SGU Episode 495
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| SGU Episode 495 |
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| January 3rd 2015 |
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| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Guest |
G: George Hrab |
| Quote of the Week |
You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. |
The Fourth Doctor, "The Face of Evil" |
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| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction[edit]
- Touring Australia
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is December 7th, 2014, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...
B: Hey, everybody!
S: Rebecca Watson...
R: Hello everyone.
S: Jay Novella...
J: Wow, this is great. Thanks, guys.
S: Evan Bernstein, and we have a special guest rogue with us, George Hrab.
R: This is the best audience ever, I have to say. They are way too enthusiastic for 9am, very obedient, and terrified of the emcee of the conference. The best way an audience can be.
E: Good start.
S: So we have been touring around Down Under, as we like to say, in Australia and now New Zealand. We've been having an absolute blast in New Zealand. As you can see by the photo behind me, we visited Hobbiton earlier in the week. That's us standing in front of fricking Bag End. I mean, that's where Frodo and Bilbo lived.
R: They're behind us in the picture. We couldn't get them to the front, unfortunately.
S: So this was a huge trip for us. We have a lot of people to thank for making this possible. In the picture with us, you can see Mark Honeychurch, your esteemed leader. And also Nathan and Matt. The three of them basically drove us around the North Island. It was amazing. And of course, we have to thank Susie and Craig for helping organize the whole trip as well. So yeah, that was a picture I took at Zeeland. Jay, do you know what kind of bird that is?
J: Yeah, that's an asscrackle whipperding.
S: Close, close. That's a pied shag.
J: You didn't make that up?
S: No, that one's real. That is a pied shag.
R: Yeah, I hooked up with a clown once too.
S: Were you sitting on that one? So I asked Matt.
R: Good night, everybody.
S: I asked Matt, so does shag mean the same thing in New Zealand that it means in the UK? And he said, do you mean have six? I said, yes, have six. That's what I said.
G: Six what?
R: Six clowns.
S: So yeah, the pied shag. Beautiful though, beautiful. I mean, and also look at the photography, the detail. It's amazing.
J: This whole freaking trip. So we've done eight shows this trip and Steve has been obsessively showing his pictures.
S: Anyone know what that is? That's a cave wetter. We found it in a cave. This was when we were at Waitomo doing the glowworm tour, which is awesome, which is incredible. And we also saw the bones of a moa, which are extinct. You know what that means, Jay? It means there ain't no moa.
J: I didn't know where he was going with it.
E: Never heard that one before.
S: Thank you.
G: So Jay Jay, that's a cave wetter as opposed to you who was a bed wetter.
J: I can take it. Keep them coming.
This Day in Skepticism (3:53)[edit]
- January 3, 1888: Lick Observatory is first used
S: So this show will be going out on January 3rd, Rebecca.
R: Yeah, and on the state history, January 3rd, 1888, James Lick Observatory was used for the very first time. Have you guys heard of the Lick Observatory? No. It's near San Jose, California. And at the time it was built, it was the largest refracting telescope in the world. And also it was the first observatory, like residential observatory. So I think even today there are several families that live in the observatory grounds and work there full time, which is pretty awesome. James Lick, the guy who it was named after, was a carpenter and a piano builder, but he was super rich. And so he donated a crap load of money to get it done.
S: Thank God for super rich people.
R: Yeah, it was $700,000, which in today's, in 2014 US dollars is $22 million that he donated to build this observatory. And he was so into this idea that he died before it was built, but he had himself buried underneath where the observatory eventually was built.
E: So it's haunted, is what you're saying?
R: Yes. It's the world's first haunted refracting telescope. And it was used to discover the first moon of Jupiter that had been discovered since the first four were discovered by, who was that, Galileo?
S: Yeah, Galileo. That's why they're called the Galilean satellites.
R: Okay, you don't have to show off.
S: I'm just educating our audience.
R: So yeah, happy birthday to the James Lick Observatory.
S: Observatories are cool. I went to the Mount Wilson Observatory once, which is beautiful. It's in California. It's like 8,000, I think, or 9,000 feet up a mountain. We drove up in one day and I got profoundly dehydrated. Like by the end of the day, even though I was drinking the whole time.
R: Alcohol.
S: Well, maybe that was my mistake. No, because when you're at that altitude, especially if you're going from like sea levels up to 8,000 feet, just the air is extremely dry and you just lose water really, really fast. So I had this massive headache on the way down. But the telescope was beautiful and they skewed it for us. Yeah, they moved the telescope. It's just massive. It was gorgeous. If you have an opportunity to see an observatory, definitely go.
News Items[edit]
Alternative Therapies for Cancer (6:27)[edit]
S: As I've been asking around, both Australians and New Zealanders, it seems like probably the most significant overlap in pseudoscience and woo is in the alternative medicine area. That seems to be like the biggest issue in all of the countries. Cancer alternative medicine therapy is unfortunately increasingly common. It's being incorporated into hospitals. My hospital where I work, Yale, which is one of the preeminent universities in the US, has a department of alternative medicine in the hospital where you can get mainly benign things, but they do incorporate some Reiki, which is essentially Eastern faith healing with waving the hands around. That's basically what it is, just magic waving hand therapy. But a lot of times people who have... Now, I understand totally and to get it, you have cancer. And especially if it's terminal or if there's a high chance that you're not going to survive the cancer, that's freak out time, right? I mean, there's no question that those people are desperate. And if you are being offered options, people are telling you, oh my cousin's uncle, whatever, he tried this thing and it helped him. People are going to latch on to any hope whatsoever. Unfortunately, there's a lot of sharks in the water. There's a lot of people out there who will take advantage of desperate patients. Or there's just a lot of well-meaning cranks, people who maybe they're not con artists, who knows, but they are selling magical potions that do not work. A recent study looked at patients who were using alternative medicine for the treatment of their cancer. A lot of them, unfortunately, are not benign magical hand-waving treatments, but they're actual herbal therapies. They're herbal products. And because of the way herbs are regulated, I know it's true in New Zealand as well as in the U.S., they're sort of treated more like food than drugs. They're treated as supplements, but they're drugs. Herbs are drugs. Always it's like the take-home I want people to realize. They're drugs often with dozens, sometimes hundreds of pharmacologically active chemicals in them. We can't really regulate the dose. So you have an unknown dose of a massive combination of pharmacological agents. Sometimes what's on the label isn't even what's in the bottle. So the industry is really poorly regulated. It's often contaminated, sometimes with heavy metals, sometimes with other herbs, sometimes with herbs that are mistranslated in the Chinese. And so you're not even getting what you think you're getting for that reason. It's horrible. It really is horrible. What they found was that many of the people who were taking herbal remedies for their cancer treatment were taking herbs that were actually interfering with their chemotherapy. So they were doing a couple of things. One is that they were increasing the side effects. And the second thing they were doing was decreasing the effectiveness of the chemotherapy or decreasing the effectiveness of radiation therapy. One of the ways this happens is antioxidants. So antioxidants, biggest hype of the last 20 years in terms of supplements. Everything now has high in antioxidants this, but there's no evidence that antioxidants are good for anything. And in fact, if anything, the evidence suggests that taking large doses of antioxidants are probably harmful, which sounds crazy. How could the marketing hype be so wrong? The problem is that we evolved over millions of years, really hundreds of millions of years biochemically, and we have what we call a homeostasis, right? Any system in the body, that's one thing evolution does really well is tweak any system so that you get to an optimal balance. You don't have to invent anything new. You're just sort of tweaking the balance of different forces biologically, physiologically, biochemically in the body. If being healthier and living longer were a simple matter of having more antioxidants in your body, we would have already evolved it. Because guess what? We have powerful antioxidants in our body. Our body makes natural, powerful antioxidants. So that would have already happened. So why don't we have more antioxidants? Well, because we need the balance we have. We actually use free radicals, oxygen, the oxygen free radicals as part of our immune system. Our immune system uses oxidation to do things like kill cancer cells. And when you take large doses of antioxidants, you're actually impairing your immune system's ability to fight bacteria and fight cancer cells. It also has lots of other downstream effects that you're pushing a homeostatic system in one direction. It's not a good thing. It was naive to ever think that this was going to be the magic elixir that would make people live forever.
B: Steve, real quick, you said that we would have evolved a tweak, but what would the selective pressure be for that to happen? Because you don't really need the benefit of antioxidants to live longer when you have kids.It would only come into play and be effective later on in your life. So could you say, could you really?
S: That's not really true. I mean, certainly the hope is that, you know, with doing things like this, you'd live longer, but you'd be also just be healthier. You know, and we were living on the edge of death. I mean, prior to modern civilization and medicine and nutrition and everything, we were always living right on the verge of death. And absolutely any physiological advantage would have been powerfully selected for it. That's why we have the optimal systems that we have.
J: But also to, yeah, to Bob, countering Bob's point, I think there would be a lot of evidence at this point that antioxidants are great and highly effective.
S: Well, yes, I think we so in 1991, you could be forgiven for thinking that antioxidants were a good idea, or that maybe in disease states, the system is out of whack and you want to return it to stability. And that's still a reasonable idea. But now we have 20 plus years of research that show us that they don't do anything. And if anything, they're probably harmful. In this case, people taking antioxidants for their cancer are actually inhibiting the activity of radiation therapy and chemotherapy, because guess how they work? Part of how they kill cancer cells is through oxidation. So we file this under what's the harm, right? What's the harm? They're going to be taking some alternative medicine to feel better, to supplement or to complement or to integrate with the science-based therapy. You're actually inhibiting the medication that has a chance of actually extending your life. There's also other studies. I've reviewed the literature in preparation for this, looking for studies that compare outcomes of cancer patients using alternative medicine and not using alternative medicine. Now, most of these are not controlled. Some are prospective, but they're not randomized. So people are choosing for themselves whether or not they're using alternative medicine. So that's always a weakness in this data. But all of the studies show that people who use alternative medicine for their cancer therapy have a shorter life expectancy and have a poorer quality of life. They actually do worse. They feel worse. And some of the studies showed that patients using alternative medicine have cognitive impairment. Or they had just overall lower quality of life. And some showed no, like either there just, there wasn't a statistically significant benefit or they actually lived significantly shorter. And the most recent study from 2012, they looked at, they broke it down by modality. And interestingly, I think this is noise, but it's funny in a way, that the prayer group lived shorter. But that was the only subgroup that actually had a significantly shorter life expectancy.
J: So prayer kills.
S: Prayer kills. That's what they're trying to say. I guess you could, maybe it's a mercy killing. Who knows? I guess you could rescue the data that way. But yeah, so don't ever buy into the notion that this is all harmless. It isn't. It actually is harming people and actually reducing. The quality of life was like the one thing that they say, oh, it's not gonna make you cure your cancer, but it'll improve your quality of life. No, it's associated with a poor quality of life. That was a real surprise.
R: Sort of side note, but yesterday on our panel, Vicky said something, which I thought was something good to keep in mind, is that she doesn't call it alternative medicine. She calls it alternative health products and services. And I liked that phrase because when you use it, people know what you're talking about. So you don't have to explain. I'm talking about alternative medicine. And also, yeah, it helps shift the narrative a bit.
S: Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's been over the last 30 years, essentially a marketing battle at the proponents of what used to be health fraud. Actually, basically 40 years ago, everything we're talking about was actually labeled health fraud. Then it became alternative, then complimentary, then integrative, all just marketing spin. We've been struggling like at science-based medicine. So how do we refer it? So we often will say so-called complimentary alternative medicine, which gives you a nice acronym.
R: SCAM.
B: That's awesome.
S: Or unconventional therapies or whatever. But we don't just buy into it. Whenever I do use the alternative medicine, so we always say the so-called at least, if not try to come up with some other one. Unfortunately, traditional doesn't work. Unconventional is not exactly the right thing. Sometimes if it's unproven, we just say unproven. But yeah, you shouldn't just buy into the alternative medicine.
J: No, if you take the first letters of that, that says SCAM.
S: Yeah, that's right. Good job.
R: Drink your coffee, Jay.
J: I majored in English, so I'm good at this stuff.
Law-Schilling Twitter Kerfuffle (15:50)[edit]
S: All right, Evan, there's a bit of a Twitter kerfuffle you want to connect.
J: Oh no, what's going on here?
E: Oh, absolutely. So in the United States, we have a TV network called ESPN. I think you probably have seen it down here. They occasionally show rugby matches or cricket games on some of their channels. And then there's some real sports like baseball and football.
B: Oh, what the hell?
E: Sorry. I apologize. I apologize. I apologize. I'm sorry. I've tried watching cricket, and I really tried learning the rules. I need a lesson or something.
S: Yeah, but Evan, honestly, if you didn't grow up at baseball, my God, that's the most boring sport ever.
E: Disagree. Thank you very much.
J: Have you guys ever heard in cricket, that guy bowled the ball and the Australians couldn't win because of that? You guys ever hear that?
R: Yeah, did you guys hear about when that guy bowled the ball? Yeah?
E: Bowling's a different sport. So the folks we have up here on the screen are, to the left is Keith Law. He's a baseball analyst and a reporter in that specialty for ESPN. And to his right is Kurt Schilling, former Major League Baseball pitcher, three times World Series champion. And he actually has the best winning percentage of any pitcher in the postseason in baseball history. So he's actually quite accomplished and quite well known. So Kurt Schilling is quite an interesting fellow. He's a bit of a, what, how should I put it, a creationist. And for some unknown reason, he decided to take to Twitter recently to make some interesting statements. And I'll just read a few for you. He asks, show me one fossil anywhere in the world that is a miss. And by miss, he means a missing link. A creature in between two creatures as it evolved. It doesn't exist.
S: You mean other than Ambulocetus? Or Homo erectus? Or the thousands of other transitional fossils?
E: Here's another one.
S: Or Archaeopteryx?
E: You'll love this one. I'm sure we've all heard this before. If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
S: Oh boy, really?
E: Yeah. And here's one more.
B: Saying that should be against the law, I'm just saying. Come on.
E: Kurt also said, too bad macroevolution has been disproven about a thousand times. Every experiment to prove it has failed. And there was more. In fact, they measured the time and it was about over a span of 14 hours. He sent out Twitter after Twitter after Twitter, all this sort of creationist nonsense.
S: These are called tweets.
E: Tweets. So he started to get, of course, a lot of pushback from his listening audience and people who were paying attention to these tweets. And among them was his, well, colleague, Keith Law, who decided to share a few facts with him. And he responded in tweets the following. There are hundreds of transitional fossils on record, Kurt. And he links to the Wikipedia page, which actually lists a bunch of them. And they're actually thousands, not hundreds. But that was his point. He also said, you can't have fossils between two species if one didn't descend from the other, e.g., monkeys and humans. He's absolutely right on that. He also says, seriously, if someone says evolution is wrong because there are about fossils between monkeys and men, find a monkey and hit him with it. One person commented on that tweet, and he told him, Keith, stick to baseball. You know, that's what you do best. And Keith replied, no, I won't. Science is infinitely more important.
S: ESPN gave him a raise for saying that.
E: Yeah, yeah, a raise. They gave him some vacation time, actually. ESPN, in its infinite wisdom, suspended Keith Law from tweeting for about four days or so. Did not suspend Kurt Schilling from tweeting, but suspended Keith Law. So, unfortunately, ESPN has a history of making these kinds of terrible decisions when it comes to media and other what they deem as controversial matters. Also, I should disclose, ESPN is an affiliate of ABC Corporation, which is also owned by Disney. So, it's all part of the mouse. Big mouse, as I like to call it. And then that was it. The Twitterverse exploded on that. Basically erupted, saying this is absolutely, totally unfair. And although they hadn't announced at the time of his suspension, they did let him come back, because I think ESPN was starting to feel the pressure. All ESPN had to say in defense of their suspension of Keith is they said, it had nothing to do with Keith's tweets in regards to this matter. Yet, they didn't explain exactly what the other matter might be that they suspended him for. And there's no more follow-up on that.
J: The timing just happened to be perfect.
E: Yeah it's just...
J: What I'd like to know is, is ESPN, was their reaction because they're creationists, or someone is a creationist, or they just didn't like...
S: No, it's because they're dumb. They don't want controversy. Maybe they saw it as anti-religious, but that's ridiculous. It was so benign. All he was saying was, hey, here's a list of transitional fossils. It was ridiculous. Who knows what corporate meathead was thinking. And they got an appropriate backlash, and only then did they let him go back to Twitter. And then they tried to deny that there was a relationship, which also is just like, no one's buying it. That's ridiculous.
B: Steve, that was so over the top, though. I mean, he just posted a link. Maybe some of the top upper echelon are creationists. I mean, right? It's just so over the top, even for that. It's crazy.
E: I think it's just blatant ignorance on their part. Somebody up top there didn't know how to handle this, so decided, let's do something. Let's suspend Keith. Why they didn't suspend Kurt, I don't know. It's probably because Kurt Schilling is this superstar baseball hero, and it would look really bad public relation-wise if they suspended the three-time World Series champion, as opposed to just the baseball analyst. So maybe that was in their figuring. We don't know. We may never know, because they've stopped commenting on it. When Keith returned to tweet again, the first tweet he sent out, and here it was. Epirus si mueve.
S: Right, mueve. Yeah, so those are the allegedly, probably apocryphal, the words uttered by Galileo Galilei after he was forced to admit that the Earth is the center of the universe and does not move, but he said, and yet it does move. But that's probably apocryphal, but maybe he did say it. Who knows? Unfortunately, I mean, the sentiment is perfect. It's great. It's like, you could try to censor me, but the truth is the truth. You can't censor the truth. Unfortunately, there's something called the Galileo gambit, where cranks love to compare themselves to Galileo, because he was oppressed, and they're oppressed. Therefore, they must be brilliant geniuses, like Galileo was just ahead of their time. In fact, that phrase is used by Michael Horne. You guys remember him?
E: Oh, sure. Yeah, he's the UFO crank, who promotes the Swiss farmer, who basically has been faking a UFO encounter for the last 30, 40 years. So yeah, he's totally full on Galileo gambit.
The Deep Web (23:37)[edit]
S: Jay, tell us about the deep, deep web.
J: So I'm curious, who here has heard of the deep web?
S: Clap. How about a clap?
J: All right. So roughly half the audience. It's interesting that so many people don't know anything about the deep web. It's a very complicated thing. I'm going to give you a quick overview. But first, let me just give you some stats on the normal internet that we all know, just so we can get some perspective here. So the World Wide Web was invented in March of 1989. The first ever website was info.cern.ch, and that was published on August 6 in 1991 by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee while he was at CERN. In 2013, the web has grown more than one third. So the web is exploding in size every year. Everyone is impressed by how much more websites are up and all the internal web pages. Now, what would you think if I said that there is a hidden web that is estimated to be 500 to 5,000 times bigger than the web that we all use?
B: I don't believe it.
J: It's called the deep web. Yeah, so we've all been talking about this.
B: 500 to 5,000 times bigger?
J: Wikipedia most certainly was not my only source of information. Wikipedia actually said 4,000 to 5,000 times bigger. A lot of other websites were in the 500 times bigger. But let's just go with a low number as an estimate and marvel at that.
S: Even as big would be surprising, let alone 500 times as big, the low end of the estimate.
J: I'd have to spend a lot of time to really dig in to see. I mean, I did some browsing of this, but let me tell you what it is, and then you'll have some perspective on what's going on here. OK, so it's a portion of the worldwide web that's not indexed. So when I say indexed, search engines like Google and Yahoo literally crawl or search and read every single web page that's out there. And what they do is they catalog it. So they'll go and they'll say, OK, this word shows up on this website this many times, and it has relevancy. And then when you search for it, it's going to match your keyword against the website's keywords, whatever they deem it as its keywords. And that's how you get your results. And of course, Google is also skewing things by where you are and who you are and everything. But that web that we are seeing all the time is intensely documented. And in fact, there is even websites that keep a history of the web, which is interesting. You should take a look at that sometime. So we call that web the surface web. Now, the deep web, you can only browse it through virtually one browser called the Tor browser, T-O-R browser, or it's also known as the Onion router, because every website that's on the deep web has a .onion top-level domain, right? So .com, .net, those are the ones that we're used to.
S: How did they come up with .onion?
J: I honestly don't know why they picked it. I tried to find out more on that, of course.
R: Because there are layers.
E: Layers.
S: Because there are layers.
J: Yeah, but I don't know.
R: It could have easily been .artichoke, but.
J: Let me tell you what I couldn't find out. I couldn't find out, like, how do you get a .onion extension? Like, where do you register it? I couldn't find that out. Things like that. It's interesting.
S: You've got to see a guy in the dark.
J: Yeah, pretty much. You've got to go on and talk to a guy. So the Tor browser is built at its core, it's built to make you anonymous online. So right out of the gate, the deep web is there to protect you because of what's actually happening on the deep web, I think. Okay. The Tor browser was developed in the 90s by a U.S. naval research laboratory to make communications private. In 1997, DARPA picked it up and then they released it and made it open source. And then since then, it's just exploded. So let's say you want to navigate the deep web. So what you need to do, it's very simple. You just look up Tor browser. You can find it on hundreds of websites. You download the browser and that's it. Start searching for .onion websites and you'll find them. All right. So what's the big hubbub? All right. How big is it? We talked about that. But what's on the deep web? As you can imagine, at this point, I think you see where I'm going here. You can find everything on the deep web. I'll give you a list of things that I found searching for about an hour. I found you can hire hitmen. You can hire hackers. You can find any drug that I put in. I found websites that are willing to sell it to you, legal or illegal. You can find something called a fixer. Remember the wolf from, what's the name of the movie? Pulp Fiction. The wolf, they call him the specialist, the guy that comes in and fixes your problems. Well, you can hire the wolf on the deep web. You could get, unfortunately, you can find child pornography, counterfeit money, fake passports, driver's licenses, gun and amo, stolen credit cards, stolen electronics, banned books, and just keep going. It's all on there.
B: Is there any legal stuff on there?
J: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. There's real commerce on there as well. People are selling things. They just don't want to be tracked by their local government.
S: They don't want to pay taxes.
J: Yeah, and they're trying to avoid taxes.
E: And law enforcement can't get into this or figure out who?
J: Of course they are, yeah. I mean, I can't speak globally, but I absolutely know the FBI uses the deep web. They use it. It's a tool for them to find criminals, but it's too big. There's too much activity on there. Think about how small law enforcement actually is compared to the populace and all the things that are happening.
S: And they can't crack the anonymity of the deep web.
J: That's right.
S: As far as we know.
J: A couple of interesting things. A lot of countries that are repressed, that don't have freedom of speech, use the deep web to communicate, which is great. I think out of all the things that I found on the deep web, when you think about that, that it's a way for people to talk to each other anonymously, get information anonymously. That's a good use for it. The deep web is almost exclusively run off of bitcoins, which is awesome. Where's my friend here? We were talking about bitcoins. Yeah, you're really giving me another education on it. So if you don't know what bitcoins are, it's essentially digital money. And you can transfer it anonymously. And bitcoins is becoming very popular and very powerful. And it's no coincidence that that's the currency that they're using on the deep web.
S: Yeah, because we were talking about bitcoin previously. There's a question of, is it going to really survive? Or is it going to be a flash in the pan? If it's the currency of the deep web, it's absolutely going to survive. If it's necessary for anonymous transactions, that's where it's going to live.
J: So I wanted to know how many people use the deep web. This is a stat I couldn't find any information on. But I would just assume a lot of people have to be using it. It's just people, for some reason, don't talk about it. I mean, as soon as I started researching this, I'm talking to everybody. I think it's fascinating. And either everybody's lying to me or nobody that I know uses it. So where are the users? Maybe they're in other countries from the United States. And maybe a lot of people in the US aren't using it. I just don't know. There's not a lot of information out there. Is it dangerous to use? Absolutely. It's riddled with scams. A lot of times when you're think about it. Okay, let's say I want to hire a hacker to do something. This happens every day. Somebody wants to hire a hacker. You know, you're exposing yourself to dangerous people that may have profound skill sets. You know, hackers can be very dangerous. There are people that hack for money and do bad things with those skills. I don't have firsthand information or knowledge about this. I haven't hired a hacker yet. May happen someday. But at this point, though, I would be intimidated to hire someone that could get on my computer and do the things I'm probably going to ask them to do to somebody else. You know, transferring bitcoins to people, it's anonymous. There's no tracking. There's no like, hey, eBay, somebody scammed me type deal. Like you're basically going to a website and you're finding a wacky email address and you're sending an email saying, hey, I want you to do something horrible or whatever. You know, yes. Okay, transfer a thousand bitcoins to me and then they're gone. So I'm sure that people are getting scammed every single day on there. I interviewed somebody. I found someone that uses the deep web and I interviewed that person.
S: Was he deep throat?
J: He's my deep throat. Yeah. I said to him, what attracted you to the deep web? And he was saying, it really is the fact that it's the wild, wild west. So he thought that that was a lot of fun. And he said that it's virtually anonymous and he just feels comfortable searching on anything that he wants to. Now, I'm curious to know, I've asked a lot of people in the United States, who here feels intimidated to put in weird search terms into Google? Just like, what if you wanted to search on something? You know, you're not a bad person, but you want to know about child pornography. Would you type it into Google? I'll tell you right now, I've edited myself quite a bit over the last couple years. Just out of curiosity, I don't put in weird search terms like that. I don't. I wanted to, over Viber, we're using Viber on this trip so we could all text each other and stay in communication because we don't have cell phones while we're here. And at one point, I was going to joke to Jocelyn about a bombing at the airport. And I'm like, I'm not doing that. Right?
E: Good call.
S: That's good, Jay. Thank you for not doing that.
J: It was a really good joke too.
E: Are you the brother of Steven Novella?
J: So we're editing ourselves. Most of us are editing ourselves on Google or whatever search engine you're using. Well, he said on the deep web, he doesn't care. He says, well, I'll do anything. I'll type in anything. You know, it's encouraged, if anything. I asked him if he needs to have a handle, like a secret handle. And he said, not really. It's the anonymous nature of it is so good that the whole idea of being anonymous is not a worry anymore. You just go wherever you want. Don't even worry about it.
B: Jay, what about the prevalence of malware viruses? Is it all over that? Or is it probably similar to the surface web?
J: Yeah, I actually asked him about that. He said he didn't know. He had never, as far as he knows, he had never been infected with anything from the deep web. But I would imagine, Bob, that sure, that's out there as well.
R: Is this guy like 15? That's how I picture like most of the hackers and stuff who are hiring.
J: Actually, he was over 50.
R: Over 50?
J: Yeah.
R: Wow.
J: I asked him, like, what can you find on the deep web? He gave a similar list. He said, and I looked this up, he said that the vast majority of stuff out there is about drugs, legal and illegal drugs. And after my research, I found that they said it was like the vast majority of stuff on there is just about buying and selling drugs. And I asked him if he had done anything illegal on the web, but he refused to answer that. I asked him if he was a member of Anonymous, and he also refused to answer that question. Probably because it was fun to go, oh, I refuse to answer that.
E: All right. So in my mind, I would think that there are people out there who would want to try to crack the anonymity part of the deep web, that they're working on that. So yeah, it may be great Wild West anonymity for now, but aren't there probably people out there really trying to break that and one day, boom, it's all going to be exposed?
J: I don't think it's as easy as that. I agree. I'm sure the FBI has tools to do things like this. But you ever see a movie where they're like, all right, we got the guy's signal. We don't know where he is. And it's like goes to station one. Then it goes to station two. And they're trying to find where the guy is. That's kind of how IP hiding works. Like if you go to a proxy server, it's giving you an IP address. And then the next time you go to another page, it could issue you another IP address from a server across the planet. So it is very difficult to do that. I think you'd need top level people with really expensive software and hardware to do that successfully. I certainly, I don't think I could ever figure out how to track somebody's IP address and figure out who they are, what computer they're sitting on.
S: I wonder how much the deep web is a metaphor for just civilization, life in general. You know, you have this surface that everyone knows, but it's really the tip of a very big iceberg. And most of the stuff that's happening is hidden, anonymous and beneath the surface.
J: I just, I really do wonder like how deep does it go? What's on there? What are we missing? It's if it's, there's a lot of quote unquote freedom of speech happening on there as well. What, what cool information is out there that we could find? All right. Question I wanted to ask you guys now that I've told you what the deep web is, for those of you who have never heard of it or have never used it, who's tempted to go on and take a look now? Give me the clap, the single clap. That's quite a few.
S: Yeah.
B: Jay, question. Maybe you mentioned this. How do they know how big this is? I mean, can they spider it? Can they actually go in and assess how, how big it is?
J: I'm sure they can. I mean, I'm sure that if some, if somebody at Google wanted to use their algorithm to do it, use their software and hardware to do it, I bet you they do. I would bet anything that they are crawling it. They're just not like exposing us to it. And I'm sure Google knows how big it is as well. But you know, really, Bob, I couldn't find anything other than there's websites that have a lot of links on it. It's not like Google. It's just, oh, here's a hundred cool pages I found by some 15 year old, but I didn't find anything that you were saying.
Jet lag Pseudoscience (36:18)[edit]
S: George, you spotted this in the airport. Tell us about it.
G: We were at the airport in Sydney and everything that we do with this large group of 21 people takes about an hour and a half. So if you are looking for a pencil, it takes about an hour and a half. So we got to the airport very early. And as we were walking to the New Zealand air area section, I passed this machine, which is being shown right here, this vending machine that has a huge sign that says fight jet lag, support circulation, hydrate faster, proven ingredients. And of course, the first thing I thought was bullshit. And it turns out pretty much it is. So it's this product. It's called One Above. Oh, by the way, every other rogue walked by this device. They didn't stop at all. So I was just like, guys, guys, guys. I took seven pictures of it.
B: I was too jet lagged to notice.
G: It was too jet lagged, right? Yeah. Too, yeah, too coffee. What's the word? Never mind. Jaffna or whatever. So the product is called One Above. The number one and then the word above. And it's actually a Kiwi product. It's a New Zealand company. So I went to their, I was looking, what's interesting is on the vending machine itself, there's no information as to what is in this magic jet lag potion. There might be.
S: I think it's technically an elixir.
G: An elixir. Yeah. I don't know if like the bottles are full of smoke or something. So I went to the website and started looking around. And I just, I know I don't want to read too much of this, but this is just such a wonderful text that means nothing. It's an aerotonic beverage.
R: I'm sorry, a what?
G: An aerotonic beverage.
R: Oh, okay.
G: One of those.
R: I thought you said something ridiculous.
G: Developed specifically for flying. Yeah. One above is lightly flavored, low in calories and deeply refreshing. It delivers fast electrolyte enhanced hypotonic hydration. Another one. Hypotonic hydration.
S: Which that, by the way, that applies to everything you have ever drunk in your life.
G: Exactly.
S: Hypotonic. Because tonic, that would mean it has the exact same concentration of sodium and chloride and electrolytes as your blood, which is, would be unpalatable. Even Gatorade is nowhere near as tonic as your blood is. Gatorade is hypotonic. Sports drinks, electrolyte drinks are hypotonic. So they're just throwing out terms.
B: So they're accurate, though.
S: It's accurate, but they're just throwing out terms that are sciencey, that just sound hypotonic solution.
J: It does sound cool.
S: Yeah, but it's just like water. This is a hypotonic solution.
G: And it continues, it's a unique blend of circulation supporting polyphenol extracts like that found in red wine. It says it's got some B vitamins and some other stuff, but the main ingredient that's running the whole system here is pycnogenol, which is what they call, which is an extract of a willow bark that, in essence, thins your blood. So it's aspirin, and it's not even as effective as aspirin. What's curious is that, in essence, this is a sports drink, in essence. However, it costs, for one liter, it costs $18.50.
R: Oh my God.
E: Hey, it's a bargain.
G: But the bottle's a really cool blue bottle. They have studies, they have links to studies on the website, because you go and you sort of learn more, so you click the learn more button. And, of course, every study that they have, in essence, says water is good. That's basically the studies that they're linking to, sort of saying that one study from 2002, the effect of hydration on fluid balance during a long flight. So not this particular product, just hydration. They cite that study. There's a 1998 study, sodium chloride citrate beverages attenuate hypovolemia, which also is basically sports drinks help you stay hydrated. They link to that, but they say clinically proven ingredients. And it just continues on and on and on. So all of these studies talking about, yeah, how aspirin thins the blood, that's a study that they quote, saying that it's very good. So this pycnogenol comes from willow bark. It also comes from peanut skin, which is interesting.
S: So buy some M&M's.
R: Or the free peanuts they give you.
G: Exactly.
J: Yeah, but there's nothing saying that what they're saying is true though, right, George? Like, okay, so you have a little bit of aspirin in the water, a couple of other chemicals that are probably meaningless. It doesn't really, it's probably ineffective, other than you're just hydrating.
G: Yeah, it's as effective as taking an aspirin and drinking water while you're flying.
S: And you probably don't need the aspirin.
G: And you probably don't need the aspirin. And it costs 19 bucks for for a minimal amount. While I was looking at this stuff, I also came across, and Mark mentioned this yesterday, this no jet lag, homeopathic jet lag medicine, which is great. And the only thing that I thought was very funny about that was in its listing of how to use this no jet lag homeopathic medicine, quote unquote.
S: They have a little bit of a watch in there that they dilute.
G: Yeah, so yeah, what are you using? Yeah, they have the hands of a watch that they dilute inside this thing. No, it's daisy, wild chamomile, leopard's bane, ipecac, and club moss. That's, those are the, those are the little minute things. But they have this big warning about use this, use our no jet lag tonic or pills. Don't use melatonin, because melatonin is evil. Melatonin, the scary chemical of melatonin. Stay away from that.
R: Really?
G: Yeah, use this. I can't find the little quote where it says, yeah, don't use melatonin.
R: Because back in the day, melatonin was like the hot, hippy thing to do. Like, oh, I don't take sleeping pills. I take melatonin.
G: No jet lag has no side effects and is compatible with other medications. No shit. It has no connection with the controversial hormone melatonin. Ooh, evil.
R: Oh, a love letter.
E: Thank you.
G: Oh, this is, yes, thank you. Thank you. The, the how to complain cheat sheet. Yes, I will. I'm going to tattoo this on my chest, actually. Awesome.
J: George, hey, George.
G: Yeah?
J: I think it's important to say, too, like so let's say you buy a couple of bottles of this and you're drinking it on the airplane. Like, it's not good to take aspirin when you don't need it. Aspirin isn't something you should OD on in any way.
S: I wouldn't worry about it, though. I mean, first of all, the pycnogenol, I think it's called, is, it's not that effective. And who knows how much is in there? You know what I mean? It's not really in the form that has a good aspirin-like effect. If you want an aspirin-like effect, take friggin' aspirin.
R: And aren't there studies that show for some people taking an aspirin every day is good for something or other?
B: It's a blood thinner, isn't it?
S: Aspirin is a gentle antiplatelet agent. It does thin the blood. If you are in certain high-risk groups for strokes or heart attacks, yes, it's a preventive therapy. It's beneficial. If you aren't in a high-risk group, however, it's detrimental, actually. The risks outweigh the benefits. It was just a big study which supported that, by the way. And because it also increases the risk of bleeding. And it's always a balance between bleeding and fewer strokes and heart attacks. And you need to be in a high-enough risk group for the benefit to outweigh the risk. So just using it in a healthy population, not a good idea.
G: And again, who knows what the concentrations are, really? Because I couldn't find any direct ingredient listing on the website, let alone on the vending machine that you're walking by in a haze without coffee and you're buying this stuff. You can also buy a concentrated form that you pour into. You can bring on your carry-on. It's a smaller, like, 200-milliliter bottle which you pour into whatever drink you want. Which, again, it's just, it's nothing. It's water.
J: So, George, in your opinion, if you had to decide, are these people, do they know that this is, like, just a money-making scheme where they're trying to help people?
G: Absolutely, yeah.
J: Doesn't it just reek of, yeah, they know.
S: It's too slick. Yeah, so, I mean, you could put any crap you want in a bottle. You come up with some totally BS, science-sounding marketing copy. You link to studies that have nothing to do with your product. And people are not going to click through on the studies. And that's, it's a deliberate marketing plan. That is absolutely deliberate.
E: Speaking of nothing to do with your product, why the hell is a runner running on the runway with a jet landing or taking off? What?
S: So, since melatonin came up, I updated my literature search on melatonin. There was some initial studies showing that maybe there's an effect for melatonin for jet lag, not for shift work and not for just general improving your sleep, not for sleep disorders, but specifically for jet lag. But then, over time, the effect size decreased, which is always a red flag. As studies get better and better, the effect size decreases. And now we, and then studies show also that there was no effect. So, reviews of the literature, current, like, updated reviews of the melatonin literature for jet lag essentially say there's weak evidence, probably doesn't work, but we need bigger studies. There's really just very low-quality studies. So, essentially, they never really produced the evidence that showed that melatonin works for jet lag. Melatonin, by the way, is a hormone. It's actually the only hormone that could be sold, and not as a drug, but as a supplement. It's secreted by your pineal gland. It actually is released, its release is inhibited by light. So, this is how your brain syncs up with the day-night cycle. When it's dark out, you start to release melatonin, which helps you sleep. And when it's light out, your melatonin secretion goes down to practically nothing.
B: Steve, didn't we think at one point that the pineal gland was the seat of consciousness?
S: Yeah, that belief was out there, that pineal gland is the seat of consciousness.
J: But melatonin does help you sleep?
S: Yeah, it's part of how your brain regulates its own sleep cycle.
J: What do you think of supplementing it?
B: Jay, you don't know this? As I said, they researched the hell out of this.
J: You research it, I didn't.
B: No, I'm talking about melatonin and how it helps sleep, because you have issues sleeping. I thought you would.
J: I read conflicting information.
S: But just taking it doesn't seem to help.
J: Right, that's what I wanted to know.
G: Go to the deep web, Jay. They have tons of melatonin. It's the good stuff. It's the really good stuff.
Gender in Education (46:24)[edit]
S: All right. Rebecca, you're gonna tell us about programs that individualize teaching to boys and girls in school.
R: Yeah, I only just found out about this thanks to an article by Lisa Eliot in Slate. But, did you guys know this? There are seven hundred fifty public schools in the United States - and just to be clear, public schools are, in the US, the government-sponsored schools that every child pretty much attends unless their parents choose to pull them out and send them to private school. They pay extra for it. Or home school. So, seven hundred fifty public schools in the United States that segregate boys and girls into single-sex classrooms, based on perceived gendered differences. Like that, to me, it blew me away. Like, it's 2014, and there are seven hundred fifty schools that are segregating boys and girls based on mostly pseudoscience. So, these aren't, I've seen some studies that suggest that maybe by segregating classrooms, you can stop girls from being spoken over by boys, weirdo things like that. But in this case, this is all based on ideas like, "Before kids take a test, boys should be allowed to go out and run around and play, and girls should take yoga and relaxing sort of (snickers) exercises." I'm just picturing myself being in a school like this. I would go completely insane, and I would be miserable. There are, in Florida, Florida seems to be the place where most of these schools are. And there are people there who make their living training teachers on sex differences, which could sound like a good idea, till you realize that they're people like Michael Gurian, who has no training in neuroscience, or education. I've seen interviews with him, where he's called "Doctor." But according to his own website, he only has a Masters in Fine Arts. So I don't know where that's coming from. But he teaches these ideas that boys - here's a direct quote: "Boys come out of the womb with a form manning for non-verbal, spatial, kinesthetic activity on the right side of the brain. In the areas where girls' brains come out ready to use words. Boys' brains come out ready to move around, kick, and jump." This is complete and utter BS. Any psychological, seemingly innate sex differences that are seen in men versus women are extremely minor, and it doesn't at all support the idea of segregating the sexes, and treating as though they're two completely different species. You know, this is something that we used to do to various races, but we realized that that was a messed up thing to do, and that it ended up disadvantaging our children more than anything. So, and even, if there were any benefits to be had from segregating kids, there are more disadvantages when it comes to teaching kids how to interact with one another as though they are all humans, and not two completely different species. You know, childhood is an important time to learn how to interact with other kids. The good news is that recently, just a week or two as of this recording, the Department of Education in the United States (they have an office for civil rights), have identified this issue as a civil rights issue. And they've put out guidelines to stop schools from doing this. How effect that's going to be remains to be seen, because it seems that these are just guidelines right now, and not actual laws. But the American Civil Liberties Union has been on top of this. It's thanks to complaints mostly from them that the Department of Education has done anything at all. So, now that this issue's starting to get more attention, the hope is that we can finally start forcing our public schools to use science-based techniques for educating children.
S: Yeah, this is all part, also, I think, of a bigger industry, right? There is almost a cottage industry, it's part of the self-help industry, if you will, which is largely disconnected from the scientific evidence. There are people who figured out that the education system is a huge client, right? It's a huge organization, with lots of money. And if you can sell something to them, you can make a lot of money. So guess what? They invented a lot of bullshit to sell to schools. And this just one of them.
R: Yeah.
S: And it is completely disconnected from the scientific literature. You don't find, like, neuroscientists doing this, or people who actually have degrees, other than a degree in balogny, which is what this guy has.
R: Yeah, like do you guys have brain gym here? Do you know? Yeah.
S: Yeah, it's total nonsense.
R: Yeah, it has some really, I don't think it's in the US too much.
S: UK, I think is the center of it.
R: Yeah, and it's the idea that kids have to do these very specific exercises every day, and move around in very specific ways, which, you know, in one respect, you could say, "Well yeah. You know, kids should be able to move around, and get out some energy." But when you look at the actual things that they're doing, it's just such a load of bullocks.
S: Yeah, it's like, get the oxygen to the brain early in the morning. That kind of hand-waving stuff.
R: Yeah.
S: Your brain gets oxygen. Don't worry about it.
(Laughter)
R: Yeah, if your brain's not getting oxygen, you're gonna know.
S: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
B: Well actually, you're not gonna know anything.
(Laughter)
R: Somebody will know!
S: Yeah, the notion that people have significant differences in how they optimally learn is also just nonsense. Hasn't really been established. Like, if anyone says something like, "I'm a right-brain learner," or "a left-brained learner," right? The whole right brain / left brain thing is nonsense. It's not true. Or like, "I'm more of a visual learner," and all that. The school system sometimes will cater to that sort of thing, but the, again, maybe thirty years ago, it was a reasonable hypothesis, but now we know it's all not true!
J: Yeah, so, to clarify, because I really believed this at one point.
S: Yeah.
J: Everyone seemed to think it was the truth. But your brain is communicating with all different parts of itself at all times, right?
S: Yeah, I mean yeah. But you have this things called the corpus callosum, which is a massive cable between your two hemispheres. And you have networks that span both hemispheres. You're, yeah, it's not like there's this one little piece of the brain doing one thing. The brain's networking with itself across both hemispheres. But also, there is, you know, a science of education. There is an education literature, and it does show that, yeah, there are some techniques that work better than other techniques in terms of getting people to learn, getting them to retain information, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't show a lot of differences between people though. So you don't have to, there's maybe these mild things that are just not worth worrying about. Just getting the broad brushstrokes correct for most people has a much more massive effect. And anything that smacks of brain training is nonsense. That whole concept of brain training, to me, is just, it's like the hypotonic solution! You know, it's a term that makes something mundane and ordinary seem more exotic and sciency. You know what brain-training is? Learning! (Some laughter from audience) It's learning. You know, and the things that work for learning, like studying, that works! But there's no special, magical, game thing or technique or exercise that you can do to sort of make things happen quicker. But people always want the shortcut, right? There's the implication there that there's this science-based shortcut that we've figured out. It's magically formulated for flight, right? Or this is scientifically formulated game to train your brain. It's all nonsense!
G: Don't the games just basically train you to play the games better?
B: Yes.
S: They train you to play the game you're playing better, and maybe very closely related games. But it doesn't get beyond that. It doesn't generalize to even the type of task, let alone making you quote-unquote, "more intelligent." That clearly, has been disproved.
J: So, Rebecca is excellent at Elder Scrolls.
S: Yes.
R: And that makes me pretty much a genius everywhere.
(Laughter)
S: Right, right, right.
B: So, if you want to get smarter, learn what you want to learn-
S: Yeah, exactly!
B: -to be smarter. Learn words, read-
J: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
B: -science content.
S: The only thing I would say about that is that the evidence does suggest that learning novel things seems to have a benefit. You know, forcing your brain to make new pathways, recruit new stem cells to learn news skills and new tasks is better than doing the same over and over.
G: Novel to you, novel to you.
S: Novel to you. Novel to you. Exactly.
R: And Steve, you, this is in your realm. I remember reading studies ages ago about people who are at risk of Alzheimer's, doing crossword puzzles, and different, like, lateral thinking exercises to stave off Alzheimer's.
S: Yeah, I think the bottom line of all that is, it's better to be mentally active than inactive. It's better to be physically active than inactive. And cross train! Do different stuff. That's pretty much all of the scientific literature on that, in a nutshell.
R: That's why I do word problems while I run.
S: Right.
(Laughter)
R: It's just the way I am, you guys.
Orion Capsule Test (55:50)[edit]
S: Just very quickly, I wanted to mention that the Orion capsule launched into space a few days ago. This was, the Orion capsule is NASA's next manned capsule or personed capsule. This was an, this was an unpersoned flight. So they just, they set it up without any people in it. They just wanted to know, could they send it up into orbit and would it separate properly and when it came down, would the parachute work and would the heat shield work and everything worked. So it was a totally successful test. It brings us one step closer to using Orion to, to send people into space. And of course, NASA is selling it as their deep space capsule, even though by itself it wouldn't be, but it would be part of a system that could theoretically take people to Mars. But at the very least, it'd get people into space. Yeah.
Seeing Infrared (56:40)[edit]
S: Bob, you're going to quickly tell us about...
B: You always say that quick, be quick.
S: I wonder why.
B: All right, I'll go. So researchers have definitively shown that not only can people see infrared light, but they've also determined how this actually happens. I'm curious to see how many people here are surprised that people can see infrared light. Wait, let me do the clap thing. I want to do this. Good.
G: Don't I feel cool?
B: Yeah, it's awesome. It's a rush. So yeah, you should be surprised because you go to any textbook. It says humans can see in the visible spectrum. We can't see any other type of light. And, so yeah, it should be very, very surprising to you.
S: By definition.
B: And visible light is, it is, it's very, it's very subjective because it's, it should be like the human light, human spectrum, because it's, it's tuned just to, just to us. Aliens, of course, if they came down with like, what's, what's the visible spectrum, what are you talking about?
S: Birds could see in the ultraviolet, right?
B: So this of course has to do with the electromagnetic spectrum, which I find endlessly fascinating. It spans from the the high energy high frequency gamma rays to radio waves at the other end of the spectrum. And of course, our sweet spot is visible light between 380 and 780 nanometers. And of course, it's not a coincidence that the sun produces those frequencies in abundance and our atmosphere does not filter them. So, of course, that's why we see them. Physiologically, what's happening in sight is photoreceptors, am I going too slow? Photoreceptors, photoreceptors are in your retina, absorb a photon of light and, that starts a biochemical and electrochemical signal, which is actually the first step in, the visual transduction cascade. Isn't that a cool term? Which of course ends in seeing light, seeing, seeing colors, seeing objects. Seeing other frequencies of light would be really cool. I mean, who hasn't imagined seeing gamma rays or x-rays or something like that. But it's, maybe it's kind of obvious that we, it wouldn't be very helpful to us. I mean, what are we going to gain by seeing gamma rays? And even infrared, if we could see infrared, that would be cool, but it would, it really wouldn't work, I don't think, because your brain is like a heat engine. You'd have all these infrared radiation coming out of your head and it would really not make vision very convenient.
S: It wouldn't be like the Predator where you get to see people glowing.
G: No, like Geordie, like Geordie LaForge.
S: You'd need like new lids to filter out different frequencies with different situations.
B: Yeah, yeah, it'd have to be very specific like that. So but still, despite everything I just said, there have been hints in scientific experiments that we have seen infrared light. Scientists have, using experiments with infrared lasers, occasionally report seeing a flash of light, which should, which should not have happened. It doesn't make any sense. Why would you see any light at all? If it's a pure infrared laser. But nobody has really looked at this extensively to find out what really was going on and how could that possibly happen. So this the Washington State University researchers looked into this. They looked at the literature that described this phenomenon. They looked at the experiments and the experimental setup. And so they did their own experiments. They got rat and human retinas, and then a pure infrared laser. And they did lots of tests, lots of different frequencies, lots of different setups to determine what how could they reproduce this reliably. And they determined that if you have an extremely short pulse of infrared light, they could reliably reproduce this effect where they, you can see infrared light. So what, how does it happen? So what's happening is that for a typical photopigment in your eye, one photon would be absorbed and that would, that would start the process. But when you have really, a really dense pulse of infrared light, you have two photons impinging on this, on the photopigment, and that is activating it. So for example, if you had, if you had two 500 nanometers hitting at the same time, that would reproduce the effect of a thousand nanometer. And that's pretty much what was happening. So I mentioned this to my niece and she had a very good question. She said well, did they see a different color? And right, wouldn't that be incredible? And I said, I had a disappointer and it is disappointing that no, they're not seeing another color because basically you're just, you're taking down the infrared light from, from outside the visible spectrum into the visible spectrum. So they were seeing green light. So it's not some new color that these people are seeing and which would be impossible, I think anyway, you would need different genes. You need to code for different proteins so that you could actually see those frequencies, but maybe in the future with genetic engineering, we'll be able to pull that off. That's all I got.
G: Is it apocryphal that there are some very, very, very rarely or infrequently people born with a condition that they can see into those spectrums a little bit? Or is that apocryphal?
B: Well, actually we can see where I talked with you about this. People can see a ultraviolet light. We evolved though, I think our the lens of our eye filters it out. So if you have, if you get a new lens, people, some people do say that they can see some, some ultraviolet, which is really interesting, but there also are people that I can see in not tens of millions of colors. Yeah. Tens of millions of colors. We can see an average of what a million. So there's lots of variation there.
S: There are, there are people who have tetrachromacy. They have four cones instead of three.
B: That's awesome.
J: So they can just see more iterate, like more shades of gray in between the colors, right?
S: More, more shades of color.
Science or Fiction (1:02:07)[edit]
Item #1: In 1990 Prime Minister Mike Moore appointed an official Wizard of New Zealand, who serves to this day. Item #2: On September 19, 1893, New Zealand became the first democracy in the world to grant women the full right to vote. Item #3: When humans first arrived in New Zealand they were preyed upon by giant eagles, capable of killing a fully grown person. Item #4: New Zealand has won the most Olympic gold medals per capita.
Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.
R: I guess it's a New Zealand theme.
S: Is this a surprise to you? The theme is New Zealand. Some of these might be a little bit easier for our audience than for the panel. So please don't give them any help. And there's four items because that's the way I roll.
R: Because you hate us.
S: Because I hate you all. Okay. Item number one. In 1990, Prime Minister Mike Moore appointed an official wizard of New Zealand who serves to this day. Item number two. On September 19th, 1893, New Zealand became the first democracy in the world to grant women the full right to vote. Item number three. When humans first arrived in New Zealand, they were preyed upon by giant eagles capable of killing a fully grown person. And item number four. New Zealand has won the most Olympic gold medals per capita. We're going to start at this end, Evan, this time. Go ahead, Evan.
E: Okay. The official wizard of New Zealand. Well, there's a wizard of Oz, so there has to be a wizard of New Zealand. So I don't. In 1990, sure. Yeah. So I have no problem. Yeah. I mean some sort of ceremonial title, whatever. Let's see. 1893, first democracy in the world to grant women the full right to vote. I have no idea about that one. I really don't. Humans first arrived in New Zealand. They were preyed upon by giant eagles. Giant eagles. I mean it's a Lord of the Rings kind of trick going on here. I don't know. New Zealand has the most Olympic gold medals per capita. Yeah. So, gosh, eagles or women, right? Full right to vote. Boy, I'll say that. Giant eagles. Okay. Giant eagles, I guess. But it's going to have to be. Shoot. It's got to be granting women full right to vote. 1893, probably not the first one.
J: I think if any country is going to appoint someone an official wizard, it's got to be New Zealand. So I agree with that. The one about the right to vote. Yeah, I don't see any reason to disbelieve that. That seems perfectly cromulent. And then New Zealand's won the most Olympic gold medals per capita. That makes a lot of sense to me. So I'm going to agree. So I really don't think that giant, ridiculously huge, evil eagles were killing people ever. Yeah, but I would like to see video of it on YouTube.
S: It's in the deep web. Rebecca?
R: Yeah, I'm stuck on the eagle one. And I'm trying to remember. I know New Zealand has had some very large birds, giant moas among them. And I do think that there was, in fact, a positive, there was like a giant eagle of some sort. But I'm trying to think of when that would have been and if it was within human history. So I'm stuck between that one. Definitely, I believe that New Zealand was the first to grant women the right to vote because New Zealand's awesome like that. And I like the idea of an official wizard. I don't care if it's true or not. I just, I choose to believe it's true. So for me, it's between the eagle just because of the timing with humans and gold medals per capita. There are very few people here compared to, say, sheep. But have they won a lot of gold medals to make up for other countries that dominate? I'm going to spread it out a bit. And I'm going to say the gold medals per capita is the fiction.
S: Okay, Bob.
B: Yeah, you guys made a lot of great points. A wizard, that's a no brainer, which makes me suspect, though, because he knows we would want that to be true. So the vote in 1893, sure. I mean, I guess that makes sense. It doesn't sound too unreasonable. The Olympic medals per capita, what's your population? Four, was it four million?
S: No kibitzing.
J: What?
B: I'm just, okay.
E: 12 billion, Bob, 12 billion.
B: I heard it's four million.
R: Well, there's like 150 people here, so.
B: No, we've talked about it. I know it's relatively low. Jay and I were talking about New Zealand would be a great place to go during the zombie apocalypse because of your low population density. So we've talked about that. So, yeah, I could.
G: They actually talked about that. This was about 45 minutes in the car.
E: For hours.
J: Also you need to grow your own food and you can grow food pretty much anywhere.
G: And there's sheep everywhere.
B: So, yeah, of course. The eagle one.
G: Are we there yet?
B: The eagle one, I'm very suspect of. First off, he's calling it an eagle. And if it was a giant bird, I would, I would buy that. But specifically an eagle. I think Steve wants to wow us with his extraordinary bird knowledge. So that's why that one is fiction.
S: Okay. And George.
G: Man, these are good points all around. This is, yeah. Okay. I think, I think, I know, I know the second one is true. I mean, unless the date is off by six months or something, which then we'd have to kill you because it's just, that would be annoying. But I know that's true because there's actually crossing signals that have, I guess I shouldn't say this, but, but I shouldn't ask you.
R: They all know.
G: They all know. Yeah. There's a crossing signal that has the woman who had, who, the suffragette who promoted the first voting. So that's the crossing signal. It's a woman crossing the street. Yeah. Awesome. Anyway, so that's two. True. Eagle is too obvious to be fake. So that's true. New Zealand with the population thing. I'm saying that the prime minister with the wizard, not 1990 because Lord of the Rings got popular around 2000. I think that's the trick is that that's too early a time for the official wizard. It was like the movies came out and they said, oh crap, we need a wizard. That's when they did. So it's more like 2001, 2003, they decided to do the official wizard who still is here and greets you at the airport with the the, I'm saying the first one's the fiction.
S: All right. So George said, said wizard, Bob.
B: Can I change mine to wizard?
S: No.
R: Bob said the eagles. I said the medals, we're all spread out. And then Evan's wrong.
S: Okay. So we'll do the single clap thing. So who thinks that the national wizard of New Zealand is fiction? Who thinks that first to grant women the vote is fiction.
E: I will win all by myself. It was September 18th.
S: Who thinks that the giant eagle is fiction? And who thinks that the gold medals are fiction?
B: Oh boy.
E: That one's looking good. I think gold medal is looking good.
G: Damn. I'm like, oh, for five for this trip.
J: All right. Hit it. Hit it. Let's do it.
R: They might not know about their official wizard.
S: So let's start with number two, since I think the audience was pretty definitive. New Zealand was the first country to grant women the vote. Congratulations.
E: Well done.
S: Sorry, Evan.
R: Congratulations on doing that.
G: So yeah, who, who, who is the woman on the, on the crossing signal? What's her? Kate Shepard.
R: She's also on the money.
G: Also on the money. Nice.
R: That's why I recommended Jay choose her for a quote. I was ignored.
S: New Zealand is very progressive apparently, and they beat everyone to the punch. So great. Congratulations. Let's go to, let's go, we'll go to number one, the wizard. In 1990, prime minister, Mike Moore appointed an official wizard of New Zealand who serves to this day. A little few people in the audience thought this one was fiction. George thinks this one is fiction and this one is science. Sorry, George. Nothing to do with Lord of the Rings. This has nothing to do with Lord of the Rings.
R: They just like wizards.
G: Everything here has to do with Lord of the Rings.
S: So I'm going to actually get my notes so I can actually remember names and stuff.
J: I'll tell you, I remember. They also appointed a ranger. And a rogue.
E: And a dwarf.
R: And they're the official protectors of New Zealand.
J: And a healer. And they have a, that's a party. And they went on adventures. So Ian Blackenberry Channel, born on December 4th, 1932.
G: Damn it.
J: So he was, yes, graduated from University of Leeds with a double honors degree in psychology and sociology. And during, I guess, the heyday of the 60s, he was essentially maneuvered out of his university position for political reasons as he tells the story. But he wanted to still have a positive impact on his university and then on society in general. And he came up with this idea of being a wizard as a way of enhancing the culture and society. And so he just created this idea, this notion of himself as a wizard. Because he couldn't do it as an official position. So he just became like the unofficial wizard of the university. And then 1990, the official wizard of New Zealand. So you guys have a wizard.
R: Congratulations. Wizards still don't have the right to vote.
J: Since you run the SGU, can I be the official wizard of the SGU?
S: You want to be the official wizard of the SGU? Can you cast spells?
J: I will make it happen at some point.
S: Cast a spell for me and you got it. All right. Let's go on to number three. When humans first arrived in New Zealand, they were preyed upon by giant eagles capable of killing a fully grown person. Bob and Jay think that one is the fiction. A lot of the audience thought that one was the fiction. And that one is science.
E: Capable, capable.
R: That's right.
B: Eagle, seriously?
S: The Haast's eagle. Thank you. Somebody in the audience said it. Yep.
G: We have one backstage.
J: How big were they? How awesome were these eagles?
S: They weighed up to 15 kilograms. They were huge. They preyed upon moa. So they were big enough to take down and eat a moa. When the Maori came to the island, they also preyed upon the moa because there's these giant walking turkeys who don't have any fear. There's just like food walking around the island.
R: They can disembowel you, though. They're not jerks.
S: Apparently, they had no problem. And they hunted the moa to extinction. And since that's what the Haast's eagle fed upon, they quickly went extinct as well because their food supply was gone.
J: Do you know what you call a moa that likes to walk around in the low grass?
E: Lawn moa.
J: Lawn moa. I'll be here all day.
R: Unfortunately.
S: And there are Maori legends of giant eagles killing adult people. So there you go.
R: OK. So they swooped in. They grabbed them by the... It's like the movie. They pick them up and they drop them to their death.
S: Something like that. Yes, that's right. But it was people instead of goblins.
'J: And they have it on video?
S: No video, unfortunately.
J: And these eagles are dead now, right?
S: Yes, they're extinct.
R: You don't have to worry about it.
E: That sucks.
S: And the last one, New Zealand has won the most Olympic gold medals per capita. That one is the fiction. But New Zealand actually does pretty well. They're ranked... So some references I read said that they were ranked seventh per capita. Others said they were ranked eighth per capita. So take your pick, seven or eight, not first. They have 42 gold medals. The first three are Finland, Hungary, and Sweden. Some people like to track the gold medals or Olympic medals in general per capita because they think it's not fair. You have a country of 300 million people. Of course, you're going to have... You have a larger pool, a population pool. But it's really tricky to calculate gold medals per capita because how many... What are you counting, right? So for example, do you count the population at each moment they won the gold medal? Like each year they won the gold medal? Or do you just use their current population and then just extrapolate from there? So depending on how you calculate the population, if you go back in time and go, okay, this year they had this population. So it would be really messy mathematically. Most of the sites just use the current population and figure that the ratios are probably similar today than they were over the last 30 or 40 years. And that's probably why some people said seven, some said eight. But yeah, not number one, though, per capita. But still doing pretty well overall.
G: This included the Winter Olympics, too? Because you weren't clear about that.
S: Yeah, yeah. It's Olympic medals, total Olympic medals. Yeah, that's right.
R: But what's important is that I won.
S: Rebecca, sole winner on the panel, and the audience did very well. Congratulations. Is there an exceptional... We have like maybe... We really don't have time for a question. Let's use an exceptional question you want to do really quick. Or should we just go to the...
G: What's better, Waitomo or Hobbiton?
R: Waitomo.
E: Whoa.
S: Totally different. I can't really compare. They were cool in completely different ways.
R: Waitomo.
audience mamber: I'm leading you tonight, so think very carefully.
S: Waitomo.
R: Waitomo.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:16:06)[edit]
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering." - The Fourth Doctor, "The Face of Evil"
J: This is a quote sent in by a listener named Chris Jensen. And this quote is, "You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views, which could be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering." This was said by the...
S: Say, who said that? This was...
J: The fourth doctor. I believe the episode was The Face of Evil.
S: The fourth doctor.
J: So it is the fourth doctor!
G: Steve, speaking of Doctor Who, I don't want to go.
S: Yeah, you don't want to go, George. It's over. I don't believe it. Eight shows, two weeks, absolutely amazing. Thanks again to everyone who needs to be thanked. Thanks to all of you for coming here. Thanks to my panel members. It was a great experience. It is sad that it's all over. It's unbelievable.
J: You guys have a wonderful, wonderful country that isn't poisoned by the rest of the world. Keep it that way.
Signoff[edit]
S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.
S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at theskepticsguide.org, where you will find the show notes as well as links to our blogs, videos, online forum, and other content. You can send us feedback or questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. Also, please consider supporting the SGU by visiting the store page on our website, where you will find merchandise, premium content, and subscription information. Our listeners are what make SGU possible.
References[edit]
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