SGU Episode 386
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| SGU Episode 386 |
|---|
| 8th December 2012 |
 |
| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Guest |
PP: Phil Plait |
| Quote of the Week |
When a man eminent in science tells us of something in his particular sphere, into which no fraud can intrude, and which can be verified under scientific conditions, he is entitled to a respectful hearing, but if he states that on a particular night his cow jumped over the postoffice his testimony on that point is no more valid than the testimony of other persons. The mere fact that a man is noted in his particular field of research, astronomy, physics, or mathematics should not be considered as presumptive evidence of his ability to see correctly things outside his experience. |
Joseph Rinn |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| SGU Podcast archive |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello, and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, December 5, 2012, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,
B: Hey, everybody.
S: Jay Novella,
J: Hey, guys.
S: Evan Bernstein,
E: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
S: And, we have a special guest rogue this evening, Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer. Phil, welcome back to the Skeptics' Guide.
PP: I don't think I'm a special guest rogue. This is like my eight billionth time, so
S: You're always special.
PP: But it's always nice to be here. Thank you for having me on again.
S: Rebecca is Down Under, at the Australian Skeptical Conference, and so she will not be joining us this week, so Phil is kindly sitting in. And this is a good week. This is one of those weeks where there was a ton of news items. So it was really hard to choose, you know, sometimes it's a little bit of feast or famine with the science news items. This was definitely a week when we had more to choose from than we really could, and a lot of astronomy news, so, it's great to have you with us for those.
This Day in Skepticism (1:11)
S: But, Evan, start us off with This Day in Skepticism.
E: Yup. December 8, 1953. So, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the President of the United States, when he went to the United Nations building in New York City to deliver his famous "Atoms for Peace" speech. In the address Eisenhower spelled out the necessity of repurposing existing nuclear weapons and nuclear technology for peaceful ends rather than destructive ends. And he stated that it must be humanity's goal to, and I quote "discover the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life." Very well said. And they think, there's a bit of an argument, or a debate, as to how much Albert Einstein might have influenced this speech that Dwight Eisenhower had given because they, some would argue that it's kind of similar in letter and tone to some letters that Albert Einstein did send to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940s talking about the potential of the atom and the positive potential as opposed to the negative destructive potential. The debate is ongoing about how much Einstein had sort of an influence over this particular moment and where it went from there.
S: Yeah, and there's also debate about what Eisenhower's true purpose was. Not long after that he started building up our atomic weapon reserve. Certainly didn't lead to disarming the United States and the Soviet Union in terms of their nuclear weapons.
PP: Well what happened there was that while giving his speech, actually, Eisenhower kept saying "nucular" and so everybody made fun of him, and he was so upset he came back and built more weapons.
E: These presidents, uh . . .
News Items
End of the World (3:02)
- In Panicky Russia, It’s Official: End of World Is Not Near
- 'The only place that will survive the Mayan Apocalypse': Residents of French mountain crack open End of the World wine (and offer house rental at $1,600-a-night)
S: Well that's actually an appropriate item, talking about the prospect of nuclear annihilation, because we are coming up on the end of the world!
B: About time.
S: It could be our last show; maybe we could squeeze one or two more shows in
E: Hope so.
S: before the end of the world. Some people think it's gonna be on December 21st, although there is that movie that came out that said it was going to be on December 12th, I think just to go for the 12-12-12 thing.
E: 12-12, yeah.
B: Yeah.
PP: What movie was that?
S: 12-12-12?
(laughter)
PP: No, I'm serious. Was it 2012? The movie 2012 never gave a date, though, did they?
S: No, there was a movie 12/12/12.
PP: Oh, I didn't know that.
S: Yeah, it was like a cheesy movie.
B: I mean why the hell am I even doing this podcast? I mean, I wanna, you're lucky I had nothing better to do today, 'cause, you know, if the end of the world is so close I got better stuff to do. I should anyway, but I don't, so here I am.
PP: You know, that's a good point. If anybody out there listening is scared about this, there's nothing that is more indicative of my attitude of the long, plodding life I have ahead of me as spending an hour and a half talking to you jokers instead of, you know, going to New Orleans or something and partying down.
E: What are you saying, Phil?
S: Yeah, it's interesting to think, who's freaking out? I certainly don't see a lot of it around me. I don't think there are many people who are taking this seriously to the point that they're behaving as if they really think the world's gonna blow up in a week or so. I think, those people who are taking it seriously apparently are all gathering in one town in the south of France. You guys have heard this about the,
E: Bugarach.
S: Bugarach? Wonder if they're playing baccarat there.
J: Yeah, the town is actually preventing people from congregating at this point because they're worried about way too many people showing up and of course that makes a very dangerous situation. You know, bathrooms, food, all that.
S: Yeah.
E: Well, it's a very small town. The population is 176 people. We're not talking about Paris or anything.
J: There's no McDonald's in this . . .
PP: Why there? What's going on there?
S: Well, Phil. . .
J: Phil, that's a good question!
PP: South of France is nice and all.
J: The UFOs are coming there, Phil, and they're gonna basically take care of those people that were smart enough to trek to the top of this mountain.
S: They're already there. Apparently they're parked in an alien space garage in the mountain. They will emerge on the eve of December 21st, kind of like the Great Pumpkin . . .
(laughter)
E: Or the Hale-Bopp Comet.
S: Right. Take the people who are close at hand, 'cause, why not, and save 'em.
(laughter)
PP: Well, that's ridiculous. I know that's not true because the lizard overlords told me a completely different location.
(laughter)
S: Oh, yeah. You sure it wasn't misdirection?
PP: Uh oh. They don't want me on that long flying saucer ride.
S: They wanted to make sure you were nowhere near Bugarach.
J: Did you guys expect there to be a lot more press and a lot more silly media hype and everything? I'm actually pretty happy to see that there isn't all that garbage going on that I was absolutely predicted this a year ago. I thought there was going to be a massive onslaught of ridiculous articles.
E: Do you think that Y2K had more of an impact on people, at least in this country?
S: Oh, yeah.
E: As far as the panic.
B: Absolutely. That's not to say, though, there's definitely isolated instances if lots of weirdness going on, although there's not as much media attention yet about it. I read one, some teacher in California was saying that he had a student that was saying that his planets, (his planets, ha!), his parents, were saying that they were planning on killing them and, the kids and themselves, because of this.
E: That's not cool.
B: Yeah. And there was this one guy who said he got contacted by an elderly person who said that her best friend in the whole world was her little dog and this woman asked him, when would be a good time to put the dog to sleep so that he doesn't, you know, the dog doesn't suffer when the world ends.
J: Oh, boy.
B: And I'm sure that's happened probably over and over many many thousands of times. Little stories like this that we're not even aware of yet. Just, people take this so seriously and it's just amazing that they don't think about it. They don't think about all the thousands of other times the world was supposed to end and it didn't. And they don't care what the scientists are saying.
J: Yeah, but this one, this one is real, Bob. This is the real one. Guys, on Sunday, I'm in Denver right now, visiting family and on Sunday I went to a Broncos game, which was really
E: Cool! Oh, wow.
J: cool. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was great. So I’m riding home on the train with my brother-in-law and we're sitting across from these two people, and they were very friendly, and the girl just basically said "So what do you think about the world ending?" and I'm like "Oh, my god, you don't know who you're talking to."
(laughter)
PP: Well, in six billion years . .
(laughter)
J: I said "so what do you think about it?" I just wanted her to go for it, you know. So she just launched into Nostradamus, like just went for it. "I don't really think it's gonna end but Nostradamus predicted Hitler" and she just went on this ramble. And I said "Well, look, you know, there's a lot of people out there that predicted the end of the world, and I could name a few for you, but the fact is, the Mayans, they didn't know anything special. They didn't have any magical powers. They weren't in contact with aliens. They just were building calendars and documenting things, and there's nothing strange here to worry about."
S: You know the country that is having a celebration about their lack of worry about the end of the world is Mexico.
B: Mexico, yeah.
S: 'Cause they know it's all BS! The Mayans never even pre-, it's not like they predicted the end of the world and we just don't think the prediction's gonna come true. It's a myth -- they never even made the prediction. I mean it was, it's completely a modern myth, misunderstanding of the Mayan culture and their beliefs.
PP: I think that's about right, yeah. The closest you can come here is that, yes, this particular roughly 400-year cycle—they had different cycles like we do; we have decades and centuries and millennia—and they had these different units, and this one's called a baktun, and it's three hundred ninety something years. And, you know, it's coming to an end this month. But they had bigger cycles, the piktun and these other ones, so, it's just one of things where, what do you do at the end of the year? You throw away your calendar and you buy a new one. It's the same sort of thing with them. In this case, the only thing that's of interest is that this particular cycle has a number to it that's relatively mystical to the Maya. But even that is kind of a stretch. They didn't write about, anything about this. To them it was just another thing that happened.
B: I love how they're planning on this big orgy on the 21st; well, I guess it's not an orgy, but it's this big party
E: Celebration.
B: Big festival, or whatever. But they also made a point to say that they're also planning the same thing next year. So that was very important.
E: That's perfect.
B: They said that. (he laughs)
PP: I was at Chichen Itza last year. My family and I went to Mexico and we went down to the Yucatan and it's amazing. I would highly recommend everybody go see the Temple of Kukulcan, that stepped pyramid, it's magnificent. And, yeah, I was talking to our guide about all this, and he knew all of this stuff. He had the math down perfectly. Every unit, how it divided into everything else and how many days were left over and how they did this and that and the other thing. It was great. So, you know they're getting a lot of tourism out of this, which is great for the economy.
B: Good for them.
PP: But everything else about this is total baloney.
S: It is amazing how much other made-up stuff gets woven into the mythology. Like, some people think, oh, yeah, what's going to destroy the Earth is this planet Nibiru, or Planet X, which is going to collide with the Earth, or get so close to the Earth that it's going to stop its rotation for 5.9 days. How do they come up with those details?
PP: Really? I haven't heard that one, not 5.9, I haven't heard a number. It's always just some sort of: "PLANET . . . CLOSE . . . GRAVITY . . . BLAH!"
S: Yeah, right.
B: Steve, I love that one, because if Nibiru was out there, it would be like the brightest thing in the sky right now.
S: Yeah.
B: It would be, like, in our face.
PP: Yeah, I'm wondering how many people are gonna go outside an see Jupiter right now, which is at opposition. Which is when it's opposite the sun in the sky and it's as close to the Earth as it gets. So it's pretty bright, and it's up all night. So if you go out at 9, 10 o'clock, it's up pretty high. And I wonder how many people are gonna look at that and think it's Nibiru. Steve, I have a 45-minute talk I give on the baloney astronomy involved with this nonsense. And I had to cut back on that, because my talks were always running long. The good news about that talk is that I think I've given it for the last time. I was in Arizona a couple weeks ago and gave it, and said, yeah, I'm wrapping this one up. There's no reason to give it. On the other hand, I was giving Planet X talks ten years ago. I gave one at TAM talking about Nibiru and Planet X and saying how this doesn’t exist, and even then I was saying when this comes and goes, when the date comes and goes at least, this thing's supposed to swing by the Earth and destroy us all in 2003, they're gonna recycle it. This is too good of a thing to just give up, and sure enough, a couple of years later they started weaving it into the Maya apocalypse. There's also solar flares, people talk about asteroid impacts, they're talking about Planet X. My favorite is the sun aligning with the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Because there's just enough truth, if somebody looks that up, they'll find that that's roughly true. There is a black hole, and it is in the center of the Milky Way and the sun does pass it every year in December. But the sun passes it every year in December. It's actually closest on December 19.
S: It's like saying the sun is going to reach its low point in the sky on December 21. Yeah, like it does every year.
E: Okay.
PP: Like it does every year. It's like I say, every murder is committed within two weeks of a full moon.
S: Right.
PP: Plus or minus. It's the same sort of thing. Plus if you add up the gravity of that black hole, it's like a trillionth of the sun's. So when a mosquito flies past your head, that has more gravity than that black hole does on you, it's crazy.
E: Is that what I felt?
Denver Bug UFO Update (13:27)
S: Talking about bugs, Phil. Let's move on, Bob.
PP: Oh! Segue! Nice work.
S: Thanks. Although if you point it out it takes a little bit of something away from the segue. You have been following up on the Denver bug UFO hubbub.
PP: Yeah, sadly.
S: Sadly?
B: What the heck is that?
E: Well, it's in your back yard, Phil, so you're kind of responsible for this.
PP: Yeah, it's my fault.
E: If you really think about it.
PP: I released the hounds. Well, what happened was, a local TV station did a report on what they were calling UFOs. Basically, some shadowy figure sent them a, I think they said a videotape, but it might have just been a video, I don't know, with this guy pointing out all of these things that are flying over a field in Denver. And you can see these things that are out of focus, they're making these sharp turns. They're moving in ways that planes, for instance, cannot move. Which, hey, I'm all, you know, I agree with that, what it looks like to me on the video as well. But then they started making all these claims. They went to an aviation expert, who said these are not planes, they're not helicopters. I'm looking at this and thinking, I don't think they're planes or helicopters either. I mean, they're birds and insects. Mostly insects. But you can just tell, I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, I feel like you should do an investigation and you have to be truly skeptical, you have to seek out more evidence, everything. And I'm looking at this and saying, you know, at some point, if it's quacking like an insect and flying like an insect, you know, it's an insect. The story was just pretty silly. And I emailed, after it came out, I got about a hundred emails from people. I sent a note to the reporter and said listen, there's a great way to figure this out. It's very simple. You just take two cameras, you sync 'em up, you separate by 20 feet, you aim them in the same direction, and you let 'em run. And if these things are objects in distance, miles away, they'll show up in both cameras. If they're insects five feet away, you'll see it in one camera and not the other. Boom. Done. And at least, at that point, you've established that they're far away. Well, she sent me a note back really quickly, to her credit, saying You know, I don't think my bosses are gonna let me do any follow-up on this, but if you wanna do this or you somebody who will, let me know. And I thought that was great. But I didn't have time. Well, it turns out some people did go out there, some skeptics did, the Rocky Mountain, I don't know if the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society went out there or not.
J: Yeah, they did. As a matter of fact they did a phenomenal write-up on their website about it. I gotta give these guys a lot of credit. They did some excellent skepticism and criticism on this. So go to rockymountainparanormal.com and take a look at it.
PP: Yeah, it's a good group of guys. And, well, guys, men and women. Generic guys. Yeah, so, I was kind of pleased by this and then, the fact that the reporter was willing to follow up. And then, this was four days after the segment aired, that I sent her the email and we had this exchange. A week later, eight days later, they air a second segment. And this time they go and talk to, they kind of rehash everything, then they went and talked to an entomologist, a local insect expert, and they show her looking at the video for a couple of seconds. And she says, "I can't identify these as insects. I don't think that's what they are." And I thought, how long did she really look at this video? We didn't really see much of her. We don't know what they showed her.
S: Yeah, she also seemed very unsure of herself on the video. She was like, "Um, yeah, I'm gonna have to say I don't know what these are."
PP: Right.
S: Wasn't convincing at all.
PP: And that's, that's fine. You can't say anything either way, but it's certainly enough to make me want to talk to her. So they gave her name, and it turns out she works at a local butterfly pavilion. If you look up, I think it's butterflies.org. If you live in the Denver area, it's a wonderful place. So I called her, and said "what's going on?" And she said they showed her some of the video, but they said that these things are really far away.
B: Oh, wow.
PP: And they say that in the segment as well. They're invisible to the naked eye. And I'm thinking, well you know, an insect 15 feet away is invisible to the eye, it's really hard to see it. And I talked to her about and so she was primed to think these things were far away, so that they should be in focus. But she couldn't detect any wing motion or any legs. No segmented body parts. So as far as she was concerned, what she told me was "I cannot positively identify these as insects." Which is true. They're out of focus and too close to see. And she seemed to be admitting that freely. That she just couldn't tell. But the segment ran, and I watched the segment, and I talked to my editor at Slate. Now that I'm writing for Slate Magazine, I talked to her and said "You know I wanna run this really kind of a snarky article making fun of the segment, but I feel bad, because, you know, she really did try to investigate this." But then they ran the second segment., where they talked to this entomologist for two seconds on the air. And then they spent five minutes, just about, well not five minutes, but several minutes, with this reporter talking to the two anchors, saying how she's a great investigative reporter, she's not a crackpot, she's not saying they're UFOs, but everybody's making fun of her, and I'm like, you're spending all this time on the air when you could have been showing a one-minute segment with two cameras next to each other. And it's like, this is not investigative reporting.
S: It was a total fail.
PP: Yeah, basically. And so I lost all my inhibitions to not come down pretty hard on this. Because if they want to call themselves investigative reporters and they come back and say "we're interested in the truth" and then they put this kind of fluff piece up a second time, where they don't really talk to enough people; they don't really do any investigation. You know, I think they were honestly trying to do a good job,
S: I don't.
PP: they just didn't.
S: I don't. I think you're giving them too much credit. I think she was stung by the criticism, and she was looking to do a follow-up piece that
B: Vindicated her.
S: vindicated her, exonerated her, as much as possible. She got a bug expert to say it wasn't a bug. But it was a total put-up job. As in, you know, the information that you added about them priming her that these are far away, et cetera, that they completely abused their expert, in my opinion. Got her to say something that was very misleading, that really wasn't her field of expertise; she is a bug expert, not an expert on identifying things on a video or understanding the implication of distance and focus and all those things.
E: Or giving her testimony to further their opinion.
S: I also think that she was not savvy in dealing with the media and she laid an egg on that interview is the bottom line. So it was a fail all the way around. I don't give them any credit or benefit of the doubt on this one. 'Cause the first time, you could say, all right, they're just naïve reporters, they got snookered, it was bad, but it happens. The second time, they had people telling them the answer. You and others told them, this is exactly how you resolve the issue. And they didn't do it. What they did do was cover their ass, and the doubled down on their original stupid and journalism fail, and it really made it much worse.
PP: Well, let me jump in, and mention two things. When I talked to the entomologist, she said she didn't actually talk to the reporter. So it was, it may be an intern or whatever, I don't know. But somebody else talked to her and that's the person who told her that these things were far away. Now, again, I think that there is a possibility, Steve, that you're absolutely right. But I don't know. I try not to necessarily ascribe motivation to people. It could have been a cover-your-ass situation, or it may have just been a little bit of a motivation that way. But she still thought she was doing honest reporting. Either way, though, it was wrong, and the point that you make of them not really making any sort of effort to do this right is what's galling to me. After a bunch of people told them exactly how to do it. And it wasn't that much of an effort, and they wasted all that time on the air just chatting about it when they could have been showing real stuff.
J: Well, it makes you think that if they're doing it for this, they're doing it for other things as well. Because we're skeptics and we've trained ourselves to be able to think critically and we can clearly see, wow, there's massive gaps in their logic and in their methodology. Right? This is our sweet spot. But they could report on dozens of, hundreds of other things that I have no clue about that I'm just hearing what they're saying, and I can't judge how true or false their statements are. It, to me it's scuttles her entire career. I hate to be that dramatic about it, but if she's that bad at a simple report like this, she must be horrible at everything else that she's doing.
E: The Daily Mail called her and they want to hire her.
(laughter)
PP: I would say that's true of any news source. I mean, certainly you should be skeptical of any news source, even experts. You know, I make mistakes when it comes to astronomy, it happens. But in this case, it's not really an ad hominem when somebody who is putting themselves up to be an expert in whatever field they are, an investigative reporter or whatever, and then they make some sort of egregious error, it's not an ad hominem to then trust them less the next time they say something. It's okay to bring up something like that in someone's past if they didn't deal with it well. To cast doubt on things they're saying now, at least in your head, if you're trying to weigh all the evidence, that's, I think that's perfectly legitimate.
S: Yeah, we all make mistakes. Obviously we make a point of pointing that out on this show all the time, yes. It's hard to talk about scientific topics at length without making errors or just being slightly off in how you're representing things, or, Phil, you and I know this blogging on a daily basis, it's the same keep, you run into those kind of errors all the time. The trick is how do you respond when it's pointed out to you.
PP: What are you implying, Steve? Steve says that because he sent me a correction to something I wrote the other day. And he was absolutely right.
S: No, but, you corrected it. You said, okay, yeah, this is wrong.
PP: Yeah, I made a mistake.
S: People point out my mistakes on my blog all the time.
J: There is no excuse anymore. Google exists, the internet exists. Everyone is connected, we're all wired in, we all have cell phones. She was getting contacted by Phil and probably a handful of other people.
S: When they went for a second bite of the apple, they had all the information in front of them, there was no excuse the second time around.
J: No excuse.
S: That's the bottom line.
J: Nope.
S: I do think that journalists deal with these kind of stories as fluff pieces and they give them less time and attention and so they may actually have a double standard where they hold other kinds of news stories to a higher standard than this kind. I don't find that acceptable either. But it
J: Wait, wait, wait. No, but Steve, that's still, I don't go for that either because on numerous occasions, Heidi [the reporter] says, I'm a seasoned reporter, I've been doing this for twenty years. Basically I don't make mistakes.
S: You're right, you're right. She was putting her credibility behind this story,
Inattentional Amnesia (24:46)
Curiosity Kurfuffle (33:06)
Age of the Grand Canyon (41:43)
Planetary Rings and Moon Formation (49:53)
Who's That Noisy? (57:24)
- Answer to last week: Lucy
Science or Fiction (59:43)
Item number one. 2012 saw the warmest July on record, a hurricane season tied for the 3rd most active, and an Arctic ice cap minimum smaller than in any year on record. Item number two. NASA warns about "cosmophobia" - fear of astronomy especially among children who have been lead to believe that the universe is going to kill them. And item number three. Despite the fact that there were no major consequences of the Y2K bug, minor computer system glitches were common and were estimated to cost over 2 trillion dollars worldwide.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:18:49)
When a man eminent in science tells us of something in his particular sphere, into which no fraud can intrude, and which can be verified under scientific conditions, he is entitled to a respectful hearing, but if he states that on a particular night his cow jumped over the postoffice his testimony on that point is no more valid than the testimony of other persons. The mere fact that a man is noted in his particular field of research, astronomy, physics, or mathematics should not be considered as presumptive evidence of his ability to see correctly things outside his experience.
Joseph F Rinn
Announcements (1:20:44)
References
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