SGU Episode 737
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| SGU Episode 737 |
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| August 24th 2019 |
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"Exploring the outdoors, a group enjoys a scenic bike ride together." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
“Dolphins and monkeys basically could play chess together. Those are brilliant animals.” |
- Perry DeAngelis (August 22, 1963 – August 19, 2007) |
| Links |
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| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro[edit]
Voiceover:You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, August 20th, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Hey everybody! Cara Santa Maria, Howdy! Jay Novella, Hey guys! and Evan Bernstein. Good evening, folks. How are you guys? Quite fair, quite fair.
U:Cara, you missed last week just because you didn't have internets.
US#01:Yeah, my internets were not set up in my new house yet. And it was literally set up seconds ago.
S:That was actually not internet that was set up seconds ago. That was my electricians have been here all day, setting up the car charger, installing fans. Fixing a couple of light switches and they promised they would be done on time to podcast and they were dragging their heels, but I finally got them out of the house. By cracking. Yeah. Yeah.
C:But wait, we should be celebrating because Cara's internet is like ridiculous.
S:It's so ridiculous. We have to say it's ridiculous.
C:It's ridiculous. It's a 473 minutes down. Oof.
U:473.
C:I'm at about 350. I'm at 350 right now. But your upload speed's better than mine. I'm at 24 up right now. I'm usually around 30, 35 upload. Yeah, that's high. I've never had that good of an upload speed. But this is also the highest download speed I've ever had in my life.
J:It's like, congratulations, your internet speed is super fast. You can download 4K porn. Mm-hmm. Well, I have 4K streaming now, you know?
S:I have a 4K TV, and just like regular Roku and all that stuff, they do 4K streaming now, so you really do need the download.
C:But we do upload, right? We do streaming, too.
S:My house is my studio.
C:And even though I have the business class internet connection, still the upload's only like 35. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein.
S:Like symmetrical up and down. It's true, you pay for download. Any package that's offered is always based on the download speed. They just ignore the upload speed altogether. Yeah, it's just neglected. Every now and then I check with my cable company just to see what is your current, what are you offering? And usually I could get more for less. I actually got almost doubled my internet connection and I'm paying less every month just because the packages get better over time. But yeah, I was actually paying less than I was, and I have a pretty significant upgrade.
C:And I think, all right, now maybe I'll be able to get some decent upload because it's a business class and people do streaming and stuff like that.
S:But nope, it's still ridiculously asymmetrical. What would the quality be for your typical user if, say, everyone had access to 200 upload speeds? Would that log everybody up? You just wouldn't use it. Most people just wouldn't use it. What do most people upload to the internet? Their email or their... A couple photos. Yeah, uploading photos or something like that. Yeah, it's not that much. If you're doing online backup, then upload is huge too. That's also another service. If you're backing up your stuff online, you might be putting a terabyte up there.
E:Upload is huge. I upload the show every week, right? And it used to take a long time. Now it takes a lot less time.
S:Sometimes I forget, like if I'm on the road, like I'm in a hotel somewhere uploading the show, and now I upload it, it's like 20 seconds the show is up. But then I forget, like I have to leave 20 minutes or 30 minutes to upload the show if I'm not at home. It does make a huge difference. I don't understand why you can't just have an a la carte service, like, hey, I want to have 100 up and 200 down. They never offer you 100 up. And that's the part I don't understand. It seems like it's rigid. They're giving you such a small upload because they know most people don't use it. And I don't think that your internet connection is saying, hey, the person isn't using upload right now, so I'll go move that over to download bandwidth. I think it's kind of persistent. It's my guess.
J:Come on Jay, it's a system of tubes, okay? That's all you need to know. The intertubes. So I'm going to do a five to ten year segment this week to start us off.
5-10 Years (04:42)[edit]
Solar Roads https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/a-solar-road-update/
J:So I'm going to do a five to ten year segment this week to start us off. Very cool. This one is just exactly five years ago, 2014, and it's not going to seem like it was that long ago, but it was five years. We first talked about solar freaking highways.
S:solar roads that was 2014 so there's this pretty significant update on this I know we have talked about it since but so there's now three experimental installations of solar roadways in the world that that we actually have some real-world data and what do you guys think what do you think the experience has been so far I know I know all about it it's crap All right, so there's a one kilometer road installed in France, and the experience with that has been completely horrible. So first of all, it was noisy. They actually had to lower the speed limit on the road because the surface just made a lot more noise than a conventional surface. Interesting. Okay, but that's not the worst of it, right?
J:No, no, that's not the worst of it.
S:So the worst of it is that it produced half the electricity that was promised. The original aim was 790 kilowatt hours per day, you know, each day, you know, which would illuminate between, say, 3000 and 5000 people, they said population. But it was only 50% on installation and declined by another 50% after a year, so 25% of the projected energy output. So the electricity production decreases rapidly with age, plus they weathered horribly. Thanks for joining us today. solar panels in the road would not survive long is true so essentially the analysis was that it was not cost effective the cost the amount of electricity getting out of it was not worth the insulation cost and would not be worth the maintenance cost so that was considered an abject failure there was a second one he says with pride Yeah, there was a second one installed in Idaho in the US. This has also been judged a complete failure. So, of the 25 of the 30 panels installed in this prototype road were broken. Oh! We didn't even get it down safely. That's the part that really bothered me when I read that. I was like, Wow, they can't even make these things, let alone get them to the job site and install them. They just don't work no matter how you look at it. 18 were broken on the installation and 25 were broken after the first week. A quarter of these tiles are broken. It was plagued by draining issues, poor manufacturing controls, fundamental design flaws. Yikes.
J:So, that was bad. Now you might argue, you might say that this was a problem of execution and not of concept. You might, rabbit. You might.
S:But this is the data that we have. Two attempts at installing a solar road and they were plagued by all the problems that the skeptics said that they would be. It's not a good idea to put solar panels on a road because they're not oriented to the sun. They have to withstand road traffic, including trucks and tractors and stuff. There are skid marks, and all the usual stuff that happens is going to degrade the surface, so their efficiency is going to go down. It's not the place that you want to install solar panels. However, there was a third experience that actually turned out fairly well. Oh, okay. But this was not a solar road, although the company that installed it was Solar Road, ironically. It was a solar bike path. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is in Belgium. Yeah, so they installed the solar bike path, and it actually produced more electricity than they initially anticipated, up to 93 kilowatt hours per square meter. However, the efficiency dropped, you know, to about into the 70s, which was the original sort of projection. So it's basically producing as much energy as projected. So that's not too bad, and for that amount of electricity, you would need about 130 square meters to power a typical home. A typical home uses about 10,000 kilowatt hours per year. That's like, you know, if your driveway were paved with these things, you could probably power a huge chunk of your home with it. It's a great question. Is that yeah, like we have solar farms, right? We have solar farms in places, but then it's like, that's all we can use that land for, is these kind of, or these diagonal solar panels, some of them shift with the sun, some of them don't, you know, they're oriented, so they capture the most sun, but
J:You know, I think that the Musk Tesla, you know, roof tiles is a smart idea. Sure, they're not the most efficient because they're not all facing the right way, but they are beautiful and aesthetics matter to people.
C:You know, people don't want always to have spent all this money having a gorgeous roof and then have these like big honking solar panels on top of it. I like them. I think they're really cool. Yeah, and I do too, personally, but some people don't, you know what I mean? And so I think the roof tiles were kind of a genius thing. It's like form meets function. And I think that's what these bike paths are about. How can we put them in urban areas? How can we get the energy right where it needs to be done? Yeah, I agree. And they are actually developing the technology, like the second generation panels that they developed. So first of all, they went from rigid panels to flexible panels. The flexible ones were less efficient, but they wore much better, and then they were able to improve the top surface so that they degraded less over time. So they are actually incrementing the technology. They're developing this bike path solar panel technology, and it's getting pretty good.
S:Yeah, so I think that we should look at this, and Jay, you're going to be talking next about wind turbines, but the idea here is that there is no one energy solution, right? It's not like this is the way we should be making our energy. It's we should be picking the low-hanging fruit of every type of carbon-free energy. We should be putting solar panels where they make sense, we should be building wind turbines where they make sense, having hydroelectric where it makes the most sense, geothermal where it makes the most sense, nuclear where it makes the most sense, everything. We should pick the low-hanging fruit of each type of low-carbon or zero-carbon energy. And for solar, I just, even the bike path, it's not the lowest hanging fruit for solar, right? I think, you know, once we put solar panels on all the roofs and, you know, in the places where they will be the most cost effective and most energy effective and efficient to put them, and then if we're still looking to cram some more solar panels someplace and we have the option, and as you say, Cara, of like putting it in a parking lot or in a park, you know on a bike path or a footpath or whatever and and that will you know serve a purpose sure okay if it makes economic sense that's fine but there's no particular reason to do this when there are other better options Right. That's a good point, Steve. Yeah. I mean, bottom line is that if they had the technology right, if they put these tiles in on the road and they worked great, we'd use them. They don't work. So stop pushing. Yeah, exactly. It's like let's not do another trial solar roadway. I mean, maybe another decade or so. Glad they tried, but. What's really annoying though is that when this first came out, if you just really looked at it objectively, it was kind of obvious that you were going to be having these problems.
J:And they put so much effort and money into it when it's like, you know, let's just be more efficient and focus on things, the more the low-hanging fruit, because we are not ready for solar roadways if we ever will be. Yeah, but I have no problem with them developing the technology because you never know how it might be used.
C:For example, one thing I say is I would love it if my driveway would melt all the snow and ice that collects on it by itself.
B:So if you could put in like if you could make my driveway into a solar pavement, right? And then put some batteries underneath there. And then it could light up at night or it could melt the snow and ice in the winter.
S:If it gets to the point where that's actually a reasonably cost effective option, fine. If it also then paid for itself by giving me some free electricity, OK. It probably still makes more sense to have just solar panels.
B:Yeah.
S:And then a heated driveway. Right, exactly. That may make more sense, you're right. But whatever, you have to consider all the options. It depends on how much sun does your driveway get versus how much your roof gets, how are they oriented. Or maybe you have solar panels on your roof and it's only giving you 80% of your electricity and the driveway can give you another 20%.
C:Or maybe you're going to get that second all-electric car and your electricity needs go up even further.
S:You really want to maximize the solar energy you're producing, but you're out of space while you have your driveway sitting there. Whatever. There's going to be niche applications where it makes sense, but it's not going to transform the way we generate our electricity. Yeah, let's say you wanted to wear solar panels on your face, Cara. In the future, we might need to. Solar earrings, solar nose rings. How about solar paint? Well, we're far away from that. I know. Smart material. Well, Jay, why don't you start us off with the news items by giving us an update on wind turbines.
News Item #1 - Wind Turbines (15:10)[edit]
S:Well, Jay, why don't you start us off with the news items by giving us an update on wind turbines. We've got a theme going on here? Is that it? Well, it just kind of happened that way. The solar roadway thing came up, and I told Steven I wanted to talk about some cool information that came out recently about wind farms. But check this out.
J:So the U.S.
S:Department of Energy had released a report that they put together. Where they quantify how did wind power do in 2018, like let's talk about the stats. So there's a few things I wanted to quickly summarize and clarify before I get into the math of how wind power did in 2018.
J:So, a gigawatt equals a billion watts, and a watt is a unit of power over time, if you want to think of it that way. So, as an example, you could say that a solar farm is producing a certain number of gigawatts Per hour, right? So if you say this solar farm makes one gigawatt per hour, that means that it's producing that amount of energy every hour, or at least the energy is available during that hour. So here's some interesting facts I found. So one gigawatt for one gigawatt hour can give electricity or supply electricity to 300 to 700,000 homes in the United States. I've read both of those numbers. So I think it's a variable depending on time of year, you know, air conditioning is being used and things like that. The size of the home. Yeah, exactly. Forty four percent of the power in the United States comes from coal. Thirty four percent of the U.S. power production comes from what? Nuclear. Right. Comes from those types of power plants. Thank you for saying that word for me, Steve. A typical coal... A typical coal-powered power plant produces 547 megawatt hours of power at full capacity. Think about that. One gigawatt equals 3.41 billion British thermal units, for our friends that use that as a measurement. So in order to produce one gigawatt hour of power, you need 3.125 million photovoltaic Panels, which are solar panels. Okay. And then, surprisingly, you need 412 utility scale wind turbines. Like, I have something like 20 panels on my house, you know? So that's like how much it would take to power one home. Whereas one wind turbine is powering, what, hundreds of homes? Yeah. They produce an extraordinarily larger amount of, you know, just a huge amount of energy. So wind supplies only 6.5% of the U.S. 's total electricity in 2018 with an installed capacity close to 100 gigawatts. Germany is getting 20 percent of its power from wind.
S:Denmark is over 40. Good job, Denmark. Well, they already had all those windmills in place. That's right. They already had the experience, right? So the key factor here is that 30 percent.
J:So if you're deriving 30 percent of your energy, your electricity from renewables, not just wind, but from renewables, this becomes a point where you will start to have problems with today's grids. So the fact that Denmark is pulling 40% from renewables is amazing because their grid is actually keeping up with it. Now what are we talking about here?
E:Why would a grid have a problem with over 30%?
J:It's because it's intermittent power. So if you're getting like 10, 20% from an intermittent power source, the other power sources that are consistent, like coal and gas, can make up the balance, make up the valleys. But if you're getting over 30%, the modern grids just don't have the ability to truly keep the power flowing, except of course if you're in Denmark. I'd really like to know how well it's working in Denmark, but it is a testament that we're hitting a technological ceiling on our current grid, and every grid on the planet needs to be updated. Yeah, it's not just that, Jay, but when you push the penetration of renewables, intermittent sources like solar and wind, past 30, 40 percent, you have to produce more and more overcapacity, meaning you need more capacity than you need at any one moment, which means that those wind turbines and those solar panels are going to be turned off when you're not using them. Thank you for joining us today.
S:That's fine with me. It's not a matter of being fine, it's that it gets less and less cost effective. So the cost effectiveness, and I know that's where you're heading with this news item about the cost effectiveness of wind turbines. Sure, at 6% penetration, absolutely, because they're going to be on 98% of the time.
J:At 40% penetration, they're a lot less cost effective because they're not going to be on 98% of the time. They're going to be on 80% or 60% of the time. That's why we need batteries. Exactly. Convenient ways to store this energy. We need grid storage.
S:The world is working on it. It's the hugest industry. I'm not worried about it. I've always been a fan of, Cara, did we talk about this? I remember talking to you, I think about this, where they spin up a super heavy disk, like a porcelain disk or a dense metal disk in a vacuum. So during the day, your house is collecting data, collecting energy.
J:You're not using all of it. You're not even home during the day. You're at work.
S:You're not using all this energy.
J:So your house could just be filling up. What would you call that? A dry battery? It's a physical battery. It's a battery that has to do more with inertia than it has to do with electrons. It's an inertia battery, yeah. Jay, that's really cool, but I think a common fear that people have with that is, imagine you've got this thing in your house. You've got this thing, say, in the basement, buried under the basement or wherever they would be. You've got this heavy, dense, super fast spinning thing. I mean, we're talking That's a lot of energy.
B:Yeah, but yeah, right, you would have to do something like that, which then raises the price. But I think people just have a fear of that. And it's cool. But what about other things that are like you have a special type of salt that you can heat and that will stay molten for, you know, it's fairly efficient where you're not losing a lot of heat. So you're storing heat that you can then turn into electricity and like this vat of molten salt type of thing. That's a viable The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Cara Santa Maria, We talked about the fact that the most efficient grid storage, in terms of total turnaround time, is pumped hydro. And after that, pretty much is batteries. Batteries are only getting better.
J:So all of these exotic things are fine, but they're not as efficient as just our current battery technology, let alone where we're going to be in 5, 10, 20 years. Yeah, there's no Eureka out there waiting to be discovered.
S:It's incremental advances. It's incremental advances. We need our batteries to be cheaper and out of more abundant material. Not dangerous for the environment as well. I've got a few more interesting pieces of information here. In 2018, 7.6 gigawatts of new wind capacity was added to the U.S. grid. The cost of a wind plant is now equal to or less than natural gas. Coal and gas costs of operation are likely to stay the same because we're not going to be having massive leaps in technology for coal and gas collection and burning and all that. Their mature technologies are not going anywhere.
J:That's right. But wind and solar, man, they're becoming more efficient every year dramatically. So what's happening is we're finding that wind power is dropping overall in price while we have advances in the technology, meaning that it's less to build and install and run, and the technology is collecting more energy as we advance in the technologies. Here's a cool example. In 2008, all turbines in the United States were smaller than 100 meters.
S:We're talking about the fan blades themselves.
J:By 2018, 99% were over 100 meters, averaging 116 meters. Along with that, the generators were producing more electricity, not just because the fan blades were bigger, but because the generators themselves got better. We've seen a 5% increase in power output from 2017 technology just to 2018 technology. That's in one year. Thank you for joining us today. Today, because of new materials and everything is working better, the technology is better, we can be pulling power from places that were just not useful a decade ago. That's only going to increase as this technology matures.
E:You never know the amount of improvement we're going to get, but it's going to be at least 5%.
J:It's going to be at least going up in that direction. As Magneto said to Charles Xavier, the future is ours, Charles, right? He's talking about mutants. Well, the future is renewable, without a doubt. Yeah, well, it's definitely good that it's cheaper now to put in a wind turbine than to build even a natural gas-powered plant, which natural gas has been, the price has been plummeting because of fracking, which is actually, the U.S. 's total CO2 output decreased a little bit. It's mainly because of replacing coal with natural gas. There you go. But hopefully renewables will really start coming into their own and drive the CO2 production down further.
S:Unless, of course, we retire nuclear plants and replace them with coal-fired plants. Right now, we have two more years for people to get government support in the United States for putting in renewable energy, and that's going to go away. I don't know if they're going to do something else at that point. They might extend it. But eventually, the efficiency of scale will be such that they'll be cost-effective on their own. So that's really the purpose of subsidies, is to get over that hump, you know, to where the economics favor doing those. So we're actually getting there with wind and solar.
J:So I don't know, they might not renew it just because it's not necessary anymore, you know. It's actually cost effective to put in wind and solar. All right, Cara, let me ask you a question.
S:Why is the FDA warning people not to drink industrial strength bleach?
News Item #2 - Bleach for Autism (26:35)[edit]
S:Why is the FDA warning people not to drink industrial strength bleach?
S:I mean, it's not a good idea, is it? But why now? Why do they have to? Why do they have to warn people not to drink gasoline? And maybe instead you should ask, why have they had to do it twice? Think of that more than twice. More than twice, yeah. But one FDA letter, I guess you call it, a statement that was put out in 2010. Now they've had to do another one in 2019, all about something called Miracle Mineral Solution.
C:Have you guys heard of Miracle Mineral Solution?
S:Absolutely.
C:We've talked about it on the show before. There you go. It's also been marketed as Master Mineral Supplement, Water Purification Solution, Chlorine Dioxide, the Chlorine Dioxide Protocol, and MMS, which is short for Miracle, or sorry, Master, no, yes, Miracle Mineral Solution. There's also Master Mineral Solution. They changed the names a little bit. So the FDA put out this statement and did not name any names. Luckily, our own Steven Novella did name names in his write-up of the piece. But in the FDA statement, they write about quote-unquote online treatments that are marketed towards autism? Cancer, HIV and AIDS, hepatitis, flu, and other conditions. These master or miracle mineral solutions, let's just call them MMSs, these MMSs are a solution of sodium chloride and water. And then there's either instructions for people to add citric acid in the form of like lemon juice or lime juice or sometimes they even have a little packet of like citric acid solution that you're meant to add to the sodium chloride. Well, what happens when you add citric acid to sodium chloride? You make bleach. Chlorine dioxide. Thank you very much. And then you're supposed to drink it because as they say, oh, it's an antimicrobial and an antiviral and an antibacterial. Well, yeah. If you're scrubbing your floor, your hospital surfaces, maybe. It's anti-human, too. Exactly. It's anti-human. You're right. You're both right. It's anti-life. It's anti-human. It kills things. And so you're right. This is meant for surfaces. It's not meant for human consumption. And the FDA has had to come out and say, this is false. This is dangerous. And here's the grossest part of this. And then we'll get into, like, the huckster that Steve, you wrote about on Science-Based Medicine.
E:Jim Humble. Yeah, that guy. Looks like a great guy. Here's the grossest part.
C:They label these solutions, these miracle mineral solutions, and say, you know, it's working because it causes you to vomit. So that's how you know it's working. Yeah, my weight loss plan does the same thing. That's how you know a knife is working when you bleed. You know it's working when you vomit makes it so that people who actually are starting to get the early stages of this type of sickness that can kill you, whether it's from severe dehydration, from vomiting and diarrhea, or from like acute liver failure, which is what happens sometimes, these things are going to cause you to vomit and you might not seek help right away because you actually think that this is the intended outcome of your treatment.
B:That's horrible. That's so dangerous. And so of course, this has killed people, lots of people.
C:The New York Times reported that there was there are at least seven deaths of people where there's a direct linkage to miracle mineral solution, which means that they were able to say conclusively That somebody drank this specific product and died. There have been at least 20 people affected by it but the deaths were two in 2018, one in 2017, one in 2014, 2013, 2011, and 2009. So this has been happening over and over. They also went to the Poison Control Center and figured out annual reports of exposure to non household bleach in their attempt to try and figure out like other types of exposure. And they found 226 cases in 2017, 276 cases in 2016. But then of course, they interviewed a medical toxicologist who works at the National Capital Poison Center in Washington, DC. And this toxicologist was basically saying, listen, People don't call poison control always, so these numbers are like massively underreported. Yeah, like A, they're not going to call because they think it's working because it says you should be vomiting. B, once they realize that they drank bleach because basically their pastor told them to and we'll get to that in a second, they're embarrassed and so they don't call. It's even worse than that because what these hucksters do, Cara, is they'll go to foreign countries as well and set up clinics, they call it there. They will treat people, so they call it, in places like Haiti, the Dominican Republic, you know, Mexico. Where they desperately need, yeah, medical care. Right, people are even more desperate. And who knows what kind of record keeping they do on the casualties and deaths Thank you for joining us today.
E:That he has run off to Mexico to basically escape regulation, to escape FDA authority, who knows.
C:The New York Times wrote about a guy from Spokane, Washington named Lewis or Louie, I don't know, Daniel Smith, who was found guilty by a federal jury for selling like these miracle cures. But I don't know like what his sentencing was. I just know that he was found guilty. But who knows? Okay, and all the jury convicted him of one count of conspiracy to commit multiple crimes, three counts of introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce with intent to defraud or mislead, and one count of fraudulently smuggling merchandise into the United States. They found him not guilty on one of the four misbranded drug counts. He faces a statutory maximum of 34 years, but who knows what the minimum sentence that he's going to end up with is. Unfortunately, our old friend here, Jim Humble, and maybe Steve, you can fill in some of the details on this, he happens to run a church. Genesis 2, the Church of Health and Healing. Yeah, and so because he runs a church and because he asks for donations, and because he makes it very, very clear that this is not a commercial transaction, that these are sacramental provisions that are acquired by donation only, he's basically skirting the FDA, the FTC, he's skirting any sort of, you know, legal action because he's saying, oh, I'm not selling these to people. He's trying to anyway. Yeah, exactly. He's trying to, but I think they're on to him. They've been slapping him on the wrist. And, you know, now he's in Mexico, but like, come on, people are still buying this to the extent that the FDA has been alerted enough times that they have to be like, come on, people don't drink bleach. So you know what his story is? What's his story? So Jim Humble, he's a former Scientologist, and he claims that he's a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda Galaxy. Yes, yes. Cool.
S:Hey, that checks out, Steve.
C:Yeah, it actually checks out because the Andromeda Galaxy, I looked it up once, is about 10 billion years old. So the 1 billion year old age is totally, totally plausible in that context. Yeah, it makes sense, for sure.
S:I like his photoshopped picture in front of the Andromeda Galaxy.
U:Yeah.
S:Well, I don't know about you guys, but I totally believe him. Do you? There's something about a man in a white suit. Yeah, he looks like a billion-year-old god. Totally exudes that, right?
E:So if he's a god, though, why would he need bleach to heal people? Wouldn't he be able to do that with his fingers? Are you questioning a billion-year-old god, Jay? I'm sorry. My gosh, you are arrogant, man.
C:You are arrogant. I guess I gotta rethink this one.
J:So is this, I mean, we've had this conversation so many times before where, you know, and we always end up with the same answer, which is ultimately it doesn't matter.
E:But, like, is this guy, like, not well? Or is he, like, a full-on... I mean, he's a charlatan either way, but does he truly believe this shit?
J:Right, how much of this is fraud, fool versus fraud?
C:You never know, you never know, but this sounds like a con to me. It sounds like a con to me too, for sure. Especially when you are charging people $450, I'm sorry, charging, asking donations of $450 per person. Yeah, it's a little calculating. To partake in this, that screams Huxter. But I just don't get, like, what is his, I mean, I guess his endgame is money, but like, he's killing people. Like, he's killed a few people at this point. Like, he needs to kind of change his method.
E:Yeah, if you're going to sell snake oil, come up with something benign, at least.
S:Exactly, and maybe make it taste good, something like you feel good after you take it.
C:Miracle Kool-Aid.
E:After Peter Popov was busted by Randy for scamming people with hot readings, cold readings and everything else, he turned around and started selling water, holy water or something to that effect.
C:But as far as I know, Popov hasn't poisoned anybody with his water sales. Mm-hmm.
S:Unlike this guy. Yeah, white bleach. Yeah. This is crazy.
C:It's horrible. All right, Cara, let me ask you another question. Yep.
S:Do you feed your dog grain-free dog fruit?
News Item #3 - Grain-Free Dog Food (36:42)[edit]
E:No. Good. I feed my dog a dog food. This is so ridiculous. It's a company where you like write in all their things like their weight and their age and kind of the flavor profile that they seem to go crazy for. And then if they have any sort of does he have a weak stomach or like itchy skin and stuff like that.
S:And then they like formulate dog food for him.
C:It's like a boutique.
S:Yeah. It's like, you know, because he needs small kibble because he's a little guy, but he needs elderly.
C:He needs senior formula because he's eight years old now and stuff. And then they just mail it to my house. But it has grain in it, I think. So here's another FDA notice. This one's a little bit less clear in terms of the data. The FDA is pretty confident you shouldn't be drinking bleach. There's a little signal here, a little concern.
S:We don't know what's really going on yet, but you should know about this.
C:So, there is a grain-free dog food fad going on. If any of you guys, you know, we all have pets, you walk into the Petco or whatever, there's like a ton of grain-free dog food and cat food now, right there.
S:What's going on with this? Where'd this come from? So the idea, it's part of this whole clean eating, eating natural appeal to nature, food woo that exists in the human market, just extended now to our pets. So the idea is, this is one of the justifications for it, well, dogs are basically wolves. Thank you for joining us today. So every statement in there is incorrect, in that dogs were separated from wild wolves about 15 to 40,000 years ago, and dogs are not obligate carnivores. They are omnivores. They have adapted their diet. They have adapted to basically live off the scraps of human civilization. They're not wolves, even though technically they are, but they're not in terms of their diet. So the dog food's been formulated because it's good for dogs, right? It's fine. Dogs need carbohydrates. They need plant-based food and calories as well as protein. And dog food, somebody's not just like cooking that up in their basement. There's like tons of scientists that have worked really hard to make sure that the dog food is safe, that dogs don't die on it, that it promotes health and prolongs life and keeps their joints healthy. They need your dog to do well so you keep buying their dog food. Not that there aren't problems. There have been some problems with dog food ingredients sourced from China, for example, etc.
C:And some dogs can be sensitive to some of the contents, the ingredients in your regular dog food. So, but if your dog has an allergy or just doesn't tolerate the regular dog food, you may need to go to different specialty food, but that's really an exception.
S:Most dogs do perfectly fine with regular dog food, and there's no issue. The grain-free thing is just a food fad like it is, like it's just a clean-eating food nonsense. Do you think it comes partially though from I mean, I'm trying to kind of understand the mindset and the one mindset that I could kind of understand if somebody made this argument online, and I was like, okay, we could have a conversation about this would be that like, as a society, we have chosen to subsidize corn in a way that is like not The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by
C:Yes. So like I could see from that kind of argument like maybe I don't want as much I don't want corn in my dog food or I don't want as much of it as probably it would be cost effective to put in as filler. But we have a tendency then to go like so we should be grain free. Yeah, but there's no evidence to support the notion that the regular foods are not perfectly fine. So a lot of the grain-free formulas, the thing is they're not like their 100% meat protein. They replace the grain with other plant-based carbohydrates, so like peas, lentils, and potatoes are the most common. So, the argument about the obligate carnivore, which is not true, doesn't even hold for most of the grain-free formulas.
S:They're just replacing grains with other kinds of vegetables. So this is why we're talking about this. The FDA put out a warning that there has been an increase in the reporting of dilated cardiomyopathy in ducks. DCM, right? Now, some breeds are predisposed to DCM. In fact, a friend of ours, I don't know if Larry's dog is still alive, but a friend of ours has one of the breeds that's predisposed to this, and they're in the process of dying from it right now. That's sad. It's usually the bigger dogs. They get this dilated cardiomyopathy. But there's been this huge uptick in reporting. And the question is, what is the cause of that? It could just all be a reporting bias, right? Just that people are reporting it because they're hearing about it. And once the initial warnings went out, then of course that's going to provoke a whole bunch of reporting. So we don't really know if there's been an increase, but vets are seeing more of it as well. There's also just a case series by a vet who said, yep, this is what we're seeing. We're seeing more cases of dilated cardiomyopathy. We're seeing it in dog breeds that don't normally get it. And it's not just the grain-free diets that it seems to be correlating with. It's correlating with what they call the beg diets, boutique, exotic, and grain-free. Geez, I'm seeing this people who are feeding their dogs like like venison and kangaroo. Yeah, exactly. And they just pay out the app. There's a place in LA called, no lie, there's a place called Just Food for Dogs. And it's like a chef's kitchen. And it looks like a restaurant for people. And all they sell is dog food. Right. And you go there and get like premium. You know, people are starving. Worst meal ever.
C:People want to like spend an amazing amount of money to give their dog super high quality food. You know, I'm fine with it. You know, like if they want to do it because, you know, the food is available, that's fine. It's more of just the misinformation. But yeah, it's like make sure that it's healthy at least and that your dog is getting the nutrition. This reminds me of when people tried to feed cats vegan and then their cats all went blind. Because they have to eat meat.
J:So the concern is that the grain-free formulas are not as good for the dogs as the traditional ones, generally speaking. But are they? Well, we don't know. This is what the FDA's warning is. There's this signal, right? We're getting these reports.
C:Vets are reporting this increase in dilated cardiomyopathy. It seems to correlate with these BEG diets, the boutique exotic or grain-free diets, but we don't know yet, so we need to actually do some research to see what's actually going on here.
S:So at present, it's unknown if it really is a risk or not, but the FDA put the warning out because the initial reports are coming in. But the real issue is that there's no reason to switch your dog to a grain-free diet just on the basis of thinking that it's more natural for them or it's better for them inherently. Now, some people have switched over to a grain-free diet because their dog has Allergies or just doesn't tolerate the regular formism. They're looking for something else that they can tolerate better and that's fine. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the fad of grain-free as sort of clean eating for dogs or natural appeal to nature. It's like the paleo diet for dogs basically. That is dramatically increasing recently. Again, it's like overtaken the pet food stores in my experience. And there's no theoretical basis for it. And if this risk pans out, it could be that we are causing problems, causing health problems in pets by needlessly switching to something based upon this dubious notion that dogs should be eating like wolves, which is not true. It's just simply not true. So don't believe the appeal to nature hype nonsense. You know, if your dog is tolerating regular food, then it's fine for them. There's no particular reason to switch over to some exotic diet. There's no reason to switch over to a grain-free diet if your dog is tolerating the regular food fine. And, you know, we'll probably know in a couple of years if, you know, when they do their epidemiological research, you know, if this is a real signal that we're seeing here. Right now it's just a hypothesis, really, but we shall see. All right, Bob, so terraforming Mars is back in the news.
News Item #4 - Terraforming Mars (46:23)[edit]
S:All right, Bob, so terraforming Mars is back in the news. This is an idea that won't die, but maybe it should. What do you think? It won't die. People have been talking about it for over a century, Steve, long before Musk said he wants to nuke it. So yeah, so we're reading up on some of the latest thinking of terraforming and I want to lead off with basically the idea that Mars is nasty, probably nastier than you think. You know, we always think of Mars as plan B for Earth, right? It's the go to planet that we could migrate to if things get really bad, or we make it really bad, which is more likely.
B:But Mars is Essentially, as friendly to life as the moon is, and the moon is not friendly at all either. Mars has an atmosphere almost entirely of carbon dioxide. The atmospheric density is a hundredth of Earth's super thin atmosphere. So that means that any water on the surface or trapped in the polar caps or permafrost would quickly evaporate. So think of the driest spot on Earth. The driest. Mars is a thousand times drier. And that's just hilarious because I don't know. But Jay's laughing anyway. What happened in my head when you said think of the driest place on Earth? Oh boy. Oh no. That's just way too easy. So plus, don't forget. There's Arctic temperatures at night. The winters are insanely cold and there's constant UV and cosmic radiation bombardment. And with hardly no magnetosphere at all to talk about, that's bad. And then on top of all of that, you've got a soil chemistry that essentially seems to be designed or optimized to break down organic molecules.
J:So not a great place.
B:So now if you don't want a fully engineered kind of artificial habitat to live in, you want to walk around without a spacesuit, right, which is like the dream of terraforming, right? So how feasible is that? Superficially, it seems plausible, right? Just melt the water at the poles in the permafrost, release the carbon dioxide that's in the ice caps in the crust, and then this should thicken the atmosphere enough to allow for liquid water and start the greenhouse effect, warming things up. Blue skies on Mars, right? No. If you look back to just last year, NASA did a study and really shot some huge, huge holes in that whole idea. Real briefly, this study looked at a lot of the data that we've gathered for the past two decades from rovers and spacecraft studying Mars, observing Mars, and they created essentially an inventory of Mars for things like how much CO2 is stored there, and CO2 really is the only real viable greenhouse gas that's available there. Nothing else really. Thanks for joining us. But no, that's only a 50th of what we would need to walk around without a suit. So the main bottom line is that there's just not enough material on Mars to provide even a minimal atmosphere, let alone one that's good for colonization. The material is not there. And this is with current technology. So their recommendation in the study was, you know, we can't really do it now or the near future. We're going to have to wait for some really dramatic new technologies to even make this possible and cost effective in any way. So then you start thinking, well, what other options are there besides, you know, besides these, you know, lame artificial tiny habitats? We're waiting for this future, this far future tech to terraform Mars. Is there anything else? What other options are there? And today, just today, Steve's like, check this out. So I checked out this link about an interesting idea called MAT, M A T T, which stands for Mars Terraformer Transfer. And this is from a group of people, a mysterious group of people, called the Lake Matthew Team. I couldn't find out too much about the team itself, but I wasn't focusing on the team, I was focusing on their idea. And their idea is to essentially terraform a tiny part of Mars. Their recent press release said, terraformation, that's what they call it, terraformation need not engineer an entire planetary surface. A city region is adequate for inhabitation, and Matt hits the mark. Inhabitation, okay? So their plan starts with what they call a Shepard satellite. This is a special device to steer an asteroid or other similar celestial body into the red planet, creating a huge crater, say a nine kilometer crater, and immensely heating the Martian bedrock. That's the critical part right there. Everything kind of stems from that. So the end result is essentially an energy storage system. That colonists can tap into and use for decades or centuries or possibly even longer than that. So now if you imagine the immense kinetic energy an asteroid imparts onto a planet. I mean you convert a lot of mass and a huge velocity, that translates into an amazing amount of kinetic energy. And that impact would transfer that heat, a lot of the heat that's generated, to the actual bedrock of Mars. And it's like we're talking many terajoules worth. Trillions of joules. And the result is what they call an Omaha Crater. Hopefully that's obvious to you. That's after the D-Day beachhead. The Omaha Crater could then offer what they claim is the critical resources that colonists can use to live off of, essentially. The first one, primarily, you've got water. Some of the cryosphere, which is the frozen water in a planet, the frozen water of that specific part of Mars specifically, some of that will melt and collect at the bottom. If the post-impact altitude is low enough, it would be designed Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for joining us. Depression 30 contains sub-aqueous domes for HAB and Greenhouse, and Depression 31 houses a spaceport, and 32 contains a brine reservoir. So you've got all these various areas that would be all linked together into this sort of facility in the crater itself. So, for things like heat and power then, how would that work? So, in this Omaha crater, they contend that, say it's the winter months and photovoltaics aren't working very much, Mars is farther away than the Earth, and when Mars is at its most distant, photovoltaics aren't very helpful, you could use, heat can be supplied using water pipes, using them as heat exchangers, and that's only just one option to get heat to To the people or the various areas of these facilities. For example, they have they say that a 300 meter dome would use a 10 horsepower pump or seven kilowatts, apparently. And that's all they would need to be able to transfer and keep a dome that big, hot enough for people to live in, for example. And they said that if you did not have a crater that was already kind of preheated, if you would, that you would take megawatts to heat a facility of that size. And they even talk, they go into detail about things like growing plants in the crater ultimately and using waste oxygen from some of the industries that would be in the crater and pumping that in and creating a local ozone layer to protect it and other life down there. So they kind of relate all the different things that can be done to use this crater and the heat that was imparted to it as a resource that colonists and industries can use to survive on Mars Without having to create a tiny, say a thousand cubic foot habitat, this could be something on the order of a million cubic foot habitat, much bigger than any previous proposals. And also not having to terraform the entirety of Mars, which as we know from my previous discussion is not really feasible with modern technology. So I think it's interesting. I was kind of only just scratching the surface today with my research, but I think it's something that seems interesting, seems plausible from what I could tell with the research I've done, but I definitely want to dig a little deeper and see what other people are saying about this once they really dig into the nitty-gritty details. Yeah, it definitely sounds like one of those ideas that needs to be vetted, you know, the numbers have to be checked out by physicists, etc. But I never thought of that, the idea that just smacking something really big and fast into Mars would heat, that the kinetic energy alone would heat the ground for thousands of years, they're saying. And that could be a massive, just the heat itself would be a huge resource to have on Mars. So, but yeah, the other half of the story is the consensus is pretty clear now that there are simply not enough volatiles on Mars itself to do any significant terraforming.
S:That's a big takeaway. Yeah, we'd have to import an atmosphere, basically. And the only plausible way to do that with our current technology would be to steer comets into it. And I was trying to find out, like, all right, so what would it take? How many comets would you have to steer into Mars? I heard different numbers. I heard thousands and I heard millions. Which one is it? I bet you it depends on, of course, how big those volatiles are, the comets are, and what do they actually contain. And then it's like, well, how much do we have in our solar system? There's only about 6,000 or so known comets in the solar system, but there's obviously... Oh, wait, wait, wait. You're talking about the Oort cloud? Not including the Oort cloud. There are trillions, trillions in the Oort cloud. There are 6,000 that we've discovered in the inner solar system.
B:Yeah, there's trillions in the Oort cloud.
S:It would take us a long time to get there and a long time for the comet to send the comet back into Mars. So that's not feasible anytime soon. So we're basically talking about there's thousands that are around. But asteroids probably have more water in them collectively than the comets do. And, you know, you wonder if you could, like, could we just harvest huge chunks of Ceres, you know, for example, which is basically a ball of ice and somehow get that to Mars?
B:I don't know.
S:Just sort of fling it, just fling big chunks of ice to Mars. Fling! Fling! Yeah, I don't know. So we got to do something like that or figure out some way to transport a lot of the atmosphere from Venus over to Mars. Yeah, right, yeah. There's a board game, an excellent board game, I might say. We reviewed it called Terraforming Mars. That's the name of the game. Oh, wow. Multiple award winner. It's one of the highest rated games out there, if you go to the websites. And one of the things you can do, because you're in charge of being, you're in a company in the year 2400, your job is to terraform Mars. And whoever you play a company, whoever does it to the highest efficiency is the winner. One of the things you do is, yep, you steer comets into Mars. And you get big bonus points if you're able to use your resources to do that.
E:Yeah. But the other lesson here is do not nuke Mars. That would do nothing. Yes. Elon Musk, he proposed that idea a few years ago. He's sort of bringing it up again. Don't know if he's serious. We don't even know if the guy's serious, but he tweeted about it again. Apparently, they have a t-shirt now. But clearly that would do nothing. That's not going to help. We have to crash shit into asteroids and comets. Or just throw one good-sized asteroid into it and just live off the heat.
S:Imagine if we could somehow figure out a way to get Ceres itself, which is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt. It's basically a dwarf planet. Crash that into Mars. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for joining us.
B:No matter what we do to Earth, it would be easier to fix our own environment than to try to terraform Mars.
E:No matter what, we can't mess up the Earth so much that it's still not much better than any attempt at terraforming Mars.
S:My response to that is, don't even go there. Yeah, but it's more the idea of, it'd be nice if we weren't all on one planet in case something really big smacks into the Earth. Okay, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:01:22)[edit]
S:Okay, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time. All right, last week I played this noisy. Any guesses, boys? Yeah. That is an amplified and extended version of the Darth Vader scream at the end of episode three when he's launched off the table like Frankenstein's monster.
U:Oh my God. Can I ask you this, Jay? Is it something slowed down? No. Is it something extended? Is it something sped up? No. Isn't that something you're supposed to say when someone kicks a goal in World Cup soccer? Thank you, Evan. I'm so sorry to every single person out there.
J:Just bear with me.
B:Hi Jay, this week's Noisy made me think of how you can set up two separate speakers playing the same frequency in phase and create peaks and troughs of sound, constructive and destructive interference. As you move your head or microphone through the room you find loud and quiet spots of fun physics demonstration.
J:Nicholas, that is incorrect, but it is a very astute guess for those of you who are sonically inclined. That is a very smart guess. Another listener named Scott Peterson wrote, and he says, Is this week's noise a vibrating metal plate? It reminds me of the vibrating metal disks. With small grains of sand that create the patterns, something called a shelladny plate. Thanks always. One day I will win, win. Yes, you will, Scott. Keep guessing. That one is incorrect. Another another listener guest named Visto Tutti said this week's noisy is a room test tone as used by audio technicians to find the resonant frequency of a space. That is not correct. He also called me an unbelievable, tricky bastard. Mm-hmm. You sure that was him? Yes. Okay. Why was it you? You just never know. This is another quick guest, Thomas. Ron Zinski said it sounds like the male tone of a Tibetan singing bowl. Mm-hmm. Interesting. A little similar. I'm familiar with that sound. If you haven't heard of that, look it up. A Tibetan singing bowl. It's hit with a metal mallet or stroked with a metal mallet. Yeah, yeah. They could be very pretty. I see people playing this, yeah. Jared Popowski wrote, Hi, Jay. My friend got me into SGU a few weeks ago.
E:I love the podcast and this is my first time writing in.
J:This week's noisy sounds like a trombone playing the note D, perhaps with a mute in its bell? Question mark? Judging by how long the note goes for, I feel like the trombone player, if that's what it is making the sound, might be circular breathing, a technique that allows you to breathe and play at the same time. Cheers, Jared. OK, so Jared. You are 100% correct.
S:Freakishly correct.
J:This is what Matt wrote. He said in the Peanuts cartoon, all adults were voiced by a trombonist with a harmon or plunger mute. The player would quickly manipulate the whole of the mute to get the famous wah-wah sound. My noisy is me playing a D above middle C with a harmon mute, but instead of moving my hand quickly, I'm moving very slowly. You can hear all the harmonics of the trombone build up and back down. It is completely analog. It's a completely analog sound. It hasn't been mechanically manipulated other than recording it with my crappy smartphone mic. I'm really glad you've gone full time. I've been listening since the early days, Matt Wright. And he's also a patron. He's a biomorph. Cool. Thank you so much for sending that in, Matt. For Matt, were you using circular breathing in order to play that note? And for those of you who don't know what circular breathing is, it's a technique used by people who use wind instruments to be able to play a continuous note. What they end up having to do is they have to fill their mouth with air and then close off their throat so they can, not close their throat, but close off the air in their mouth from their nasal cavity so they can inhale, get more air in, and then continue playing. I actually had to learn how to do this when I learned how to play the Hoosie Watser, you know, the didgeridoo. Steve? Yeah. Did you learn circular breathing with your didgeridoo playing? A little bit. I never really got good at it. No, it's funny. I got good at it. If you didn't know what a didgeridoo was, you would probably think that was a made-up name. Right. I know. It just totally sounds like a Hoosie Watser. It totally sounds like it. Yeah. Very cool. I have a new Noisy for this week. Now, my question for you is, how is this sound produced? How is that sound produced? Geez, what is that, the train to hell? This was sent in by Justin Fisher. Apparently Justin is, I don't know, you're going to have to email him if you want to know before next week. Now, Steve, there's a few more things. One of them is we will be appearing in Australia. Oh, yeah. No, in the picture with me. We will be in Australia.
U:We will be in New Zealand. These are conferences you're going to want to go to. Yes. Yeah.
J:You can go to the SkepticsGuide.org and go to our events page and all the details of these conferences that we will be at will be listed there for you. And man, if you're in New Zealand or Australia, please come and see us because we're totally looking forward to these conferences. We're going to have such a great time.
S:And it's a ton of hard work, but we really are looking forward to it.
J:Now, something a little bit less temporally compromised, meaning it's happening much sooner, is that our friend George Robb is having what he calls a house-type concert, and this is happening in Dedham, Massachusetts on Sunday, September 8th, which is what, like the week after Dragon Con. So he said these events are incredibly cool. George has done this. I've seen George do these types of events. It's him with a guitar and that's it. And he usually likes to take questions from the audience. And it's a lot of fun and he tells a lot of stories. Of course, it is a ton of fun. I mean, I've seen George do this dozens of times at this point and never get tired of it. I love I love all of George's songs. Well, he has enough of a repertoire that like you don't get the same show twice, you know. Yeah, and George is working on new songs too, which I'm sure he'll probably play some of his new material. So that's on Sunday, September 8th. George will be performing an intimate acoustic concert at the WYND Television Studio in Denham, Massachusetts. How intimate. He says it's intimate, Bob. You better watch out. It's only 30 minutes out of Boston. It's in South Boston, and there's a limit of 50 seats. That's it.
S:So you got to reserve your seat. That will sell out.
J:If you want to reserve a seat, you can email George directly at george at georgerob.com. And WYND TV is at 502 Sprague Street, Dedham, Massachusetts. And the show will start at 6 p.m. Cool. So, guys, we have a fun Name That Logical Fallacy.
Name That Logical Fallacy (1:08:30)[edit]
Topic: Grand Conspiracies and Fake Hair Message: I've been posting on Steve's blog in the comments section to his post about Jeffrey Epstein's death. My position has been that the banal explanation that suicides (unfortunately) happen in prisons, especially when paired with incompetent or ineffective policies or prison staff, is the most likely explanation for his death, while a grand conspiracy murder plot is unlikely based off the available evidence. As part of this discussion I referred to the news article from a while ago regarding the analysis of grand conspiracies and how fast they fall apart, and thus that we can say that successful grand conspiracies which remain concealed over time are relatively rare. Another commenter (shout out to mumadad) argued that this was an expression of the toupee fallacy; that we can't say how rare such conspiracies are because they are by definition hidden. So, any thoughts on how to untangle this? Thanks for years of stimulating, thought-provoking discussions, SGU. Ben
J:So, guys, we have a fun Name That Logical Fallacy. This one comes from a letter from Ben, and Ben writes, he heads his email to us, Grant conspiracies and fake hair.
E:What do you think those two things have in common?
J:Grant conspiracies and fake hair? He says, I've been posting on Steve's blog in the comments section to his post about Jeffrey Epstein's death.
S:My position has been that the banal explanation that suicides unfortunately happen in prisons, especially when paired with incompetent or ineffective policies or prison staff, is the most likely explanation for his death, while a grand conspiracy murder plot is unlikely based off the available evidence. As part of this discussion, I referred to the news article from a while ago regarding the analysis of grand conspiracies and how fast they fall apart. And thus, we can say that successful grand conspiracies which remain concealed over time are relatively rare. Another commenter argued that this was an expression of the toupee fallacy, that we can't say how rare such conspiracies are because they are, by definition, hidden. So any thoughts on how to untangle this? Thanks for the years of stimulating, thought-provoking discussions. Thank you, Ben. So what do you guys think about this? Is that correct? Do you think that is the toupee fallacy? And so the toupee fallacy, for those who may not know what it is, He is claiming that I always can tell when someone's wearing a toupee, right? And of course, you only know when you think you can tell that someone's wearing a toupee. Unless you systematically evaluate 100 or 200 sequential people and check if they're wearing a toupee, you don't know what your false negative rate is, right? You don't know how many toupees you missed. You also need to confirm that the people you think are wearing toupees are actually wearing toupees. So that's the toupee fallacy, because at the very least you're missing the negatives as well as not confirming the positives. So their point is, if a conspiracy is successful and remains completely hidden, we wouldn't know about it, and therefore we have no idea what the rate of successful conspiracies is. What do you think about that, guys? I don't disagree. I disagree. It's all about probability with these grand conspiracies. If you look at the odds of so many people, a certain amount of people, keeping a conspiracy, then it goes down. The longer that grand conspiracy happens and the more people that are involved. So the biggest grand conspiracies that involve lots and lots of people over many decades, like the moon landing hoax, are so highly unlikely that chances are that it
B:It's much, much more likely that it doesn't exist, that we did land on the moon, because it never could have lasted that long. So it's about probability, whereas the toupee fallacy really isn't. It's based on observation. Yeah, you're right. So they're making a category mistake here. The principle is based on probability, not observation, whereas the toupee fallacy is about observation. So if we were saying we know that successful conspiracies are rare because we never see them, that would be the toupee fallacy. But if you're saying they must be rare because it would be impossible to sustain one mathematically from just fundamental analysis of how they work, that has absolutely nothing to do with the toupee fallacy.
S:So it completely depends upon what the basis of your argument is. But it is interesting that it is true, although unrelated to our discussion, that we don't know if there are any successful conspiracies out there. Grand conspiracies, yeah. Yeah, by definition, they are successful. But they would have to be completely successful. So successful that there aren't conspiracy theories about them. And they never eventually come to light. So, but, you know, but you can sort of nibble around the edges of that claim in other ways. Are there anomalies that require explanation that we never explained, you know? But then even then, so you would have to say that, well, what if the conspirators are so successful that you're not even aware there's anything awry? Yeah, it's lurking in the background. You can't even see it. You have no means of detecting it. How could you even know its existence? That drives all conspiracy theorists, though. It's so devilishly well-planned, like the Illuminati, that you'll never be able to find a clue about them. No, but that's not true, Jay. So the format of a grand conspiracy is that the conspirators are devilishly clever on the one hand, but they're simultaneously so dumb that they completely tip their hand to the conspiracy theorists who, you know what I mean, who can see that it's really going on.
J:So they always make really stupid mistakes while simultaneously carrying off this impossible conspiracy, because otherwise the conspiracy theorists would know about it, right?
S:So that's like the flag waving in the wind, right, for the moon landing hoax, conspiracy theory. It's like, yeah, they pulled off this whole theory and then somebody opened a door and let the breeze in to blow the flag that's supposed to be on the moon. Yeah, that's what happened, Guy, you're right. But that's literally what they think. But what we're talking about is a hypothetical conspiracy that's so successful that nobody even knows that it exists or thinks about it. But that, of course, is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, right? You're saying, what if there is something that exists that's undetectable by definition? It's like, OK, well, you're right. We don't know what the rate of that is because that's unfalsifiable. We can't know by definition, but so what? You know, but we still you still have that the what the incidents could be zero, you know, or they could be happening all the time dimensional shifting aliens might be observing us right now. How would you but it's but it's also important to recognize that that's never what we're talking about right when we're talking about we're talking about conspiracy The grand conspiracy theory has a certain structure to it that is different than a hypothetical, perfect conspiracy that nobody detects. And the thing is, I'm sure that conspiracies have gone undetected.
E:The only question is how big. Three people? Sure.
S:One corporation getting away with doing something sleazy? Sure. You know, governments hiding their bad stuff? Whatever. Of course. But a grand conspiracy? Something that would require hundreds or thousands of people or multiple institutions or even international over generations, I mean, that kind of thing? No, that's inherently implausible, and the thing is eventually that would have to come to light somehow. Basically, I would bet everything I own that there is no grand conspiracy in effect. Thank you for joining us today.
B:You're asking a level of control of people that's practically impossible to contain that for nothing to leak accidentally or otherwise. Statistically, it just would not happen. I would add one caveat to that. We're assuming an open society. If you had in North Korea, if you have a totalitarian government that has that level of control, everything's a conspiracy, right?
E:I mean, the small cabal of people at the top are running everything and are hiding information from the general population. A totalitarian government.
S:So that's what it takes, though. So what most grand conspiracies essentially are saying, that we're living in a totalitarian country but don't know it. That our democracy, our freedom of the press is all an illusion, it's all part of the conspiracy. That it's actually even more totalitarian than the likes of North Korea because we don't even know it. That's how much control they have over the press. They're actually hiding the fact that it is a totalitarian government. Yeah, so again it comes around to, again, the unfalsifiable hypothesis. It's a fun thing to think about, but I really feel sorry for people who slip into that hole. It's terrifying to think that there are people that are inside of that and spending all of their time. It's a trap. It is a trap. It can be all-consuming. It's a mega-filter on your entire perception on reality. These are delusional people, I think. Functionally, yeah, like we know people and there are people absolutely who believe the world is flat.
J:What gets you to that point? It's the conspiracy thinking, right? You have to, your thinking gets turned in on itself to such a pathological degree that you could believe anything. This is part of the human condition that we have to understand and we have to work against. Otherwise, you can fall into it. It's just a flaw in how our brains process information. And yeah, but even more importantly, Evan, you mentioned The Matrix.
S:Just found out how hot off the press is Matrix 4. Matrix 4 officially a go with Keanu Reeves, Karian Moss, and Lana Wachowski. Oh my God. Just saying, kids. All right, well, we won't get into that. That's our discussion for another, for a different program altogether. Jay wraps off of Matrix 6. Oh, wait, we're out of time. All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction.
B:It's time for Science or Fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:18:47)[edit]
Theme: Mad Scientists
Item #1: Jose Delgado, a Yale physiologist, invented the stimoceiver – a radio controlled implant he placed in the brains of animals and ultimately people, to remotely control their emotions and physical movements.[5]
Item #2: Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanov successfully created a human-chimp hybrid, although the infant only lived for three weeks.[6]
Item #3: Russian physician Sergei Brukhonenko kept a decapitated dog’s head alive and awake with extracorporeal blood perfusion.[7]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Item #2 |
| Science | Item #1 |
| Science | Item #3 |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
B:It's time for Science or Fiction.
B:Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake.
J:And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.
E:We have an interesting theme this week. The theme is mad scientists.
US#01:These are three real-life mad scientists, although one is fake.
S:So two of these are real and one fake mad scientist. You'll understand. Ready? Yes. Listen to this. Jose Delgado, a Yale physiologist, invented a stim-o-ceiver, a radio-controlled implant he placed in the brains of animals and ultimately people to remotely control their emotions and physical movements. Item number two, Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanov successfully created a human-chimp hybrid, although the infant only lived for three weeks. And item number three, Russian physician Sergei Brukhanenko kept a decapitated dog's head alive and awake with extracorporeal blood perfusion. Cara, go first. Okay, I have a hunch on this, so I want to like just go with my gut, which is maybe going to screw me, but the StimoSever from a Yale physiologist, which is a radio-controlled implant that he tried in people to remotely control their emotions and physical movements, I have no idea. That's the one where I'm like, I don't know, could be. What year was this? The stim-o-seaver? The word sounds fake, which makes me think it's probably real. The one that I'm not liking is the human-chimp hybrid.
C:The one that I really am liking is the decapitated dog's head, because I know that there have been experiments with a decapitated dog's head. Where it was like blood vessels and nerves, or maybe it was just blood vessels. And like the dog was like blinking its eyes and like smacking its lips and stuff. I don't think it stayed awake for a life for a very long time, but it stayed alive after it was severed from the head like a chicken's head does. And so that one I think is science, even though I don't know if this is the guy or if I'm kind of making this up. But I think that one's science. But the one that bothers me is the human-chimp hybrid. Three weeks?! How, like, what does this even mean, a human-chimp hybrid? Like, a human and a chimp mated? Or, like, they implanted an egg with sperm from the other one? I don't think that's possible. I think it would definitely have spontaneously aborted. We have a different number of chromosomes. I just don't see it happening. I could see grafting, like, a chimp's arm onto a human, but to me that's not a human-chimp hybrid. That's cheap. So I think I'm gonna go with Ilya Ivanov being the fiction. Okay, Jay. Oh my sweet God, Steve, what have you done to us tonight? All right, I'll take them in order. Jose Delgado, of all three of these, this is the one that seems the most believable, that he implanted a stimo-ceiver. It was basically a radio-controlled shock therapy, I guess, the way I'm reading it. Some jerk-o would do that to people, okay? I have no reason to doubt that, and that's at least plausible. Now, this one about the Soviet biologist who created the human-chimp hybrid, it's a hybrid.
J:I agree with Cara, like, what are we talking? Although the infant only lived for three weeks, so you can't breed a human and a chimp, so this had to be genetic engineering, and I just don't see There's no year on this, so we don't know when this was done. I just can't possibly see how that would work. So that one is highly, highly, you know, I just, I'm not sure about that one on a huge level. And this last one, a Russian physician, Sergey, and he kept a decapitated dog's head alive in a week. Yeah, I thought I heard they did this to monkeys. Maybe I've heard about this. So it's between the human-chimp hybrid It's a hybrid. It's a hybrid, like I'm saying, or a capitated dog's head in a petri dish, like just barking away, you know, just... Petri dish. Small, big petri dish. Or a small dog. Whatever. It's in a bowl of some kind, Bob. I mean, come on. I will go with Cara. OK. It's bold. Yep. All right, Evan. Yeah, this one's really, really tough to swallow. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. And Bob. Okay, so the decapitated dog's head. Yeah, I researched head transplants.
E:Yours didn't succeed, right, Bob? The one you were working on? No, mine was good. It's never been replicated. So I remember researching it, and I came across something like this. My memory is telling me that it was done and didn't survive long, and they really couldn't, of course, Find out or figure out what was it was really experiencing.
B:But yeah, it's a nasty bit of work right there. So that one, I think I could, you know, I'm very confident about. The first one is Stimo receiver.
E:What the hell?
B:This only makes sense if you think that this was many, many decades ago that this happened, because, I mean, getting to the point where you even think Yes, I am ready to implant this to control motions and physical movements. We're so far from that at this point. Punk from Yale from many, many decades ago. So that's the only way I can make sense of that. The second one, yeah, I mean, first off, Cara was right. What kind of hybrid? You're not going to mate. And if it's some sort of transplant or I was thinking, you know, some chimp genes, but then you're not a hybrid. You're kind of a chimera, right? Is that how you pronounce that word? Mm hmm. So that one, yeah, this one is much more egregious than the other one. So I'll definitely say that I'll say that Cara, Evan, and Jay is going with Bob for this one. Because I thought of it before anybody said anything. Well, you probably thinking the same thing, but that's very confident for when Steve sweeps us. Yeah, right. So, let's take these in order. Persey Delgado, a Yale physiologist, invented the Stem-O-Sever, a radio-controlled implant he placed in the brains of animals and ultimately people to remotely control their emotions and physical movements. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is... Say it.
C:Science.
B:And Bob, he did this and it worked.
C:Bullshit.
B:Radio controlled implants.
S:Yeah, it totally worked. What was he control? I mean, I know it says to remotely control their emotions and physical movements. Yeah, but what was he actually doing? Was he making their arms jump around and stuff? Yeah, he could make them move. If he put the leads in the motor cortex, he couldn't control them like a puppet because they didn't have that exquisite control. Ah, that's what I was thinking. But he could control their physical movements. He could make them move an arm or move a leg or stop moving. In fact, he implanted one of these into a bowl.
C:This was kind of a gimmicky thing that he did. And then he got into the ring with him, and then the bull charged at him, and he hit the button on his radio controller and stopped the bull in his tracks.
S:On the stim-o-ceiver. With the stim-o-ceiver, because it stimulated and it was a receiver, because it also sent EEG information back to him. When was this done? What year? All through radio transmissions, like in the 30s. Yeah, okay. I'm still impressed that they could have pulled that off in the 30s. This was like before modern ethical standards. Yeah, you think? Before the Helsinki Accords. But this guy at the time was a legit researcher, and then he did it in human patients. He would stick electrodes in different parts of their brain. Like the thalamus and they would go through like every emotion like they would feel fear or anger or contentment or euphoria or whatever.
B:Where did this guy find people to do this?
S:He's probably already doing brain surgery on them, right? Now he really wasn't a surgeon. He was more a physiologist. He also invented an early version of what would evolve into a cardiac pacemaker. So this is along the same lines. Guys, here's a little cool thing I remember reading a while back where they had identified, doing brain surgery, they identified basically the area of the brain that mediates humor The appreciation of humor. So when they stimulated it, the person under the knife was, like, laughing at everything that happened. And she'd say stuff like, ha ha, you guys are standing there so funny. This is just so hilarious. Everything was funny. No matter what you did, no matter what you did, you were hilarious.
B:It's like the Matrix cartoon, Bob, right, where they're experimenting on people's dreams and, like, how to interface. Exactly. They're laughing and crying. Right. So the thing is, Steve, one thing I could see stimulating an area and inducing an emotion or a random movement. I mean, how many places would you need to stimulate to have to run through a suite of emotions? I mean, would you like stimulate all these areas and have them ready to go? Or would it just be like one area? Or it just seems like, oof. Yeah. So you know, it was the 30s.
S:You know what the problem was with this technology? Infection? Infection.
B:Yeah. Yeah, I think. Yeah. One washed his hands. One of the many problems. Also, did he market it as like, I'm going to cure your depression? Is that why people were willing to do it? This was research. I don't think he was on the market. He wasn't a crank. He was a legit physiologist.
S:No, but that's why I'm saying he was probably working with surgeons. That was his goal. Surgeons were already doing surgery. Yes, the goal was to develop this into a treatment for things like depression. Yes, that's correct. Seizures. Well, that's what he was saying.
C:He also did this thing where he, and he did this, you know, in a person, you know, where the, no, I'm sorry, he did this in a chimpanzee or a monkey, where he
S:Basically created a negative feedback loop so that whenever the animal got excited it would give them a negative feedback emotion and then it was able to over time they basically avoided that behavior so they just became really calm. He said, oh, we could do this kind of training to stop panic attacks or seizures or whatever. That was kind of the idea. But just the technology wasn't quite there. Oh great, let me get this straight. You're having a panic attack, and they zap you to not have the panic attack? Calm down! Yeah, okay. Yeah, that would help me a lot. All right, let's go to number two. Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanov successfully created a human-chimp hybrid, although the infant only lived for three weeks. You guys all think this one is the fiction, so let me give you a little background. This was, in fact, the area of Ilya Ivanovich's research.
J:She was trying to do this. The question is, did she succeed?
S:So first, she tried to inseminate female chimps with human sperm. And she progressed to trying to impregnate human females with male chimp sperm. Oh, OK. But she never could get it to work. Yeah, so this is the fiction. Yeah. But she tried to do it. But yeah, the whole, you know, she did research into hybridizing different species, like she did different horses and, you know, horses and zebras and things like that. But I could not get it to work between humans and chimps. And we know now because they have a different number of chromosomes. I don't know if she was aware of that at the time she was doing her research. This was 1898. I hope she wasn't. She established her laboratory. Yeah, so she was doing this after that. So 1901. When did we even find out about like chromosomes? Genes und chromosomes? When was the Mendel experiments? In the 1850s. We didn't know they were chromosomes. They were like packets of information back then. Later, not till later. Yeah, so there's no way she could have known. That's really interesting. She was smart. Worth a shot back then.
E:Let's see what happens.
C:Humans and chips are very closely related.
S:They were as close as horses and donkeys. Zebras. All right, all this means that Russian physician Sergei Brukhanenko kept a decapitated dog's head alive and awake with extracorporeal blood perfusion is science.
C:Cruel. Yeah, man.
S:Evil science.
C:You can see the video. I linked to the video in the show. Yes.
B:And there's this dog's head on a table.
S:Yeah, watch this video. You've seen the video. I don't even want to watch it. Well, it's really like it's very grainy and black and white.
C:So it doesn't look nearly as graphic as you would think.
S:It's not in 4k? Screw that. It is pretty cool though. Why a pet animal? Why couldn't it be a warthog or something? Because they were easy. Well, first of all, warthogs are not. Wait, where was this in Russia? They're under warthogs in Russia. But second of all, they were easy to get. How about a bog hug?
C:No, this is like to think that there really were mad scientists out there like doing wacky stuff like this. I mean, these are nightmares for everybody.
B:However, however.
C:This guy is credited, Brukenenko, with advances that were critical to the development of the first heart-lung machine for total body perfusion. This was serious medical research.
J:He wasn't just a mad scientist. This was serious medical research, and it did lead to technology that is important and life-saving today. So I know we could look at it and go, oh my god, it's keeping a dog's head alive. How creepy. It is kind of creepy.
S:But this guy developed real medical technology that is still relevant, still important today. If anyone used to get bypass surgery or whatever gets surgery, where you have to put the heart on a heart-lung bypass so that we can operate on it, owes their life partly to this research that we're talking about. Yeah, and hey, man, if I'm 85 or 90 and a body tran- or a head transplant would work, I'd do it. Yeah? I'd do it. Sure, better than- what's the alternative? Die? Die, yeah. Probably. Die or- die or head transplant? I'll take head transplant. I'll take die. Wait, wait, but you're the head being transplanted onto the other body. Of course, right, Bob? It's a body transplant. Yeah, see, it's old. By- by definition. Thank you for joining us today.
J:Yeah, it's like, first, let's regenerate spinal cords, then you can talk to me about a head transplant. Yeah, that's fine.
S:But hey, you know, I mean, there are scenarios where it's even being a quadriplegic is preferable. Okay. Think so? Sure, of course.
B:A quadriplegic and you can't breathe either, so you're on a ventilator. So it's a complicated question, Bob.
S:You can't be flippant about it. No, I'm dead serious. First of all, some people legitimately would rather be dead than that be their quality of life, and that's fine if that's what you choose.
B:In other words, other people would choose to be virtually locked in as long as their mind were intact. That's a very individual decision.
S:Until you're staring down life as a quadriplegic, you shouldn't be flippant about that. But also like, yeah, you're right. I'm serious. That's what my choice would be. That's what my choice would be. You really feel that way? In a heartbeat, in a heartbeat. And I feel the opposite. I feel like there's just no way but again, who knows if I would feel desperate at the time. I think it also depends on how old you are. So the question is, how well-developed is VR technology at this point? That's a very important part of our calculus. You know, just put me in front of Netflix, I'll be good for a while. Bitch, watch! How close are we to the next Star Wars movie coming out?
C:Steve, in the future, this is how corrupt and nasty TV shows are going to get. They're going to fund wacky scientists to start their own mad science lab.
S:Like a reality show?
C:A reality TV, the whole thing.
S:Right out of Running Man, you know? All right, Evan, hit us up with a quote.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:36:38)[edit]
“Dolphins and monkeys basically could play chess together. Those are brilliant animals.”
– - Perry DeAngelis (August 22, 1963 – August 19, 2007), (description of author)
S:All right, Evan, hit us up with a quote. Dolphins and monkeys basically could play chess together. Those are brilliant animals. Peri De Angelis.
J:That's right, anniversary anniversary. 12 years, 12 years. Gone 12 long years. Wow, holy crap. I know, we're starting to get to that point where he's been gone longer than I knew him. That sucks. Not quite. I still think about him every day.
E:At least my memory tells me I think about him every day as best as my recollection allows.
B:I don't want to co-op this because I want to end it on a note with Perry. So I want to come back to it.
E:And I know we're closing up the show, but I lost a good friend this week.
S:And so I wanted to make sure that just in case if anybody was listening who loved Jesse as much as I did, who remembers Jesse being the heart of their high school experience as I did, I miss you every day.
E:And, um, it was really a shock to me and to everybody else. And, um, and I'm so sorry, I couldn't be there for the funeral, everybody, but Jesse, I love you.
C:I'm sorry, Cara. This was an unexpected death. Yeah, it was very unexpected. And it was a guy, you know, I haven't seen in a very long time because he's back in Texas, but he really was the center of everything for my group in high school. He was the glue that bound us together. He was the reason we were all friends. He's, he was the influence for me for why I listen to the music that I listen to still to this day. I mean, just so many amazing memories. Yeah, there were some people, man, that just were bigger than life. Absolutely. That definitely was Perry. Perry was always the guy that had took up all the space in the room, just psychologically. In a good way. In a good way. In a good way. In a very good way. All right, guys. Thank you all for joining me this week. Sure, man. Thanks, Steve. Good work, Steve. Yeah, we're off to Dragon Con next week. The next episode up is going to be the private show that we recorded at Nexus.
S:Oh, it was fun. And then the show after that will be the live show that we're recording from Dragon Con. And that will be fun. And then we'll be back in three weeks. All right, guys. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Thanks for watching! Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info at theskepticsguide.org. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com slash skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.
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- ↑ arstechnica.com: Wind power prices now lower than the cost of natural gas
- ↑ sciencebasedmedicine.org: FDA Warns About Miracle Mineral Solution
- ↑ theness.com: Grain-Free Dog Food - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ theness.com: Nuke Mars? - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ en.wikipedia.org: José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado - Wikipedia
- ↑ www.britannica.com: Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov
- ↑ www.youtube.com: Russian Dog Head Isolation Transplant - YouTube