeptic will balance perfectly on its edge. (laughter)

S: It is the-

E: Autumnal equinox, 12 hours of light, 12 hours of darkness.

J: Cara is a doctor.

E: And Cara is a doctor, more importantly.

J: So I was texting Cara and I said, she was thanking all, she was like, I really want to thank you guys for essentially like putting up with a lot of schedule changes over throughout the last because she's becoming a doctor, so she had so much work to do.

S: It's been a living nightmare.

J: So I'm like, Cara, you don't get it. Like this is great for me because it lifts my status up because now I'm on a podcast with two doctors. (Cara laughs)

E: That's right.

C: Oh man, it's been a lot, but yeah, I'm so, I am really grateful for you guys' patience, for everybody's patience during these, especially the last few months where everything was coming together. It's so funny. I have to say how quickly you can go from like being overworked and super burnt out to like forgetting how to work at all, like I went from doing so much to so little so quickly.

S: Just turn your brain off. That's good.

C: And I'm loving it.

E: Oh, this happens to me every year, come April, it really does. And we do, we're aware of it. That's sort of a phenomenon in our industry in which they tell you, don't take a vacation the next day on April 16^th. Don't do it. They said you have to kind of wean yourself, take a week or two to kind of bring yourself down and then come May. Okay, you can start going places and really detaching from work because it's just not healthy.

C: Yeah, it's like a lot of not just work changes, but lifestyle changes. So my last day of my internship was the 31st of August, which is also the day that my PhD was granted because I defended my dissertation a couple of weeks prior. Then I had the weekend and then I went to Disney to celebrate, which was really fun. And it was a great time to go because it was right after Labor Day, so it was pretty dead and the weather for some reason really cooperated. But then it was pack up my truck and move out and drive across the country immediately afterward. So kind of waving Florida goodbye in the rear view. So it's just a lot of changes all at the same time, but I'm loving it. And now I'm here, I'm actually recording and the Wi-Fi is doing okay so far. I'm recording from Manchester where I'll be speaking at QED this weekend. And then I'm just going to stay in sort of like the UK and close by in Europe for about a month to just take some real time off.

E: Nice.

C: Yeah.

E: Well, well deserved. I mean, that's for certain.

C: Thank you.

E: I mean, it was a grind for you from what you were describing to us, a grind.

C: A grind. And I think it's all going to be a little bit, I'm going to go back to work starting in February, just so everyone knows. I'm going to be starting my postdoc back in LA in February. I'm going to take January to study for, well, I don't want to jinx myself, but to study for the EPPP. Anybody listening who is a psychologist knows the horrors, but basically to get my licensing exam. I want to do that early rather than late.

S: That's a good idea too.

C: Yeah. That's what everyone tells me.

S: So you may have noticed that Bob's not with us this week. Bob is essentially on his honeymoon. He did the stealth marriage thing earlier, like over the summer. He just called us up and said, hey, Liz and I got married, like out of the blue.

J: But then he immediately wanted us to buy him dinner, you know? Which we did. He said, bring us at this very expensive restaurant and you're going to buy us dinner. Okay.

S: We basically had the reception this past weekend and then he and Liz went to Disney World too. You guys didn't cross paths though, right?

C: No, I was gone before he went, but they are, I have to say, they're going to freaking love the Star Wars land at Hollywood Studios. I was in awe of how well it was done, but I wasn't like, I didn't get everything. You know what I mean? He's going to get it to the tee and be freaking out. The rides are incredible. The whole land is, it's like you're there, you're like on another planet and everything's written in this like alien language. It's so cool.

S: Right.

J: I can't believe by all the Star Wars that is inside of me, I cannot believe that I have not gone yet.

C: Yeah, you have to go. You'll freak out.

J: I know. I mean, look, let's cut to the chase here. Disney World is unbelievably expensive.

C: It's so expensive. The only reason I could go is because I was a Florida resident at the time and you have massive discounts.

J: And I can't go as an adult. I have to, I have two children. I have to take my entire family.

C: You can't be like, hey kids, don't you have mom and dad are going to Disney World.

S: They'd be telling the psychologist about that 20 years later.

J: I priced it out. I priced it out. I did my research for a while and then I priced it out. And like before I knew it, like I'm like, I want this, I want this, I want this, I want this. It was like $20,000.

C: Yeah. It's out of control. I've managed to go for, and I'll say this like point blank. I managed to go for about $1,500.

E: For how long?

J: How many days?

E: Four days?

C: Four full days. Yeah. So four days. So basically Monday to Friday, get there late on Monday for dinner and then all day, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at the parks. And then, but again, I could drive there. I didn't have to fly. I could get a Florida resident pricing on both my tickets and on my room. And then, but then that doesn't include food and you spend a lot of money on food.

E: Oh, the food. Yeah. Especially nowadays.

J: When you dig in, like to all the things that you have to do, like when we were kids and we went to Disney World, you'd show up at the park you don't have to like do anything before you come and you just like we're going to go to Disney World. Let's drive there. We drive there. You go. You walk in and you walk around and you go on every ride and then you leave, right?

E: Yeah. It was more like a Six Flags kind of experience.

C: Yeah. It's not like that now. You got to make like reservations for everything.

J: You have to tell them what park you're going to on what day. You have to, ahead of time, schedule what ride you're going to go on.

E: It's like entering a country.

J: And then, yeah, if you want to eat, like you almost are assuredly not going to find a place to eat unless you like you predict it and then make reservations.

C: Yep.

J: So it's really, it's a lot of work. Like it's a stressful thing being a parent taking kids to Disney World because you got to like manage the entire thing from beginning to end. But I mean, look, I got to see Star Wars. I got it. And then I got to go see Harry Potter, which isn't Universal, right?

C: Universal. Or what you could do is you guys can come visit me in LA and I'll take you to Universal in LA, which is the better Universal, because that's like the actual Universal studios. And they've got Harry Potter World there too. But I think they just built, somebody was telling me, I haven't done my research on this, but somebody was telling me they just built Super Mario World.

J: Whoa.

E: Oh my gosh.

C: Which sounds so cool.

E: Get to drive around in carts.

J: Can you actually go into a pipe?

C: Yeah. I hope so. That sounds so cool.

E: Jump on some mushrooms.

C: Super Nintendo World. Yeah. They're calling it Super Nintendo World.

E: Oh my gosh.

C: Like a power up band.

E: That's a multi, you see, that's smart because that's a multi-generational experience, right? You're going to have certainly the young kids, the older kids and the generation or two beyond them actually familiar with Super Mario, Mario Brothers and the whole thing. So it's actually pretty smart. I think so.

C: There's a Mario Kart ride.

E: Of course. Oh my gosh. How could there not be? I'd be disappointed if there weren't.

J: So very interestingly, the two biggest things in the SGU stratosphere that happened this year happened pretty much in the same week. Cara becomes a doctor and Bob and Liz get married and go to Disney World, basically. This all happened in the last week. Pretty awesome.

C: I love it.

E: Everyone's growing up. I'm not crying. You're crying.

S: All right. And I'm still here doing all the work.

E: Oh, hey Steve. Hey, thanks for doing the work. We appreciate it.

S: No worries.

C: Hey, Doc.

S: I'll get started with the news items.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

CAR-T Therapy (9:01)

• Immune Cells to Fight Cancer 

Martian Life (25:55)

• NASA may have unknowingly found and killed alien life on Mars 50 years ago, scientist claims 

Oldest Wooden Structures (39:17)

• Wooden structure that predates modern humans found  

Mexican Alien Bodies (55:07)

• The true story of the fake unboxed aliens is wilder than actual aliens 

Life Signature on Exoplanet (1:06:02)

• Possible Sign of Life on Exoplanet 

_Rogue_mentions_SGU_discussing_Venus_phosphene_^{[link needed]}

Who's That Noisy? (1:10:54)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Sound of the surface of a rock

New Noisy (1:16:35)

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

what this week's Noisy is

Announcements (1:17:56)

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Science or Fiction (1:24:39)

Theme: Climate change Item #1: According to the most recent statistics, deaths due to extreme weather have almost tripled between 1970 and 2019. Item #2: 2022 saw both global coal consumption and CO2 emissions hit an all-time high. Item #3: The Earth is losing 1.2 trillion tons of ice each year, and this pace is accelerating.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Weather deaths have tripled
Science	All-time high emissions
Science	Accelerating ice loss

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess
Evan	Weather deaths have tripled
Jay	All-time high emissions
Cara	Accelerating ice loss

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:41:18)

What is at stake here is whether our country will follow science or superstitions and quackery.  – Alejandro Frank (1951-present), professor of mathematical physics at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Signoff

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.

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Today I Learned

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References