SGU Episode 945

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SGU Episode 945
August 19th 2023
One of the five large antennas, called Deep Space Stations (DSS), at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, part of the NASA Deep Space Network. The DSS-43 antenna is the only antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager 2.
SGU 944                      SGU 946
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.
Brian Greene, American theoretical physicist
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Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Cara's dissertation, Maui wildfires

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, August 16^th, 2023, 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 everyone.

S: So Cara, how did it go? You defended your thesis two days ago.

E: Oh, boy.

C: I did. I did. Dissertation is in the can. It went well, I think.

S: Did you have any immediate feedback?

C: I did a little bit, but not like, it's kind of silly because, like, we had been going back and forth. So my chair didn't have any feedback. He said that it was great and he's ready to obviously move me forward and I can graduate and all that good stuff. My methods expert said that I shouldn't be hard on myself about my limitations. I'm not, but I do have to have limitations. How do you tell a story of like three years of your life and 180 page paper and really, really get to the meat of everything in 45 minutes? That's like less time than you usually have to give a public talk.

S: Yeah. I mean, that's the art of it, right? Is knowing how to distill it down to the essence and knowing what to cut out. Like the Sophie's Choice, like, oh, I can't talk about this because it's not enough to talk about everything.

C: Right. And like, how much do I talk about the background and how much do I talk about my findings and how much it's just, it was a lot. So but yeah, we got through it. It was great. Everybody's very gracious and kind. The dissertation is now off to the proofreader, which is the important intermediary step where they copy, edit and make sure everything is where it needs to be. And it's formatted appropriately for the university. And then once it comes back from the proofreader, it goes to ProQuest, which is the publisher.

S: Cool.

C: So yeah, then it'll be published.

S: Congratulations.

C: Thank you.

B: Huge milestone.

S: So have you guys been following this fire in Hawaii?

J: Yeah

B: A little bit.

C: Yeah, my aunt lives in Maui. It's been very difficult. Like, yeah, she's updating me. It's horrible.

S: Yeah, it sounds like it was a real CF like multiple things went wrong, you know.

J: And it happened really fast people were literally like, when you think a building is burning or a neighbor's house is burning and like you'd have time. But it seems like they didn't have a lot of time.

C: No, a lot of people died. Over 100 people have died.

J: Yeah. Well, it's probably going to be a lot more than that because there's a lot of people missing.

C: There's a lot of people missing. Yeah. Over 100 people accounted for have died.

J: But I haven't read an account that kind of takes me through like the blow by blow what happened.

C: Well, I mean, it's not like all of Maui, right? It's like mostly in this one town.

J: Yeah. Yeah. In that town.

C: And it was just it was devastating.

S: From what I understand, it like they they didn't evacuate. They didn't really have a warning. It spread. They just caught him by surprise. It spread very, very quickly.

C: It's not common. That's the thing. Like, you don't think of that landscape, you don't think of that area as being so vulnerable. But things are changing rapidly. And that's the scariest part about all of this, the places that we didn't think as critical places for wildfire have become them.

B: Yes. It boils down to climate change yet again.

C: But also, I think there's been a lot of conversations around city planning and around sort of moving away from sort of the natural landscape and into some of these more human built structures that were not very fireproof. I've been reading quite a lot about the way that the landscape has changed over time to make it not intentionally, of course, but that makes it less kind of resilient to fire. And that's obviously very problematic.

S: No, Bob is correct in saying that the probability of this happening without climate change is very, very low. It's always hard to attribute any individual event. It's all about probability. But with all the heat waves and all the fires that we're having in Canada and in Maui, we're way past the probability of this just being like a normal fluctuation.

C: Oh, yeah, 100%.

S: Yeah. It's so infuriating. We're in the middle. I'm sure there's still like pulling bodies out of the ash, right? And people are talking about space lasers. Like, come on.

C: What about space lasers?

S: They're saying that this is that the fires were caused by lasers it's not natural.

C: Oh, like a conspiracy theory.

S: Yeah, it's a conspiracy.

B: Oh, my god.

S: Already the nut jobs are─

J: So the idea is─

S: Turning this into a conspiracy event.

J: They took a picture that was taken from the Falcon 9 rocket launch. I think that happened a couple of years ago. There was like a time lapse type of picture where it shows like the initial dust that's kicked up when the rocket fires. And then you see this trail, which is essentially, I think, exhaust that's coming from the ship, right? As it goes up. But when you look at this picture, it's showing all this at once because it was a time lapse. So it looks like it could very easily be interpreted as something coming from the sky and doing something to the ground. Because the smoke that's kicked up and everything, the dust that's kicked up on the ground. And they're literally like, yeah, space lasers started this fire in Maui. That's where they jumped to.

C: Why?

S: Because conspiracy.

C: Usually there's like an ideological reason behind a lot of these things.

B: Well, there is. There is. Climate change is a fiction being promulgated by the liberal elite. And we want people to believe it for some reason. So we're going to burn some brush and kill people to make them think that it's climate change when it isn't. That's the reasoning. Right?

C: Absolute bananas. That people can like do the mental gymnastics to get to that place.

B: People are elite gymnasts when it comes to mental gymnastics.

C: That's so true.

B: Perfect 10s straight across. Oh my god. We are superhuman gymnasts in that context.

S: And some people are just saying that it doesn't look natural. Really? What does that look like? What does a natural fire look like versus a laser-caused fire? You're an expert at determining that based upon the resulting fire.

C: I'm sure fire is fire once it catches fire.

E: I recall that because in one of the shots you can see sort of this oval ring of fire as almost a, that doesn't happen in nature. It had to have been deliberately set.

S: I'd love to take that quote out of context, Cara. Fire is fire once it starts fire.

C: Exactly. Come on people.

S: [inaudible] catches fire, clearly.

C: You don't even need the context. We can use this in all sorts of contexts.

S: All right. Let's go on with some news items.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

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

Deep Space Network (6:49)

• Talking with Webb using the Deep Space Network

Identifying Misinformation (19:00)

• Young People Tell Us They Need Help Identifying Misinformation

Regret and Gender Affirming Care (49:07)

• No regrets: Gender-affirming chest surgery in adults has long-term satisfaction

Localizing Hidden Consciousness (1:01:32)

• Injury patterns associated with cognitive motor dissociation

Ice Baths (1:18:37)

• What's the science behind the ice bath trend?

Who's That Noisy? (1:29:15)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Bread crackling out of the oven

New Noisy (1:36:23)

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

what this week's Noisy is

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:39:58)

Email #1: Metazoans

I am a big fan of the SGU and pod! I noticed that on the Aug 12 science or fiction, the item about ctenophores was fiction as stated because it was missing a word. For the item to be science, it needed to be ‘ctenophores are the oldest extant *metazoan* branch of life’ , and by metazoan I basically mean multicellular animal. There are some much older extant branches of non-metazoan life. For example, cyanobacteria and archaea that form stromatolites have been around for a few billion years and can still be found alive in the Bahamas. The source of the ctenophore statement is a recent paper in the journal Nature (Schultz et al. 2023) showing evidence that ctenophores were the first animals, challenging a decades long consensus that sponges were the first animals. Thank you all for this great podcast, community, and outlet for my pedantry! I started listening years ago as a broke grad student, and just became a patron. Lastly, huge congrats to Dr. Santa Maria!

Cheers,

– Lauren

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Science or Fiction (1:41:23)

Theme: Medieval jesters Item #1: In medieval Europe women were forbidden from being jesters, as it was unacceptable for a woman to make fun of a man. Item #2: Jesters typically only worked part time as a jester, while most of the year they would engage in other mundane jobs around the castle. Item #3: So-called "jester's privilege" meant that jesters could mock or insult any noble, even the king or queen, without fear of punishment.

Answer	Item
Fiction	No women jesters
Science	Jesters worked part-time
Science	"Jester's Privilege"

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess
Cara	No women jesters
Bob	"Jester's Privilege"
Jay	Jesters worked part-time
Evan	No women jesters

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:58:03)

The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.  – Brian Greene (1962-present), American theoretical physicist and mathematician

Signoff (2:02:24)

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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Today I Learned

• Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References