SGU Episode 360

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Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, June 6th 2012, 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: Hey, guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Buona sera, everyone.

S: Buona sera. How are you doing, Evan?

E: Just fine. Relaxed, back from vacation and ready to go.

R: That's right!

S: You'd rather be in Italy, though, right?

R: How was it?

E: Well... Exotic. It was wonderful. Great time, saw a lot of stuff: Vatican City, Pompeii, Isle of Capri. It was really great; great time.

This Day in Skepticism (00:47)

R: Well, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news after that nice vacation, but today's This Day in Science is kind of a downer, because today, the day that we're recording this, June 6, Ray Bradbury died at the age of--

B: That sucks!

J: How old was he?

R: He was 91 years old.

B: Whoa.

E: 91 years young.

J: Can't complain.

R: At least, you know, at least he had a good long life. We can be thankful for that. He turned out a lot of great works in that time. He got a lot of kudos. Our listeners are probably most familiar with his works like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. Oddly, he says Fahrenheit 451 was his only science fiction book. He had an interesting definition of science fiction, so he always maintained that he was not a science fiction writer, even though they put that on all of his books, "greatest science fiction writer ever".

B: Wow, didn't know that

E: Helped sell a lot of those books, yeah.

S: Yeah, The Martian Chronicles, that's not science fiction? Come on.

R: He says that's it's fantasy, because it couldn't actually happen, and he thinks that science fiction should just be about what could possibly happen.

S: Oh, I see.

R: You know, that said, I think everyone will continue to remember him as one of the greatest science fiction writers ever.

E: And prolific. What, 50 full books, 600 short stories and essays, and that's all he did. Wrote and wrote and wrote some more.

R: Yeah, and his short stories are my favorite; I prefer his short stories to his longer works, personally.

B: Yeah, me too.

E: He's a descendant of Mary Bradbury, who was a-- well, she was found to be a witch during the Salem Witch Trial years. And she was actually persecuted, arrested but never-- sentence was never carried out; they kept delaying it and delaying it until she escaped; she made a getaway, until the whole brouhaha with witches went away. She was able to expire on her own terms. So, I thought that was interesting. Never knew that before about him.

B: Wow.

R: Another interesting Ray Bradbury fact: On Letters of Note today they included a letter from Bradbury in which he discussed how he originally came to write Fahrenheit 451. He was trying to find office space and was unable to find it anywhere, and so he happened to go past a university library and he heard the tick-tack of typewriters coming from down below. And he realized that in the basement of the library, they rented out typewriters for 10 cents an hour, so he gathered up all of his dimes, which amounted to less than $10 and he went down to the library basement and he sat down and he ended up writing Fahrenheit 451 in a couple of days, basically.

B: Whoa.

E & J: Wow.

R: He wrote 25,000 words in just a few days. Nine days is how many days he says it took him, and it was the UCLA library, I should mention. And here's what he wrote in this letter:

How could I have written so many words so quickly? It was because of the library. All of my friends, all of my loved ones were on the shelves above and shouted, yelled and shrieked at me to be creative. So I ran up and down the stairs, finding books and quotes to put in my "fireman novella". You can imagine how exciting it was to do a book about book-burning in the very presence of the hundreds of my beloveds on the shelves. It was the perfect way to be creative. That's what the library does.

J: Wow.

S: Yeah, it's definitely a classic; I really enjoyed that book. I could also see how he wrote it in nine days.

E: (laughs) What are you saying?

J: I get that; it makes sense.

S: You know, it's-- There's one big idea in that book, you know? It's cool; it's great, but you could just see that it was written that way.

R: Yeah, I don't think it's his best work; like I say, I much prefer his short stories and I think that Fahrenheit 451-- you know, it's like, it's a polemical novel, which is not necessarily going to be-- it's good for being the most well-read amongst junior high school students, and for good reason, but isn't necessarily the best read for adults.

B: Should we explain what typewriters are to people?

(laughing)

B: I guess most people know.

E: A good point!

B: Most people should know.

E: They can Google it.

J: When he wrote that, there was no such thing as a print button.

R: (chuckles) Right.

S: Yeah.

E: He was kind of anti-technology, especially at the end; he felt that there was "too much Internet", as he said, too much cell phone use, and he was-- he felt it was kind of taking away from our ability to really have meaningful conversations with each other. He was definitely an analog man, you know, and as the years went on, got stuck in the digital times, but-- you know, he's a classic, no doubt about it, you had to admire him.

R: I think he said-- didn't he say that there are "too many Internets", isn't that his quote?

E: Yeah, I think he did say that.

J: Well, that's pretty much the only way you could say that.

R: (chuckles) That's true. He was a bit dystopian, I think, in his outlook on technology, because he would-- he saw technology as a way of distancing ourselves and of limiting human communication, when in fact, I think we would all agree that it actually does the opposite in a lot of ways. But he would see-- you know, he mentioned once-- I read a bit about him seeing a man and a woman walking along the street and the woman had a-- she was carrying a little radio and she had a-- like an earbud in her ear and he was marveling at how the guy next to her might not have even existed. It didn't even matter because she was listening to far-off voices from a distant land. And to him that signaled something really terrible, this lack of connection with other people in the real world, but I think that he was a little short-sighted in that regard, a little too pessimistic.

E: He was 91 in the end, you know, so we're talking several generations.

S: That's a hard transition to make for people who lived most of their life in the pre-digital age.

R: Yeah.

J: I think part of it is true. You know, we've all been in a situation where you've been with a family member or friends or whatever and everyone's sitting there on their iPhone. It's OK to admit that, you know, any big technological advancement doesn't necessarily mean it's an improvement on all-- all over the board, it's--

R: Right, but also, I think you need to be not so quick to say that a change is automatically bad; maybe it's not the end of the human race if we spend more time talking to people around the world instead of the people right in front of us; I don't know. It does annoy the shit out of me when people open up their cell phones at dinner, but...

S: Right.

E: Well, like Professor Farnsworth said, he said, "technology isn't inherently evil; it's how it's used, like the death ray."

(laughing)

B: The death ray...

News Items

Show #360: SGU Comes Full Circle (8:00)

S: Well, today is another milestone; this one a very positive one. This is episode number 360. So if we are going to use arbitrary numbers as milestones for our show we might as well choose one with a mathematical bent.

B: Yay, what a great idea!

S: The SGU, as they say, has come full circle.

E: (laughs) Officially.

S: The history of the number 360 is actually pretty interesting. Do you know why there are 360 degrees in a circle?

R: I've heard it's because of the Babylonians; 'cause they used a 60--

B: Nobody really knows!

S: Yeah, it's not-- There's no definitive answer. The Babylonians, that's one hypothesis; they used the sexagecimal system, a 60-based system.

J: What was that again?

E: Woo-hoo!

B: Sexagecimal!

E: Sexy genital system.

(laughing)

B: Yeah. It's a base 60 numbering system, like our base 10; binary's base 2. What they did was they would-- when they were messing around with circles they would use an equilateral triangle; they would put it into a circle and the side-- two of the sides would be the radius of the circle--

E: Radius. Radii.

B: So if you took that and divided it by 60, which they would naturally do because of their sexagecimal numerical system, then you'd have a degree; there's your one degree. So that could definitely have been one of the main reasons why we use it; that's why they did it, but there's lots of other reasons-- like one is 360 is pretty damn close to 365 (and a quarter) days in a year so that's another thing, that's another good reason, it's really close to that. And the other one that I think is probably one of the main reasons why it's stuck around is 'cause 360 is so easily divisible; it's got 24 divisors; it's only one of the 7 numbers that have more divisors than any number twice itself. Well, that's kind of esoteric but it's divisible by every number 1 to 10 except 7. I mean, there's so many different ways to chunk it up that I think that's one of the reasons why it's stuck around so long, and the other one--

S: Well, so is 60 itself; I mean, the sexagecimal system did come about partly because 60 is divisible by so many numbers, including 1 through 6.

B: Right. Well, the other good one-- get this one: the 24 time zones. Think about the 24 time zones: you divide them by 15 degrees of longitude and there you've got your 24 hour-- your 24 hours, based in different time zones, separated by 15 degrees of longitude. So that's perfect; that really just kind of like meshes nicely, so--

R: I found this, and I'm just going to read this to you because I'm not good at math and I-- it takes me a long time to figure out what this actually means, so. This is from mathforum.org:

There is more to this than the six sixes for the 360 from the Babylonians. It has to do with Claudius Ptolemy (100-170 AD), who divided the circle into 360 parts for his sine table. He actually used the length of the chord for each central angle in steps of 1/2 degree in a circle of radius 60 rather than sines.

R: So I don't know what that means but I thought I would offer it.

E: Ptolemy. I got that part.

S: That's what Bob was saying; you know, the chord is the base of the equilateral triangle with the other two sides being the radii. And yeah, so there's six of them around a circle, and that gives you 360. Do you know what you call a unit smaller than a degree, if you have to divide a degree up-- Bob, you know.

B: Yes.

R: Of course Bob knows. Shut up, Bob.

J: A sub-degree?

S: It's a-- well, you start with an arcminute; there are 60 arcminutes in one degree.

E: So it must be an arcsecond.

S: And there are 60 arcseconds in an arcminute. So, that's 3600 arcseconds in one degree.

E: Sweet.

B: So what would you do if you want more precision than that, Steve?

S: You do fractions of seconds.

B: Well, you do decimals.

S: Decimals. I meant decimals of seconds.

B: And then you could-- And that's commonly done today, but in the past, some scientists would actually subdivide the arcsecond into pieces-- into 60ths, and they would just denote that by using a Roman numeral like a III and then a IV but nobody really does that anymore but it's just decimal versions of the arcsecond.

S: Right.

E: Hey speaking of Roman numerals, the Roman numeral for 360 is CCCLX, right? So you go five letters there, three of which are the same and two are different. Kinda like this show! We got three Novellas, three Cs; I'll be the L, and Rebecca, you can have the X.

R: I'm gonna need two.

S: Yeah, I think so.

E: (laughs)

R: You're really getting into some Bible Code territory; this is interesting. We could develop a whole conspiracy theory of SGU and 360.

S: The numerology of 360.

R: There's actually this crazy person who-- he hasn't emailed me in a while but for the last few weeks he's been really into me. If you go to etcorngods.com--

E: What?!

B: Oh, yeah.

R: That's E-T-corn-gods dot com. It's this guy who thinks that-- I mean it's kind of sad; there's something seriously wrong with him. But he assigns numerical values to letters, and then adds them together, and you know, finds all of these different conspiracy theories and things like that.

E: Yeah, the Unabomber used to do that too. Look where that wound up.

R: And I'm on his site. So, like, he decoded my name and--

J: Uh-oh.

E: And?

R: --and I'm sure if you email him, he'll decode yours as well.

J: Well, so what's it mean?

R: Actually, I'm trying to find it right now; I might have deleted his crazy-person emails. His name's George Simpson.

S: Simpson, eh?

E: I don't know we if should be talking about his name. ET corn hole is another--

B: That reminds me of the Anti-Christ and Caesar Nero and supposedly if you use numerology, Caesar Nero equals 666; 666 is one of those theories, which is a coincidence because today--

S: Is June 6.

B: Because, June 6; so, 6 AM June 6, that's the hour that Damian was born in The Omen from back in the 70s, the first release of The Omen. For some reason that just stuck with me and I always remember that every June 6. I mean, I might not be awake at 6 AM but I remember it on June 6: "Hey, it's 666 day!"

E: Forget that it's D-Day, but yeah, it's Omen Day.

B: Anti-Christ Day.

R: I found what he wrote about me, it's actually-- he has another blog called ufoetblog.com and there--

E: Oh, that's better.

R: --he's translated my name. It's a long line of things but it ends with--

B: Let me guess! Your name translates into "unicorn rainbow"?

R: I wish. No, it's so much better, though; it's "red-headed goddess wacko ms. laugh at male ego". (laughs) Which is--

B: Oh my God, wow!

E: He needed a code?

R: I could have just told him, really. Although, I'm hesitant to tell him that my hair's not red anymore; it's blue, and I'm interested in seeing how that screws up his code. But anyway, we should--

B: He's probably just reading it wrong.

R: We probably should let him know this is our 360th show and he'll probably find something interesting.

S: Some significance.

E: Yeah, great, exactly what we want. Thanks, Rebecca.

B: I could guarantee it.

R: No problem.

Transit of Venus (15:40)

NASA: 2012 transit of Venus

Legislating Science (26:52)

Neurologica: Legislating Science in North Carolina

Science Education (35:40)

ClassroomScience.org: Second Year Science Graduation Requirement Elimination: Governor Stands Firm

OC Register: Calif. students rank 47th in science

NCSE: Creationist success in South Korea?

Quickie with Bob: Vapor Storage (47:18)

Discovery news: Movie Frames Saved to Atomic Vapor

B: Yes! Thank you, Steve; this is your Quickie with Bob. I call this Quickie with Bob "Vapor Movies". Scientists--

J: (laughing)

E: (Southern accent) I think I've got the vapors.

B: Scientists have devised a way to store images in a vapor of atoms. In fact, this is the first time that images have been stored at the same time and reliably played back in a non-solid medium. These scientists work for the Joint Quantum Institute-- wouldn't it be cool to work for a place called the Joint Quantum Institute?

S: Although, there's a 50% chance that it's total quackery. But this one's legitimate.

B: Why? Why?

S: If you have the word quantum in your name, chances are 50-50 that you're either legitimate scientific organization or total quackery outfit.

R: Never know until you open the door.

E: Or you're in the Deepak Chopra realm.

B: Plus they got "joint" in there too, so who knows what's going on. But, this institute is a research partnership between the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, so high level of confidence there. The quantum process that allows images to be stored like this is called "gradient echo memory". Now, it's accomplished by finely tuning electric and magnetic fields along the 20-cm length of a special cell containing a vapor of rubidium atoms. Talk about cloud storage. Using this technique, they stored two movie frames: one of the letter N and one of the letter T. Now, I didn't say it was a long movie, but it consisted of two frames, so technically, you could call this a movie. Unfortunately, you probably won't be watching a movie with this technology in the near future, but it appears very well suited, though, for storing and processing quantum information and this is because this technology would be ideally suited to handle the very subtle issues that quantum computing requires, like coherence and environmental isolation. So for more fascinating details about gradient echo memory, look for the May issue of Optics Express or do a Google News search for "atomic vapor movie" you can read a lot more details about it. This has been your Quickie with Bob; I hope it was good for you too.

E: So we have to have an Academy Award category for Best Quantum Movie now.

B: Yeah.

E: "The nominees are: the letter N, the letter T..."

(laughing)

B: I'll wait until they get 24 frames, so we have a full second.

Magnetic Skeptical Phrases (49:44)

S: So Rebecca, I think it's time to announce the winner of our Magnetic Words for Skeptics.

R: I think it is. Sorry we had to postpone it a little bit because of travel and such. You guys can tell me which is your favorite. And of course, the winner will receive a free SGU T-shirt and I'm happy to say that everyone whose poems I am about to read will receive a free download of our brand-new iPad app, which is Word Magnets for Skeptics, sponsored by Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, which you can find by going on iTunes and searching and it costs like, just a couple of bucks and it has all of the same words as the word magnets, but you can play on your iPad. OK, so here are the poems. Number one:

I wish, of all my billion creations, the technology to evolve angry nano robot monkeys was the worst threat.

B: I like that one.

R: That came from Joe Albetz. Next up:

Alien, Bigfoot, and creation hoax.
Why the Skeptics' Guide will think and coax.
To homeopathy do not believe,
Debunked by evidence proof from Steve.
Rebecca kicks at Science or Fiction
Smart like Evan, go vaccination.
Of bird vs. monkey we like Perry.
Jay always doubts fraud technology.
With nano Bob they all face a billion
Teaching medicine, physics, and evolution.

R: That's from Jamie Hero. Or that might be Jaime[hi-me], sorry if I-- might be Jaime or Jamie[jay-me], I'm not sure.

E: I like that one.

B: That was good.

R: Yeah, that included a bit of rhyming, which I think is kind of impressive. Next up:

They who ask about evidence and proof teach against every fiction.

R: That's from Dustin Manning. Couple more:

Homeopath actually debunks evolution with anecdote only, said psychic.
Skeptics doubt this, ghost of Darwin angry.

(laughing)

E: Darwin ghost getting angry!

R: That's from Mark Van. Next up:

Vaccinate Bigfoot against alien nano particle robot abduction.

Simple and sweet, from Brian Brophy

E: Sums up the show.

R:

Darwin monkey eats his creation.

E: (chuckles)

R: Joe Jermonie. And last up:

There was a podcasting ghost,
Hoaxed the skeptic almost.
 But she did have doubt,
 Said proof it's about,
And offered the haunted some toast.

R: That's from Scotty Harrison.

E: Scotty!

R: So that's all of them. So, you guys, weigh in. I know which one is my favorite, but I'd like to hear it from you guys.

S: I mean, the angry nano robot monkeys is-- you know, deserves an honorable mention. But, I mean, the limerick has gotta get the nod.

B: Yeah, I feel the same way. Exactly. "Nano robot monkeys"; what's not to love about that, but the limerick was just like, all right, that just flows so nicely.

E: It was perfectly paced. Very creative. That definitely, I think, will wind up being the winner here, although Jaime's is really good, too; I like that one as well. I'm splitting my vote between those two.

R: Mmm, a split vote. Jay, did you weigh in?

J: Yeah, I don't disagree that the one that the guy wrote is hard. He definitely put time into it but I have to pick the one that goes, "Vaccinate Bigfoot against alien nano particle robot abduction". Short, sweet, to the point, says it all.

R: That's a fine choice, that was Joe Jermonie's-- no, I'm sorry--

E: It's a slogan you can live by.

R: That was Brian Brophy's. My favorite, like most of you, was Scotty Harrison's: the limerick, because he-- he actually like, built words out of other letters and stuff just to get what he wanted and you know, it scanned well. A lot of people can't write a limerick that scans just when they have a limitless supply of words. So, yeah, it scanned, it rhymed. Scotty Harrison.

E: Scotty-doo!

R: Congratulations, Scotty, we're going to send you a free T-shirt. I will send you an email and get your address and send it right off to you. Thanks to everyone who entered. Like I mentioned, everybody will get a free copy of our new iPad app, Word Magnets for Skeptics, and the rest of you can go onto the Apple Store and you can buy it.

Who's That Noisy? (54:37)

Answer to last week: holosystolic murmur

S: Well, Evan, I had to cover Who's That Noisy last week all by myself; it was lonely without you.

E: Ohhh. Well, I heard you did a very, very ... how do you say

S: Competent and adequate.

E: Competent and adequate job. (laughs) Thank you Steve for doing that. I was away, as you know, but now that I'm back, I'm gonna go ahead and play for you last week's Who's That Noisy, as a reminder. And here we go:

(faint thumping sound)

R: L. Ron Hubbard.

S: (Scottish accent) That's easy!

B: My first thought was a beating heart, but there was no-- it was too regular.

S: What do you mean, "it was too regular"?

B: It didn't have the characteristic thump-thump of a heart; it was just like a-- it was like half of a heartbeat. I don't know; it just-- it reminded me of flowing liquid.

S: It reminded you of a beating heart but there was something wrong about it.

B: Yes. Oh, yeah, right, that's another way to look at it.

E: Correct. That was the point, and a lot of people did guess that it was a, you know, the sound of a beating heart in some capacity. But you know, you had-- what we were really looking for is, what exactly is going on here? What condition is this heart in, right?

B: Asystole?

S: No...

E: What is it called? That's known as a pansystolic heart murmur.

S: And, any medical student should be able to identify that.

E: And, apparently a medical student did identify exactly that it was a holosystolic murmur, also known as a pansystolic. Are the two terms interchangeable, Steve?

S: Yeah.

E: Uh.. cyclosarin, C-Y-C-L-O-S-A-R-I-N, his first post on our message boards, and he said "sounds like oscillation [sic] of a heartbeat with a systolic murmur, classically a 'pansystolic' murmur." And he says, "which would be due to mitral valve regurgitation or a ventricular septal defect". Yeah, so this guy's read a heart book or something like that. In any case, he was the first one to correctly guess exactly what that Noisy was. Well done; thank you for playing, cyclosarin.

S: Good job.

R: Good job. That's impressive.

E: On to the new one. Rebecca, I had you in mind when I came up with this week's Noisy. So, little hint for you there. Here we go!

And--and what it is, as probably your readers know, the sun is made of plasma; it's a-- it's a fourth state of matter, so.

E: All right, that's it.

R: That's it?

E: That's all you need! Our email address is info@theskepticsguide.org and our forums is sguforums.com. Go ahead, post your guess, give it your best shot, and good luck to all of you.

Questions and Emails (57:21)

Peer Review

Steve, I know that you know what peer review is, but I think you sometimes mislead your audience when you mention that some new idea has not yet gone through "peer review" as a way to validate the claims of the idea. Peer review is just the initial step in the validation process. It is a series of experts who review a paper to make sure that there is no blatant error or mistake in what has been written. Once a paper has gone through peer review and then is published, the real validation then begins as other scientists try to duplicate the results. Only after repeated cases of duplicating the results or of failed attempts to invalidate it, does the claim start to have validity. Peer review does not help against collecting faulty data or downright fraud. And it is sometimes possible that the claim is not true even though it seems to have been validated. This last case is what pseudoscientists count on - that their claim is the one out of thousands that will overturn established scientific principles, something that rarely happens. A discussion of this might make an interesting segment on the SGU. Marv Zelkowitz Columbia, MD

Science or Fiction (1:01:04)

{jingle)

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:14:36)

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

Ray Bradbury

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References