SGU Episode 688
|
This episode needs: proofreading, time stamps, formatting, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing! |
How to Contribute |
| SGU Episode 688 |
|---|
| M Dth YYYY |
 |
Click for the gallery of uploaded files |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella
|
| Quote of the Week |
QUOTE |
AUTHOR, _short_description_ |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Introduction[edit]
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, September 11th, 2018, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...
B: Hey, everybody!
S: Cara Santa Maria...
C: Howdy.
S: Jay Novella...
J: Hey guys.
S: ...and Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening, friends.
S: 17th anniversary of 9-11, we're recording the show.
C: Yep.
S: It seems like 17 years though, I have to say that. About feels about right.
C: It doesn't to me, I don't know. Maybe it's because I was in college then, and I don't want to think that I'm 17 years past college.
S: Well, so much has happened since then.
E: Oh my gosh.
J: Yeah.
S: Like the entire podcast, yeah. There was no podcasting in 2000.
C: Oh, wow.
E: No iPhones.
S: There was, what else was there? No iPhones, yeah. No any of the things that control our life.
J: Right, think about how much more footage there would have been if there were iPhones back then.
S: Yeah, that's true.
C: Oh gosh.
B: Wow.
E: Gosh, in 2000, I mean in 2001, I was five years into like my first serious computer. Four or five years. Really, the first real computer that I owned. Something I seriously used as an everyday tool.
S: I was already on my third computer by then.
E: Right, and I was jealous.
S: So Cara has a story, a little bit of an update on 9-11 coming up at the end of the news items. But I actually have an interesting story I wanted to tell you guys from my life this last week. This is, it's kind of a funny story, but I'm gonna tell you up front, it has a happy ending.
J: Okay.
E: Okay.
S: So nobody has to worry.
C: Thanks goodness.
S: Yeah, just so there's no worrying about my health.
B: Spoiler alert, hello.
S: Yeah, I just, I don't want people to worry, so I'm telling you up front.
B: Gotcha.
S: All right, so anyway, last Friday, so last week, as I do, I pee right before I go to bed. I'm sure you guys all do the same thing.
B: Oh my God, is everybody okay?
S: I'm not gonna say that I monitor the color of my pee, but I'd certainly notice the color of my pee every time.
C: Do you have rhabdo?
S: No, I do not have rhabdo.
C: Okay, good.
S: Good guess though. But because it's a good measure of hydration status, you know? I know your pee gets darker when you get dehydrated. I like to keep my pee a nice pale yellow. And so I noticed that my pee was a little dark before I went to bed.
J: Like a dark yellow, like a normal yellow, or an abnormal color?
S: It was an abnormal color. It was a little dark, but I was like, ah, there's a little hue to that that I'm not used to. It looked almost a little mauve.
E: Mauve, ooh.
S: Yeah, I didn't think about it as much as I should have, and I just was so tired, I just went to bed. But then when, of course, I get up the next morning, and I pee, the first thing I do when I get up is I pee as well. And this time, my pee was pink, like-
C: So there was blood in it.
S: Like it was dark, yeah. So it looks all like, oh, F, I have hematuria, right? I have blood in my urine.
C: That's the first thing he thought, I have hematuria.
S: Yeah.
C: That's such a doctor thought.
S: Oh, it's worse than that.
C: Anybody else would be like, ah, am I dying?
E: I drank pink lemonade, what?
S: No, it's worse than that because as a doctor, I instantly know the differential diagnosis of gross hematuria, blood in your urine that you can see. I still wanted to check myself, so I called my wife over to say, is that red or am I going crazy? And she said, yeah, yeah, that's red.
E: Oh, that's right, because you have a little bit of colorblindness, Steve.
B: And you're crazy.
S: You're right, because I'm a little colorblind, it's true.
J: Steve, what did you think, what was the worst case thing it could have been right then?
S: Well, all right, so-
C: Kidneys.
S: -the most benign thing is like a urinary tract infection, but guys don't generally get urinary tract infections, and I had no symptoms of a urinary tract infection.
C: And you hadn't just been boxed. You hadn't been boxing the day before and got punched in the kidney.
S: No, no, there was no trauma, no significant exercise or anything like that. So I'm thinking, okay, it's either kidney cancer, bladder cancer, or prostate cancer, so-
E: Oh my gosh, you go right to the big C.
S: Well, that's it. What else? That's for a guy my age, you have blood in your urine. I'm thinking it's gotta be one of those three, unless outside chance I have an asymptomatic, unusual case of urinary tract infection, but I know that that's not likely, right?
B: But I would think diet. Like, did I eat anything weird?
E: Right.
C: Oh, really? I would only think that in my poo.
J: Yeah, I mean, not much changes the color of your urine. That's for damn sure.
C: I might think that I had like a little cut or something in my urethra.
S: Well, yeah, then we're thinking, all right, do I have hemorrhoids? You know, is there anything else going on here? So this was Saturday morning, right? So I had to do the show. So I did the show, basically planning on going to the hospital clinic, the walk-in clinic, after I'm done. So I do the show, I'm in the shower.
E: Dedication.
S: Yeah, well, whatever. I got to not like a few hours is gonna matter, but I just wanted to get it done, and then I'd have the rest of, I'm basically planning on spending my day in the clinic, getting blood work and a urinalysis and whatever follow up from that, scanning, whatever. Like, that's gonna be my day, right? I'm just preparing myself for this.
C: Yeah, does that sound like fun?
S: So I'm in the shower and I'm I'm going over my own history in my head, right? Because I'm trying to like get outside of myself and say like, if I were taking my history, what would it be? Bob, you actually hit upon it. Because I'm thinking, all right, what's my medical problems? What are my symptoms? What's my recent history? Have I eaten anything unusual?
E: Drugs you're taking.
S: Then, yeah, what drugs are you taking? Is there anything that could possibly account for this? And then it hits me and I instantly knew the answer to why I had pink or mauve urine.
J: Food coloring and the cookies at Olivia's party.
S: No, this was Saturday morning and your party was on Sunday, so no.
C: Time travel food coloring.
S: It was something, it was not food coloring. It was something I ate for lunch on Friday.
C: Beets.
S: Yes, beets.
C: Yes.
B: Yes.
S: I had a huge, I had a huge helping of glazed beets for lunch on Friday.
B: See, that's your first problem. Why would you ever do that?
J: Beets are great, Bob.
S: They were awesome.
E: They're sweet. They're very sweet.
B: I can't help but remember the stupid beets they put on the hamburgers for some reason in Australia.
E: Oh, I know. Yes.
B: Totally turned me off. It was bizarre.
C: I hate beets, I'm with you, Bob. They taste like dirt to me.
S: It depends. These were glazed beets. I had them with rice pilaf. It was very, very good. But, so I looked it up. I was instantly like 99% sure that's what it was. The timing was perfect. It was basically clearing overnight. And then I peed again and it was now just really, really pale. So clearly whatever was happening was being cleared. And it was also, I've seen hematuria before, obviously. I've seen it many, many times. And while it's pink and pink is pink, this was just a little off. It wasn't quite the color you see with blood in the urine. It was a little mauvey. There was almost a little purpley tinge to it. So it made perfect sense. So everything clicked into place. But I looked it up anyway. Then I ended up going down this rabbit hole of beeturia, which is what you call it. It's called beeturia. There's actually precious little that's been published about it. If you go to the actual literature, there was one study in 1969 that, and there's no abstract or anything available because it was all pre-electronic, that said that beeturia could be a sign of iron deficiency, anemia, or just iron deficiency. But that's it. That is it. But every single general reference, like if you just look up the Mayo Clinic beeturia, they all say it could be a sign of iron deficiency. But the evidence is precious little and really doesn't stand up to later studies, even though there's really only a few other studies. There's also a question of, are there genetically people who have beeturia and people who don't? And there was a study which suggested that as well, but that has not held up to later replication. And essentially what they found is that it's clearly not a single gene thing, right? There's no inheritance pattern. You also cannot divide people into two groups, people who have beeturia and people who don't. Older references said, oh, we found that 14% of people excreted the red color in their urine, but later studies that are more thorough found just a bell curve. Just people are all over the place. It's not bimodal, like there aren't two groups of people. The bottom line, the multiple studies, again, there's only a few total, but a few studies show that it probably mainly has to do with the pH of your stomach and what else you have eaten with the beets. So the higher the pH, the more likely the chemical that causes the coloration is to survive the stomach and get absorbed in the colon, right? So it doesn't get absorbed in the stomach, it gets absorbed in the colon, but it gets broken down in the stomach to a non-colored chemical, betanin. So there's-
C: Beetanin. I love it. Beetanin.
S: So yeah, there's a chemical called betanin, which is that red color. So the 1971 follow-up to the 1969 study did not find a relationship between betanin and iron levels. So it didn't really replicate. Still gets reported by everyone, by the way. But if you also consumed oxalic acid with the betanin, then the oxalic acid interfered with the metabolism of the betanin and then it survives to the colon and it gets absorbed and then you excrete it in your urine.
E: Neat.
S: Yeah, so-
C: That's oxalic acid?
S: It's just a type of acid that you might get in food.
C: Like what food is it in?
S: It's pickled, so pickled beets might have more oxalic acid, so vinegar, things like that.
C: Interesting.
S: Yeah, so it's, because I've had beets before, although this was a big helping. This is a bigger helping of beets than I'm used to eating, I'll admit that. I probably just overwhelmed my body's ability to metabolize the betanin. And it took about three peas total to clear.
C: When I was little, I used to eat, do you guys remember that ice cream place, TCBY?
E: Yes.
C: Does that still exist?
E: Nah.
S: I don't know.
J: I haven't seen it.
E: It was like the first big yogurt chain.
C: Yeah, and there's one near my house. And when we were little, that was like our ice cream place that we would go to. And it had this crazy flavor that looked, I mean, it was so bright. It looked like a bunch of Play-Doh sort of mashed together. It was like this crazy galaxy swirl, rainbowy flavor. And when you would eat that ice cream, your poo looked crazy for days. Yeah, it was like bright blue or bright green. And I remember the first time that happened, I was really scared. And then after it, I was like fascinated.
S: So next time they serve beets at my cafeteria, I'm gonna have another big helping and see if I could replicate the effect.
E: Well, yeah, that's really the way to do it.
B: That's funny you say that, because my takeaway is just don't eat damn beets.
S: Well, but I mean, it was such a relief though. I gotta tell you to remember I ate beets the day before.
C: Oh gosh, I'm sure. Have you guys, do you guys ever take, oh, I guess, because guys don't get UTIs as commonly.
S: Never had a UTI. Never.
C: Never had a UTI? Oh my gosh. The ASO standard is an over-the-counter anesthetic basically that you take. It's like a urinary anesthetic and it has an indicator in it that turns your pee fluorescent orange.
S: Cool.
C: It's crazy looking, but that's how you know that it's in your system. Like you know that you've taken it and it's working because when you pee, your pee is fluorescent orange.
E: So it's by design?
C: It's by design, yeah, it's intentional. But I have definitely had UTIs before where I was in so much pain, I'm like taking a bath to try and like just calm the nerves and relax a little bit. And you squeeze out a drop of pee in the bathtub and the entire bathtub turns fluorescent yellow. And it's like so embarrassing.
E: Only if someone's in there with you.
C: Exactly, only if your boyfriend who is trying to take care of you tries to open the door and you're like, get out of here.
E: I'm fine.
C: I know that there are girls listening who have had that experience before. Ugh, it's rough. It's rough times.
E: That's why they make locks on doors.
C: Exactly.
S: So the lesson of the story is always look at your pee.
E: Bob, what's the lesson of your story here?
B: Don't eat beets. Thank you.
E: Many lessons to be learned.
C: I'm with you, Bob.
S: Oh, if they're preparing me, I'd brought beets-
B: Especially on hamburgers.
S: -they're a little earthy, but there's plenty of ways to prepare beets that are awesome. You guys are crazy.
E: Yeah. We're the crazy ones.
C: My pee is bright yellow, so-
What's the Word? (m:ss)[edit]
- Word_Topic_Concept
S: Cara, I have a question for you.
C: Yes.
S: What's the word?
C: Yay. So the word this week was recommended by Mark Chandler. I came across the word trophic in this article and I had to look it up. It's an article about wasps, mummy wasps. And so where it said the word trophic, right here, in ecological parlance, we find this was a new trophic interaction between two species, meaning that one was feeding off of the other. Okay. That's kind of clear, but not completely clear. You guys have come across the word trophic when you've been reading science articles, right?
E: Yes.
B: Sure.
C: You've probably also come across the word tropic, although it looks like tropic, which can be very confusing. And I think a lot of people might mix these terms up and also publications mix these terms up an awful lot. I actually found a letter to the editor that was written to JAMA Network that basically is talking about like, you guys don't do it much, but we've gotta be really careful when we talk about trophic and tropic, because they mean two very different things. So let's do a little bit of a dive. When you look at basic dictionary definitions, trophic, over and over, you're gonna see definitions that say that it is of or relating to nutrition or nutritional, like a trophic disorder might be a disorder of nutrition. But oftentimes you'll see a second or third definition that actually says the word tropic. So that's probably where some of the confusion comes in. A lot of times people use these words synonymously, although I don't think it's recommended, at least not for specificity in science writing. You will also sometimes see a definition, especially in more specialized dictionaries that says promoting cellular growth, differentiation and survival, which of course is related to nutrition. So you may hear trophic as an adjective relating to a lot of things, trophic cascades, trophic eggs, trophic factors, trophic levels, trophic mutualism, trophic webs, trophic species, trophic ulcers. What's a trophic ulcer?
B: It's eating away at your stomach, isn't it?
C: No, it's penetrating into your skin, usually on the sole of your foot. But yeah, that's probably where the, it's like in diabetes. That's probably where they're saying trophic as in it's like eating through the layers of the skin, but it's not technically eating. So yeah, trophic does though refer to this idea of eating. Yeah, so that is actually I think a good guess, Bob. Eating or nutritive. So I think one of the common ways that we've all heard it is maybe you've heard of trophic levels. Like when we talk about food webs, part of food webs, food chains, different trophic levels, right? There's like the first level where organisms make their own food through photosynthesis and then things eat those things and then things eat the things that eat the things and eventually we build up those levels. They're never that clean cut, but it is an interesting way to see how certain chemicals make their way through the food system. I first came across the word trophic when I was studying neuroscience and psychology because we talk a lot about trophic factors, which are different chemicals, sometimes trophic hormones, different chemicals that quote unquote feed the cells, that nourish the cells as they're either growing or as they're moving. And that's where I think things start to get confusing because the word tropic, not tropic, although it does seem that they're derived from the same place, tropic with just a P not a PH has to do with turning, changing, or also the solstice. So that of course makes sense when it's the root of things like the tropics or the tropic of Capricorn, for example, but when we talk about it in neurobiology, we often talk about tropic factors as being factors that tell the cells where to go and trophic factors as being factors that feed the cells. So those are two really different uses, but a lot of times you will actually see a neurotropin or a neurotrophin kind of mixed up. And a lot of times tropic and trophic factors are present for the neurite, for the growing nerve cell during development. They're two very common experiences during development. So it's complicated. Today we're focusing on trophic, T-R-O-P-H-I-C. And if we were to look at the etymology of the word trophic, it comes from the Greek trophikos, which of course translates to nourishment or food. And so you'll often see the suffix on words like atrophy. So that is something that is wasting away.
B: Hypertrophy?
C: Hypertrophy, exactly. It's the opposite. Which would be the opposite of atrophy, exactly.
S: But see, in a lot of those contexts, Cara, trophy means more, refers more to growth than nourishment.
C: Than the actual nutrition.
S: Neurotrophic factors aren't literally feeding the neurons. They're just stimulating them to grow. They're promoting neuron growth. And tropic, like a neurotropic virus, is one that has a predilection for the nerve cells, for neurons.
C: Yeah, it goes to those neurons. That's really where the roots come from. So it's interesting, you're right, because the roots really come down to nourishment and food, but ultimately that, in the trophic sense, sort of morphed into this idea of food makes things grow. So really, trophic factors make things grow.
S: Yeah, right, it skips over to the growth part, rather than the, like atrophy is not really about nourishing either. It's about the muscle withering.
C: Wasting, yeah, exactly. It doesn't have to, yeah, because atrophy often happens when there's no inputs, right? Like even if you're eating plenty, you have enough nutrition, you'll see muscle wasting when a muscle's not used, for example.
S: Whether it's, either it's not used or it's not getting nerve supply, because the nerves provide the myotrophic factors to keep the muscle healthy and going. Thanks, Cara.
News Items[edit]
News_Item_1 (m:ss)[edit]
- [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] [1]
S: All right, Jay, I was taking this personality test in the Cosmopolitan magazine the other day. Is that reliable?
J: Oh, yeah, absolutely, Steve. Just go with it, man.
E: Gwyneth Paltrow says yes.
J: This is funny because I think a lot of people have actually come across these personality tests in their careers and college. I remember taking a test when I was graduating and they were telling me what careers I would be good for. I remember also being told I would be good at creating jigsaw puzzles. I mean, not jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles.
E: Ah.
J: Yes, and they felt like, just because I was an English major, they were like, yeah, you should be doing something with words. It's like, yeah, I'm gonna sit there and make crossword puzzles? Like, that's what I do? No. So have you ever heard of Myers-Briggs, guys?
C: Oh, yes.
E: Infamous.
J: Have you ever taken it?
C: Oh, yes.
J: So Myers-Briggs is a psychometric test, and what this does is this is a test that measures a person's, in essence, it's measuring their personality. If you don't know what a personality test is, essentially, it's a collection of questions that helps the people administering the test narrow down through some type of formula what kind of personality that they think you have, and their goal here is to put you into one or more buckets, and then what they do with that information is give you a write-up on lots of different things. Like, they could say, I'll give you something super basic, but if you are more of a critical thinker than you are someone who goes off just on emotion, then they could tell you things about yourself, some insights that might help you understand yourself better, and Myers-Briggs goes as far as to, again, offer you career ideas. Now, in the 20th century, this has been a huge business, and you'll see in jobs like leadership roles and management courses, they'll include Myers-Briggs along with these things. So if you go work for a big company, they'll give you a couple of weeks of management training, and part of that will be a Myers-Briggs test. It's not uncommon to get a Myers-Briggs test or some type of psychometric test when you are looking for career counseling, or if you're job interviewing, or if you're applying for a job, companies will ask you to take the Myers-Briggs test. And here's the big question. Is this scientifically valid? Is there anything here that's worthwhile? And it's a complicated answer, but in short, I would say that some people agree, some people don't agree, but there are lots of professionals out there, professional psychologists out there that have been complaining against Myers-Briggs for decades. There's over 2 million of these tests are administered every year, which that's quite a bit, quite a bit of tests that people are paying for in different companies. So here's an interesting thing. If you retake the Myers-Briggs test after only a five-week gap, so you take it and then you wait five weeks and you take it again, there's a 50% chance that you'll fall into a different personality category compared to the first time that you took the test.
E: Sounds like astrology.
B: What's the percentage chance of that happening?
J: 50%.
B: 50, damn.
C: Is it, so Myers-Briggs is the one that has the four, it's like sensing, touching, feeling, judging, right?
S: Yes, yes.
C: Okay.
J: So here it is.
C: Sorry, Jay, when you say that you have a 50% chance, when you say completely different, you mean one of those letters are different or all four letters is different?
J: Probably one of them is different.
C: Okay.
S: At least one, I think at least one is different.
C: At least one, yeah.
S: But that's terrible-
C: Still bad.
S: -reliability.
C: For sure.
S: You know, so if the test, we call that test-test reliability. Test-retest. You do the test twice, if you get a different result, that's bad.
C: That's very bad.
S: It's bad for, it means the test is not valid. It argues against the validity of the test.
J: There's four things here, like two in each category. You're either an introvert or an extrovert. You're either a sensing, which is using basic information, or you're intuition, which means you're interpreting. You're either thinking, which is logic and consistency, or feeling, which is relating to people in particular circumstances. You're judging, which is making decisions, or perceiving, which is staying open to new options.
C: Yeah, so basically only the very first one of those actually has a really strong-
E: Introverted, extroverted.
C: Validity core, yeah. And you know, Steve just did a story, Jay, do you remember a few weeks ago when he was talking about some sort of personality thing, and he was talking about using the big five measure, which has become much more common in psychology.
S: Right.
C: Yeah, OCEAN, which is openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Like, that's much more often used now in psychometric settings than Myers-Briggs. It's really been co-opted by this weird kind of management woo-woo.
S: eah, it's corporate crap.
J:' It is corporate crap.
S: But the two big problems with this, from my point of view, as Cara said, other than introvert, extrovert, the other ones don't really touch upon anything fundamental about personality. And the second thing is, these are massive false dichotomies.
C: Yep. Yeah, everybody is all of those things.
E: Thinking or feeling. What?
S: Yeah.
E: Can't have both.
S: Not only is it like reducing many possibilities to two, but it's reducing it to an either or when we are complex combinations of these and many other things.
J: Yeah, even if you take the two that are the most valid, like introvert and extrovert, depending on circumstances, you could be fully in one of those two camps.
C: Yeah, and a lot of that really is about, we've talked about this a lot. In psychology, all we can measure are constructs. We're not actually measuring something fundamental. We're measuring the behaviors and the feelings and the experiences that we think amalgamate to be that fundamental thing. So how do you define what an introvert, is it you look like an introvert, you feel like an introvert, you act like an introvert? So all those different things play into it.
S: It also neglects the playoff. So you could be extroverted, but shy. And then you act like an introvert because you have social anxiety, but you really want to be an extrovert in some ways. You know, it's very situational and it interacts with other traits.
C: And different tests are measured differently. Some of these things are self-report, like the Myers-Briggs. Actually, most personality tests are self-report. But obviously, if you were talking about a clinician watching somebody's behaviors, they might get a completely different read on a person than that person has on themselves.
S: Right, right.
J: So another point too is, if you were to take a look at the math behind the scores, now there are people who take the Myers-Briggs test and have almost identical answers, but one would be labeled an introvert and the other person would be labeled an extrovert. But if you're looking at them on the spectrum via the math, they could be one point or two points away from each other. And that's to back up what Steven Carer is saying, like it's really not efficient or it's not accurate to try to put people into these discrete camps. And you know, you gotta look at what altitude any kind of test like this is at, right? Like I would say that Myers-Briggs is at a pretty high altitude, meaning that the error bars are large.
C: Yeah.
S: Yeah, it'd be far better off to like rate people on a five-point scale or a 10-point scale or something on multiple different traits, you know? You know what I mean? Rather than saying you're either A or B, how about you're three out of five toward the extroverted end of the spectrum? You know, it's obviously a continuum.
C: Yeah, a Likert scale.
S: Yeah, like a Likert scale, yeah.
J: I recently took this at work. I going into it, I was like, yep, this is all BS, I'm listening to the spiel and everything. But one cool thing I walked away from, I saw people, after they were given their, you know, this is what you are, your four-letter definition of what you are, which explains to you, there's a whole packet that you get. You are one of these, and you get the packet, and you open it up, and it tells you all this information about you. So first thing is it totally smacks of fortune-telling.
S: Yeah, it's like astrology at that point.
E: Astrology.
C: Yeah.
J: And then the other thing I noticed was people were reading it, and they were trying to make it fit them.
S: The four-er effect.
E: Sure.
J: Yeah, I am this way.
E: Yeah, hand your envelope, give it to the person to the left and take theirs, and you'll be just as accurate, probably.
C: And it's the same thing, yeah.
J: Yeah, then what do you do in that situation? You know, are you gonna tell your boss, like, this is ridiculous?
S: Yes, that's what you should do.
J: But you gotta be smart about it. You know, you gotta be careful about what, the way you handle those situations. You know, I think, and I've taken several of these, and I think for the most part, there's not much you're gonna do. You're not gonna change the tide. You know, you're not gonna change what the HR director wants or what your boss wants. I think it's more about, first off, don't fall into it, and don't start treating people differently because so-and-so says that this person's an extrovert or they're amicable or whatever. It's BS. You gotta be careful about that, because it's a way to put people into buckets that they probably don't really belong in.
C: Yeah, and you know what, I think the real bummer of it is that there is a profession, it's called industrial organizational psychology, where people work really hard and have advanced degrees and do a lot of psychometrics and do a lot of training to try to help corporations function in a way that is, I don't know, respectful and responsible to both the management and the workers. And the idea here is if there are people who should be in management positions because they are command respect more or because they understand what the needs of their employees are, are there certain people who are terrible managers because they are narcissistic or because they have a hard time relating to their employees. And so it's unfortunate that it's become this thing that's been relegated to basically astrology, because there is, that's the thing about pseudoscience, right, there's a kernel of good science behind this stuff, and it's just been bastardized over so long.
B: Those bastards.
S: Yeah.
E: Yeah, and it's soaked into the culture now.
C: Like you can't take a Cosmo, it's basically what you said at the beginning, Steve, you can't take a Cosmo quiz and then be like, oh, my entire corporation is gonna run better now. So when you say, what should you do about it? I say, go to your HR department or go to your boss and say there's a lot of evidence and here's some, let me show you. They say that the Myers-Briggs isn't really valid, but there are these other things that we could do that might be more helpful. Who knows if they'll listen to you, because the problem with shitting on something with no alternative is that their hands are tied. They're like, well, we have money that we have to put into organizational structure.
S: All right, thanks, Jay.
News_Item_2 ()[edit]
- [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] [2]
S: So guys, the Pluto debate rages on.
J: Yes.
E: Still.
S: It's another round.
J: It's raging. It's raging.
B: Let's get over it.
C: Oh, God.
J: Hey, come on, this is science. Sometimes it comes back around and people like us are like, whatever, but the scientists are, this is what sharpens the freaking instruments, guys.
C: This is nomenclature. This is taxonomy. Yeah, it's not that science.
B: It's completely subjective.
J: How dare you, Bob?
S: You're all wrong.
E: Steve's such an introvert.
S: It is important. I think it's important how we classify things and just how we approach classification, because it should reflect some underlying knowledge about the slice of nature we're trying to categorize. In this case, we're having difficulty because there aren't discrete categories that we're trying to create them. There's basically a chaos of various types of things orbiting the sun, and it's hard to divide them into discrete categories. But here's the latest salvo. A astronomer wrote a paper, UCF planetary scientist Philip Metzger et al from the University of Florida Space Institute. He said that the specific criterion that a planet must clear its orbit is both arbitrary and not scientifically useful. So for quick background, Pluto was discovered in 1930. You guys remember by who? Yes, Clyde Tombaugh.
E: Clyde, yes.
S: Clyde Tombaugh. And it became the ninth planet at that point. And then in 2005, Eris was discovered. Do you guys remember Eris?
B: Yeah.
E: Dwarf planet.
S: Eris is now considered a dwarf planet. It was the second Kuiper Belt object discovered after Pluto, or large object. It's actually slightly smaller than Pluto, but it has 27% more mass than Pluto. And Eris has a moon, Dysnomia.
E: Oh, I like that name.
S: Right, and we've since discovered two other Kuiper Belt, large Kuiper Belt objects, there's obviously lots of small ones, Makemake and Haumea. So at that point, astronomers were a little concerned when they discovered Eris, because they said, huh, there could be dozens of Plutoid objects in the Kuiper Belt. How many planets are we gonna have, right? So they said, maybe we need to nail down this whole planet definition so we don't suddenly have dozens or hundreds of planets. So that's when in 2006, they came up with the formal definition of planet, which has three criteria. A, it has to be in orbit around the sun. B, have sufficient mass for its gravity to basically pull itself into a sphere to overcome what they call hydrostatic equilibrium. And C, has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.
E: Okay.
C: Okay.
S: Now that was always the controversial one, because what is it, and that's the one that demoted Pluto, because Pluto meets A and B. It's a sphere and it orbits around the sun, but it hasn't quote unquote cleared its orbit.
C: What does that mean?
S: Well, that's a good question. What's the operational definition of clearing your neighborhood around your orbit? Because it's in the Kuiper Belt and there's a lot of stuff in the Kuiper Belt that's saying it hasn't really cleared its orbit. Having a moon is not enough. Obviously, a lot of planets would be demoted if having a moon means you haven't cleared your orbit.
C: Does that mean you're not gonna crash into something as you go around the sun?
S: It doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna collide. It just means that there's other stuff roughly in your orbit.
B: Well, isn't it also like there's no other major gravitational source in your immediate orbit?
S: Whatever.
B: I think I read something about that as well.
S: Yeah. You mean like the moon is a gravitational source in our orbit?
B: No, like a greater gravitational source than the supposed planet.
S: Nothing's greater than Pluto, unless you count Neptune.
C: Neptune?
B: No, Neptune, Steve.
C: Don't Neptune and Pluto's orbits cross?
S: Yes.
B: That was part of the problem.
E: Well, they do, yeah.
C: So that's the problem, right?
S: Is Pluto big enough for Neptune not to have cleared its orbit?
C: Oh, interesting, yeah.
S: And what about the other Kuiper Belt objects that don't cross Neptune, but they haven't cleared out their orbit because they're surrounded by Kuiper Belt stuff? Not because of Neptune. So that's the point. There's no really consistent definition. And also, there are asteroids in every planet's orbit. I mean, it's not even just about moons, right? There are Earth-crossing asteroids. So there isn't any really rigorous operational definition of what it means to clear one's orbit. This is what Metzger and his co-authors are saying. That he's also saying, so he looked at the astronomical literature for the last couple hundred years, and he said, the last time anyone published a paper that mentioned the concept of a body in the solar system clearing its orbit was in 1802.
B: So there is precedent.
E: Well, there is, 200 years of precedent.
C: 200.
S: He's saying it's just not a useful or used astronomical concept.
B: That makes sense.
S: So why are we making it one of the linchpins of this definition?
B: So wait.
C: You almost said diagnosis, Steve.
S: I know.
B: But more than that, why the hell didn't anybody say this back then?
S: I think they did, but he did the literature review, which was the new bit, and he's basically repeating this argument, but with the backup of, hey, no one's publishing about this. Astronomers are simply not using this as a concept. So get rid of it. Now, he thinks we should keep only the criteria B.
B: Round? Spherical?
S: Anything big enough to pull itself into a sphere is a planet. He doesn't, he thinks that it should be based entirely on intrinsic characteristics, not anything to do with its relationship with other things.
B: So does that mean that Earth, the moon would be binary planetary system?
S: Well, it just means the moon would be a planet. The Galilean satellites, there would be seven of the largest moons in our solar system would be upgraded to planets by his definition. Titan, Europa, Ganymede. Yeah, that's weird, right?
E: I don't think I like that.
S: But why? Why don't you like it? It's just aesthetic, right? It just doesn't feel right.
E: That's why I don't like it.
B: That's all that matters.
S: I know, but why are you saying it matters? It matters because what we call things matters, how we classify and how we think about things. What are we gonna be teaching our kids, right? Jay, when you're teaching Dylan about, they're here are the planets. What are we gonna tell them? Are we gonna call the moon a planet? Is that gonna confuse him? Is that gonna help him understand it?
C: Yeah, I think it confuses things.
S: Yeah, is it gonna be a stepping stone to deeper knowledge or no?
C: Do you think it's a natural, I mean, that's a really complicated question, right? Like, is it because it's been ingrained in us for so long from the time we were born that there are these eight versus nine planets? Or is it because if anybody were to show you a simplified schematic of the solar system, you would naturally say, those things are like the other things?
S: Yeah, I think so.
C: Those must be planets.
S: So I have actually humbly proposed my own definition of planet. When I wrote my blog about this topic and here it is.
E: Okay.
S: So I would keep criterion B that it has to be big enough to pull itself into a sphere because that's very intuitive and it feels right. And it's a good objective, intrinsic characteristic. I think, and I also think it needs to be in orbit around the sun. And I would say, get rid of the clearing its orbit thing. I always thought that was stupid. But rather, how about this? It's just not a moon. And I would operationally define a moon as anything in orbit around another body in the solar system other than the sun where the barycenter, Bob, you know what the barycenter is, right?
B: But of course.
S: The center, the orbital center of gravity of two or more objects.
B: It has to be within one of the spheres, right?
S: Exactly.
B: If it's within it, then it's a moon.
S: Exactly. If the barycenter is beneath the surface, at or beneath the surface of the larger planetary object, then the smaller one is the moon. If it's outside of either of them, then they're both planets. It's a double planetary system.
C: Yeah, that makes sense. I like that.
S: Of course, doesn't it? It makes perfect sense. So in this system-
C: Because we have no binary planets in our solar system.
S: Yes, we do. Yes, we do.
C: We do? Which ones?
S: Pluto, Charon.
E: Yeah.
S: So in this system, the moon would be a moon, right? All of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune would be moons because they're barycenters well within the gas giant. But Pluto and Charon would be both upgraded to planets. They would become a double planetary system because their barycenter is in between the two of them. They're very close in size. And also, Eris and Maki Maki would be upgraded to planets. So we would go to 13 planets.
E: I'm good with 13.
C: Four of which are binary. I like that.
S: Two of which are binary. Now, Pluto, Charon. No, Ceres, Eris, and Maki Maki are just, they're now dwarf planets, but they would be upgraded to planets.
E: Right, so there would be no more dwarf planets in this equation.
S: Haumea would be a dwarf planet because Haumea is not a sphere.
E: Oh, you still have dwarf planets.
C: Yeah, there's still a bunch of Kuiper belt objects out there that probably would become classified as planets.
B: Two questions.
S: Maybe, yeah, probably.
B: Two questions. How spherical is spherical?
S: But you can define that mathematically, right? So that is, you can put a number on that.
B: Okay, second question.
S: Which should be basically naked eye sphere, right?
B: Yeah, that's fine, that's fine. More importantly though, does your scheme, and I like it though, I like it, but does your scheme put, does it bias, does it bias for huge disparities between the planet and the orbiting pseudo planet around it? So for example, how big would a moon of Jupiter have to be in order to be a planet? It could be bigger than any, yeah, it would be bigger than the Earth, bigger than any other planet except maybe the gas giants, and it would still not necessarily be a planet, and that's kind of distasteful. Think about it. A gargantuan Earth-like, say five, 10 times the mass of the Earth orbiting Jupiter, but no, it's a moon because it's at the very center.
E: But we don't have that.
C: But you're thinking of that from an Earth-o-pacentric standpoint because the truth of the matter is Titan is huge. Titan is, how big is Titan compared to Mercury?
B: Bigger than Mercury. I think it's bigger than Mercury.
C: Exactly, and we know it's a moon. It's not a planet.
B: I know, but at some point it gets a little silly, right? I mean, come on.
C: But right there, that is the example.
S: Bob, I don't think, it's possible that what you're describing may not even be possible. In other words, Jupiter might not be able to capture a planet that big, something as big as a Neptune-sized planet because it wouldn't be able to keep it away from the sun. I don't know. We don't have any examples of that in our solar system, but it may be because it's very unlikely, if not impossible. Mercury doesn't have a moon because it can't have a moon. It could not keep a moon away from the sun.
C: But also this taxonomy, as it were, this naming, we don't have to think of every eventuality. We just have to look at the actual data that we have within our solar system.
S: Yeah, although as exoplanetary hunting gets more and more sophisticated, we're gonna have to come up with a system that can account for any system.
C: Not really. I mean, we can figure that out then.
S: That's true.
C: As of right now, those planets just have numbers and we can only see like one of them per, like we are not anywhere close to being able to, we're still figuring out stuff that's in our system.
S: I agree, my system rules, and the International Astronomical Union should adopt the Novella system of planetary definition.
E: Here, here, I second the motion.
S: And we would have a nice, beautiful 13 planets, right?
B: Awesome number.
E: Oh my gosh.
S: Although we will discover more in the kind of-
E: That's fine.
C: Yeah.
B: But at least for a little while, we have 13 planets.
S: It does limit it to some degree because it has to be at least big enough to be a sphere and it can't be a moon of something else. Because you know, like Dysnomia would not be a planet, that would be a moon. So it doesn't go crazy the planets don't go crazy in number, but-
C: So there are no asteroids that are spherical that are in orbit?
S: Ceres is basically an asteroid that's big enough to be a sphere. And so when Ceres was first discovered, it was deemed a planet. Then it got demoted to the biggest asteroid and then it got promoted to dwarf planet and I would promote it back to planet because it's a sphere. It's a sphere.
C: Interesting.
B: All right, here's another question, Steve. What are the two smallest, how small could a binary planetary system be?
S: I think it has all to do with the barycenter. They're both planets, right? They both have to be big enough to be spheres and their center of gravity-
B: That's my question. So we might end up with the possibility of having a dual planetary, a binary planetary system that are very tiny. But because they're round and because of the barycenter is outside the surface, it's planets, they're planets, but they could be very surprisingly tiny.
C: And you think those, you're talking about probably discovering some in the Kuiper belt, right? Not within the asteroid belt.
B: Whatever, just within the realm of possibility. I'm just thinking, what's within the realm of possibility here? How small could a round planet be? That might depend, of course, on what it's made of, right? I mean, sure, it would depend on the density of the material, which would help or hinder the sphericity. But just an interesting thought experiment.
S: So anyway, I agree with the criticism of the paper. I disagree with his solution. I think that there are better solutions, including the one that I proposed. But I do think it does matter for how we communicate science to the public, even though there might not be any really critical scientific principles at stake here. I do think it's important, if you know what the definition of a planet is, you learn a little bit about mechanics, right? About this why are some things spheres and not others? What the barycenter is, what how things orbit each other. Yeah, there's some interesting concepts in there. It's a good learning tool. It does sort of help us organize our knowledge of the solar system without it being crazy or meaningless.
C: But don't you think that the vast majority of people who are fighting about whether Pluto is or isn't a planet don't know any of that?
S: But this is a great opportunity to teach them, right? That's the point.
C: Totally agree. But there are like little children who just, a planet is a planet, and they don't understand barycenters.
S: Yeah, but they could understand, but you can explain it to them at their level, right? Why is the earth a planet and the moon a moon?
B: You can demonstrate the barycenter, you can demonstrate it in a cool experiment.
C: Of course you can demonstrate it, Bob, but there's a big difference between demonstrating something to a child and a child understanding it.
B: Sure, but that's a good way to teach it. I think Jay's son, five-year-old Dylan, would kind of understand that if you had, if you could hold the barycenter of two orbiting two balls that are spinning around each other. I don't know. I think it's just a cool way to teach it.
C: But the understanding the way that mass affects other objects with it, I mean, I don't know, I disagree, but I do think that showing this is a moon because it goes around a planet, exactly, that's more intuitive. Like that, you can.
S: Well, smaller things orbit around bigger things because bigger things have more gravity, right? The earth goes around the sun. The sun's a lot bigger than the earth. The moon goes around the earth because the earth is a lot bigger than the moon. But if you have two things that are almost the same size, they would go around each other, and they're both planets. You could explain it at that level, and then as you get more sophisticated, then you could introduce the concept of the barycenter, add math to it, make it more rigorous.
C: Understanding gravity from a more Newtonian perspective, right, because we're taught it that way.
S: But Newtonian mechanics works fine as long as you're not at relativistic speeds or masses or whatever, so that's fine.
B: Yeah.
S: And it also, just the categorization is a thing. It is a skill. It is a concept in science that is important in its own right.
E: I agree.
S: No matter what you're categorizing, just how we approach it is important, and this is just one exercise in how to utilize, optimally utilize categorization, so-
E: Yeah. And it's a concept most people can understand. Therefore, you're right, Steve. It's an excellent teaching tool.
S: All right, let's move on.
News_Item_3 ()[edit]
- [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] [3]
S: Evan, this is an interesting article about solar sails, but it's really about material science, and the solar sails are a possible application, but tell us about it.
E: Possible application, indeed. Sails in space, and we've talked about this before on the SGU. It's a way for us to quite literally sail into outer space, but the sails come in a variety of types. The type we're gonna be talking about with this news item is called a light sail. A light sail is a type of solar sail, but it doesn't move using any of the sun's energy, as the term solar implies. A light sail will use, in fact, lasers as its sorts of energy.
S: Is that really the distinction of the term light sail? Couldn't a light sail just use the light from the sun?
E: But you would call it a solar sail.
S: Oh, that terminology distinguishes a light sail from a solar sail.
E: Right.
B: Yeah, Steve, I would also say that a light sail could get by by being much smaller than what you would need for a solar sail, since the intensity of the laser.
E: And there's several different kinds of solar sails, but I didn't wanna get too much on a tangent on the different kinds and the differences between them. I do wanna concentrate just on this light sail and the use of lasers to propel the light sails. So a limitation of a solar sail is that you need solar energy. It works well, very near the energy source, but the further you get away from the source, the less speed that you can build up. But what if you had a steady source of power that could get that sail moving very quickly in a relatively short amount of time? When your energy is a bank of lasers, which are situated here on Earth with pinpoint precision, you can get that craft, you can give it enough particle pressure that it needs to fly. And we're talking so much faster than other sails, which will rely on solar-generated propulsion. You would have a light sail, which in theory have the potential to achieve relativistic speeds, speeds so fast that you're best describing them in relationship to the cosmic speed limit of the cosmos, which is 300,000 kilometers per second, namely the speed of light. But exactly how fast are we talking? It's been reported that this new material that they can make the light sail out of would be capable of withstanding the pressure to achieve 134 million miles per hour, which is roughly 20% the speed of light.
J: Yeah, but how long would it take to speed that thing up to that?
S: Depends on the power of the lasers and the weight, the mass of the object.
E: It would have to, right, right. And it would have to go fast very quickly in order to, you'd have to, because you have to build that up over a certain amount of time to achieve that speed.
B: Yeah, I remember I did, maybe we should mention, I talked about this a couple of years ago with plans to have these little, these, a nanoprobe, what do they call them? Not a nanosat, but like a, essentially a probe that weighs ounces. I mean, so tiny, because still, sending atoms to another star, even if it's very, very light, it takes a tremendous amount of energy.
E: Oh, yeah.
B: So, yeah, they're talking about a round trip not a round trip, but we basically get to Alpha Centauri, in like five years. That's just like crazy, crazy fast. I mean, we could basically get information back, within 15, 20 years, which is amazing. It's so much better than centuries. So, yeah, and my memory of that item that I talked about was that the powerful lasers that they have today, they are so amazingly powerful and modular that you could potentially put one in orbit that could do this.
E: The limitation at this point becomes the sail material.
B: And so this is the latest breakthrough, which is fantastic, excellent.
E: Right, right. And like any material, they all have their breaking points. You apply enough pressure to an object, it will become compromised. Now, in the case of the sail, you're talking about a very delicate piece of material to begin with. So with enough pressure, even light pressure, or the pressure generated from a high-powered laser system, it will eventually break up. But they say the ideal light sail should be several meters wide and mechanically robust enough to withstand intense radiation pressure, yet be merely 100 nanometers or so thick, and weigh just a few grams. Easy, right? Oh, but on top of that. That's easy. That's easy, but it gets better. When you're propelling that light sail, it's the reflection of the light energy which gives it its thrust, so to speak. So you need material that is tremendously efficient in its reflection capabilities. And that's just the infrared light being reflected. You have to also account for the cooling, for the emission of the waste product of that heat energy that comes out. So you have to add to that equation, material must also emit radiation for cooling purposes. This is no small engineering feat. If only such a material were to exist, wait, what? Oh, news item. And this is it. The new study published in Nano Letters. The researchers from Caltech, researchers Anjan Ilic, Cora Wendt, and Harry Atwater, have shown that nanophotonic structures may have the potential to meet the stringent material requirements for light sails capable of traveling at these relativistic speeds. They created the new material out of silicon and its oxide, silica. The researchers showed that a two-layer stack of silicon and silica show promise due to the combined properties of both materials. Whereas silicon has a large refractive index, which corresponds to efficient propulsion, but a poor cooling ability, the silica has a good radiative cooling property, but has a smaller refractive index. So you get sort of the two pieces of the puzzle you need in order to make this nanomaterial to be able to potentially achieve these relativistic speed. Very, very cool concept and idea, and I hope they are able to take these things to the next step and actually get some things working.
S: Yeah, I mean, even forget about getting to the 20% of the speed of light.
B: Right.
S: You know, what about just bouncing around our own solar system?
B: Exactly.
S: For example, Earth to Mars.
B: Yeah, exactly.
S: Because once you get to Mars, you have another laser at that end that could slow the craft, right?
B: Which is critical.
E: Sure.
B: Very critical.
S: Yeah, so you have a laser on or near Earth, on the moon, on the Lagrange point, whatever, a giant laser that will accelerate things from the Earth orbit to Mars. Then you have a laser at the other end that will decelerate it and put it into Mars orbit.
J: So what would it be powered with over there, Steve?
S: Whatever there are.
E: The laser itself?
S: Yeah, the laser, whatever it's powered with here, whatever.
E: Just plug it into the 110 volt on the planet. Find an outlet.
B: Eventually, there'd be just fusion lasers. The thing is, though, that's a little scary. Imagine you're traveling at an amazing speed, far faster than the chemical energy to Mars, and there's a malfunction. You are done, you are done.
E: You're toast.
B: You will leave the solar system.
S: You gotta have a backup laser on Ceres, right, or whatever.
J: This sounds like us recording when we're at events, Steve.
S: Yeah, I've got a backup.
J: The primary recorder. The secondary laser, and you know what? You might as well just use the microphone on the camera, which was what we did for the last show.
S: Yeah.
J: Oh my God.
B: Yeah, and don't forget, another great use is to actually deal with like asteroids, or potentially even comets on a trajectory that could hit the Earth. I mean, you could actually, with a sustained laser for, laser bursts against it, you could actually alter its orbit if we learn about it quickly enough. So that could come in handy. It could save our asses.
S: And the other point, though, about why the whole solar sail concept is so compelling is because you're not carrying your fuel with you, right? You might need some fuels and rocket for little adjustments, but for the main propulsion, yeah, that's huge because there's the rocket equation, right? Yeah, the more fuel you have to carry, then you have to carry fuel to carry your fuel to carry your fuel, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's why it's so expensive, and you have to take so much fuel to get anywhere.
B: Like $10,000 a pound.
S: But if you're not carrying your fuel, if all the energy is accelerating the ship, passengers, and cargo, then the efficiency is massively greater. This could be the way, I mean, this may be the one thing that, like I was thinking about this on the Expanse, is that I haven't seen any solar sails or light sails on the Expanse.
J: I guess they don't need them, Steve.
S: I know, it's whatever. It's a very well thought out vision of that phase of our future when we've occupied the solar system. And it's something that I haven't seen yet on that show, which is curious. I bet this might be the most efficient way to get around the solar system.
B: Yeah, I mean, they have a gimme on that because they did develop that super propulsion, which kind of obviates the need for a light sail, but that's okay.
S: You still have to carry your fuel with you.
B: Yeah.
E: That's right.
S: There's also, you talk about aesthetics. There is something about a spaceship being completely self-sufficient, right? Whenever a spaceship is dependent on something outside of itself to function, it always feels like it's gimped in some way. You know what I mean? But I think that's just a romantic bias from science fiction. It's not really practical.
B: And don't forget, even for the relativistic speeds going to, say, the nearest star system well within a human lifetime, even that is gimped a bit because even a laser, sure, a laser is a collimated beam of energy, but even that will spread. If you shine an intense laser on the moon, I think that laser beam is about one or two miles wide by the time it hits the moon.
E: Oh, wow.
B: So you would need an incredibly intense laser to launch this thing to Alpha Centauri, and you would be able to use the laser for a period of time, but you're not gonna be using it for a year or two years. You have to accelerate the crap out.
E: You build up all of your speed early.
B: Very, very early.
J: Bob, could they send a lens out to refocus the laser?
B: If the lens is 10 miles wide, sure, Jay.
J: Well, first of all, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm questioning that that whole laser beam is that big when it hits the moon thing. I need to read on that because something is telling me that that could be BS.
B: No, Jay, laser light spreads.
S: Depends on the laser, but yeah, of course. It's not completely, completely coherent.
J: I'm not saying it doesn't spread, but I don't know how true that information is because I think that we found out about that a long time ago.
E: And they described the laser systems that would propel this light sail as a bank of lasers. So we're not just talking one laser. It's a series of devices or a series of arrays even that would probably be involved.
S: All right, here's an article from 2017 asking this very question. This one says, if you went to the North Pole and placed a class 3A laser pointer on a tripod to steady it and pointed it at the moon, it would form a spot about 500 miles wide at the moon's surface.
E: 500 miles for a class 3A laser.
J: Jesus.
S: It's almost like class 3A laser pointer. I don't know what that means.
J: A laser pointer, that's the thing that you play with your cat.
B: It's not industrial, but that's the point.
E: That's a big cat on the moon.
C: That's probably one of those astronomy pointers, right? A more fancy one.
S: Right, right.
C: Because those astronomy pointers, like I have a lot of friends who, like Caltech physicist people who bring them when we go to meteor showers and things like that. And like they have to be really careful because you can like take out an airplane with those things.
E: Oh yeah.
S: All right, here's another one.
C: Like you're not going to light it on fire, but you'll blind the guy.
S: He said, on the other hand, if you have a Maui AE-06 3.67 meter telescope with adaptive optics, and let's say you had a 100 watt laser available full aperture, then you could put a spot on the moon as big as a football field.
E: That's pretty tight.
S: Now that, but now you're using optics. You're using optics to focus it.
B: Sure, you could minimize it tremendously. The point remains though, that you're not going to have a pinpoint laser beam when you're pushing that light sail out to like say Jupiter. When you get to Jupiter distances, all bets are off. You're done.
E: Oh yeah.
C: Jupiter is really far away.
B: That's what I mean. You can only do it for a brief period of time. You're not going to be pushing that thing along when it's like halfway to Alfa Centauri. You've got a window, you've got a tiny window. It could be weeks of weeks only to accelerate. And then that's it. Probably far less than weeks.
S: Point made. Okay, let's move on.
News_Item_4 ()[edit]
- [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] [4]
S: Bob. If only we could grow, if only we could grow brains in a vat, it would solve all our problems.
E: Wait, we can't do that?
B: Yeah, if you guys, yeah, if you heard mini brains are in the news, researchers are making progress on mini brains, which offer hopes for improving therapies and our understanding, but it also offers ethical concerns. Of course, damn ethics.
C: Organoids?
B: Mini brains. Mini brains.
C: Organoids? Or is this more than an organoid?
B: Well, okay.
C: Because we've had those for a while.
S: It's a cerebral organoid.
B: About five years, but it's kind of popped back into the news and we never covered it. So mini brains, they're-
S: Well, we have sort of talked about organoids, but yeah, go ahead.
B: Did we? Okay, I wasn't paying attention, but this is going to be more fascinating. So mini brains are definitely a thing, and I hate that nickname, because it basically, I think it just kind of sucks, because you always got to think of how the public perception with names like that, and mini brain always conjures up the ideas of human brains in a vat, screaming, but nobody could hear it scream and all this stuff, because it's just a brain. But if you look at-
C: Call it an organoid.
B: Yes, and that's it, because if you read the real research papers, they never use the term mini brains. They use, and I just love this, I never heard this specific term before, but cerebral organoids, and that's what they call it, and I just love, love that scientific term.
S: This is a good point for me to point out, that in order to maintain wakeful consciousness, you need about 45% of your cerebral cortex. So unless you're getting that much brain tissue, like cortical brain tissue-
C: And you're saying in an actual human being, like coma status, like, okay.
S: Yeah, like a human brain, like if I wiped out 56% of your brain, you could not be conscious. So you need a lot of brain. These little pieces of brain are not gonna be conscious.
B: Yes.
S: Just to be clear.
B: Yeah, obviously. We're talking about a million cells, we're talking maybe cubic millimeters of brain tissue. So yeah, nothing, there's not much cogitation going on at all with these things. So that's pretty much a given, but that's not even the point, because that's just now and we know how these things change. So, but what is an organoid? Let's just talk about what the hell we're talking about here. It's essentially small clumps of tissue, often in vitro, which are essentially simplified versions of an organ created from stem cells. And these stem cells have been essentially reprogrammed to become this tissue. The purpose is to study biology and diseases and even treatments in a way that they allow you to be more realistic and focus in on details that you wouldn't otherwise have. So that's kind of what an organoid is. Cerebral organoids are obviously made from neurons. But one of the cool parts is that where the neurons come from, they essentially take fibroblast from the skin to generate pluripotent stem cells from them. And then they in turn can be directed to turn into almost any cell we want. And in this case, they become the cell types that make up a human brain. So here's a quote from Alison Mowatry, who's a PhD professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine. She said, cerebral organoids can form a variety of brain regions. They exhibit neurons that are functional and capable of electrical excitation. They resemble human cortical development at the gene expression level. So it was clearly some interesting biology is happening with these cerebral organoids. And the concept is not new. As Cara pointed out, this is five years old. What's happened is in that five years, half a decade, a lot of some things have changed. It's more automated and efficient than ever. But of course, once this process starts, once they kind of coax the stem cells to become neurons and they kind of glom onto each other, it's really essentially a sit back and watch science. Because since with self-organization, which takes over and it forms the ball of brains all by itself, a lot of this is just how these things self-organize. But this technique is limited. Think about this. You have a Petri dish, you've got the brains coming together. And after a few days, this million cell clump starts losing cells because they die without a robust blood supply. So their lifetime is very limited.
C: Really? They can't keep it alive in medium?
B: At the very center of these organoids, the cerebral organoids, you start having some cell death.
C: Oh, because it's-
B: Yeah, I mean, it's not, they're kind of isolated and you can kind of feed them, I guess, but the ones that are isolated are really hard and they start dying. So what they did to get past that is they started grafting vascular tissue onto the organoids and that helped, but it wasn't good enough. There wasn't a good enough replica of that cellular microenvironment to keep it alive as long as they would like. So now what they do is they actually graft the organoid tissue onto mouse brains and there it just totally thrives. New neurons are created as well as the supporting cells like astrocytes. For the first time recently, they saw blood vessels with actual blood flowing through it within the organoids and this has never happened before. And so that's been a fairly big breakthrough with this, a way to make this tissue live for extended periods of time.
C: But that doesn't really solve the problem, does it? Because the whole point of growing an organoid is to not do invasive animal research. Because if you could just use a clone mouse brain for anything that you want to figure out.
B: No, I disagree, I disagree. You could do a lot, you could still do lots of good. Sure, you're messing with a mouse's brain, but you have a way for this tissue to survive. And this is tissue that you're not gonna get with clone mouse brains. These are, say, human neurons or human abnormal neurons that you can then study and see how the disease progresses, a disease that wouldn't necessarily ever happen in a regular mouse brain.
C: But then you're gonna have a whole, I'm not saying that this isn't totally amazing, but at the same time, you're gonna have all the same issues that you would have with a graft. You're gonna have to immunosuppress this mouse in order for the graft to stay. You're gonna have so much crossover between the mouse's cells and the actual graft cells between the immune response that's occurring in the mouse, obviously all of the nutrients that are traveling through the blood supply that's going to become intermixed that it's gonna be really hard to keep clear the difference between the two. I mean, I think it's super interesting from a, tell me if you agree with this, Steve. I mean, obviously from a disease perspective, sure, that's not really the first place I went, but I think it's really interesting from a network perspective. So I all of my previous research was in neuronal networks, and at least 10 years ago when I was in graduate school, so this was before we had organoids, we were finding that there was a lot of really good systems-level research, and there was a lot of really good cellular-level research, but the network-level research was really lacking. So like, how do these networks form? What are the communication strategies? So what we did is we made monolayer networks, but I could keep those suckers alive for six months just by feeding them, but they were a flat, it was a flat network that self-organized from urine, embryonic tissue, and it would grow, and I could, it would fire. I mean, it had like, what do you call it? The kindling firing. It was epileptic, basically.
B: You called those organoids?
C: No, no, no, no.
B: Oh, because they're not. Those aren't organoids.
C: No.
B: Okay.
C: We called those monolayer networks. They were network-level, but they were not organoids. So what a lot of people started to do around that time is they would take, where they would do, instead of multi-electrode stuff, that's what we did with a flat electrode array, is they would patch clamp into a, oh gosh, a three-dimensional chunk of tissue that they could basically just take out of the animal and then do experiments on and watch, which had the same problem as organoids. It dies. So you're right, I think, Bob, in that grafting it to a new mouse is really interesting because you can graft, let's say, human tissue to the mouse to try and understand what's going on with it, but I still think you face a lot of the difficulties and the ethical quandaries that come along with doing in vivo experimentation as opposed to in vitro experimentation.
B: Sure, but I think this might even be a temporary thing. I mean, you're working with pluripotent stem cells. Why can't you also grow this vascular network to keep it alive instead of having to graft it into a mouse brain? I think it's a matter of time before this grafting or using the stem cells that could actually vascularize it and keep it fed without having to graft it.
C: But that's not the only thing that keeps it alive, right? Yes, you need all of the nutrition, but our biggest problem in my lab was keeping them from getting infected because you can't use, we couldn't use antibiotics. We didn't culture in gentamicin like you would with almost any other in vitro preparation. The brain has a really shitty immune system. It's got microglia, that's about it. And so when you don't culture in antibiotics, it leaves it really open to infection. Lab infections are rampant. It's so hard to keep these things super, super clean. And the minute you drop antibiotics in, you completely change the pharmacology of the system. It doesn't act the same way anymore. So there's a lot of issues. I mean, it's interesting.
B: Sure, there's definitely clearly, there's a lot of technical issues there, but they've already had some big successes with this technique. Just the idea of the cerebral organoids in terms of figuring out like the Zika virus and things like that, they've had solid successes that were solved this way. But there's also, besides the technical concerns, there's also things like ethical concerns. As I mentioned above, people have expressed concern to researchers working on these mini-brains. They wanna know if it's conscious, which is it's silly when you're talking about cubic millimeters. But really though, we know so little about consciousness, it's hard to really answer at what point will this be a concern? How big does it have to get?
C: Well, so doesn't it have to have sensory inputs?
B: Yeah, oh yeah, sure, that's part of it as well. But when you're, say in five years, if they're researching brains with a billion neurons, and what's going on in there? I mean, that's something that needs to be talked about. And actually a lot of scientists and ethicists are now calling for a public ethical discussion about things like this that can occur along with the research. And that's probably a good idea. I mean, look how people have reacted to clones. You know, cloning people has been such a major issue for decades now. And it's really, we're just talking about twins, creating temporally displaced twins. I mean, it's not nearly as dramatic, I think, as creating a brain from scratch like that. But so regardless, I hope that these ethical concerns don't eventually derail this type of thing once they start really ramping up and go well beyond the conventional cerebral organoids as they are today. I mean, the benefits are just so amazing.
C: Well, Bob, if you think about it, those ethical concerns already have derailed this research. The reason they're having to use pluripotent stem cells as opposed to, or certain types of pluripotent stem cells, and where are they getting them from, as opposed to being able to use cleaner embryonic stem cells is because that's against the law.
B: Yeah, right.
C: Like we've already had these ethical conundrums literally get in the way, like that are based purely on nothing.
B: Sure, we are years behind where we could have been. And I remember this because I remember when George Bush, before, right before 9-11, I mean, the timing was kind of exquisite. Right before that is when he killed that whole idea of, he really derailed all the research. Steve, what exactly did he do with that? He really limited the research and crippled it.
S: You could only use existing lines. You can't create any new lines.
B: Right, so yeah, we are years behind. And that's why this type of stuff, talking about this now, I think, is a good idea to prevent the type of backlash that we could experience in five or 10 years once this type of technology really goes crazy. And because it's just too important. I mean, the brain is the ultimate black box, right? It really is. It's the most complex thing in the known universe. There's so many things we don't know about it. But using this technology, we could potentially find cures for brain disorders. You could speed drug testing using this technology. You could potentially have the ability to, imagine transplanting brain tissue into somebody's brain that lost parts of their brain from brain damage.
S: Yeah.
C: Yeah, that's amazing.
B: You know, that's a possibility. And who knows, maybe they could, imagine if we just added a few hundred million neurons to the frontal cortex of somebody with a healthy brain. Would you be smarter? What would happen? That's kind of cool to think about. But it's-
C: All new ethical cancer.
B: Yes, all new. But I have to say, it's fascinating where this can go. And I would just hate to see this derailed and delays yet again for such promising research.
S: It means that definitely as technology progresses, we talk about it with genetics, with stem cells, et cetera, the ethical implications get bigger, right? The stakes get higher.
B: Sure.
S: Both good and bad.
Who's That Noisy? ()[edit]
S: All right, Jay, get us caught up on who's that noisy.
J: Okay, last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] Wait, what is that?
E: Malfunctioning droid. But I doubt that's-
C: It's so cute.
J: I know, there's something really cute about it.
C: I want it to be a puffin, but I know it's not a puffin.
J: Well, we got some emails. Jeremy Dunbar wrote in and said, I think this week's noisy isn't a baby dinosaur, like Cara said, but I think it's a screw being screwed into wood.
C: Oh, weird. But it's not, is it?
J: It's not.
S: He thinks it's the squeaking of the screw.
J: I know that sound very well, and there is definitely some. But anyway, that does sound kind of like that, but not to that variety. Stu Akers wrote in and said, hey guys, thought I'd have a guess at this week's noisy. It sounds like a bird mimicking, and being from Australia, I would have to guess the lybird, to be specific, as they are exceptional artists.
S: Lyrebird.
J: Lyrebird. Lyre.
E: Lyre.
J: They're such good mimics that virtually all of the sounds you've had on the show previously could have been that bird.
S: That's correct.
E: Sure.
S: Have you ever seen the lyrebird?
J: I heard one make a camera click noise.
S: Yeah, yeah, right? Like a shutter, camera shutter noise, or a chainsaw. I mean, unbelievable mimic.
J: I'd hate to have one live near me, though.
S: Yeah.
E: Is that a survival trait of some sort, or what?
S: Yeah, the male lyrebirds mimic the songs of other birds for mating purposes, for the mating ritual. And the females have been heard mimicking sounds during foraging and nest protection.
J: So Mike Caruso wrote in, this is my second time guessing in many years. I have been listening, but this noisy elicited a reflex. It made me want to tell my kids, quiet, we're in a restaurant. No one wants to hear that noise. So my guess is someone having way too much fun with their soda straw and lid, trying to make music, but not realizing that it only works for the samba bands. Come to think of it, it could be the Brazilian cuica. Cuica.
C: Cuica.
J: Cuica.
C: I don't know, I don't know Portuguese.
J: Okay, so he's guessing that this is a straw in a cup like from McDonald's or something. Nope, that's not it. Nobody guessed it, because this thing is completely out there.
C: It's not a puffin?
J: It's not a puffin. Well, in part it is, though, Cara, and I'll explain it to you.
E: Oh.
J: So Tim O'Connell sent this one in, and he said, Jay, a really cool project went public this week that is a partnership between some computer scientists and the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. And he gives me this link. They've broken down the songs and calls of birds into little one-second snippets and used AI to arrange like sounds in ordinal space. The results so far is a grid of similar sounds arranged together. Example, all the similar squawks are in one row, regardless of which species produced the sound. As most birds have songs that last for at least several seconds, it can include lots of different elements. A single bird's entire song can be scattered in a bunch of places around the grid. So if you take your cursor and slide it around the grid, you can create a cacophony of bird sounds that are barely recognizable as such. I hope you can use it or make your own. It's got a great mechanical R2-D2 kind of quality. He is so right, and I played with this thing like crazy. And when you guys get this, you're gonna freak out because it's just like one of those things you could just mess with for a long time.
E: Oh, boy.
C: You don't have the time.
E: Like the online theremin?
C: Have you ever played with a real theremin? I used to have one. So fun.
J: None of us are surprised, Cara. So no winners this week, but it ended up being a really, really fun noisy, and this is something that you guys can play with at home and with your kids. And if you zoom in, you could actually see pictures of the birds, and it gives you information. It's a really cool utility.
New Noisy ()[edit]
J: All right, moving on to this week's noisy. This is the new noisy. This noisy was sent in by someone named Master Schaff, or I think his name is actually Dirk.
S: Dirk Gently?
E: Yeah, detective agency.
J: Are you ready?
[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]
E: I know what that is.
J: What is that?
E: That's Crispin Glover in his latest role.
C: He's so weird.
J: I picked this one because I am celebrating early Halloween with Bob.
E: There's an early Halloween? Nobody told me.
J: Well, we just keep celebrating a few days earlier each year, so, you know.
E: It's up to September 12th, man.
J: Yeah, right. So, bottom line is, this is a weird one. What is it? If you have any idea or you heard any cool noises yourself this week, email me at WTN at theskepticsguide.org.
S: I'm still playing with this bird thing. There are some you can zoom way out and then it gives you much more freedom to like roam around the different bird calls. Some of them sound creepy, like a demon, like if you go through the deeper ones.
J: Oh, yeah.
S: Listen to this.
E: Oh, that is Raptor.
J: Oh, my God. What the hell is that? That's awesome.
S: What the hell is that? All right. Thank you, Jay.
J: You got it.
S: All right, guys. ell, let's just go straight to science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (h:mm:ss)[edit]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | |
| Science |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There's a theme this week.
C: Uh-oh.
E: Here we go.
S: Guess what the theme is this week.
E: Uh, planets.
S: No.
C: September 11th.
S: Yes, 9-11.
E: Oh, Cara.
J: Okay. I'm ready.
C: I am ready.
E: Cara goes first.
S: Three things about 9-11. You ready?
C: No.
S: Too bad. Okay, here we go.
J: Yep, here we go.
S: Item number one, a seeing eye dog named Daisy led 31 people to safety after the jet hit the first tower and before it collapsed. Item number two, the fires at Ground Zero burned for 100 days before they were finally extinguished. And item number three, Google's top search topic for the week following 9-11 was Nostradamus. Evan, go first.
Evan's Response
E: Well, I have not specifically heard of any of these. So.
S: Good.
E: So you have a seeing eye dog named Daisy that led 31 people to safety after the jet hit the first tower and before it collapsed. I don't think there's anything implausible about that. As far as it being a seeing eye dog in the building, that's certainly fine. Named Daisy is no problem there. Did it actually lead the people to safety? I guess this is straightforward. There's really not much to try to even figure out here. It either happened or it didn't. Plausible. Number two, the fires at Ground Zero burned for 100 days before they were finally extinguished. Boy, I don't know about this one. 100 days. That's a long time. What may have happened, though, is that it wasn't just the surface level fires and things. The ground below actually had these pits and caves and stories deep divots that were there as a result. And perhaps there were fires down in those lower, lower areas, which we simply could not get to at all. Had no access. So I suppose that is possible. And then number three, the Google's top search topic for the week following 9-11 was Nostradamus. The top search topic. That one's not striking me correct because, I mean, there's millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of search topics. And Nostradamus was number one for the week. I mean, I know there were people trying to tie in the prophecies and everything to this. But the top search topic, I don't know if I'm buying that just because there's so many other things. I mean what about Al-Qaeda? What about Osama bin Laden? What about all the other things that we were just learning about at the time? And wouldn't those have been more likely candidates for the top search as opposed to Nostradamus? Maybe Nostradamus was up there, but maybe not the top. So I'm going to say that that one, Nostradamus, is going to be the fiction.
S: Okay, Cara?
Cara's Response
C: These are hard. Well, one of them's easy, but two of them are hard. And I'm not going to say which one I think is easy. Wait, I think I'm going to be giving it away by saying that. The Nostradamus one bothers me, but at the same time, it bothers me because I feel like that could totally have been the number one search topic. Because, A, I don't think we knew it was Al-Qaeda within the first week by any stretch. If I'm remembering correctly, and I think this might be a lot of clouded vision, a lot of hindsight. I don't even know if we knew. We knew it was terrorism within a few days. Maybe the top search would have been terrorism. But even the word terrorist was like, became in vogue after 9-11. Like, I don't know if we even threw that word around then the way we throw it around now. So, I don't know. And I, honestly, I don't really buy the seeing eye dog one. This one is like 31 people, which is a low number. It seems like a plausible number. But were there 31 blind people? Was there like a blind school in the Twin Towers? Because I don't see why a seeing person would need Daisy to show them where the stairwell was. And I don't see why Daisy would have had a very good ability to know the floor plan of the building any better than seeing people. I think that probably in a situation like that, a blind dog might even be, a seeing eye dog might even be a hindrance. You go with the flow. Like, there's thousands of people trying to get out of the building. So, I don't know. That one seems kind of silly to me. After the first jet hit, people were panicking. They were all trying to escape. So, I don't know. I think that's the one I'm going to go with as the fiction.
S: Okay, Jay.
C: Although, Evan, you might be right.
E: Yeah, but you're good on the themed ones, Cara, or the rest of us are not.
C: No, that's going to screw me.
Jay's Response
J: So, that third one about the Google top search being Nostradamus, that doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, especially in the early hours, like people were probably trying to find out if this was predicted. It makes me sad, Evan. I agree with you. You want to kind of not believe it, but I could believe that. The second one here, the fires burned for 100 days before they were finally extinguished. You know, I also find that believable because we're talking about a massive pile of rubble and steel. And there was also subterranean subways and everything down there. So, I can believe that. But I agree with Cara. I just don't see that a seeing eye dog somehow led 30 people to safety. And where to safety? What? The story of this doesn't seem to make sense. The dog led them to safety? How? Where was the dog? Were the people in the building? Were they on the ground? You know, and where would safety have been? How would the dog know where to go? It just doesn't make any sense. I don't see that happening. So, I think that was a fiction, Steve.
S: Okay, Bob.
Bob's Response
B: Yeah, this was a good one, Steve. I've changed my opinion like four times in the past 10 minutes. But the Nostradamus one, yeah. I mean, yeah. I remember when the first time I ever saw Osama bin Laden, and it was a little bit after. It could have been a week or two or more after the 9-11 before we really knew it. And just people just I'm just not surprised anymore by this stupid crap like Nostradamus. So, I could see. And I remember. I remember that those vague things, something mentioned about some towers or whatever, might have been completely even false, whatever. I do remember that. So, that one's kind of possible. I could imagine that happening. A hundred days for a fire sounds like too long. Like, what? Come on. A hundred days? I'm trying to remember when they actually started moving things out of there. And I just, of course, it's such an old memory at this point. But I could conceive of a fire lasting that long. You know how things can smolder too, and there was a lot of depth to that. So, I can kind of see that. It's this first one about the dog that I just can't get past it. I don't understand the logistics. How would it work? You guys have done a good job describing why this one just seems so silly. I mean how could this work? What kind of training? This is something that happened. There was no training for that really, not for that situation. Who was being led where? How many blind people were we talking about? I just can't figure out how this makes any sense. So, I'll say that that one is fiction.
Steve Explains Item #2[edit]
S: Okay. So, you all agree on the second one. So, we'll start there. Number two, the fires at Ground Zero burned for 100 days before they were finally extinguished. Cara, you're such a pessimist. You always do this. I follow an algorithm, whichever one you guys didn't pick. That's the one that I start with. This one is science.
C: But I heard a smile.
S: I'm always smiling. I'm just throwing it.
C: I hear a smile in your voice.
E: I'm smiling because at least one person is wrong this week.
S: That's true. This one is science. So, yeah, it burned for 100 days. And you guys are right. It was under the rubble. It was smoldering. And it was very difficult for them. They were actively trying to put out the fire. But it took 100 days.
B: That's amazing.
S: You would think just keep throwing water on that thing. But yeah, it was a long time.
C: I think I remember reading that. Like that it was like a really – that's why I skipped over it. But it was like a really long time, like too long basically.
S: Yeah, it was reported at the Times. Here's an article from December 2001. Ground zero stops burning after 100 days.
E: Wow.
C: Jeez.
S: Yeah. Incredible.
Steve Explains Item #1[edit]
S: Let's go back to number one. A seeing-eye dog named Daisy led 31 people to safety after the jet hit the first tower and before it collapsed. Evan, you think this one is science. Everyone else thinks this one is the fiction. Now, guys, the story here – let me tell you the story because you kept – you were speculating about how could this work. But here's the story. There was – after the jet hit, there was fire and there was a lot of smoke and confusion and people could not see where to go. And this is a seeing-eye dog. These dogs are incredibly well-trained, Bob. You're saying how could he – would he have been trained for this? They are incredibly well-trained. And they're low to the ground.
C: But that's only like up in those really high levels.
S: Yeah, but this is where they were.
C: But that's where most people died.
S: Yeah, but that's – so the other thing you said is that people were panicking and fleeing the building. Actually, people were given the order to stay in place.
C: Yeah, I forgot about that.
S: That was hugely criticized.
C: It was the second building.
S: Yeah, when the second building got hit, then there was panic. But when the first building got hit, they were told, stay in place. And that was not the protocol and that was not obviously the correct thing to do. They should have started immediately evacuating it and that increased the death toll.
C: Because they didn't know it was going to fall.
S: The question is, did this dog, Daisy, leading their blind owner out create a train of people that eventually got out of the tower? And the dog was credited with leading them to safety. The question is, did that happen or not?
E: Right.
S: And this one is – are you ready?
C: No.
S: The fiction. This is the fiction.
C: Yes. I just don't think I would ever be like, follow the blind guy. I don't know why. Like I just feel like – I don't know.
E: Well, you'd be going on vocal cues at that point because you couldn't see anything. So –
S: Right. Anyway, this is a story. This is a myth of the 9-11. In fact, it's been embellished. Now, Daisy –
E: I don't remember it.
C: I don't either.
S: Daisy is a dog, a seeing-eye dog, a golden retriever that led its owner, James Crane, out of the tower but just him. There was one other seeing-eye dog that also led its blind owner out of the tower.
C: Oh, that's amazing. Good job, Daisy.
S: There's just two people. But the story evolved and you read reports of 31 people. That was like the lowest number. I used the lowest number to make it more believable. But in its full manifestation, this myth had the dog leading thousands of people out of the towers.
B: Oh my god.
S: Like going back for multiple trips and then finally going in one last time and not coming out heroically. But then a fireman carries out the injured dog. I mean the story got so ridiculous. I mean like a Disney story on crack. I mean it was just – But it's all made up. Yeah, it's just all rumor. It's all apocryphal. It was just – yeah, he led his owner out of the building.
C: But good job, Daisy.
J: Yeah.
C: That's awesome.
E: I have a dog named Daisy.
C: Oh yeah, you do.
S: Golden retrievers are awesome too.
C: Oh, I know. I love them.
Steve Explains Item #3[edit]
S: OK. All of this means that Google's top search topic for the week following 9-11 was Nostradamus is science.
E: People!
S: Here are the top four terms. The top four in descending order. So Nostradamus is first, then CNN, then the World Trade Center came in at third, and then Osama bin Laden was number four. So we did know that name at that point in time.
B: Within a week?
S: Now here – do you guys remember – this is why Nostradamus was number one. After 9-11, it immediately was an internet myth that Nostradamus penned this quatrain. You ready? In the city of God, there will be a great thunder. Two brothers torn apart by chaos. While the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb. The third big war will begin when the big city is burning. Now here's the thing. Nostradamus never wrote that. That was completely made up. That wasn't even a Nostradamus quatrain. That was just made up after 9-11 and spread as a hoax.
E: Oh, we're so good at hoaxing.
S: But it was spreading around, you know. And so then people were asking about it. Then there was also this one. This is a good one. On the 11th day of the ninth month – we're getting a little specific here – two metal birds will crash into two tall statues in the new city and the world will end soon after. I mean, come on. Nostradamus never said anything that specific, right?
E: Never.
B: Pathetic.
C: So unimaginative.
E: He had to be vague.
C: I know, but you can imagine being someone on the internet not knowing – not having the skills to do the kind of research.
S: That's just some kid on the internet, yeah.
C: Yeah, and then they're like, Nostradamus said this. And you're like, no way. Because if he had, that's amazing.
S: That's pretty amazing, yeah.
J: That's something that I see teenagers like geeking out over.
S: Yeah, exactly.
E: Prognostication way back when was a dangerous business. If you were too specific and you got it wrong, you were often thrown in a dungeon or so.
S: You were hanged, yeah.
E: So you had to be vague in a lot of the things that you either wrote or said so that you couldn't be held responsible when it didn't happen.
S: Nostradamus was the king of vague. In fact, there was a study where they showed Nostradamus' quatrains to historians of different specialties like Chinese history and European history and Mesoamerican history, whatever. And they were equally able to match them to historical events within their specialty. Like there's no specificity. You could match it to anything.
E: Right.
S: That's the point.
E: He survived a long time and wrote a lot of these things and that's why.
S: Whenever he would occasionally throw a date out there, he's totally wrong. That's why he rarely does that.
Skeptical Quote of the Week ()[edit]
(quoted text)
– _alternate_display_text_for_name_ (_birth_year_-_death_year_), (description of author)
S: OK, Evan, give us a quote.
E: "I believe there is no philosophical high road in science with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed." Max Born.
S: Yeah, that's an interesting quote.
E: We haven't quoted Max Born, I don't think, in either a while or ever.
S: Yeah.
E: On the show.
S: Not that there isn't philosophy of science and epistemology, but yeah, a lot of science is definitely trial and error. There's no signposts. I agree. There's no like this is the path to scientific knowledge. It's more of we have to find our way as we go.
C: Yeah, a lot of it is based on mistakes.
S: Yeah. There's a lot of chaos.
E: It's an important part of the system. Yep. Of the process. Max Born. Hey, Bob, what's Max Born known for?
B: With the atom. Something about classical atom. Damn, it's been so long. I forget. I forget the details, man. Remind me, what did he do?
E: Well, more generally, mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics.
B: Oh, geez.
E: Generally speaking.
Announcements ()[edit]
S: Jay, we have how's the extravaganza ticket sales going?
J: The ticket sales are going well. Yeah. So we had a little snafu. There was some type of weird credit card thing that I resolved finally. So that's over. Everyone that had their tickets accidentally refunded. I straightened it out with them. But that is not important, Steve. What is important is that we are doing this show. It is happening on October 11th and it's going to be a great show. So we've been working very closely with George Hrab, George is going to be coming up to put some final decisions on what we're actually going to be doing. We really did finally iterate this show to a point where I feel like it's pretty spit-polished at this time and you got to come see it. I really am excited. We love doing it. I mean this show is so much fun for us.
S: It's a ton of fun.
E: Oh, yeah.
J: There's a lot of audience interaction and we do some cool demonstrations on the stage. There's a lot of comedy bits. Now, Steve, the trivia contest, I think what you said we lost once. I don't remember losing.
J: That's my memory or at least it got close enough that we said, all right, this guy wins. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like the five of us against everyone in the audience. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. Jay, if I won a ticket to the extravaganza, how do I get it? Well, the easiest thing you could do is go to theskepticsguide.org and then in our upper navigation, just click events and you'll see a skeptical extravaganza of special significance. There should be an echo at the end of my voice there. Yeah. So thank you, guys, for any of you that do purchase tickets and we will be talking to you after the show and we'll even be signing books and just hanging out for a little while to talk to everyone that came.
Signoff ()[edit]
S: All right, guys. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
J: Thank you, Steve.
C: Thanks Steve.
E: Thanks, Doctor.
S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.
Today I Learned[edit]
- Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference[9]
- Fact/Description
- Fact/Description
References[edit]
- ↑ [url_from_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_from_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_from_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_from_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_for_TIL publication: title]
|
|
|