SGU Episode 880

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SGU Episode 880
May 21st 2022
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 879                      SGU 881
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
This image is a testament to what we can accomplish, when as a global research community, we bring our brightest minds together to make the seemingly impossible, possible. Language, continents, and even the galaxy can't stand in the way of what humanity can accomplish when we come together for the greater good of all.
Sethuraman Panchanathan, Director of the National Science Foundation
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Intro, "Blood Moon", Eclipse 2024, Door on Mars

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, May 18^th 2022, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening folks!

S: How is everyone? So who saw─

B: Good.

C: Did not wait for the response at all.

J: How is everyone? Hey move on to what I wanna talk about.

S: So who saw the lunar eclipse?

B: I don't wanna talk about it.

J: What do you mean by lunar Steve?

C: I saw everyone's pictures of it.

S: The blood moon.

J: Blood.

S: Blood moon. How was it Evan?

E: It was great. It looked awesome. Now the clouds came in soon after it actually went into full eclipse so I only got a couple minutes of being able to see it in its totality. But it was great. The thing I love about lunar eclipses is that it looks it has this fake look to it. It's it's almost like it's a prop up in the sky.

S: Special effect.

E: Right. There's something wrong. It's not it looks artificial in some way. And the other another thing I like about it is that you can see the stars right up very close to the Moon the background. Where usually on a full moon you get all washed out. You can't see any stars any practically anywhere near the Moon. But here you could see every last little star that was poking out and around the Moon. It was very very cool.

B: You know Evan I'm real happy you enjoyed it because for me what happened is what always happens.

C: Oh no.

B: I go outside. Here we go. I'm excited. Clouds everywhere. Can't see anything because something interesting was happening in the sky and therefore I can't see it.

E: I don't know why you have such a string of bad luck.

B: The string is years─

J: It's years Bob, it's been over a decade.

B: ─years and years right it's been nuts.

E: Would you call it a cosmic string?

S: It started with the worst viewing of Hayley's comet in 2000 years.

B: Yeah that was a cosmic slap in the face. Yep it was. That was wow thanks for reminding me Steve that was a major disappointment.

E: Was that 1986?

S: Yeah.

B: That was pathetic. Not only was it crazy far away.

S: We were old enough that we knew we weren't going to make the next one, you know what I mean?

B: Oh yeah that ship has sailed.

E: 78-79 years later right?

B: We're gonna be way dead.

E: What about Hale–Bopp we all saw Hale–Bopp because that was in the sky for several days.

B: Yeah that was yeah I remember that.

S: We've actually seen few comets but nothing special you need binoculars you know or whatever.

B: Yeah the naked eye ones are always great but I want naked eyes daytime. That's what I want. Make it a comment or even better a supernova.

S: See Bob that's your problem is that your standards are too high. It's not that the cosmos starts conspiring against you so you're just too picky.

B: Too picky.

C: He's so picky that he is smited.

B: Yeah I just wanted to see a lunar eclipse that's all. I'm not asking for too much. But I could dream oh yeah I could dream about a daytime supernova. Abso-effin-lutely.

C: When's the next solar?

S: 2024 right?

E: 2024.

C: The one that's gonna be over Texas and Buffalo?

E: Yes.

B: And I don't think you guys are going to want me to go but I think we're going to go anyway but I think we should go to Texas.

E: We're going to Texas.

C: Come to Texas. Come hang out meet my family and we we'll go to all my favorite restaurants and we'll it'd be so fun.

E: I'm so there.

C: Yay!

B: Guys seriously man we got it's a couple years now we gotta like start talking about this.

J: Yeah I'm in let's just make it.

E: Yep.

J: Steve we were talking about having an SGU event. like a viewing event.

C: That would be fun.

J: Do a podcast make it make it like a two-day thing or something.

B: And I think two years I think we'll be hopefully between variants at that point. (laughter)

S: We'll be on to the next pandemic. A completely different virus.

B: Oh geez.

S: In two years. Don't worry about it.

S: Did you guys see the door on Mars?

B: The mouse door?

S: The pareidolia on Mars?

E: Oh gosh.

S: Yeah.

E: Yeah they took images and like so many other things misidentified on Mars. This particular picture looks like sort of a doorway etched into the side of a rock.

J: It's gotta be.

C: I mean it does look. I mean to be fair really does look like a doorway.

B: Door-ish.

S: How are the martians going to get into their underground bunker?

E: Right?

S: They need I mean there's a door cut into the side of the stone hill or whatever that is.

E: I mean yeah it's rectangular in shape we're not placing it on...

S: Sort of. On of the pearls in medicine is that there are no straight lines in nature. It's like when you're reading an X-ray there's nothing natural in the body should be a perfectly straight line. So you know if you're seeing that you're seeing something artificial. So it's just it's sort of the same thing but it's not exactly true because there are like cleavage planes and things sure could be relatively straight. Here it's not straight. These things are naturally look closely like they're a little curved or there's a jag or a doodad that looks like stone. Looks like a natural stone formation.

B: And if you look at the doorway as a gestalt in the geography of that area it makes perfect sense of what's happening.

C: Yeah you just have to kind of like zoom out.

B: Right it's not anomalous it's not like what the hell. It's just like yep. This makes sense right there.

C: Yeah and there's some great pictures online where it's like it shows it in that really perfectly cropped shot and then they zoom out and you're like oh it's just like a weird hole in the rock.

E: And of course everything is human size, right? That's a six and a half foot doorway.

J: Of course! Yes!

E: Because I'm a human and that's what it would be for me. No actually it's quite smaller than that.

S: Less than three feet.

E: Yeah.

S: I didn't really realize martians were so small but it's always just it's just pareidolia. There's people pouring over all the NASA photos and looking for anomalies basically.

B: And yes and sometimes it's blob squash effect as well. Like look at that thing it look kind of looks like this until you get close up like oh not at all.

S: Like the Bigfoot on Mars which was like sideways and teeny. You rotate it and don't don't tell people what the scale is and because it's reminiscent of the silhouette of Bigfoot. It would be amazing if there was nothing like that online. You know what I mean? Like that would be that would be remarkable.

E: That would be remarkable.

Arizona Announcements (6:33)

S: All right so guys our next event coming up. I want to talk about this. Is Arizona we are going to be in Phoenix on July 14^th that's a Thursday, July 14^th. We're gonna be doing a private show plus. This is a new thing that we're doing. It's basically an expanded and extended private show. We record a podcast like we've been doing for a long time. These are always super fun we do get a little bit off the rails and have bits that are only for the live audience. We're going to expand it by at least an hour. Like there's going to be three hours of content where we're doing songs and games and interactive stuff. But also we'll spend as much time as we can there to interact with everybody. Sign books, take pictures, just chat and hang out. We won't be rushed. We basically like rent the room for the evening or the half day or whatever. So that'll be Thursday night. Then Friday we have, Friday evening in Phoenix we have an extravaganza. Then we go to Tucson for a private show in the afternoon extravaganza in the evening. So listen we if you're thinking of going we are asking you to get your tickets now because we need to plan this event. We really need to know what the ticket count is going to be for all of these events. So these are always super fun. We really enjoy going but we strongly encourage you to get your tickets now. We really appreciate that. Jay tell them how to do that.

J: Hello? (laughter) Steve they can go to theskepticsguide.org/events and you will see all four shows right there listed in front of you and the information is there as well.

S: Right. And don't forget for the extravaganzas there are also VIP tickets where you get preferred seating and you also get to hang out with us if you again want that picture or sign a book or ask us questions or whatever there's time built in for that as well. But these are completely distinct from the private show events which are much more elaborate.

C: You also get swag, VIP swag.

S: You also get the special VIP swag. All right guys let's go on with our news items.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

S: ... All right, guys, let's go on with our news items.

Health Benefits of Clean Energy (8:42)

• Health Benefits of Clean Energy

SIDS Study Hype (24:04)

• SIDS study shows the risks of science hype

Growing Plants In Lunar Soil (36:32)

• Scientists Grow Plants in Lunar Soil

Milky Way Black Hole (48:01)

• Astronomers Reveal First Image of the Black Hole at the Heart of Our Galaxy

Gullible Acupuncture Article (55:23)

• Why Acupuncture Is Going Mainstream in Medicine

Who's That Noisy? (1:06:06)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Bird whistle

New Noisy (1:10:25)

[perhaps an oscillating, long, taut cable making strumming, chirping vibrations]

J: ... So if you think you know what this week's Noisy is or if you heard something cool, you have to email that to me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Email #1: Language and AI (1:12:48)

I'm a new listener to the podcast, and I appreciate the time and hard work you've put in creating this content and doing research. Currently, I work for an AI company that helps the largest companies (the Googles, Facebooks, Amazons of the world) create and deploy their machine learning solutions. It is a groundbreaking industry, which I think you know well enough and highlight on your show. One thing that I specifically appreciated was that you, unlike most other commentators, touched on the fact that there is prevalent bias in these large models. This brings me to my main point, which is that there was a huge emphasis in the latest episode placed on the idea that DALL-E "understands" and "knows" things about the image and contexts within. This is actually a super dangerous idea to perpetuate. While GPT-2/3 is a different technology, I believe that the research outlined in Dr. Timnit Gebru's paper, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big", is relevant and can speak to the issue better than I ever could, specifically: "However, no actual language understanding is taking place in LM-driven approaches to these tasks, as can be shown by careful manipulation of the test data to remove spurious cues the systems are leveraging [21, 93]. Furthermore, as Bender and Koller [14] argue from a theoretical perspective, languages are systems of signs [37], i.e. pairings of form and meaning. But the training data for LMs is only form; they do not have access to meaning. Therefore, claims about model abilities must be carefully characterized.

I appreciate the consideration and hope that you will be able to find some free time at some point to review Dr. Gebru's paper who, if you are not familiar, was ousted from Google's AI ethics division for bringing up bias issues. [Here is] her full paper.

– Cheers, Noah

Email #2: Eating Raw Foods (1:18:01)

I recently came across this Instagram post of a person just eating raw foods for over a hundred days. Curious as to how much raw food is humanly acceptable to consume?
Cheers from Singapore too!

– Chuan Hao

Science or Fiction (1:21:23)

Theme: Which is bigger? Item #1: The world-wide gaming industry grossed 9.4 times as much revenue in 2021 as the world-wide film industry. Item #2: The largest adult tardigrades are larger than the smallest adult fleas. Item #3: The largest known star in the Universe is UY Scuti, with a radius larger than the average distance of Pluto from the sun.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Largest star
Science	Gaming > film
Science	Tardigrade > flea

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Cara	Tardigrade > flea
Jay	Tardigrade > flea
Evan	Largest star
Bob	Largest star

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Bob's Response

B: ... the Ant-Man [movie], remember when the older guy was shrinking down? ...

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:35:18)

This image is a testament to what we can accomplish, when as a global research community, we bring our brightest minds together to make the seemingly impossible, possible. Language, continents, and even the galaxy can't stand in the way of what humanity can accomplish when we come together for the greater good of all.
– Sethuraman Panchanathan, Director of the National Science Foundation

Signoff/Announcements

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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