SGU Episode 377
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| SGU Episode 377 |
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| 8th Oct 2012 |
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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 |
| Quote of the Week |
For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it. |
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| Show Notes |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday October 3rd, 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 Burnstein.
E: Well-e-well-e-well well. How's everyone?
J: Ha!
R: Super!
B: What language is that?
S: Real khorosho.
E: Real khorosho.
R: What?
E: Borrowed a little Kubrick there, well, Burgess I suppose.
S: Burgess, yeah.
E: Yeah.
S: Little "Clockwork Orange".
E: Yep.
B: That's a good movie.
S: I like any book where you invent a slang just for your own book.
B: (laughter)
E: A glossary, yeah, there's a glossary at the back of that book. Because you need to... Otherwise you can't figure it out. Like what the heck is a lomtick of toast? Right? I mean, how you gonna know that?
S: Starry Devotchka. Well, if you speak Russian, it's a lot easier. 'Coz it actually is Russian.
J: I think that the slang in that book though, in the way that they present it in the movie. It just has, it has like a half not serious feel to it which I like.
S: Yeah.
J: It's almost like they're joking when they're talking their slang.
S: Well, the best one was "khorosho" which is a Russian word they turned into "horror show".
B: Oh cool! That's right!
S: Yeah. That was awesome.
This Day in Skepticism (1:20)
- October 5 1945: Curse of the billy goat placed on Chicago Cubs
S: Rebecca, what's special about today?
R: I've got a good one today you guys. Ok. On this day in 1945 the curse of the billy goat was placed on the Chicago Cubs.
J: What's that?
R: And it is a curse that continues to this day. I'm glad you asked. Apparently, on October 5th 1945 the Chicago Cubs were playing the Detroit Tigers. Those are baseball teams you guys.
B: Oh yeah
E: Thank you.
S: Oh ok.
R: In the world series at Wrigley Field and a man named Billy Sianis was in attendance with his pet goat. As one does. And according to some reports the goat smelled so bad that the other fans in the stands demanded that they leave. And so, they were kicked out and Sianis was infuriated and according to his family he sent off an angry telegram to the team owner - Wrigley - and to this day, it remains, quite possibly the greatest possibly legendary telegram ever sent to anyone. And it reads "You are going to read this world series, and you are never going to win another world series again. You are never going to read a world series again because you insulted my goat.
(laughter)
R: So according to the surviving Sianis family, the curse of the Billy Goat can only be cured by the Chicago Cubs showing a sincere fondness for goats. And allowing goats back into Wrigley Field because they genuinely want to. Because the Chicago Cubs genuinely want to, and not just for publicity reasons. The curse of the goat will know.
(laughter)
R: Yeah I mean, they haven't done it yet, and sure enough the Chicago Cubs have not won a world series since then. So...
J: So, do you think that somebody inside the Chicago Cubs organisation is actually thinking "You know - that damn goat curse".
R: Oh no doubt! People are always straight up trying to trying to fix this, like, fans at least are. A couple of years ago there was a dead goat carcass found outside by some memorial statue or something. Didn't work, apparently. So yeah, this is I guess this is big news around Chicago. I don't know why they haven't just let the goats come back into Wrigley Field. 'Coz that sounds like a really fun theme night. First of all.
S: (laughter)
E: Yep.
R: Second of all. Maybe they maybe they fix the curse.
S: Rebecca it's obvious. Because if they did that, and fixed the curse, then they would have no excuse for continuing to lose the world series.
R: Oh I'm sure they could find another excuse Steve.
J: The thing that really disturbs me is like, how bad did that goat smell? Like, what would make that goat smell, how could one animal smell that bad?
S: That's what disturbs you about this story?
R: (laughter) If it was a warm day, goats do not smell good.
J: Moral of the story is wash your goat.
S: That's the take home.
R: Yeah that's a good take home.
J: Thank you.
News Items
The Physics of Roulette (4:22)
S: So Bob - you are gonna give us one more way to beat the casino next time we're at TAM in Las Vegas.
B: Ha! Yeah. Maybe 3 ways.
S: I like 3-ways.
(laughter)
J: Somebody was gonna say it.
E: Wow. Newsflash.
B: Well looks like we can use science to all get rich at the casinos. This is pretty interesting. Scientists have published in the American Intitute of Physics Journal "Chaos" research showing that you can increase the odds. You can dramatically increase the odds of winning at roulette. Now you guys know roulette right? I'm sure pretty much everybody knows it's uhh it's derived from the french little wheel, and that little wheel has lots of numbered slots around the perimeter and you spin the wheel and then you send a metal ball around and around with it as well. And then you can just, you can bet what number the ball will land in, or what color - red or black - and there's lots of these little bets that you can do. It's a real easy game. I mean I pretty much encapsulated the whole thing in just a couple of sentences. Now, but real easy at casinos generally means that the odds are shit. They really are they really are not good. With roulette though there's no real choice to make. There's no decision to be made that's based on anything like how good the dealers or the other players hands are like, such as Black Jack or Poker. Each game is a single event. Bam! The ball lands in a slot. Done. That's it. So there's really.
S: There's no skill.
B: There's not a lot of wiggle room. Exactly. And please don't use those stupid electronic boards that are ubiquitous. They tell you what numbers have come up previously. Oh I hate 'em. People always saying "Oh look! Look at the pattern of numbers that came up. You know now that means that blah blah blah blah blah whatever". They're independent events. LIke flipping a coin. One even has no impact on the next. And if the number 34 came up 20 times in a row of roulette. That would be amazing, but that information still would be no help in guiding your betting assuming that it's not rigged. 'Coz uhh that's the first thing I would think if 34 came up 20 times.
R: The only way that a knowledgable player would do better at something like roulette is understanding the odds that go with each bet. Because there are different odds. Some are what look to be 50/50. They aren't. Because of the 0 and 00 but the red/black, the odd/even bets and then you can also bet on 12 numbers. You can bet on 3 numbers, you know. So knowing your odds and the payouts involved can help slightly improve the edge you have. Or I should say, would slightly decrease the edge the casino has!
B: Right right.
S: Yeah.
R: But none of those magical boards ever actually gives you the edge.
B: But it seems now though that you can increase your odds in roulette though I'm pretty sure that you'll never be able to put it in practise it's still very interesting. Michael Small - a statistician - at the University of Western Australia and Chi Kong Tse of Hong Kong Polytech University. They've apparently found that knowing the location of the ball and its relative speed compared to the wheel at the start is very important. Now, when I read that I was like "well no duh" I mean that's the key to maximising predictability in chaotic systems. Knowing the starting conditions as accurately as possible. The same thing applies to weather. The more you know about the current state of the atmosphere the better your prediction's gonna be. Now of course you can't know the starting conditions even in theory, so predictability will still decay over time and you won't be able to predict indefinitely in the future. But so, for their experiment this was pretty cool. For the experiment they recorded in a computer the times when the spinning wheel and ball passed a fixed point on the frame of the roulette table. So they had this device where they were watching the initial spin of the wheel and the ball and they would do these clicks that they used to enter the information into the computer. Now based on that data their relatively simple calculus and classical calculations produced consistant experimental earnings of 20% instead of the expected loss of 2.7%. And that's really really dramatic. Some people might know that the European roulette which is the one they used in the lab. The odds are a little bit better. It's worse for the American roulette because we have that, we throw that extra cursed, extra 0.
S: The double 0, yeah.
B: Right. the double 0. So it makes the odds worse.
E: Yeah but it's green. It's very tempting!
B: Oh yeah. I mean that's a pretty dramatic increase but they found that there were ways to even make it better by of course gathering you know better data. They actually mounted a digital camera above the roulette wheel and use that information and the odds.
R: The European casinos are very lax than the states.
B: (laughter) Yeah.
J: So what was the point of this Bob? And why would the casino let them do it?
B: No well uh they didn't go to a casino and do this, this was all just like, this was all in the lab. No casino would let you, you know, do anything like this. But there was one other thing that they found that increased the odds in the players' favour. If the wheel was slanted, even just a little bit, because that introduces a bias that would let you basically make your predictions even better. So these 3 things that they did can dramatically improve the odds. Now they didn't mention how much the odds went up with the slanted wheel and the camera but they said there was even better than the initial one. Remember though the calculations do not say "the number will be 13". Roulette is far too chaotic for that to work. What it does tell though is which side of the wheel the ball will likely land in. Just knowing that makes betting much easier because remember you can bet in groups of numbers. I mean if you played I'm sure you've seen people spread their chips all over. Like tonnes of numbers can be annoying throwing their chips everywhere. So in 22 trials Small and Tse predicted the correct half 13 times. When I first read that I was like "well so what" I mean that's, you know, that's not that great. But just that slight edge gave them the potential to make an 18% profit which is really immense in roulette.
S: Yeah but that's, the number of samples is too small though. I mean that could easily just be statistical variation. Just fluctuations.
B: Yeah, that's true I thought of that too. I was hoping that they would have done more than just 22 trials.
S: Do a few hundred trials and then I'll be impressed.
B: Oh yeah, yeah do 1000 trials and yeah. So I guess. Yeah I don't know why they only did 22.
E: They ran out of money.
(laughter)
J: But they go through the trouble of setting up all this equipment and writing a piece of software to figure stuff out and they only spin the wheel 22 times? That seems ridiculous!
B: No but don't forget though. That's just 1 suite of trials i think. Because don't forget they also did tests with the camera. They did tests with the tilted wheel. They did lots of different tests.
S: Meh. Even still. They need to do a lot more trials.
J: Come on Bob! Say it. Say it!
B: I agree. It's yeah. The sample seems too small from what I've read.
J: Thank you.
B: But I love that Small through in a caveat in there so people wouldn't go cray thinking that they're gonna go get rich. He said that "roulette's a game of change, even if the odds are in your favour there's still a probability of losing and losing big. In the long run you would come out ahead but you may first need very deep pockets". And that is so true Steve. We've talked about this.
E: Yep.
B: One of the mean reasons the house wins isn't necessarily that the odds are in their favour.
S: That's not true!
B: A key reason is that - What? That's not true?
S: That's not true. That is a fallacy.
B: What, because the odds are in their favour? What you disagree with me?
S: Yeah I'm disagreeing with you! I made that mistake and I was corrected on it. And I had looked it up and there's a lot of experts saying what oyu'reabout to say. That the absorbtion wall on the left side. That if you lose all your money then you lose the opportunity to win it back.
B: Right. Oh I do remember that!
S: But yeah that's not true though because that's just another version of past events not affecting future events. That the moment you're removed from gambling because you lost all your money you were just as likely to win or to lose from that point forward. So it has zero effect on the house. The only thing that determines the house's long term haul is the odds. They need to have a statistical edge over the players.
B: Yeah. That does make sense. That's just one of those things that got stuck in my head that I always thought were true.
S: And there's a lot of people. A lot of mathematicians made that mistake you know they said the wrong answer. I had to keep digging to find the right answer.
R: It's Monty Hall-esque in its ability to...
S: It is. It is.
E: It kind of is!
S: Now Bob, one thing I was thinking of with this. You need computer power right in order to be able to make predictions.
B: Right.
S: But you can place your bets after the croupier has spun the ball.
B: Yes that's key
S: And the wheel. And you can even observe it for quite a while before there's no more bets. Typically the croupier will say "no more bets" pretty soon before the ball drops down into the numbers and starts bouncing around. That one thing theoretically makes this possible but it's just that you'd never be able to have the equipment necessary to pull this off in a casino. And there's no way you could do this by eye. There's just no way.
E: Yeah couldn't visually be able to...
B: Yeah you'd probably have to be a Vulcan or something
J: Unless you had a cool implant.
S: Yeah you'd have to be a Vulcan, a Cyborg or something.
B: Yeah I mean I guess it's conceivable that somebody would have some sort of very simple innocuous interface to a computer that's offsite and that would let them quickly enter the information and get it back. Although that's detectable not fool proof. It seems it's possible to pull it off.
R: You could hav somebody with an iphone sitting at the bar signalling someone at the roulette table. Yeah I mean it's as easy as that really. Depending on how much processing power you need, but I can't imagine...
B: Yeah you could write an App for that. I wonder what the turn-around time is though. If it takes you 20 or 30 seconds to pull this off then that's too much time.
S: It's gotta be in real time.
B: I think it's definitely possible that it could be pulled off, at least over the short term before they become really savvy to this.
Vitamin D and the Common Cold (14:28)
S: All right, well, the next news item is about another vitamin that doesn't help with common colds.
J: Is this – is this vitamin D we're talking about?
B: Yeah, vitamin D, oh man.
E: Delta.
S: Yeah, so I guess D is after C in the alphabet, right? So –
E: Last time I checked.
S: Yeah,vitamin C doesn't work for common colds and now we're on to vitamin D doesn't work for common colds either.
E: Guess what's next?
S: (chuckles)
J: Washing your hands, that's – there's a vitamin wash. There you go.
S: There are actually very good reasons to suspect that vitamin D supplements may be helpful for a number of respiratory conditions: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD; or asthma, or even upper respiratory infections. Vitamin D classically is important for bone homeostatis and bone health, calcium regulation, but it's been found that it also is an important cofactor in certain aspects of the immune system for certain proteins in the immune system and vitamin D deficiency could impair immune system function. So therefore, it stands to reason that supplementing may be beneficial. The existing research was, however, recently reviewed, and it showed that there is no current evidence that just routinely taking vitamin D decreases the risk of getting a cold or the duration of getting and there was the largest study conducted to date. So this was 161 people in the vitamin D group; 161 in the control group; it was double-blind, placebo-controlled, and they followed subjects for 18 months, over an 18-month period. The vitamin D group had no advantage over the placebo group; both groups got about 3.7 colds per person over that period of time. 3.7 in the vitamin D group; 3.8 in the placebo group, so no statistically significant difference.
E: Steve, what do you think of these numbers: 161 people, 18 months. Are we talking a large enough sample size?
S: That's reasonable; I mean, the rule of thumb is 50 people in each arm is a reasonably powered study for most ef– it depends on the effect size you're looking for, but for a clinically relevant moderate effect size – rule of thumb, 50 people in each group is – is good. So this is 161 in each group; it's not a massive study, but it's perfectly reasonable; large enough, certainly, to have detected a clinically relevant effect. Obviously, you can't rule out a tiny effect; that would be too small to measure with that many people, but that's probably not clinically relevant either. This is probably not the last word on vitamin D and all respiratory effect because there is some reasonable plausibility here. There is some preliminary evidence to suggest that maybe it is helpful with COPD, for example. One big question in all of this research is: Does supplementing vitamin D only with those who are vitamin D deficient or insufficient, or will it also help with people who have a normal level of vitamin D to begin with? Probably, it seems that, if there is a beneficial effect, it's probably limited to those people who are low in vitamin D. Many people, their vitamin D levels do dip in the winter because we have less sunlight exposure and that's also when the flu's going around and kids are in school and passing germs around and people get more colds. Taking a vitamin D supplement to prevent the dip in your vitamin D levels over the winter is not unreasonable. But certainly this study shows that it's not – obviously a panacea; it's not helpful taking – taken routinely. One criticism of this study was that this was conducted in New Zealand and New Zealand gets more sunlight during their winter than maybe other parts of the world, and so the question is: do the results of this study extrapolate to–
E: To the Northern Hemisphere?
S: Yeah, parts of the world, or just farther away from the equator in either direction so that you have less sunlight exposure during the winter. That's, I think, a pretty minor criticism; you know, holding out for an effect. I think if there were any effect they still would've seen something with this size study. If people want to repeat it in higher latitudes, then that would be reasonable, it would seem. Vitamin D's been very interesting in the last ten years; we've discovered a lot more about it, above and beyond the classical view of it. Taking vitamin D supplements does seem to help reduce the incidence and severity of autoimmune diseases like Multiple Sclerosis. We've been paying a lot closer – I know we've talked about it before on the show[link needed]; we've been paying a lot closer attention to vitamin D, adjusting the levels that we think are the minimum normal levels and increasing the recommendation for supplementation. I definitely find that – that physicians, primary care doctors, and others who are checking vitamin D levels a lot more often now, it's almost become routine, and then recommending supplements for those whose levels are very low. So that's been a pretty significant change just over the last four or five years, which is interesting, but doesn't prevent the common colds. If you're concerned about it, what I would recommend is just having your levels checked and if it's low, supplement it; if it's not low, don't worry about it. That seems to be the bottom-line recommendation at this point.
Harpooning Satellites (19:42)
Bee Brains (30:50)
S: Alright Rebecca, tell us about scientists studying bee brains.
R: Yes, scientists are studying bee brains, turns out. Bee brain - very good insult you'd think, but no, bee brains are apparently very interesting to scientists who want to make robots that can process sensory information. What these scientists who are at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex, what they're doing in, they're researching how bee brains process sight and sound and they're hoping to apply that to robotics. And right now, a lot of the research into artificial intelligence is being done on human and you know primate simulations of artificial intelligence. And there's not a lot really going on in terms of insect intelligence or in this case honey bee intelligence. What they're hoping to do is make a tiny flying robot that can behave like a bee. This could for instance help pollination, they could do a sort of artificial pollination process. Or it could be bumped up into a larger scale and be used for something like search and rescue. Being able to survey a landscape, process the information, and find what you're looking for That could be very very important in a robot. So, that's what they're doing. They haven't actually made the bee brain yet, the artificial bee brain, unfortunately. It sounds like this research is still kind of early on. Oh, and one other thing that I thought was interesting is that the article mentions that many scientists have started using graphics cards as number crunching engines, because they're cheaper and easier to use than traditional super computers. So, that's what they're planning to use in this research. They're going to put models of bee sensory systems on graphics cards, and hopefully that will be powerful enough to run a bee brain.
J: That's awesome.
R: It's kinda cool. And yeah, it's a nice solution just in case our biologists are unable to save the bees from that whole horrific collapse.
E: Extinction, yeah...
S: Rebecca do you know how many neurons there are in the bee brain - the honey bee brain?
R: I'd say at least seven, eight...
S: At least - yeah.
(laughter)
S: Anyone have a serious guess?
R: I do not.
J: I don't know. 5 million.
E: Number of neurons?
B: How many neurons..?
E: How many neurons are in a human brain?
S: About a hundred billion.
E: Hundred billion. So a bee brain..? A billion?
B: I know it's as big as the little ball at the tip of a pen.
S: Mmmhmm.
B: That transports the ink. I know it's like that's how tiny.
J: A hundred million I say.
B: Five hundred thousand?
E: Probably about a billion.
R: I'd say a billion.
S: Wow you guys are all over the place. 960,000.
R: Wow.
S: Less than a million.
E: Barely a million.
S: Cockroach has about a million. Mouse - 75 million. Human, about a hundred billion.
R: Oh yeah mice are the other that's one of the other common research...
J: So I won!
B: No. What'd you say Steve.. Jay?
J: I said uhh uhh uhh 900 million.
R: You can't even remember what the actual figure was so you can cheat. That is pathetic.
(laughter)
S: 960,000. That's a lot. That's still a lot to model, and you know they have some complicated algorithms in there, sure. That's 10 to the 9th synapses, so that's a lot.
R: I mean they don't have to perfectly recreate it though. THey just have to find the important parts of it.
S: Yeah.
R: The artificial jellyfish that sceintists were making. Science has a benefit over evolution in that they don't have to try and fail and try and fail and have a bunch of parts that don't really do exactly what they want to do. They can pick and choose. So, with that in mind, you know, they don't necessarily have to recreate each and every neuron, they just need to find what's responsible for evaluating the sensors input that the bees get and processing that in some way. Which is still, you know, an enormous problem.
S: It's probably a huge chunk of the bee brain.
R: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
S: By the way, how many neurons are there in a sponge?
R: Ooh.
B: I'm gonna guess none.
S: Yeah, zero, correct.
R: Really?
S: Yeah.
R: Aww. Poor sponge.
J: So what do they do?
S: What about a round worm?
B: Don't you watch Sponge Bob Rebecca? Isn't it obvious?
S: Sponge Bob does have a brain.
R: Uhhh. I don't because I'm an adult.
B: That's right he does. They showed it.
R: But also Steve, do you just, do you have all these at your fingertips all the time? Is this just common neurologist factoids?
J: This is what they do when they're at the hospital Rebecca they hit each other up. <nerd voice>Oh how many brain cells are in a Troglomage.</nerd voice>
S: A Troglodyte? Yeah.
(laughter)
J: Some dude's like sipping coffe, and he's like <nerd voice>oh I believe it's blah blah blah</nerd voice>. You know it's like.
S: C. Elegans the round worm is an animal used in a lot of neurological studies, because it has only 302 neurons. We've mapped the entire C. Elegans or round worm brain.
B: They're awesome, they are so helpful.
S: Yeah.
Who's That Noisy? (36:17)
Questions and Emails
WTC-7 on 9/11 (38:18)
Science or Fiction (50:44)
Item #1: Recent research supports the claim that the rise in allergies in recent decades is due excessive cleanliness and hygiene. Item #2: Theoretical physicists claim that quantum mechanics supports the notion that an event can be both a cause and an effect of another event. Item #3: Recent study shows that commonly prescribed Beta Blockers do not protect against heart attack and stroke.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:06:34)
For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it.
Patrick Henry
Announcements (1:07:46)
References
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