SGU Episode 383

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SGU Episode 383
17th Nov 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 382                      SGU 384
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
BH: Bruce Hood
Quote of the Week
I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
Wonko the Sane from Douglas Adams's So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish
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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, November 14, 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: Hey, boys and girls. How's everyone?

S: Good. How are you, Evan?

B: Pretty good.

E: Very fine, thank you.

This Day in Skepticism (0:0:29)

• November 18, 1978: Jonestown massacre

S: Rebecca, I understand you have an uplifting This Day In Skepticism for us today.

R: Yeah. I was trying to find a fun one, but there was one big news story that jumped up – jumped out at me for this week. November 18th, 1978, more than nine hundred people died due to the mass murder–suicides of the People's Temple cult, which was led by Jim Jones, better-known as the Jonestown Massacre. We have talked about this in the past, but there's one fact that I wanted to call out—which might make this slightly uplifting, even though it's still kind of not—but I wanted to highlight one particular person, and that's Congressperson Leo J. Ryan, who was one of the victims, but he's the only U.S. Congressperson to have died in the line of duty. Ryan was a representative in San Francisco, and he was very vocally critical of all kinds of cults, including Scientology and the Unification Church, which was Reverend Moon's church. He started getting these reports from his constituents, who were worried about friends and family members who were getting involved in the People's Temple, which was headquartered in San Francisco but had locations all around California, and, in 1974, of course, the cult began moving to a farm in Guyana, now known as Jonestown, and that was to escape growing media scrutiny. And Ryan heard from these constituents who were telling him that people were being held at Jonestown against their will. So he asked Congress for permission to investigate the cult, but he faced this – just a load of red tape, basically. Despite that, he was eventually able to fly to Guyana to see what was going on. And he went over there with several aides and a number of journalists who wanted to come along for the ride. When he got to Jonestown, several cult members told him and his entourage that they desperately wanted help escaping, and Ryan's crew took the defectors to the nearby airstrip to get them to safety, but they were intercepted by cult members who opened fire on them, killing Ryan, three journalists, and one of the defectors. Ryan was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for being possibly the greatest, most badass Congressperson to have ever served. I mean, can you imagine your present-day Congressperson flying to another continent in order to make sure that you were safe? It beggars belief. But he did it.

E: Mm-hmm.

R: And he paid the ultimate price for it, unfortunately.

E: Yeah, he did.

News Items

Denver UFO (0:03:03)

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/bugged-by-ufos/

S: Well, Jay, tell us about the latest UFO over Denver.

J: Fox 31 out of Denver, in the United States, did a TV report titled "Mile High mystery: UFO sightings in sky over Denver". So, an investigative reporter named Heidi Hemmat led the report, and she said on air that she was skeptical the first time she heard about the mysterious objects taking off and landing in a populated area over Denver—which I found very ironic, that she used that word, "skeptical", that she used it as if, you know, she was skeptical. Which she isn't. So, anyway, her source of the video is a man who also did not want to be identified, which I found unsettling. The UFOs that this guy captured on the camera—on his digital video camera—can't be seen unless you slow down the footage, because, according to him, they were moving so fast that the human eye couldn't pick up on them until you slowed the video down. So, they slow the video down, and the TV station—and a photojournalist at the TV station—actually brought an expensive camera to the location, which was like a turned-over field—it looked like a farming field—and they put their camera there, and they videotaped the same area of Denver, around the same time that this guy taped his, and they found the same thing. They captured the same exact type of stuff—which, you know, was is it? What are these things? That are in a field, out, you know, in the middle of nowhere? Zipping past the camera, or, you know, far away. What could they possibly be, guys? What could they –

S: Or, "buzzing around the camera"?

J: Yeah, right?

E: Hmm.

J: You look at the video that's – that'll be on the link to the show, and the absolute very first thing—a nanosecond after your brain registers what it's seeing—the first thing your brain says is, "It's a fly! It's an insect!" It looks like an insect. It moves like an insect. It buzzes around like an insect. And, you know what? It's not far away. It's right up on the camera. It's, like, probably a foot in front of the camera.

E: Yeah, we've seen evidence of this before. This is common, and we have talked about it before on the show, and these turn out to be bugs!

J: It's amazing. It's amazing.

B: I know, Jay. A lot of those people just really just didn't quite understand, one: somebody just said that, "Oh wait, these – this is a bug. We're looking at bugs." And this other guy said, "It can't be bugs, 'cause bugs don't fly higher than the clouds." Like, wait a second, dude. Whoa, really?

(laughter)

J: They brought in an aviation expert named Steve Cowell, and he's a former commercial pilot, and—this is so entertaining it blows my mind—he's an instructor, a flight instructor, and an FAA Accident Prevention Counselor. And, very convincingly, he argued that there is just no explanation for this. And then the news reporter, at the end of the newscast, said, "Oh, and it's not bugs. It's not bugs. They guy said it's not bugs."

E: "The guy says", yeah.

J: Oh, OK. So the guy says it's not bugs, so therefore it cannot, absolutely, be bugs. But it is bugs!

R: Well, you know, I mean, why would that guy lie? Come on, Jay. Come on.

J: It just boils my blood. Like, you're on TV. Your job is to report the news—information, unbiased, and as logically as you can. FAIL. No good. You can't do your job.

S: It was 100% failure. It was a total failure.

E: And no (inaudible)

S: And, she said, like, four times, "It's not a bug. Stop saying it's a bug. It's not a bug." I wonder why so many people are telling you it's a bug? 'Cause it's a damn bug.

B: Yeah.

S: It was so obvious. There's a couple of other things—not that you need anything more—but, from the illusory perspective, you know, of the guy who did the film, who thinks that he's looking at spacecraft, he thought, "Oh, it must be landing somewhere at these crossroads", and, of course, there's nothing but residential houses there. Oh, OK, so these ships are taking off and landing every day in a residential area, and nobody sees them. 'Cause they're moving so fast, I guess.

E: Or hears them, yep.

J: Yep.

S: Or hears them. And nothing got picked up on radar. I guess they just haven't (inaudible) radar technology.

B: Nothing on radar.

E: Yeah, they called NORAD or something.

B: And they found some way, obviously, to suppress the sonic booms, right?

J: Yeah.

E: Ha.

B: I mean, didn't that – didn't that guy say that this thing must've been travelling at multiple-mach speeds? OK. No sonic booms? Nothing that – not even that. Even, you know, if you're landing in an area like that, just the disturbance to the air of something moving so fast –

S: Right.

B: – that it's not visible to the naked eye –

J: Bob, you can't question future technology. Come on.

B: Oh my god.

J: The guy who, for some reason, doesn't want the public to know who he is, who's capturing all this incredible footage, at one point, like, you know, the—and I'm just going to very proudly call this a fly, 'cause it was a fly, OK?—so the fly –

S: Jay, it might have been a bee.

J: Whatever. The fly –

E: What kind of fly?

J: You know, you ever see a fly, and their – up close, and their skin is kind of shiny?

S: Yeah.

J: Like, they actually look like there's a rainbow effect going on?

B: Iridescence, yeah.

J: Exactly. So, the fly changes direction, and he freezes the frame, and he goes, "Rocket booster", you know? No.

(laughter)

E: Oh, yeah.

R: Yeah, right.

J: No.

E: Or the after – yeah, "the afterburners".

J: No, that – see, that is called – the afterburner is actually the Sun, like, bouncing off of the fly's body.

B: Jay, I think this guy was actually smart. This guy was smart in not to reveal his name, because when it does come out that this was a bug, he just saved himself years of people going up to him with fake bugs, flying them around his face, and saying, "Look! A UFO! Look! A UFO!"

E: Oh, god.

B: And I think somebody's gotta get down there with a real camera, with the right settings—high definition, high frame rate—so that you could actually see what this thing is, because you could focus in on it. It's blurry. You can't see what it is. You could see the glinting, Jay, that you mentioned, but you can't really make out any structure at all. But if you film it properly, you can do it –

J: Of course, Bob, but –

B: – especially if you film it. And somebody's gotta do that. It's such an obvious next step, just to completely put this to bed.

E: It would be an easy test to devise to make sure it's an insect.

S: There's a couple of things you could easily do, and the comments to the article have multiple suggestions. Interestingly, this guy's been doing this for a month—like every day, almost, for a month, he's been seeing this—and he hasn't done even basic techniques to try to challenge or question his assumption. So, here's two things that were proposed in the comments that would be very easy. One is, hang a sheet ten feet away from the camera. If they're bugs, you'll see the bugs in front of the sheet.

B: Yeah, very good. That's a good one.

E: So much for the – yeah, far off in the distance.

S: Yeah. Number two, just put a second camera up and triangulate.

E: Yeah.

S: You could triangulate far away, you could triangulate close-up. Let's see which one captures the thing at the same time. My money's on the close-up triangulation.

B: Yeah, you're right, Steve. Those are great suggestions. But they don't even see that. They can't even imagine that. 'Cause, to them, this has got to be a big object, far away, moving fast, and they can't get past that illusion. They can't get past that. It doesn't even occur to them.

S: Well, but that's the point. They didn't do a scientific test to try to challenge their assumptions, or to test alternate hypotheses. They just are, you know, imagining that it's a flying saucer –

J: They don't want to.

S: – fitting the interpretation into it.

J: They don't want to.

E: And it – this doesn't –

S: All right, and here's the final thing that he said: "They seem to be most active between noon and one."

B: Interesting.

S: Do you know what else is most active in the middle of the day, when it's warmest?

E: Bugs?

R: Bees.

S: Bees, yeah.

E: Bees.

J: It was a fly.

E: Or a bee.

S: I think it was a bee. I think we blew this one wide open. All right. That was our fish in a barrel segment for this week.

(laughter)

Math Hurts (0:10:32)

http://bodyodd.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/05/14947181-fear-of-math-makes-your-brain-hurt-study-confirms?lite

S: But, Rebecca, you're going to explain to us why, for some people, math physically hurts.

R: That's – yeah, that's what the headlines are announcing, due to a study by psychologists at University of Chicago and Western University in Ontario, Canada. They have apparently found that doing math literally makes your brain hurt, sort of, but not really.

S: Sort of, but not really, yeah.

R: What happened was, they looked – they took fourteen adults who said that they, in general, are very anxious about math, and they had these people do math problems while in an fMRI, which is obviously the best way to help people with math anxiety. You know, you strap them to a gurney, you put their head in a tiny cage, put them through an enormous whirring magnet, and then make them solve math problems. Anxiety gone.

E: Cool.

R: The researchers say that they found that, when the told the subjects they were about to get a math question, the subject's brain showed activity in the part of the brain that registers real, physical pain, and that went away once they actually started working on the problem. Now, this is being reported with headlines saying that, you know, math makes your brain hurt, but the subjects didn't actually feel pain. It's just that their brains were reacting as though they were feeling pain. The researchers point out that the brain reacting as though the body's in pain could contribute to people with math anxiety actually doing worse on math tests, which can feed back into the anxiety. This isn't just out of nowhere. There are a lot of studies that show that your ability to score on math tests does vary, depending on how anxious you are about taking the test. For instance, there are a few very famous studies showing that female mathematicians who are reminded about the stereotype of women being bad at math tend to express more negative emotions and anxiety, and then do worse on subsequent tests.

E: Like that Barbie doll that said "Math class is hard!"

R: Yeah, that Barbie doll obviously had a lot of math anxiety. So, yeah, that's the study. There are a couple of issues that I saw straight out. Number one is that the study doesn't show that this is something unique to math. It only shows that the brain freaks out when people are upset and anxious about something. Number two, also, they might not have found the brain reacting as though it was in pain. The authors in the study actually note that it might be just the brain reacting to a threat, which is already how we categorize a lot of anxiety—like, if you have to give a speech, and you experience this rush of adrenaline, and that old flight-or-fight response, you know – because our brains have evolved to deal with stress by assuming that there's a lion about to eat us. That's the common knowledge, at least. But, at the same time, it's kind of interesting that our dumb human brains can't figure out the difference between a serious bodily threat and a math problem, you know.

S: I don't think we can even say that, Rebecca –

R: Yeah?

S: – because different parts of the brain will participate in different networks, and you can't necessarily conclude that, because the same part of the brain is lighting up, that it's serving the same function that it is in other situations that also make it light up. It's not that simple. And so, you know, that part of the brain may be contributing to a negative emotion or experience about, you know, the math anxiety, but it doesn't imply even that it's analogous to physical pain or other forms of anxiety. It could be serving a completely different function, right? So, you can't even assume that analogy, that the brain is responding to math anxiety as it does to other threats, or to physical threats, or to pain. That is a huge assumption not justified by the evidence.

R: Hmm. I don't know. You're the brain doctor. OK, so now we're at the point where the study shows nothing, basically. The study showed nothing, everybody. It's not interesting.

(laughter)

S: No, you know, it's the kind of thing where, you know, these one-off fMRI studies are really hard to interpret. Even assuming that the results are reliable—which, for small studies, is a coin-flip, in my opinion, to be generous—even if you –

R: Now, I mean, there were fourteen adults.

S: Yeah. Even if you buy that, there's – the interpretation is extremely complicated, and this kind of straightforward interpretation is almost silly, in my opinion. Maybe if, you know, they do four, five, or six other fMRI studies, as you said, looking at other effects, altering variables, we might get a better idea of what's actually going on here. It's – I don't think this one study's really interpretable.

Communicating with the Vegetative (15:11)

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/communicating-with-the-vegetative/

Nearby Rogue Planet (24:34)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20309762

Twisted Light (29:17)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20217938

Who's That Noisy? (35:46)

Answer to last week: Argon gas in the microwave

Questions and Emails

Bicycle Physics (40:13)

Follow up from last week regarding the physics of bicycles

S: However –

R: What about the correction on the bike tires? Because, it's like, everybody hated that.

S: Yes, that's the next thing.

E: Yeah, nobody –

R: You guys got that so wrong –

E: Oh, gosh.

R: – and I can tell how wrong you were based on the haughtiness of the emails we got in response.

S: And this is, you know, some on email, some on our own forums. The guys on our forum are usually very good at giving us technical feedback and correcting our errors, like with the group velocity thing, but in this one, I don't think they did a good job. So, last week we were answering a question by a listener who wanted to know why everything in the universe goes around. But he tacked on the end of that question the question about, like, how do bicycles stay up, how are they so stable, and all I did was say, "It's not the obvious answer most people think it is. It's actually very complicated, and physicists aren't 100% sure" and I left it at that.

E: Hmm.

R: Damn you.

S: I actually thought it might be a good problem for people to investigate on their own. But what we got, though, were a lot of people who were like, "Good grief! It's obviously due to the caster effect" or "It's due to the gyroscopic effect" or "It's the person riding the bike that steering it that's creating the balance", and really dumping on me for mystery mongering about saying that physicists don't understand it. So – but they were all wrong! And the whole point is that all of those answers that people think are the answer are not the most signi– are not really the answer to the question, of how are bikes self-stable. So that's the term that physicists use. If you take a bicycle and you run alongside of it—you get it up to ten or fifteen miles per hour or whatever—

E: Wow.

S: —and then you push it and let it go, it will – it'll stay upright with no rider, for a long time—until it slows down or hits something that's too bumpy—but if you're on a flat surface, the bike will stay upright and riderless for a considerable amount of time. And the question is, what process of physics is at work here to create this self-stability? The classic answers are that it's a combination of the gyroscopic effect; the rotation of the wheels, which—you know, this is what we were talking about last week—that rotation does, in fact, cause a little bit of a gyroscopic effect and, you know, because of angular momentum and the forces at work there, that when the bicycle gets tilted over to the side, it actually creates a force that will push it back—or that it will create a force that will turn the wheel, that will tend to right the bicycle. However, that force is actually quite small, and is not sufficient to explain self-stability.

E: Hmm.

S: Further, engineers have built a bike with no gyroscopic effect. It has two wheels—you know, in place of each wheel are two wheels, one above the one that's touching the ground that moves in the opposite direction, right? So you have a cancellation effect.

B: Ah, cool.

S: You have two wheels spinning in opposite directions –

E: I'll be.

S: – so, yeah, so the gyroscopic effect exactly cancels itself out, so there's zero gyroscopic effect, and you can create a bike with that that is still self-stable. The other effect is the caster effect. Most people are familiar with this from shopping carts. The wheels are designed so that, no matter what direction you move the cart in, the wheel aligns itself with the direction of movement because of the – the point of contact on the floor is a little bit behind the angle of connection, like, where the axis is. So, that causes the wheel to trail behind and self-align itself. Physicists have also created a bicycle—the same one—you know, the bicycle that has the – that takes out the gyroscopic effect has the point of contact a little bit in front of, instead of a little bit behind, where it's anchored, so that – it eliminates the caster effect. So, with no caster effect and no gyroscopic effect, the bicycle is still self-stable. So other forces must be at work.

E: Unidentified forces?

S: No, no. So, that's where we get into, like, how to talk about this. And, what some people were criticizing me for was maybe overemphasizing the mystery of what forces are at work. But, you know, I did a lot of reading before. I wasn't speaking off the cuff there. I had read many, many articles about it, and, in the last week, I've read many, many more, and watched videos of engineering professors discussing, and they all say the same thing—that we're not really sure, or they think that this is the answer, and the math gets really complicated, you know? But there doesn't seem to be one consensus, clear-cut answer to the question of what is the factor that's at work that's causing the bike to be self-stable. There's multiple possible things that are contributing to the self-stability of the bicycle. It really is just – it's a ferociously complicated problem. It doesn't mean that we have no idea what's going on, or that it's a mystery, or that the bike can't be self-stable, or that it defies physics. None of that. It just means that it's really complicated, there are multiple effects at work, it's not the simple ones that people think it is, but it does – One thing that we can say for sure is that it is dependent upon steering. If you lock the wheel of a bike, the self-stability goes away—if you lock the handlebars so it can't move.

E: Right.

S: The bike has to be able to steer. So, when the bike tilts to one side, the wheel moves in such a way that it pushes the bike back to the upright. So, no matter which way the bike wobbles, it's always getting pushed back toward the center. But the question is, exactly what is it that's causing the bike to steer in just the right way that it pushes itself back to the midline. So, but it was amusing, the number of people who were like, "Yeah, come on. It's the gyroscopic effect. What are you talking about?" It's like, nope. That's not it. It's not significant. While it does contribute to bike stability, it's not significant, and it's not necessary.

Science or Fiction (1:02:56)

Item #1: While corn is native to the Americas, the innovation of heating corn until it pops was introduced by the English colonists in the 17th century.

Item #2: The modern celebration of Thanksgiving in America began 200 years after the Plymouth celebration, when a letter that had been lost, by the Plymouth colony leader describing the event was rediscovered and publicized.

Item #3: Wild turkeys can run up to 20 miles per hour and fly up to 55 miles per hour.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:17:28)

I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

Wonko the Sane from Douglas Adams's So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish

References