SGU Episode 389
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| SGU Episode 389 |
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| 29th December 2012 |
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| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
It has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating. |
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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 December 19, 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: Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind. How's everyone?
S: Good. This is our 2012 year-end review wrap-up episode where we take a moment to look back at the year in skepticism and the SGU. Did you guys all have a good year?
R: It was all right.
B: Yeah, it was good.
E: It had some ups, you know, more ups than downs, I suppose.
J: Yeah. Significant ups and downs.
S: Jay, you just finished moving into your new house.
J: I did.
E: That's an up.
J: I did and my body is killing me, my god.
E: That's a down.
J: Yeah, we had half of our stuff already packed from our, a year and a half ago, that we couldn't even open 'cause we didn't have the space and we were saving money. We're opening up our wedding presents for the first time right now.
S: Yeah.
R: It's like second Christmas!
J: Yeah, it is. It's pretty cool. Like, there are things that I own that I had completely forgotten about.
S: I just like throwing out tons of stuff.
E: Yes.
S: It's amazing how quickly you accumulate junk in life, you know?
E: Especially with kids.
S: Yup.
E: Kids help.
R: You can't throw out kids. (laughter) That's illegal, Evan.
B: One thing I learned, though. Nothing like a divorce, though, to cut down on how much junk you have.
S: Is that right?
(Overlapping comment)
B: I've got squat now. (laughter)
R: Ups and downs. Ups and downs.
This Day in Skepticism (1:46)
- December 29, 1790: Thomas Fuller dies.
S: Well, Rebecca, you're gonna tell us about this day in skepticism.
R: Yes. On this day, which is December 29, in 1790, an obituary was posted for Thomas Fuller. Have any of you ever heard of Thomas Fuller before?
S: You mean Negro Tom?
R: Negro Tom, as he was known in his, yeah, in the obituary. Yeah, I had never heard of him before. He sounds really amazing. So, he was a slave who was brought to America when he was only fourteen. And he was born in Africa somewhere between Liberia and Benin. And late in his life it became well known that he was a, this mathematical genius. Apparently he was really good at doing complex mathematics in his head. He apparently couldn't read or write in English, but had self-taught him, self-taught himself? No, that's not right.
S: It's redundant and unnecessary.
R: But, he had
B: He was self-taught in—
R: He had taught himself a great number of arithmetical operations, riddles and mathematical games and things like that. For instance, some guys came to visit him to test what he could do, and they asked him a few questions to determine whether or not he was in fact a mathematical genius. First they asked him how many seconds there were in a year and a half, which he apparently took about two minutes to answer: 47,304,000. And then they asked how many seconds a man has lived who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old. And in a minute and a half he came up with the figure, 2,210,500,800. And one of the guys who was testing him said, no that's wrong. The actual answer is much smaller. And Fuller replied "Stop, master, you forgot the leap year."
B: Ooooohhh.
R: Then the sums matched.
B: Sweet.
R: So, yeah, he was a genius and he was often used by abolitionists who were pointing out the fact that slaves were just as intellectually, could be just as intellectually rigorous as white men. And, yeah, so he was an amazing guy. And in his obituary it concluded "Had his opportunity been equal to those of thousands of his fellow men, even a Newton himself need have ashamed to acknowledge him a brother in science. " Thomas Fuller.
S: Yeah, very interesting. I also read that it's probable that he learned his mathematical skills while in Africa. He didn't acquire them after being brought to Virginia.
R: Yeah, I mean, he didn't really have much opportunity to acquire them in Virginia.
E: So that means his brain operated in such a way with a strong disposition towards mathematical calculations.
S: Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, almost certainly he was a mathematical prodigy, and there are those people around today.
R: Don't mistake him for necessarily being a sort of idiot savant type, because it doesn't appear that that's the way he was. He seemed to be just a normal guy. Just with an incredible brain for mathematics.
E: Goes to show you don't need the environment. It's the brain that's really the key here.
S: Well, I think math is one of those things that is very hardwired. You know, your ability for math. But that's funny you bring up the idiot savant thing 'cause a lot of the pro-slavery people at the time dismissed his evidence of intellectual equality among Africans by calling him, dismissing him, as an idiot savant.
R: Right.
B: Oooh.
S: They could just dismiss the evidence away. It's like "Oh, he's not really intellectually equal to the white man, that's just a trick. It's like a trained monkey. It's just an idiot savant.
R: Yeah. No surprise, that they were coming up with any excuse they could.
S: Yeah, right. There was, but you know the Africans were trading with Europeans and the African merchants and traders were able to calculate sums in their head and do the trade. They had mathematics. It existed, so it's not as if he wouldn't have had access to anything like that in Africa. Very interesting.
Best and Worst of 2012 (6:04)
- The Rogues review the last year of the SGU, science, and skepticism
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Best Science News Story(6:05)
S: Well, for our year-in-review episode we look back over the best and worst and most interesting and some highlights from the previous year, from 2012. We're gonna start with the most interesting science news items of 2012. We've been collecting votes from some of our listeners, but we also have some of our own. So what do you, do you guys wanna start, or who wants to go first with their pick for the best science news story of 2012?
J: My favorite is the rover landing.
E: Yes, that's what I chose, too.
S: Yup. The Curiosity landing, that's in everyone's list in the top five, a lot of people voted for that. I agree. That was a huge news story. It was a technical—
B: tours de force.
S: Tours de force. Absolutely. NASA really deserves kudos for that. And it's doing good science.
E: It is. The event itself, watching it unfold live, or as live as it could be, what with the signal delay and so forth. There was a real suspense and it sort of did entice a lot of people. Even people who don't really know or have much of an interest in science. They were glued to their televisions and to their computer monitors to kind of see exactly what was going to happen. What it was gonna reveal. Very, very riveting moment.
B: And the cost of failure just had me on the edge of my seat. 'Cause I was just thinking, oh, man, this thing is just gonna make a Curiosity crater like I said. I was very nervous, because imagine one little metric error and bam! It's hundreds of millions of dollars shot. People's careers, literally their careers just cut short because, I'm sure, they had planned on spending so much time gathering and analyzing all this information that's streaming to us now. It was amazing.
R: I think one of the big wins here was the proof that people will still be interested in this stuff even when humans aren't on board. With recent cutbacks, and there's been a huge question on will we ever bother putting people in space, sending them to the moon again, things like that. And a lot of the arguments are, well, we do that to inspire humans. But I found the Mars rover landing to be really inspiring and I think a lot of other people did, too.
J: That was one of the elements to it, that it actually sparked my interest again. The space shuttle going away was very depressing. And I know that the space station's up there, but I hate to admit, it's gotten a little mundane. As ridiculous as that sounds. One other comment I wanted to make was the fact that the landing sequence was so complicated and every step had to work perfectly: the way that they slowed it down, the platform, the arm lowering it down, everything. All of those things somebody dreamed up and we pulled it off and we had never done it before. It was the first time we had done anything like that.
S: But speaking of that, Jay, something else that's on the top of a lot of people's lists was the SpaceX launch. The Dragon capsule. This may mark the real beginning of commercial space flight.
R: True that.
J: Yeah, I mean it is the beginning of commercial space flight, and the fact is it's feasible for companies now to not only afford to do it, but they can, from a technological standpoint they can do it. But now what we have is the beginning of probably a huge growth. Imagine if there were twenty or thirty companies launching and doing different things in outer space.
S: yeah.
J: We're gonna have a lot of ships entering low-earth orbit and it's gonna be a daily occurrence. It's gonna be something that we're gonna not even care about anymore like planes taking off.
S: Yeah, eventually. But I do think that this, we could be entering into a new era of cooperation between governments and private industry, a new phase of that. Obviously we've always had that to some extent, you know, NASA would contract with companies to make rocket boosters or components of their ships. But now we have a company really taking a much bigger role, designing, building, their own ship and NASA, our big government agency, can farm out, or contract out, actually delivering things into space, delivering goods to the space station now. Perhaps eventually delivering people, back and forth from the space station. So it's shifting that balance a little bit from government to more cooperative between government and private industry. I think that's a good thing, 'cause you can kind of get the best of both worlds then. There are certain things that governments do better because of their size, and there are other things that companies can do better because they are going to be more competitive and more efficient.
B: Yeah, less bureaucracy, red tape and—
S: Yeah.
B: more adaptable. But I think you guys missed, you've all missed the boat.
S: Well, I haven't given mine yet, but go ahead. I know what you're gonna say, Bob.
B: All right. Yeah, Curiosity landing and SpaceX, yeah, they're on my top five. But number one, I think it's a no-brainer, sorry. But it's gotta be, it's gotta be Higgs.
S: Yeah
R: Definitely, mine, too.
B: I'm glad that Physics World has been apparently listening to me, because their award, recently, for the 2012 break-through of the year went to the discovery of Higgs, and went to specifically the CERN ATLAS and CMS teams that were, of course, in charge of the whole thing. Just an amazing, if you just counted the shear number of words that went into this news item, I mean, throughout the year we kept getting hit with it, throughout the year. It wasn't just like in July or September we talked it. It was like an all-year event.
S: It was.
R: And it's still happening.
(overlapping comments)
B: Well, yeah, but, this is the year that we knew something big was gonna happen. But, and you're right, Rebecca, to cap it all off, just recently they announced that CERN is now 99.999999999 percent sure that what they found was a Higgs-like boson that the standard theory predicts. And that means that they're approaching seven sigma certainty, which is well above five sigma, which is the gold standard. So it's pretty much a done deal. I mean this is pretty much the Higgs. And it's funny, they still won't really say it, and they're predicting they won't until 2015, really officially say, yes, it's the Higgs boson.
R: And also I saw a recent news item on this that they might have found two different particles, because there's one with a mass of
B: Really?
R: Yeah, here we go. "There seems to be a Higgs boson with a mass of 123.5 GeV, gigaelectron volts, and another Higgs boson at 126.6 GeV, a statistically significant difference of nearly three GeV."
B: Whoa. I gotta look that one up, I didn't hear that.
R: And so they're trying to figure out if it was a mistake in the data analysis or if there are, in fact, two different particles. The cool thing about this is that this is going to be shaping science for years to come. They're gonna continue getting stuff out of this. They're gonna continue making new discoveries and refining this discovery. So yeah, I agree with Bob. It's either this or dinosaur farts. laughter) One of the other is the greatest (overlapping comments)
E: They're very close. So what do you think, these researchers will win the Nobel Prize in about 30 or 40 years? Assuming they're still alive.
S: Oh, it won't take that long. Ten, fifteen years. Maybe.
E: Yeah.
S: Wait until the dust settles. So you guys are all between the Higgs and the Curiosity? Is that what I'm hearing?
J: Yup.
R: And dinosaur farts.
S: And dinosaur farts. (laughter)
B: What've you got, Steve?
S: So before I give you mine I'll give you, so our listeners voted for those: Higgs, Curiosity was the top of everybody's list. SpaceX honorable mention. Some mentioned the Venus transit. Very cool. I agree. That was a lot of fun.
B: That was awesome.
S: Venus transiting the sun. It was amazing. I did what you were supposed, one of the mechanisms for viewing it. It was very simple, just binoculars and a white piece of paper, a white board, and you could see it! You could see the spot of Venus moving across the surface of the sun. It was cool.
R: Yeah, and I think I mentioned when we talked about this before, but it was really awesome to go, I went to the local science museum because I heard that they were setting up telescopes and they had glasses and stuff. And I found, like they had already given away all of the glasses they could and were asking people to recycle them and the place was just flooded with kids and families who were excited to see it. And it was really awesome seeing, kids particularly, but also whole families turning out to get excited about this, and learn something.
S: Yeah, science, astronomy excitement kind of event. Very cool.
R: Yeah.
S: So, I chose something I knew wouldn't just be redundant to everybody else's choice. One of the biggest, I think, stealth science news items, and it was really multiple studies, multiple events, not one thing, this year, was the development of the brain machine interface. And I really think that in 2012 it's all incremental advances, you know. But I do think it was, maybe we're sort of turning a corner in 2012. And this was capped off by a very recent news item. Researchers have developed, taken another advance in implanting electrodes. What they did was they implanted two strips of 96 electrodes each on motor cortex of a woman who was a tretraplegic, whose paralyzed below the neck, so can't move her arms and legs. And attached it to a sophisticated robot arm that has seven degrees of freedom. Meaning that there's seven different that you can manipulate it. You close and open the grip, you can bend in three dimensions and be positioned in three different dimensions, that's seven different ways it could be moved.
R: She was feeding herself chocolate. It was awesome!
S: Absolutely. It took, on the second day she was able to move the arm, and then she rapidly gained greater and greater control and coordination with the arm. It was a 13-week study. And by the end of the study she was using it with, they said, the researchers said, with more facility than any other previous study, and not quite, but getting to, the level of a normal arm.
B: Oh, come on.
J: And then they took it away from her!
E: It's science, man. That's science.
S: Well, it was in the lab. Yeah, I mean, this is it. We're developing a brain machine interface where we're gonna hook up paralyzed people to robot arms, and virtual arms, whatever, you know, controlling computers, controlling robotics. It works. The technology works. They could learn to just think and move that arm. And all of the basic groundwork is laid for taking it to the next step of the brain machine brain interface, where the device also provides sensory feedback. So they've done this in a monkey where they -- so some of this research is in monkeys, some is in humans – one of the monkey studies, they had electrodes on the somatosensory cortex, and they had the monkey controlling a virtual arm. And the monkey learned how to distinguish different virtual objects by different sensory feedback. Meaning that the virtual objects had a different texture. They felt different to the monkey. And that was the only way to sort of tell the difference. There's other research that shows that with brain plasticity and by manipulating the sensory feedback, we could make people feel they are occupying a virtual, or artificial, limb. Or entire body. One simple experiment is if you have someone sit next to a table where their real arm is underneath the table,
B: Great experiment.
S: and maybe cover it with a blanket or something so they can't see it, and then you have an artificial arm coming off their shoulder and laying on top of the table, so they're seeing an artificial arm, you know, on top of where their real arm is, and then you scratch the artificial arm, so they could see that happening, while somebody under the table scratches their real arm in the same place. So the brain sees and feels the fake arm being touched. And then suddenly, for many people, that is enough to make them feel as if that is their arm. That the fake arm is their arm.
R: That's not really a recent thing.
S: No, that bit is not recent. But this is, I'm just saying, the groundwork has been laid, you know, over the last decade, to show that it's theoretically possible, by having motor and sensory electrodes on the brain, to have someone not only control a robotic arm, but feel the arm, feel as if they own it and control it, and that they occupy it. And that it could actually even feel natural for them. Now we don't know what the limits of that are. Especially in an adult. We don't know what the limits of plasticity and training and everything will be. But it seems like it could be pretty close to real. You know, like real bionic limb kind of thing. You know, where it feels like it's your own arm.
B: What incredible promise. But Steve, for me though, I keep thinking that the big leap, though, that's gonna be required—I mean, they actually still had to scratch his real arm. I mean that was, to me that's kind of like the weak link in that because the guy still has an arm that can be scratched. If they could have replicated the feeling of a scratch in somebody who didn't have the arm,
S: Well, Bob, but that was the monkey experiment I told you about, where the monkey was able to tell the quote unquote texture of virtual objects by sensory feedback directly to the somatosensory cortex. So these pieces have not been put together yet but they're all there.
R: And this research has been used to help people who have lost limbs cope with ghost pain, ghost-limb pain, so, yeah, it's all there.
S: yeah. There's a number of different labs. There's Duke, Brown and Pittsburgh, are the three in the U.S. that I've been seeing studies coming out of. So that's good, that there's different centers working on it. And every year, every six months or so, I see another study where they are doing a little bit better. More electrodes, greater control, more functionality, some other piece of the puzzle gets put into place. I just don't see any theoretical barriers anymore. It's having a robot arm that you feel you own and control, you know, the whole sensation.
J: So how long do you think it'll be, Steve, until we have something that's really close?
R: Five years.
S: Well, I think . . .we have something now that could actually be useful for people who are paralyzed. Imagine having a robotic arm attached to your wheelchair with electrodes going onto your motor cortex, you're otherwise completely paralyzed below the neck, but now you can manipulate your environment. You can feed yourself and whatever, you can do stuff. Which is better than not being able to do anything.
B: What is the person going through in order to manipulate it? I mean, what are they actually, do they have to manipulate their alpha waves or think something specific? I mean, is it, will it get to the point, or is there any hint that it could soon get to the point where it's just completely unconscious? Well I guess that shouldn't be a problem, but I'm just wondering, what will it be like in terms of a real arm and this fake arm?
E: You want it to be seamless, Bob, right?
S: No, this is with pure thought. And that's been shown, too. You do not have to physically move something. That study's been done, too, Bob. You don't have to physically move something. It's, you can disconnect the physical movement from the thoughts that are necessary to control the robotic arm.
B: Yeah. I realize that, but my point is what
S: What's the experience like? I don't know. I'd love to talk to these people and find out exactly what they say. But because it's on the motor strip, right? That's when it's reading. It's reading their intent to move something, to move that arm. And the computer is interpreting that and translating that into the movement, and so then they, with the feedback of seeing how the robot arm moves, they learn to control it. And their brain begins to map to it. That's the key, is that the plasticity kicks in to the point where the brain starts to map to the movement, and eventually they just have to think of the movement they want to do. Just like you do, with your own arm. And once you add the sensory feedback, I think it's really gonna take it to another level.
B: Yeah. Well, now, extrapolate that a little bit. Imagine if you could, if the brain is plastic enough, imagine if you could manipulate two fake arms, but imagine if there was like 50 fingers on each arm. On each hand. Imagine if you can do that type of thing and then go beyond, and manipulate things beyond what a normal, a regular person would be able to do.
E: How could you sense 50 fingers, though?
B: Well, how do you sense ten? You can sense ten, I mean, you can manipulate
E: 'Cause we were born that way, Bob.
S: So that's a really good question, Evan. And I had that question, too. Could you have six arms? And could you . . .
B: Why not?
E: Doc Octopus.
S: But that was the question, Bob, is the brain plasticity sufficient that it could map to limbs that don't normally exist? To supernumerary limbs. And the answer to that is: yes it can.
(overlapping comments)
S: To things you never had. So that, there's no theoretical—
R: I'm gonna get a penis.
(laughter)
S: Oh, you always wanted one, didn't you, Rebecca?
E: Rebecca: ten penises!
(laughter)
S: There's no theoretical limit why your brain couldn't eventually, through plasticity, learn to map to own to control limbs that you were never born with. Isn't that cool?
J: So it's just what you get yourself used to. At that point.
S: Yeah.
B: Yeah, oh yeah.
S: Right. And now you have to do this to kids, where they have even greater plasticity. Then I think the limits are even less in terms of what—
J: Steve, with that thinking, you could have a tentacle!
S: Yeah, you could have tentacles. Sure.
R: Tentacle penis. (laughter) The Japanese are gonna love me!
S: That's the Centaurans on Babylon 5 have prehensile penises.
J: All right. All right. Let's keep going. We've got a lot of stuff to cover.
Tim Farley (54:20)
E: Tim Farley did some really excellent work this year, in regards to his reporting and keeping us all up to date on what was happening with "Mabus," also known as Dennis Markuze, who was arrested multiple times in Montreal, and they were able to finally sort of piece together all the parts with great help of the skeptical community and great work by Tim, the police were able to track this guy down. Markuze has been inundating all of us - Rebecca, Steve, all of us - we've received the emails for years now. It's been as long as we've been doing the show I think. Finally it got to a point where something had to be done about it and they did arrest him, not once but twice, and Tim deserves a lot of credit for that work.
S: Yeah, absolutely.
J: Tim does a lot of stuff like that. He's definitely not a one trick pony, he's got a lot of things going on. He's one hell of a skeptic.
S: He is. I also think he's one of the underrated skeptics, you know, who does a lot of good work, and maybe he's not in a position that gets him a lot of attention, but he deserves more attention than he gets in my opinion.
In Memoriam (55:26)
- The Rogues remember those we lost over the last year
Who's That Noisy? (57:53)
- Answer to last week: Tetris theme
Science or Fiction (1:00:03)
Item #1. Biologists have discovered a species of small jellyfish that can float briefly above the surface of the water to evade predators. Item #2. Scientists have discovered a cyanobacterium that creates calcified structures inside its cell. Item #3. An entomologist discovered a new species of lacewing fly from a picture posted on Flickr. And item #4. A new species of primate was discovered - cute and cuddly looking, but with two tongues and highly venomous.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:16:48)
It has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating.
Iain Banks.
Announcements (1:17:37)
References
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