SGU Episode 734
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| SGU Episode 734 |
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| August 3rd 2019 |
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"Exploring innovative atmospheric research tools under the afternoon sun." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"I want people to walk away with an understanding of how remarkably superlative the oceans really are. Not just in terms of sheer size and beauty, but also in their ecological complexity and the tremendous biological wealth they contain. Perhaps above all, I want them to understand how absolutely critical ocean health is to the health of all life on Earth." |
Melanie Stiassny, the Axelrod Research Curator of Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History. |
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| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro[edit]
Voiceover:You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, July 31st, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria, Howdy, Jay Novella, Hey guys, and Evan Bernstein. Good evening, folks. So are you guys surviving the heat? Well, we don't have much of a choice.
US#06:I feel bad for our friends in Europe who are sweltering. Yeah, they had some serious heat. Oof, records left and right in Europe.
S:Alaska, too, is apparently breaking all kinds of records. Well, get used to it. Yeah, right. I mean, here we go. I mean, how quickly could we see a change in temperatures? Meaning, could they go down even? Would they ever go down in our lifetime if we mobilize globally to counteract global warming?
E:Our lifetime's no. I mean, we'd have to start sequestering more than we're putting in of CO2. Even then, well, you're right, if we could actually pull it out, but if we stopped all emissions today, I don't think we'd see any major dipping or detectable dipping for quite some time, right?
J:I mean, I've read that many times. I mean, there's always going to be a range, depending on lots of variables. There's also a range of the climate sensitivity, which is still fairly broad.
S:It's probably around 3 degrees C per doubling of pre-industrial levels, but it could be anywhere from 1 to 6 or something like that.
B:The two standard deviations from the probable amount is still pretty significant. Do you guys think that the climate is going to be a huge part of the election in the United States coming up? No.
S:I want it to be me, but no, I don't think it will be. It usually is not. Usually not. It'll be part. You know, there's so much else going on, it's hard to say that it's going to be a major part or a big part. Well, I think that would be more of a debate to happen in the general election. There isn't much of a debate to happen on the Democratic side. I agree with that. Let's just do something. We all agree, yeah. We all agree.
J:I agree too. We all agree. We all agree. And it's hot as heck out. What was it, 95 degrees Fahrenheit here in Connecticut the other day?
C:It hit 95, yeah. It gets impressive very quickly.
E:It does. And we have a lot of humidity, so you really feel it.
S:Cara, you're from Dallas, and I lived in Dallas for a year of my life in 1980. Perhaps you remember while you were young. I was not born yet. Oh yeah, well you see there. There you go. Sorry.
C:So this old man here lived in Texas in 1980, and there were, I think, about 60 consecutive days of 100 degrees plus.
U:60.
E:60 consecutive days, and 113.
S:That was, up till that time in my life, definitely the hottest I had ever experienced. Wow, that's like Phoenix level.
E:I do know growing up, I was born in 83, so it was very soon after that, and I feel like there was at least
C:Steven, Jay, and Bob, you remember in, I think it was 2014.
E:In Las Vegas, that was the year we visited the Grand Canyon.
C:And as we were flying into Las Vegas, there were fires occurring in the hills and the mountains overlooking Las Vegas. If you remember that haze as we flew in, we sort of came in through this orange cloud of smoke and haze. And those temperatures were about 114, 115 degrees that week.
E:So that was officially the hottest I've ever experienced. Okay, let's get started with the show. Cara, you haven't done a what's a word in a long time. I haven't. And we just actually got an email today from Robin Payne, who was asking about the episode, Steve, where you were talking about lactic acid and lactate metabolism. And the word buffering was thrown around a bit.
What's the Word? (04:08)[edit]
- Buffering
E:And the word buffering was thrown around a bit. And so he's actually asking about how a buffer works in chemistry. And we'll touch base on that a little bit, but I thought maybe we can open it up to the word buffer across the board.
S:So maybe if we start with the etymology.
C:So apparently the word buffer comes from the old French, I'm totally pronouncing it wrong, buff. That's probably bad, which means a blow, a slap, or a punch, and that's actually, oh, this is kind of cool. It actually seems to be the root of the word buffet, but only one of them. No, no, buffet's different. It's a sideboard. It has two different, or it might be pronounced to buffet, to strike with a fist or something. Yeah, buffet, that's what it is, not buffet. But it's the same freaking word! I know, I know. A buffet, of course, is a, yeah, it's a credenza sideboard. Okay, anyway, but yes, in the other sense, it is the same root. So it actually has a kind of colloquial meaning that was derived from the more, I guess we could say concrete meaning, which was in the mid 16th century, which is to make a dull sound when struck. So, Evan, that may be an onomatopoeia.
S:What do you think?
C:I believe that is correct. I saw it in a Batman episode way back when, so it must be. So making the dull sound when struck, then I guess evolved to become something that absorbs a blow. So that was around 1835, and then eventually that became something that lessened the impact of something. Which of course is the, I shouldn't say of course because probably if you don't remember chemistry you might not remember this, but is the definition that was used by Steve that our listener wrote in about. So in chemistry a buffer is a solution that stabilizes the pH of something. So you add a buffer in order to make sure that the pH doesn't spike up or down. So like our blood has buffers in it, right? Like sodium bicarbonate is a buffer to make sure that our blood doesn't change pH too much. And so he was asking how that works. Quick and dirty, buffers usually are weak acid, weak acids with conjugate bases. And so they basically pass protons back and forth to each other. And in doing so, kind of back and forth, back and forth, and also because they're not very soluble in water, they tend not to react to strong bases or strong acids. So if those things are already in the solution, the weak acid and the weak base, if you add a strong acid or strong base, the change will be buffered by the buffer, because they're just moving those protons back and forth between themselves instead of having to take them or add them to the To the new solution that you've added. But that's not the only definition of the word buffer. Somebody who buffs is a buffer. Did you know that? Of course. You mean like buffs a car. What about when you get buffed from pumping iron? Sure, you might be a buffer then. We've heard the computing term, or the computing definition of buffer, right? Like when something, when pictures used to have to buffer. Yeah, trying to watch that video and all you get is a spinning disk. It's buffering. Yeah, so the buffer is actually, the noun form of the buffer is actually the chunk of memory that was set aside to store the data. There's a lot of definitions that I didn't even know about.
J:An isolating circuit, like an amplifier that's used to minimize the influence of a driven circuit?
C:Sure. We know about buffer zones in politics. That kind of takes that same definition as the colloquial definition, right?
E:Like a buffer zone, a demilitarized zone, or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a buffer zone, yep.
C:Oh, a buffer is often used to just describe a gap between two things. That might be a buffer between them. Makes sense. There's even a buffer in rail transport. So it's a device that's added to trains that cushions the impact between the trains. That's the buffer between them. Makes sense. And lastly, I'm seeing a definition in telecom, a routine or storage medium used to compensate for a difference in the rate flow of data, a time of occurrence of events when transferring data from one device to another. So it's interesting because all of these definitions I think kind of make sense because they all come back to that original etymology, which is actually to absorb a force. And in doing that, I think we've kind of figuratively translated that to mean two things that aren't bumping into each other or changing because of their interaction between themselves. So it's a buffer between things. Kind of cool. It's amazing how our brain seamlessly, like we don't detect the confusion of all the different meanings and applications of that word. Even though they're pretty different. It's all context, it's all context. Yeah, it's all context. And the funny thing is they all come from the same place, but because of the literal, or I should say the figurative changes in the term, you're right, Jay, like we use it very differently, but it's all got like a thread beneath it.
J:Yeah, but the thing that is remarkable to me is how we're not conscious of the fact that our brain is figuring out which version of the word that it's going to apply to the feeling we get of understanding, right? Like it just happens.
C:And the fact is, there is, you know, Steve, with the speed, the way our brain works, and the fact that it's happening outside of our consciousness, it just feels like it's happening automatically all the time. You know, how long does it take the brain to pluck something like that out of our, you know, to make that a construct that means something?
J:4 for 1. Yeah, I'm sure neuroscientists could probably put a precise number to it. There are ways to measure certain processes in the brain. Typically, conducting through a circuit in the brain is on the order of magnitude of 200 to 300 milliseconds. That's what we're talking about for any basic process like that, just to conduct through the system. And obviously, the more that you know a word, right, the more that you've read it and you've used it in speech, the more kind of automaticity, quote unquote, there's going to be.
S:Obviously, if it's a new word, it might become conscious. It's a conscious effort. But like you said, Jay, this is sort of, well, it's not sort of, it's an unconscious processing. Well, it's also, yeah, it's true that we read words, not letters, and so the word is an entity unto itself and you don't necessarily notice the details or the similarities because it's just slotted differently in your language area.
C:Like, for example, I remember a foreigner, I think it was a German speaker, native, sitting next to me on a train, trying to figure out if he was supposed to get off at Newark or New York. And to me, those are two completely different words. To him, it was like he could not parse the difference between New York and New York.
S:Steve, I got another one. Our good buddy that worked for my dad, Joe Gomes, he would always say to me, Kitchen chicken. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Jay's head, he heard it completely differently. of course yeah and the and that never the funny thing is that never occurred to me it because i saw it spelled before i ever heard it and so that was the word to me d-i-x-w-e-l-l it didn't even occur to me but jay instantly made that connection because he didn't know how it was spelled because that's the way jay's brain works the pen is mightier that's right the penis mightier anal bum cover What was in Arrested Development? He was an analrapist, remember? He was an analyst. He joined the two words between analyst and therapist and he decided to call himself an analrapist.
C:The Benny Hill one was, there was a therapist putting a sign on a, you know, like an office door, the door, and instead of saying therapist, he wrote the rapist. Yeah, the rapist, yeah. Yeah. Totally. No, but Benny Hill, like, moves the the over, you know. So first you just see the rapist, then he moves it over and says, oh, therapist. Yeah. He was good that way. He's going to stay. Is it funny? He's leaving to stay. No, he's going to stay. All right, let's move on.
J:Jay, you're going to start with a news item about whether or not we can see technological civilizations in other solar systems, potentially.
News Item #1 - Signals From Earth (13:21)[edit]
J:Jay, you're going to start with a news item about whether or not we can see technological civilizations in other solar systems, potentially.
S:Wait, why aren't I covering this?
J:I'll ask you, Bob.
S:So how visible, Bob, is our presence on Earth to aliens? That's a provocative question, right? Can we or should we be detecting light similar to our light on other planets? And now I ask this because a recent study has posed this question. You know, what kinds of signs should we be looking for? What kind, you know, Right now we use radio telescopes to search the night sky to find alien signals, possibly. So let me ask you guys a question.
J:Do you remember when you first thought about the idea of aliens and the fact that they might be receiving the transmissions that leave Earth? Do you remember the first time you thought about that? Yeah, it was a Wednesday, I think. Well, I think one of the earliest times for me was when I read the book Contact by Carl Sagan, and he, in that book, discusses this cool idea that we receive this alien signal and they send us back the first signal that they ever received from Earth. And in the movie, it was the 1936 Berlin Olympics that was broadcast by German television. That really blew The Berlin Olympics was not the first signal that was ever sent. It wasn't the first signal that humans generated. And it wasn't probably the signal or isn't the first signal that aliens are likely to receive from us. Now the reason why is that signal was incredibly weak and it's very likely it didn't escape the Earth's ionosphere. Really? Right. So quickly to explain, the Sun's ultraviolet light creates a mishmash of ions that we call the ionosphere. And it literally reflects radio transmissions back down to Earth. So only radio transmissions that are lower than 50 megahertz Have a chance at that power level, have a chance of punching through the ionosphere. And once through, of course, those transmissions can travel really far because they operate exactly like light does. You know, they're just moving at the speed of light and unless they hit something, they're just going to keep going. Now, these signals probably don't have enough power to be easily detected by aliens. It's been compared to dropping a pebble off the coast of California and then having a tiny wave that it made detected in Japan. Right. That's about how unlikely it is that aliens will pick up these incredibly weak signals that may or may not have left the earth. Right. But of course, since then, you know, since the 1930s, we've had a lot of signals In November 1974, a radio astronomer named Frank Drake used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to send a message. This is the one that they do. It's really awesome. Yeah, it actually doesn't move. It's in a big depression in the ground. It doesn't move. It's a little limited, but it's very sensitive. It's huge. The signal he sent was actually pretty damn strong. It was a thousand kilowatts of power, and he sent it to the globular star cluster Messier 13. Now, my question is, if they clean up that star cluster, would they still call it the Messier 13? It's Messier. I see. It's more than 20,000 light years away.
B:And he sent some interesting information, like an image of our solar system, and an image of the double helix, and the numbers 1 through 10, lots of other stuff. But that was what he was sending.
J:It was basically a, hello, we're here. And as of today, that signal has traveled 45 light years. And it's going to take another 19,955 years to get to the star cluster. That's how big the universe is. That's close, right?
C:That's close. As our technology has advanced, our radio signals have become much quieter, though.
J:And this is a cool thing that I thought was very provocative. You know, we're using fiber cables now instead of giant radio towers. And there's something that we do that is clearly visible. That is outside of radio frequencies, and that is light. That's visible light. Now, if you look at photographs taken from the International Space Station, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. You'll see these amazing amounts of light coming off of the cities around the world. And now we're upgrading to LED lights, and that light, you know, it's a bright light. It's a very, very bright, intense light, and it's also thought to be clearly artificial. So if aliens were looking at the Earth, They would be seeing LED light, and LED light does not occur naturally. It occurs through technology. So it has a spectrum that is different, that has a signature of technological origin. Exactly. So we're basically saying technology over here, right? So I think that's really cool. It's also a little like, hey, you know, let's become aware of this. Let's think about this. And should we be hiding ourselves? Should we be Careful with the kind of light, the colors and the spectrums of light that we spill. No way. Two reasons why I'm not worried. Too far away. Yeah, too far away, speed of light.
S:It's not going to happen in my lifetime. Second reason is that any civilization we would need to be worried about, we wouldn't be able to hide from, probably.
J:You know what I mean? We're hiding from ourselves, but we're not going to be able to hide from an advanced technology that we would need to worry about.
S:You know, we should have kept the incandescent light bulb. Now, there's nothing we could do. I mean, at the very least, what they could do is using some form of spectroscopy, they could find out the what chemical elements are in our atmosphere. And they would know that, oh, OK, there's lots of interesting things here that could only be produced by carbon, you know, carbon based life forms.
J:So there's got to be life here. Let's go and have some fun. So, yeah, there's no hiding that. And that's been emitted for billions of years. But Bob, look at what happened, man. I have no response to that.
B:Thanks for watching.
J:Yes. Of course. Yeah, we should. We should be looking for the same signatures that we create. I think LED light is probably pretty common in technologically advanced ... It doesn't have to necessarily be what we are using exactly as LED, just technological spectra. There might be signatures of technological origin of light.
S:Also, keep in mind that visible light is a very human definition. There may be other ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum that other creatures use. Sure, there's been talk in the past, lots of talk about using lasers as a signaling, you know, to look for alien life by, you know, by detecting laser light, you know, specifically using lasers to communicate and that's very similar to what you're talking and probably orders of magnitude more detectable than our feeble LED light. Bob, that's what they're using to propel their light sails all over the cosmos. Right, exactly. It could be. If they're using powerful lasers for light sail craft, then we could detect those very lasers.
B:Yeah, exactly. Explain that, Cara. Go ahead. And they'd probably be using exowatt lasers, you know. Oh, I think about them all the time. Yeah, that sounds fancy. Come on, don't look at them. Don't worry, basis. Don't worry, got a watt. Oh, Bob. Okay. You're totally teasing me. Bob, we're going to end on Yottawatt.
E:That's a topic killer, so we're going to move on. It was meant to be.
S:So this comes up all the time, but I think it's a good opportunity to go over some details here.
News Item #2 - Acupuncture for Angina (22:22)[edit]
S:So this comes up all the time, but I think it's a good opportunity to go over some details here.
B:A new study published in JAMA purports to show that acupuncture is effective for angina, for the pain you get in your chest from heart ischemia, from poor circulation in your heart.
S:And then once that happens, I get tons of emails, people just happened a few minutes ago, hey, how could this study be true? What do you think about this? And of course, the acupuncture proponents are screaming it from the rooftops, like, look, finally, we have proof. Finally, the latest, greatest proof. Yeah, but as you might predict, the study is not very convincing at all. There are some fatal flaws. I will get to the biggest one at the end, but let me just go through some of the details. This is where I think it is interesting for skeptics to have some sense of like how we break down an individual study to say if we consider it to be convincing or not. So superficially, superficially, if you just read the abstract, the study looks fine. The devil is always in the details. There are four groups in the study with about 101 people, subjects per group. There's true acupuncture where you do it in the so-called correct spots. Then there is acupuncture where they do it in the incorrect locations. And then there's sham acupuncture where they don't even penetrate the skin. And then there is the waitlist group where you have essentially no intervention. Everyone is always taking their background medication for angina, right? So you always, like if you get angina, you could take the drugs that you are prescribed for them. But this is, they're tracking by patient self-report how many episodes of angina did they get over a 16-week period. And they found that the true acupuncture group had a significant decrease in the episodes of angina when compared to all the other groups. Sounds impressive. Acupuncture, but at the wrong location, the sham acupuncture, and the weightless group. So yeah, so again, that's all you knew about the study, but okay, that sounds like a legit study, so why are we nasty skeptics don't believe it? Well, there's numerous reasons. Let's go over plausibility first. Acupuncture points aren't real, first of all. And we know that from a hundred years of looking. There's no evidence that acupuncture points have any basis in physiology, biology, anatomy, or reality. There's nothing to show that they exist, and the history of where acupuncture points are alleged to be is purely pseudoscientific. It began as an exercise in astrology, essentially reflecting the astrological signs onto the body. That's why originally there were 365 acupuncture points, one for each day of the year. 365 in one quarter. That expanded to thousands of acupuncture points. .240, exactly. Then there are many traditions of where the acupuncture points are. So the question is, for the study like this, where they're claiming correct and so-called incorrect acupuncture points, how did they decide what the correct points were? Basically, the acupuncturists involved in the study just decided. They just said, we're going to choose these. These are the correct ones based upon our study. But there's no evidence. You can't produce a study to show that these are the correct points. So there's no basis in reality for the difference between the correct and incorrect locations. It's just made up. Okay, that aside, if we entirely put plausibility aside, which you shouldn't, but even if you do, there's some fatal problems with this study. First of all, and you don't know this until you read deep into the study, and you don't learn this from reading the press releases, this is a study of electro-acupuncture, which means they're doing electrical stimulation at the point. Oh, that's totally different. Like representing acupuncture, kind of? So it just means that they're doing a completely different intervention in the guise of acupuncture. They're not putting needles into people. No, no, they are. They're putting needles, but they're electrifying the needles. They're electrifying the needles. They're doing the acupuncture, but then they're sending current through them. So, okay, that can produce a whole host of effects that have nothing to do with acupuncture, so they're just muddying the waters. So that's a problem whenever you see that, but that doesn't explain the difference between the true and the fake acupuncture unless there was something physiologically different about those locations. Again, that had nothing to do with acupuncture. All right, but it gets worse.
C:I'm sort of going from the progressing to the bigger problems as we go through.
S:One problem I had is that in this study, there was no significant difference between the fake acupuncture and the waitlist group. Think about that. In pretty much every other acupuncture study, that's where the difference is. That's an unblinded comparison. You have the people who are getting nothing. And the people who are getting something, the people who are getting something always report a subjective improvement. That's standard placebo effect. So why would that difference not be here in this study? It's very, very curious. It's a massive red flag. That's a standard assessment that we always make in clinical trials, that you have to see differences where you expect them to be and don't see differences where you don't expect them to be. And if there's something off, it calls into question the validity of the study. So not seeing a difference between the waitlist group and the fake acupuncture group is a massive red flag. It suggests to me that this study was not well-blinded. And that is one of the most common flaws with acupuncture studies. And there's reason to think, there's actually two reasons to think that the study was not properly blinded. The first is that it was only single blinded, meaning that the subjects were not aware whether they were getting correct or incorrect or sham. But the test was so much for the gold standard. But the acupuncturists were So they said the evaluators were not blinded, but who cares? The evaluators are irrelevant. The endpoint was patient subjective report of their angina. And the only thing that really matters is, did the acupuncturists doing the procedure know if they were in the treatment or the control? And they did. Now, we know from previous studies and common sense that the most important factor in subjective improvement from acupuncture is the interaction with the acupuncturist. And so I suspect that the acupuncturist, knowing who was getting treated and who wasn't getting treated, completely unblinded the subjects. And that's why you had to disappear. The people who were getting the fake acupuncture knew they were getting the fake acupuncture, and that's why they weren't better than the no treatment wait list. Further, in this study, they didn't assess the blinding. They didn't ask the subjects, do you think you got the treatment or the placebo? So, which is again, it's pretty standard to do that, to evaluate how well-blinded this study was. So they didn't do that. So we have good reason to think it wasn't blinded, they didn't assess the blinding, and the results suggest it was not properly blinded. All of that means the results are completely and utterly worthless, especially because the outcomes were entirely subjective. They weren't able to correlate it with any objective measure. They didn't look at EKGs or anything, echocardiograms. It was just subjective symptoms by the patient. And things like angina, there's a huge psychological component to that, how much stress you're under, et cetera. So that's one that's pretty easy to manipulate with placebo effects. So those are, in my opinion, the real fatal flaws. But there's some other nuances in here. They reported a lot of side effects to the study. So it's important to remember that this is not a completely harmless or non-invasive They said there were reasons for withdrawal and acupuncture-associated adverse events, including bleeding, subcutaneous hemorrhage, hematoma, fainting, serious pain, and local infection were recorded during the study. Here's another thing. The dropout rate was very, very small. Now, in general, if your dropout rate is too high, then that is a problem because that could be a source of bias, right? If more people in one arm are dropping out than another, that could be biasing the results. But in this case, the compliance with a six-week course of acupuncture and keeping careful records of the angina was like 99%. So that's actually a little bit too good to be true, which again suggests that maybe there's some funky manipulation going on here. So this is a basically worthless study. It is certainly not a study you can use to claim that acupuncture points are real and that acupuncture, by definition, works. But now the big thing is, which kind of puts a bit of a ribbon on everything I've said so far, is that this study, while even though it was published in JAMA, All of the authors are Chinese, and their affiliations are with Chinese hospitals, like acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine hospitals. So why is that important? Because there have been now at least two studies I'm aware of, one in 1998 with a follow-up in 2014, so recent enough, that show that 100% of acupuncture studies coming out of China are positive. Thank you for joining us. And there are other studies which could explain parts of why that's the case. So one study showed that they looked at studies that were registered with clinicaltrials.gov, traditional Chinese medicine studies, half of which are acupuncture studies.
B:Only 8.7% had reported the results.
S:That's low. That's a red flag for publication bias. What are they doing with all the negative studies that they're clearly not publishing? But another review found they looked at acupuncture studies conducted in China and conducted in the West, and they found that the ones that were conducted in China had lower methodological rigor. They were not as well controlled, they were poor studies. And so the methodological quality was lower than the international standard. So they're poor studies, they have a huge file drawer effect, and they only publish positive studies. There's a huge cultural and political bias in China. Not to mention that, generally speaking, they have orders of magnitude more study withdrawals for improper procedure. They have a huge problem with fraud and with improper scientific technique in that country. Combined with the fact that politically they're trying to export their culture through the export of traditional Chinese medicine, and there's massive political pressure to prove that TCM and acupuncture works. And that, I think, dovetails with all of the specific flaws in this study. And, you know, may explain why. Why would they bother? That's the thing. I ask myself, in 2019, after thousands of acupuncture studies, when we've already sorted through all of the weaknesses and we've managed to do well-controlled. We've solved all of these problems. We've done well-controlled acupuncture points that are negative, acupuncture studies. Why would you bother doing a study like this that won't convince anybody who isn't already convinced because it's terrible? Well, the point might just very well be to just produce headlines that say acupuncture works for angina and hope that people don't read the details. Is that why this appeared in JAMA? I think that what happens in, unfortunately, in journals and academia in the West is that they don't know, they're not paying attention. And they basically will, guess who peer reviews these studies? They just send them out to acupuncturists. Yeah, because they look for subject matter experts. Yes, exactly. They look for subject matter experts, especially the fox. The fox is watching the henhouse, and it's a totally internal system, and it's just up to science-based medicine and Edzard Ernst and a few others who are like, hey, wait a minute, this is a horrible study. What are they doing here? Thanks for watching. So it's very, very frustrating. But this is like almost weekly. This was a particularly bad one. And in fact, I'm only talking about it because it was in JAMA and people are emailing me. But this is like every week there's another shitty acupuncture study at this level. They're just not doing good research is the bottom line. Boo. Boo. But none of it matters because we were almost hit by an asteroid last week.
News Item #3 - Asteroid Near Miss (36:04)[edit]
S:So yes, an asteroid has just missed the Earth, and this time it was a city killer. And as it happens too frequently, we found about it only when it was way far too late to do anything about it. So annoying, I got so frustrated with this. So this happened July 25th. The official announcement happened before it passed by Earth after teams in the US and Brazil had detected it a few days beforehand. So it took a little digging, but this was a Brazilian and American teams separately discovered the asteroid.
B:I thought they were working together for some reason. They were doing this, they separately discovered the asteroid, but neither group was aware of how close it would get until probably hours before it did. So they spotted it and didn't know enough about it to say, hey, this is going to get really close, really soon, until it was just hours away from that perihelion, I guess you would call it. Well, not necessarily, Bob, right? Perihelion's the closest to the Sun, which is not when it's closest to the Earth. So, what do you call its closest approach in general, then? Could perihelion specifically be the closest to the Sun? Yeah, because it's got helios. Right, you're right. Peri, fly, fly, fly-bian. So, the asteroid is called Frankie. Peri-G, I think it's Peri-G. Oh, Apogee and Peri-G. Oh, yeah, G. That's right, that's right. And I knew that, too, goddammit. But that may refer to something that's in orbit around the Earth.
S:Oh, man. So the asteroid is called Frankie, and that's my joke that I've said three times now.
B:Actually, it's called Asteroid 2019 OK.
S:Yes, we're OK, thanks. OK, OK. It's 57 to 130 meters wide.
B:Pick a number in between there, apparently.
S:Some people compare it to a huge boulder.
B:I don't know, if that's 130 meters wide, that's a huge boulder. It doesn't quite cover it.
S:It's a Robtic Nagian, at least.
B:So it managed to get within just 73,000 kilometers or 45,000 miles to our planet, close to our planet, without anybody noticing. That's less than one fifth of the distance to the moon. One fifth within the orbit of the moon, real close. That's a kind of a bullet graze kind of situation. And this bad boy was traveling at 54,000 miles per hour. That's 15 miles per second. That is a lot of kinetic energy. So they're calling it a city killer. This this kind of size would basically take out a, you know, a decent sized city. Professor Alan Duffy, a scientist at the Royal Institute of Australia said, I know Alan. Alan. Hi, Alan. Hi, Alan. He might be listening to the show. Yes. He's a skeptic. So Cara's skeptic scientist friend, Alan, said it would have hit with over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima. So little calculations, very easy calculations. That's 30 times 16 kilotons. That's 480 kilotons, or basically a half a megaton, 500,000 tons of TNT. So that would have been a big whack.
C:So I went to the, of course, when we have similar stories like this, of course, I go to my kinetic energy calculator and put in some of the numbers here.
B:So at a 45-degree impact, they were saying that, let's see, it would break up at an altitude of 59,700 meters. That's 196,000 feet. The projectile would have reached the ground in a broken condition. The massive projectile would strike the surface at a velocity of 4.07 miles per second. Thank you for joining us. I assumed that it was a dense, rocky asteroid. It could have been less dense, more of a conglomeration of loose rocks. I also said that it hit the ground, maybe. I don't know what his calculations were. But still, we're talking about a lot of damage, take out a city, many thousands of people probably dying. The next question you should be asking yourselves is, why the hell did we miss it? And there's a few reasons. This is kind of like one of those asteroids that is kind of like, man, this would have been hard to see on a good day. It's a very small size, right? This is small. So that means it's a lot dimmer. You're mainly seeing these from reflected light. So there really wouldn't be a lot of reflected light until it was very close. The orbit was unusual. It's described as elliptical that takes it from past Mars to within the orbit of Venus. So that means that it would spend very little time near Earth when it would be visible. And it was going fast, 54,000 miles an hour. Some people were saying that it came from the direction of the sun that would blind the astronomers, and we've seen that before, although I looked at a video of its orbit and it wasn't coming from the direction of the sun. So I don't know what they're talking about. But if you put that all together, it was very difficult to detect. Currently, if you look at how we currently try to detect these things, they're primarily or probably all telescopes on Earth. Congress mandated that by 2020, NASA needs to find 90% of the large asteroids that could hit Earth. I think we've mentioned that on the show before, but NASA's probably not going to meet that goal. So far, they've found about 90% of all near-Earth asteroids that are about half a mile in size or greater. So they're doing kind of okay in that regard, but they found less than half of the estimated 25,000 near-Earth objects thought to be 459 feet in size or greater. So these are the city killers and worse. So they've only found half of those that they think they should have been able to find. You know, I would like to definitely get these numbers well into the 90th percentile of detection. Although, like I said, it's really hard for these small guys, but we got to just keep looking and looking harder and harder because, I mean, we could wake up on mornings like, oh, boy, we just lost a city and hope that other countries don't think it's a nuke and respond accordingly after an asteroid strike. That's a scary misinterpretation that I worry about. So I really don't know what it's going to take for us to take this as seriously as I think we should be taking this. We've got so many existential risks, gamma ray bursts, nearby supernovas, alien attacks that are trying to read our LED lights, and there's nothing we could do about those. There's nothing. We are not going to be able to do anything about that. Until we get so advanced that I can't even describe it, it's so complex, but in the very near future, never, we're going to be able to deal with that. But we can do something about these. The bottom line, we need to detect them as early as possible so that we can do something about it. Imagine if we detect an asteroid that's much bigger, that's going to whack the Earth in six months, three months, a year, even five years, and we're like, and all of our scientists say, You know, if we only detected this earlier, there's nothing we can do about it. But if we knew a few years earlier, we could have dealt with this. But now we can't, and we're just going to have to wait and play cards and do other crazy shit while we wait for the end, knowing that we could have done something about it if we just detected it earlier. 25,000 estimated objects of roughly this size are out there? So tell me about this guy who claims he could make it rain. Yeah, he's one of these shamans who shakes a stick at the sky, and before you know it, it's a deluge.
News Item #4 - Rainmakers (44:12)[edit]
B:Yeah, he's one of these shamans who shakes a stick at the sky, and before you know it, it's a deluge.
E:That's probably just as effective as what he's doing.
B:That's right.
S:Well, this particular item comes to a courtesy of one of our listeners, a new listener, in fact, from Australia. His name is Caleb Miller. Thank you, Caleb, for sending this along. I'll read part of his email.
US#00:Hey there, I've been listening to the podcast for a few months now, slowly making my way through your older content, so I'm not sure if this guy has been mentioned before. We have a local rainmaker named Peter Stevens claiming his atmospheric ionization research machine can bring the area some much needed rain. I come from a town in regional New South Wales and the area is being impacted. By quite a persistent drought. He isn't taking any money from people as direct payments but he's asking for money to come to town because it's expensive to move the machine around.
E:And Caleb believes that he's preying on people's desperate nature and he has a problem with that and wanted to know what our thoughts were about this.
S:Well, thank you Caleb for sending the email in.
E:This intrigues me. I had never heard of Peter Stevens or his atmospheric ionization research machine before. I actually reached out to our friends in Australia, the Australian skeptics and Richard Saunders, to see if he had ever heard of Peter Stevens in this particular machine, and he had not. So the Australian skeptics have not tackled this particular person. So I did some other poking around. There are lots of online news articles about Stevens and his machine. You ready for this? I'll give you the bullet points. The machine magnifies the sun rays with a series of mirrors. There's also an infrared source of heat, as well as a series of magnets with the secret science, secret science folks, The secret science being that the magnets are somehow paired north to north in a complete disregard for physics as we know it. The light and heat is then directed back into the sky where it gives an intense, warm section of air that charges particles in the atmosphere and causes clouds to form generally within 24 hours and then it will rain. Did you catch all that? Can't be any clearer than that. Here are some quotes from Mr. Stevens. If I set it up out there for seven days, I could cause quite a lot of rain over the state, but I wouldn't do that. The ground is too dry and not ready for all this rain at once. The best would be to cause an inch or two and then do follow-ups over the next three months, probably at his fee to come back every couple months. Causing a rain event is an amazing and quite a wonderful sight to see. I don't do it for the money. I do it for the result. It can benefit the whole country. I won't divulge the secrets because no one will believe it, and people just can't cope when you go against physics, but it does work. I've been doing it for 30 years and have never failed. I always get a rain event. I claim a 100% success rate. Yeah. What do we say about 100% success? Yes. Acupuncture China. This guy was raining in the Arizona desert. Like Sex Panther perfume. So? Nobody? Nobody saw Anchorman? Yeah, I did. It works 100% of the time, 50% of the time, or something like that. Now of all the articles I read about this guy, the best headline was this one. Man believes machine caused rain. That about sums it up. All right, so there's a kernel of not craziness here. Let me just cut. Because I was looking to see, is there any possible way this guy's device can work? I mean, I think the short answer is no. But I mean, here's the only thread I could pull out of this. There are other companies working on a technology that essentially uses an ionizer in order to seed the clouds. So cloud seeding works. Right.
S:Cloud seeding is a thing, yes.
E:That's a thing. If you take a cloud that has moisture in it and you seed it with dust particles or something that attracts the water, forms the nucleation sites, then that could precipitate rain, right?
C:So the idea here is that instead of seeding the cloud, you use ionizers.
E:And when I say ionizers, I'm not talking about this one little mirror this guy has. I'm talking about like a dozen of these big towers, you know, with ionizers on top of them.
S:The ions get released into the atmosphere, they attract the dust, and then that becomes a manner of seeding the clouds. Even that method, which at least sounds superficially plausible, experts say it's garbage. Here is a quote from Joseph Golden, a former senior meteorologist at the Forecast Systems Lab of the National Weather Service. He said, that's garbage.
E:That's absolute garbage.
S:I don't believe that for a nanosecond. You aren't going to get anything out of clear skies. I don't want to sound like Tom Cruise here, but show me the data or data, depending on your preference. And when you have secret technology, such as this, in which you refuse to reveal exactly what is going on with your machine, it's kind of hard to have any reliable data to go with, because who the hell can replicate this if you don't share it with anybody else? Well, yeah, the thing is, this guy's been doing this for 30 years, and you haven't been able to prove that your device works 100% of the time to the scientific community in 30 years. You're doing something wrong. Don't go screaming conspiracy. You're not convincing, probably because it doesn't work. The other thing is the company that was doing the ionizer thing say it works if you have 30% humidity in the clouds. Well, yeah, that's because it's about to rain anyway. If you have rain clouds, I could make it rain. Good for you. But you can't make it rain with clear skies. That's what I'm saying. You're not going to really alter the precipitation patterns here. You're not going to make it rain in the desert.
E:What did Froze don't say? There is no water in this air. You can't make it rain from nothing. The deserts are deserts because there's no water in the clouds passing over them. They've already dumped all their water. Thank you for joining us.
S:But you're not going to be able to bring rain anywhere you want, whenever you want, make it rain in the desert. That's just not happening. And that's what this meteorologist was saying, that this is, that's what's garbage. You're not going to get water out of clear skies by putting ions in there. So the ionization approach is controversial and probably doesn't work. This guy's little machine, even if it does work that way, it would be way too small to have any effect. And his reflecting the heat back into the sky, whatever, is just total nonsense. And the magnets, you know, Thank you for watching. Crank is exactly the correct term for this. I looked up a few other videos about Peter Stevens to see if there was a demonstration, to see if he goes into the technology at all. Well, not exactly, but he does come up with a couple other things. He has some family relatives who are apparently in the business with him, and among them, I don't know if it's his son or his brother, couldn't tell, a dowser. He's out there with his divining rods and of course looking for water, so the Dowsing community apparently shares some company in there. Then there's another video in which he traveled to Coral Castle in Florida to talk about the strange and unexplained happenings in and around Coral Castle. It's a very magical place, don't you know, in which Long story short, this fellow back in the early part of the 20th century used magic technology of some sort, unknown, in order to lift very large rocks into places to create buildings and little structures and other sorts of things in which these things are so heavy.
E:The technology at the time would have made it impossible. For him to do it any other way unless it was some sort of magic. Unless you used leverage or something. Exactly right, a fulcrum and a lever. But other than that, it's pure magic. So this is the kind of worldview I would say that Mr. Stevens encompasses as well. But Cara, there is a conspiracy to spread Lyme disease.
News Item #5 - Lyme Conspiracy (53:33)[edit]
E:But Cara, there is a conspiracy to spread Lyme disease. I heard that on the internet. Oh, you heard it on the internet. It must be true. But not according to Sam Telford, who wrote a really great piece in the conversation. He is a professor of infectious disease and global health at Tufts. He's an epidemiologist. He even teaches a course to graduate students on biodefense, which is a big part of this conspiracy here. Don't trust him just because he says that the government did not secretly weaponize and militarize Lyme disease and then spread it around. Don't just trust him because of all of his qualifications. He actually went through in this article and made like a point by point rebuttal of this conspiracy. So I guess I knew that this was a conspiracy because somebody reached out and I don't want to throw her or her publisher under the bus, but apparently there is a book right now that's like kind of popular all about Lyme disease and there's a whole section entertaining the idea in it that Lyme disease is a government conspiracy.
C:Not that it's not real, but that Lyme disease is real. It was like that aliens guy. I'm not saying there's aliens, but it was aliens. Lime disease is real. And this is not a conversation about chronic Lyme, which we've had on the show at other times, right? That's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about actual Lyme disease. What about real Lyme? Real Lyme getting bit by a deer tick that's carrying this bacterium coming down with Lyme disease. The conspiracy, apparently, that's played out in this book, but that's also got a lot of traction on the internet right now. I mean, have you guys heard this conspiracy? Like, what do you have you heard anything about it? I have heard that before, but it also in the context of a lot of other things as well. But yes, gotcha. Yeah, that HIV is another one. Yeah, that it was created by the CIA or whatever. Well, so I think apparently the reason that this is like a big deal right now is because there are a bunch of headlines, a lot of people are talking about it, and the House has actually ordered the Pentagon to come clean as to whether or not it weaponized ticks and released them to infect people with Lyme disease as a biological weapon.
J:So even our Congress is kind of caught up in this.
C:Let's talk about why this isn't true, and actually maybe we'll talk about the main kind of argument behind this conspiracy, and that is that the military's Plum Island research lab, which is on Long Island Sound, It's actually next to the place where American lime was identified. And so a lot of people think that because it was right next to a military laboratory on Long Island, because we often associate American lime disease with Long Island, there was a government conspiracy to weaponize these ticks and they were released and then people started to get sick and then the government said, oh, we can't let people know this, let's cover it up. Now, this researcher points out a lot of inconsistencies with this conspiracy, namely the timeline. I mean, I think that's probably the strongest argument that he makes. So Lyme was actually discovered by a researcher named Willy Bergdorfer. That's why the bacterium that is transmitted is called Borrelia burgdorferi or burgdorferi, probably burgdorferi. It's transmitted, of course, through deer ticks. This researcher in the 40s recognized something that he was calling tick-borne relapsing fever, couldn't figure out what it was, eventually was a big researcher in the world of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which is also a tick-borne disease. When they finally started to look for the bacteria that caused Rocky Mountain spotted fever within the blood of the ticks, they realized that that bacterium wasn't there, but there were spirochetes within those ticks. And ultimately, they were able to identify those spirochetes as a bacterium that was ultimately named for him. And that was the cause of Lyme disease. So that paper came out in 1982, but the research leading up to that started in the 40s. The first identification of Lyme disease in Old Lyme, Connecticut was in the 70s. So that doesn't really add up. But also weirdly, actually before that, there was a case of Lyme disease that was identified in Spooner, Wisconsin. So even though it has its name for old Lyme, Connecticut, Spooner, Wisconsin a year before in 1969, Lyme disease was identified. And within that same decade, there was Lyme disease identified in Northern California. And it doesn't fit the timeline. We also, apparently the researcher who wrote this article, his lab has actually identified old ticks that were in storage. He was able to look through these old ticks to figure out whether or not they were infected because we didn't know what Lyme was back then. And they found ticks from 1945 on the South Fork of Long Island that were infected. And ticks from Cape Cod, actually sorry, mice from Cape Cod from 1896 that were infected. Okay, so we know Lyme is old. We know that Lyme occurs naturally. We know that even though Plum Island was right next to the place where Lyme disease was often identified in Long Island, we know that the timeline doesn't add up. We also know that Lyme has independently evolved in multiple parts of the country, Connecticut, New Jersey, California. These types of Lyme are not genetically related to one another. Also, another thing for the timeline, apparently Plum Island was switched over in 1954 from being a government research facility where they did do tick research. into an exotic animal disease facility where they did not do that kind of research anymore. Also, President Nixon outlawed biowarfare research in 1969, but I don't think that that argument is going to calm any conspiracy thinkers down because they might just say that was a public banning. I think the reason that the government conspiracy tends to persist, A, because hello conspiracy theories, But B, because it is probably likely that Bergdorfer did get government grants to study tick-borne illness. But that's because tick-borne illness makes a lot of people sick, and it's not uncommon to get government funding for public health research. So I think that there's a lot of crossover there as well, and probably a lot of people are kind of afraid of that. Now, he does comment in his article that Bergdorfer alluded to bio warfare or biodefense programs in interviews towards the end of his life. He didn't say anything about top secret work. He apparently was a really sarcastic guy. And also, he was pretty elderly when he made that kind of commentary or that innuendo. And it seems to be that that also adds, fans some of the flames of conspiracy theorists. But as far as researchers who actually work on Lyme, researchers who have spoken to people who worked on Lyme back in the day, and researchers who look at ancient sources of Lyme, or at least maybe I should say older sources of Lyme, There is no good evidence and actually very good evidence to the contrary of the fact that Lyme is a government conspiracy. So I would not be worried if I were you. I would just focus on maybe good prevention, good treatment, don't think that your government is trying to make you sick, and instead just be careful when you're out in the woods. Make sure that you check for ticks. Hell yeah. All right, Jay Eads, who's that noisy time?
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:02:06)[edit]
C:All right, Jay Eads, who's that noisy time? So last week I played this noisy. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's not an animal. Okay. You know what, Steve? Of all the guesses I've ever gotten, that's probably the best guess. That is, I can guarantee you that that is not an animal. Unless it's a lyrebird. It could be a lyrebird. OK, so a listener named Ben Thompson wrote in. He said, I think this week's noisy is a calibration signal for communicating with an oldish space probe like interplanetary dial up. I love the show. Keep it up. So, Ben, that is not correct, but that is a really cool guess.
J:Yeah, a calibration signal does make sense. Absolutely. And I bet you we can find a calibration signal that sounds exactly like that.
U:Another listener named Michael Carroll wrote in and said, Hey, Skeptics, the noise from episode 733 sounds like a Simon Says game. Long time listener on the recommendation of a former client. Love the show and thank you for the discount codes. My daughter, seven years old, loves KiwiCo sets. Very cool. Cool. Nice. Simon Says, huh?
S:Simon Says, beep, beep, beep, beep. You're wrong. Sorry, Michael.
J:Although, man, that is basically the same sounds that Simon Says makes. It is.
S:I mean, I've played the game many times.
J:So it's similar, but yeah, that's exactly right.
S:So the sad news is that there was no winner.
J:No, but he stumped everyone. Yeah. Now, I think and I didn't get lots of guesses this week, I think because it really could be so many things that people were like, I'll never get it right. Could be so many different things. And it's also the summer. But. You know, it is fun when you guys send me in these guesses, even if they're wrong, because the thing that it illustrates, which is one of the reasons why I love Who's That Noisy, is just how constructed, you know, our memory is of things like, you know, you hear Simon Says, somebody else hears something else. You know, you can have like so many different things can actually sound like a sound that you hear and your brain needs something to relate it to. So anyway, I just find like, you know, like I've said this before about bacon frying is sounds exactly like the rain if you think it's the rain. Yeah. There's so much of that going on in this segment. So keep sending me even your bad guesses because you know what? You might get it right. So a listener named Ben Nolting originally sent that in, and Ben wrote, Mitchell Feignbaum, F-E-I-G-E-N B-A-U-M, right? Is that how you guys would pronounce that name? Feignbaum? Feigenbaum? A pioneer in chaos theory passed away on June 30th. He was responsible for discovering some deep and remarkable patterns in how period doubling bifurcations converge to chaos. He made these discoveries by studying bifurcations of the logistic map. Wow. And nobody got that? Yes. So he sent a file that is a sonification of these bifurcations a while ago, and he thought that he'd send it again. And I did think it was a very interesting sound. And this was a hard one. And that's probably the main reason why I didn't get that many guesses.
US#11:But I really enjoyed the sound.
J:So Ben, thank you and thank you all to those who guessed. We have a new Noisy this week. Ian Winski sent in the following Noisy. I love this noisy. This noisy is not only fun when you find out what it is, but the fact that it sounds like somebody is screaming in there is so, it's really provocative. There's something cool about it. If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or by gum, if you've heard a cool noisy, did I just use the phrase by gum? By gum. Ah, you did, yeah. That was from all your darn tootin'. Ah, Steve, Steve! You pulled that out of my lips a picosecond before I said it, goddammit. Dagnabbit. Gotta be fast, Bob, gotta be fast. I pulled that quote from Blazing Saddles, though, so it wasn't... No, but it's funny that we both thought of it the same damn thing.
U:So anyway, if you've heard a good noisy, you've got to send it to me, because look it, I play one a week. You have to. You have to, guys. No choice. No choice. And before I end this segment, which means before I hand the microphone back to Steve, we have a few quick announcements. So one, go to
J:sgudragoncon2019.eventbrite.com if you would like to come to our private show at Dragon Con and that show is happening in a month. Yeah, they're always a blast and they always sell out by the way. You know, it's Saturday night at Dragon Con at 8 p.m. It's in Hotel of the Americas, which is the same hotel we did it last year, except we have the bigger room. We're in the Mercury Room. Mercury? Mercury. Mercury, right? Is that how you say it? Nuclear.
B:Nuclear. Yeah, Mercury. You're in the Mercury Room. It's going to be really cool.
J:There's going to be water. It's going to be great.
B:So you got to come to that.
J:Better be water. Another very important announcement, so the New Zealand Skeptics Conference 2019. The conference is going to be in Christchurch on the 29th of November to the 1st of December, so that's Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We will be having an SGU private show on that Friday, which I will be creating an Eventbrite for pretty soon. Hopefully within a week or so, I'll be putting that up and we'll let you know on the show. And we will be there, the entire SGU crew will be there. Susan Gerbic will be there, and lots and lots of other speakers, local and not local. The South Island, we went to the North Island before, this is our first time on the South Island. We're going to be there the week before the conference, just trying to get our sea legs being a 16 hour time difference, oh my God! My wife and I went to Greece for our honeymoon, and when we got there, we slept for a day and a half. God damn! That was the worst jet lag I've ever had. Well, go to conference.skeptics.nz, and that's Skeptics with a C. It is not too late if you've never been to the South Island and you just want to go to an awesome conference, or two, because of course there's also one in Melbourne the next weekend. Melbourne. Melbourne. Melbourne. It was good. I liked it. I'm working it, man. You could fly out to that part of the world and go to two amazing conferences within the same week, because they're weekend to weekend. And we will be all over this. So please come and join us. It's going to be an amazing time. That is conference.skeptics.nz. I will be back here probably next week or the week after that with more updates on speakers and fun details. And if anybody has any great suggestions on what we should do when we're in the South Island, let us know.
S:We're also going to be, of course, you know, hanging out with some of the conference organizers and friends and all that stuff there too, so give us your suggestions now just to help us figure out what to do.
J:I understand that Lord of the Rings is basically all over the South Island. Thanks for watching! But also, guys, the South Island is amazing for other reasons. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Well, there's other stuff, too. Yeah, but look at the Lord of the Rings stuff. But it's literally one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Guys, we have an interesting name, not logical fallacy, this week.
Name That Logical Fallacy (1:10:28)[edit]
Topic: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/coincidence-and-the-law-of-large-numbers/
J:Guys, we have an interesting name, not logical fallacy, this week. I actually wrote a whole blog post about this because there was an editorial published in the journal Psychology Today that says that the skeptics are wrong. So it always gets my Yep, pricks my ears up. So a couple of people sent this to me. So this article says that skeptics are wrong when we talk about the law of truly large numbers, right? That this has to do with coincidences.
E:When things seem to be an amazing coincidence, like somebody winning the lottery twice, or you think of a friend you haven't seen in 20 years and they call you, or you pick up the phone because you're about to call somebody, they're on the other line because they were calling you at the exact same moment, even though the phone didn't ring. That's happened to me.
C:Oh, the chances are one in 12 trillion that that would ever happen.
S:But it happens. Or you play any game of chance in a very unusual sequence of dice rolls or cards or whatever happens. We would say that, well, it may seem like an amazing coincidence that defies the odds, but if you actually calculated the odds, things like that should happen all the time. And what you're underestimating is the number of potential opportunities for something that's individually unlikely to happen. And also the definition of what constitutes a coincidence is open-ended. And so that open-endedness plus the fact that you're comparing, like if you define a coincidence as the alignment of two events, well, it's every event with every other event. The probabilities magnify exponentially. And if you think about all the opportunities for any pattern, noticeable pattern of chance alignment of things happening in your life,
E:It should happen on a regular basis.
S:But what Sharon Hewitt Rowlett wrote in Psychology Today is that that conclusion by skeptics is not correct because we don't know that the apparent coincidences aren't happening more frequently than chance. That basically was her whole point. Are you arguing that they're not really coincidences? No, she's saying that there's a metaphysical, supernatural explanation for these things. Psychology Today? No. Psychology Today. I mean, it's a periodical, right? It's a pop magazine. It's not a journal. Right, you're right. It's not a peer reviewed journal. It depends on the coincidence. Sure, you don't know how often specific types of coincidences happen, but there's plenty of times where we would know. For example, the classic example of the law of large numbers is somebody winning like a lotto type thing twice. I mean, sure, winning it once is insane odds against you, but people have won it twice. And like you said, Steve, it all depends how you look at it, because the chance of John Smith winning twice are many billions or trillions to one. But the chances of somebody winning it twice are actually quite good.
C:And so we would be seeing things like these extraordinary coincidences happening more and more, like somebody winning twice over and over, like lots of people winning twice, things that we would know and that are not hidden because they're just a public thing that people would find out about. So why don't we see these coincidences happening that are just way out of what you would expect?
B:And if that did happen, that would support her contention. But she's saying that we haven't proven that they're not happening. Oh, proving a negative? I'm done. I'm walking away. Mic drop. Yeah, so she's essentially making an argument from ignorance. We don't know how often these coincidences are occurring, so we can't invoke the law of truly large numbers. We're saying that, well, first of all, that's a shifting the burden of proof, right? It's like you're the one who's saying these are magical, so you have to prove that they're happening greater than chance. And Bob is correct. When we can calculate it because it's something finite like double lottery winners or sporting events, like how many perfect games have there been, When statisticians do have the data and they could do the calculation, it turns out that the observed unlikely events occur exactly as often as you would expect them to occur by chance alone. And so there doesn't seem to be any excess alignment or coincidences. But you can't do these calculations when you're just talking about any coincidence happening to anybody of any kind, of any probability. It's too open-ended.
S:You don't have any parameters to do calculations. All you could say is that our perception of what is a coincidence is based upon our in numeracy, the fact that we are unfamiliar with truly large numbers, and we underestimate the opportunities for these things to happen, and we underestimate the impact of open-ended criteria have to exponentially increase these probabilities. And so that's what the skeptics are saying. So she kind of creates a straw man, she makes an argument from ignorance, and she's all doing this to nurse her belief because she wrote a book about it, you know, that coincidences are supernatural. So she's defending her true belief, you know, in coincidences. She's also a full-service, you know, woo peddler. So this is... That sucks. Is she a psychologist? Or is she... I don't know. Okay. Because she should have taken like a fair amount of statistics if she actually has a PhD in psychology. What's interesting, she does some calculations, like she relates an anecdote of somebody told her about this game of Parcheesi or whatever, I think it was on backgammon, where they rolled doubles six times in a row. And she calculates the odds of this happening, so it was one in 3.7 quadrillion. And therefore, if there's an opportunity for that to happen every two seconds, then that would happen in one in every three million lifetimes. So, her numbers are made up. But even if you say that that's correct, okay, so a 1 in 3.7 quadrillion coincidence should happen in 1 in every 3 million lifetimes. That means there's 100 people in the United States right now that that has happened to. Right? There's 300 million people in the US. And you don't think that we're going to hear about it? So here's another thing.
US#08:She does calculations about how many people this guy knows and what's the probability of me hearing about it.
S:And it's like maybe there's 50,000 people connected to them, but she's not considering second and third and fourth generation connections, right? The degrees of separation. The bottom line is these really amazing things, these stories are going to get out, and people are going to hear about them. And if you think about it, there's 7 billion people, over 7 billion people in the world, so there's got to be 7,000 million to one chances out there, right? Those stories are going to get around. And there's also another aspect to this that she's completely ignoring, and that is maybe the story isn't true as she's being told. That assumes perfect memory and no bias that this person, this story did not evolve to become more impactful, more amazing in the retelling. Which is of course what it usually Yes, often, like for example, I know a lot of people say their dream came true the next day, and I've had that experience too, but I realized that what happens is you have a vaguely remembered dream, and dreams are a mishmash anyway, they're psychedelic trips, and then something happens the next day that triggers a memory from your dream, but then you just align the details. You know, one person in your dream could become somebody else. So that enhances the perception that coincidences occur more frequently than they should. But even without that, even just the math is enough to explain it. And her moving the goalposts, well, we have to know how many times the coincidences occur. It's like, no, actually, if you're going to claim supernatural magical things, actually, you have to do that. And we've actually already done it when we can, and it shows that there is no excess of coincidences. So total fail on her part and on Psychology Today. She does have a doctorate, a PhD in philosophy. Philosophy, there you go. Philosophy. Still, she should definitely know better. All right, guys, let's move on to science or fiction. It's time for science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:19:30)[edit]
Theme: Neuroscience
Item #1: A new study finds that children born of older parents have a higher risk of aggression, anxiety, and depression.[6]
Item #2: Neuroscientists find a positive correlation between general knowledge and the efficiency of cortical networking.[7]
Item #3: Researchers find that subjects talking to themselves in virtual reality as Sigmund Freud was more effective in improving mood than speaking to a scripted Freud character.[8]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Item #1 |
| Science | Item #2 |
| Science | Item #3 |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
S:It's time for science or fiction. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There's a bit of a theme here. It's kind of a neuroscience theme. Item 1. A new study finds that children born of older parents have a higher risk of aggression, anxiety, and depression. Item 2. Scientists find a positive correlation between general knowledge and the efficiency of cortical networking. Item 3. Researchers find that subjects talking to themselves in virtual reality as Sigmund Freud
E:was more effective in improving mood than speaking to a scripted Freud character.
US#08:Let me explain that one a little bit.
S:That was right into a single sentence.
US#01:So the two groups here, the two interventions, one is so they're both using virtual reality. In one group, the subject is talking to a virtual reality Sigmund Freud, who is giving scripted responses to their sentences and their questions. Like a chatbot therapist kind of thing. Tell me how you feel, just the scripted answers. Thanks for joining us today.
S:Bob, why don't you go first? Alright, let's see, finds that children born of older parents have a higher risk of aggression, anxiety, and depression. Yeah, I guess that sounds reasonable. There's definitely a sweet spot to have kids, at least for a woman to give birth, to get pregnant. So I guess that kind of makes sense of you having a kid in your late 40s or 50s. That kind of makes sense. Let's see, neuroscientists find a positive correlation between general knowledge and the efficiency of cortical networking. General knowledge. I'm not, I mean, I don't know a tremendous amount about this, but why would that impact your general knowledge? Just because I could see how efficiency of cortical networking would impact intelligence. I think I've actually read something about that connection, but general knowledge? The auto psychoanalysis, I could see, I could actually see that I can actually see that happening for sure. That kind of makes sense to me. So I'm going to say that the cortical networking one is fiction. Okay, Jay. Okay, this new study finds that children born of older parents have a higher risk of aggression, anxiety, and depression. My gut is telling me that this I think actually this one is the fake without even really diving into the other two, just because I would think it's the exact opposite. I would think that the older parents are more mature and have there's a big difference between being raised by a 20 year old and being raised by a 40 year old.
B:You know, not to, you know, not to insult the general young adults that have children. But I just think, you know, you're more, you know, you were definitely more mature and more able to deal with things and rationalize things. I mean, it's hard having kids and there could be a, you know, possibly more financially well off in your life. The second one here is the neuroscientists find a positive correlation between general knowledge and the efficiency of cortical networking. That's really interesting. See, this is, again, when it comes to neuroscience, I don't know. The third one here, researchers find that subjects talking to themselves in virtual reality as Sigmund Freud were more effective at improving mood than speaking to a scripted Freud character. I would totally agree with that as well, because I think when you're role playing, you're going to actually say things to yourself that the scripted one wouldn't say, like you're going to actually talk about your problems to yourself. So I think the first one about the children born of older parents, I think that one is fake. OK, Evan. I think I am going to agree with Jay.
J:He made the points I was thinking about. I was also thinking in regards to this one that older parents probably have fewer children and I'm not sure. How that would necessarily impact, but I think that that would bring the number down as opposed to an increase based on the fact that it's a smaller number. So I think that has an impact as well. So I'll just stick with that one. I'll tell you, that one's the fiction. The other two? Cool. Okay, Cara. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing before Jay even said it, like, that one, I think because our brains probably, hopefully you were hoping that we were going to go to the, oh, there's more genetic risk when there's older parents. But I think, yeah, but behaviorally, and most of these things, aggression, anxiety, depression, of course have a genetic component, but they have such a strong behavioral component. That, yeah, just having older parents who are more adept, who are more stable, who have maybe worked on themselves a bit before they have the children, that they would be able to raise kids with less aggression, anxiety, and depression. I definitely think there's a positive correlation between general knowledge and efficiency of networking. I thought that was already found. I'm kind of surprised that that's a news item. And then subjects talking to the cells in virtual reality as Freud were more effective in improving mood than speaking to a fake.
E:Yeah, of course, that's like exercising an actual therapeutic exchange as opposed to just like listening to a bot. So yeah, I'm going to go with Evan and Jay. All right, cool. So you guys all agree on the third one, so we'll start there. Researchers find that subjects talking to themselves in virtual reality as Sigmund Freud were more effective in improving mood and then speaking to a scripted Freud character. You all think this one is science, and this one is science.
C:Yeah, and you guys, I think your intuitions here were all correct, and I mostly included this one because I'd like anything to do with virtual reality, but virtual reality for psychology is this great new paradigm because, as I know we've discussed on this show before, when you're wearing those virtual reality goggles and you've got the sound going and everything, your brain is fooled. What's happening in virtual reality is real to your brain. Absolutely. Real and safe. Yeah. Which is key. Like spider-aversion therapy. Yeah, exactly. You could use VR for exposure therapy and then doing virtual therapy. Absolutely. I mean, why would you physically be in a room with somebody if you didn't have to be? I mean, just, you know, obviously, my point being that it'll just be so much more efficient. You won't have to physically go to a place, you know, doing—and in fact, there's a lot of work being done just with online therapy in general, but virtual reality online therapy could just be a very cost-effective way to do it. And what's interesting—I also was interested in this one because—is anybody here watching the cartoon Final Space? No, is it good? Yeah, it's pretty good.
S:But on the most recent episode that I watched with my daughters, one of the characters was having a conversation with a hologram of his dead father. And then as the camera pulls back, you see that he's typing what his dead father's saying. So he's having a conversation with himself, but he's just making the avatar of his father say what he's typing. And it was actually believable that that would be therapeutic the way it was presented in the cartoon. And now here we go. A week later, here's a study showing that, yes, in fact, having a conversation with yourself, but having the other half of the conversation being spoken by an avatar of either a father figure or a professional figure, whatever, actually can be effective.
B:It's very interesting. Yeah, it's interesting.
S:All right, let's go back to number one. A new study finds that children born of older parents have a higher risk of aggression, anxiety, and depression. Bob, you think this one is science. Jay, Evan, and Cara, you think this one is the fiction. What's interesting about this one is that there are so many variables here, and you can make sense of it either way. And you guys brought up a lot of them. You guys did very well, actually. So, for example, you could say, well, older parents Thank you for joining us today. On the flip side, you could see that older parents are more mature, as Jay said. Jay, you also hit upon the fact that they may have more financial resources. So, where does all that shake out? This one is the fiction. So you guys are correct. Yay! There was one factor, the study said, there was one factor that pretty much explains, so yeah, so aggression was lower, anxiety and depression were no different. So there was an inverse relationship with aggression, and then no statistically significant relationship with anxiety or depression. But the benefit of decreased aggression was pretty much explained by what one factor, would you guys guess? That they had worked on themselves more. Now they had more money. That is it. Money. Money penny. Interesting. Yeah, they weren't. They weren't struggling financially. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. You know that the money is the most common, right? Isn't that the most common source of fights among spouses? Probably. Yeah. So yeah, all those things boil down to you have more money. That creates a more stable environment. All of this means that scientists find a positive correlation between general knowledge and the efficiency of cortical networking is science. This also is a very interesting study. They looked at a fairly large sample, 324 healthy individuals. They used a standardized test of general knowledge. And they used MRI scanning, a particular type of MRI scanning that could estimate the networking. And they used a complicated mathematical algorithm to try to figure out what the efficiency of the networking was. And they found a pretty good correlation. So Bob, you said intelligence, yes, general knowledge, you're not sure how that would work. This is how they explain that. They actually do address that very question. And the neuroscientists speculate that efficiency of networking is actually necessary for general knowledge because general knowledge involves a lot of different pieces of information that you have to pull together. And so they gave an example of like knowing what the letters stand for in E equals MC squared requires a lot of individual pieces of information that you have to pull together from different parts of your brain. To come up with the end result of, like, you know, E is energy, right? So that's how I said, because pieces of information are going to be stored throughout the brain, but you may have to pull from many different pieces of information in order to have general knowledge about something, that networking efficiency would be a huge advantage to that process. That make sense? Yeah, but I don't care anymore. Yeah. So you were thinking along interesting lines, but that's why we do the test, right? Yeah, and I know what E equals MC squared stands for, so that's cool. Good for you. Yeah, but you just found out. Hello. Very funny, Jay. All right, Evan, give us a quote.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:32:13)[edit]
"I want people to walk away with an understanding of how remarkably superlative the oceans really are. Not just in terms of sheer size and beauty, but also in their ecological complexity and the tremendous biological wealth they contain. Perhaps above all, I want them to understand how absolutely critical ocean health is to the health of all life on Earth."
– Melanie Stiassny, the Axelrod Research Curator of Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History., (description of author)
S:All right, Evan, give us a quote. I want people to walk away with an understanding of how remarkably superlative the oceans really are, not just in terms of sheer size and beauty, but also in their ecological complexity and the tremendous biological wealth they contain. Perhaps above all, I want them to understand how absolutely critical ocean health is to the health of all life on Earth. That was said by Aquaman, right? It could have been. But in this particular case, it was from an interview with Melanie Stiasni, the Axelrod Research Curator of Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History. She's a fish doctor. Doctor of fish. Ick theology. I love that. And she's very cool. Lots of videos with her online, interviews, American Museum of Natural History. Look her up. She's very cool. Good science communicator. Definitely. Cool. All right, guys. Thank you all for joining me this week. You're the best, Steve. Sure, man. Thank you, Dr. Steve. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.
B:Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org.
E:Send your questions to info at theskepticsguide.org. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com slash 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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- ↑ phys.org: Could light and noise from Earth attract attention from outer space?
- ↑ sciencebasedmedicine.org: Study on Acupuncture for Angina
- ↑ www.technologyreview.com: A huge asteroid flew very close to Earth last week. How did we miss it?
- ↑ www.northerndailyleader.com.au: Peter Stevens' claims his Atmospheric Ionisation Research Machine can cause rain in NSW
- ↑ theconversation.com: No, Lyme disease is not an escaped military bioweapon, despite what conspiracy theorists say
- ↑ onlinelibrary.wiley.com: None
- ↑ onlinelibrary.wiley.com: None
- ↑ www.nature.com: An experimental study of a virtual reality counselling paradigm using embodied self-dialogue