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Nov. 22, 2011 - Skeptoid
16:04
Skeptoid #285: Slips and Goofs

Skeptoid corrects another round of errors found in previous episodes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Admitting My Factual Error 00:06:26
Forgive me, listeners, for I have sinned.
I have made a factual error in a Skeptoid episode.
Believe it or not, it does happen.
But in my own defense, at least I do my best to admit and correct the error, as I do with any that can be pointed out and verified.
So please, allow me to prostrate myself before you and admit and clarify some errors from past shows.
That's coming right up on Skeptoid.
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I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Slips and goofs.
As is the tradition here at Skeptoid, mistakes and misinformation are corrected whenever they're found.
A nicer tradition would be to not make them in the first place, but like we always say, getting the right answers is not as important as using the right methodology to find them.
No matter how hard I work, I'll only find the right answers most of the time.
And it would be unscrupulous of me to promise otherwise.
So let's dig right into the most recent batch of errors that have been pointed out to me and verified.
Let's start with one that resulted in a popular uprising of Scots, who nearly had me drowned in my favorite Isla whiskey.
The episode about the monster of Gloms is centered on Gloms Castle in Scotland.
However, in my opening paragraph, I said it's in England.
I've since received literally hundreds of emails correcting the error, many containing helpful analogies to guide me through my haze of ignorance, such as saying Glom's Castle is in England is like saying the Statue of Liberty is in Canada.
However, give me a chance to explain.
What I meant to say is simply that the castle is in the United Kingdom.
I didn't intentionally place it within England as opposed to Scotland.
Now, many Americans, honestly, have no idea what the difference is between England, Britain, and the United Kingdom.
The less cultured among us often use any of the three terms interchangeably, lumping all the parts of the British Isles together into one hazily named monarchy.
This is, of course, wrong, but it's common in the United States.
And it's what I meant when I said England.
Glom's Castle is in the UK.
I do know where in the UK Gloms Castle is, and I do know that that part of the UK is Scotland.
It was perhaps lazily disrespectful to proud Scots to place Gloms generally in the UK.
And it was wrong, though colloquial, to refer to the UK as England.
So I was wrong, though in a different way than what you thought.
And I hereby apologize to all.
There is a town in Scotland called Dunning, and I hope this episode will not affect my rights to reassert and reclaim my lordship.
In the exact same way, I mistitled the Queen Mother of the United Kingdom, calling her the Queen Mother of England.
While we're at it, I apologize for mispronouncing Darby as Derby, and it was only by the skin of my teeth that I didn't pronounce GLOMS the way it's spelled.
Glamis.
Episodes in the UK are just too complicated for me.
In my episode about the Haitian zombies, I pointed out that a sufficient dose of tetradetoxin, the poison in puffer fish, will cause paralysis of the muscles, including the heart and lungs, resulting in death.
The effect does wear off, but unfortunately the victim is dead by then.
I stated that there is no antidote or treatment.
Well, it's true that there is no antidote, but it's not true that there is no treatment.
Tetradetoxin poisoning is most common among aficionados of fugu, the famous sushi that has to be cut just right.
A number of these victims have been kept alive by CPR, long enough for the tetradetoxin to wear off.
Thus, the brain damaged caused by zombie powder can in fact be treated if you get to the victim quickly enough and he can be placed on life support.
Here's one from the hair splitting department.
While discussing some of the earlier historical solutions offered to Zeno's paradoxes of movement, I made reference to the Planck length, which can be fairly described as a quantum of distance.
I called it the smallest possible unit of length within the Planck system, which is based on universal physical constants, such as the speed of light and the gravitational constant.
The hair splitter correctly informed me that it is not the smallest unit of length in the Planck system.
It is the only unit of length in the Planck system.
Fine.
I stand quantified.
In my episode examining the health risk from radio frequencies, as proposed by some fringe opponents of Wi-Fi and smart meters, I pointed out that some 10% of the static on an empty radio station is leftover background radiation from the Big Bang.
I misspoke.
This number is closer to 1%.
How do we know this?
Well, it's a measurement of the volume of radio signal that's constantly coming from all directions out in space, at a wavelength of 7.3 centimeters, or about 4 GHz.
It consists of photons that filled the universe as it inflated from the initial bang.
Neat stuff.
Gold Investment Scams Explained 00:03:19
In a student questions episode, we talked about gold being hawked on television infomercials as an investment.
Typically, these are just high-interest loans from financial services companies.
All they want from you is the interest on the loan they sell you.
They don't really care whether you buy gold or put the money up your nose.
Gold, I pointed out, is rarely a growth investment.
It's renowned for its stability in times of financial crisis.
However, since that episode came out in July 2010, the world financial crisis sent investors scrambling for gold to stabilize their portfolios, and gold went from about $1,200 an ounce to about $1,700 an ounce.
That's a tremendous gain.
Gold has been on a sharp rise since about 2006, which I failed to check.
Prior to that, what I said held true.
Gold had been stuck under $500 an ounce for decades, doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Be stable.
Expect it to do so again.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
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We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
In my episode discussing the reasons for the various scary sounding vaccine ingredients, I dismissed the claim that vaccines contain aborted fetal tissue as made up.
It's true that they don't contain any, but the anti-vaxxers didn't simply make this one up.
More likely, they misinterpreted it.
Some vaccines must contain weakened viruses, not dead viruses.
Growing the weakened viruses means they have to have living cells which they can invade in order to multiply.
The Fry Standard Debate 00:06:15
And these living cells are specific lines that can divide and multiply predictably over a period of many years.
Some of these are animal cells and some are human cells.
These cultures are continually reproducing, self-perpetuating lines that are the same generation after generation.
The human cells used for this purpose all come from two healthy three-month-old fetuses aborted in the 1960s by choice.
One line, MRC5, was created in 1966.
The other, WI38, was created in 1962.
These two cell lines are used for all the vaccines currently in production worldwide that depend on human cell culture.
The cells themselves are not part of the vaccine, just the weakened viruses grown within them.
When we pointed the skeptical eye at the various rumors claiming Shakespeare's works were written by somebody else, we wrapped up with computational stylistics.
This is the use of computer software to do much more thorough comparative analysis of writing than it is possible to do manually.
Through computational stylistics, we establish what's called a literary fingerprint for a given author.
This makes it a relatively simple matter to learn the author of any given anonymous work, provided that author has a known library of works and has a fingerprint established.
Interestingly, this technique can also do things like identify collaborations between multiple authors, and even determine whether a given work was influenced by earlier works from other authors or influenced later works.
In my episode, I referenced some specific research and stated that it conclusively proved that Shakespeare, and Shakespeare alone, was the author of all the works attributed to him.
This is not quite right on two levels.
First, it doesn't conclusively prove it.
It merely establishes it with an extremely high level of probability.
Also, all it really shows is that one man wrote the works, who was stylistically different from all the other men whom some name as the true Shakespeare.
The results don't prove that that one author's name was Shakespeare.
But since all the other candidates are eliminated to a high probability, there remains no plausible reason to doubt that Shakespeare was just as history records him.
When we looked into brainwashing and deprogramming, I mentioned what's called the Fry standard.
The Fry standard comes from the court decision that rendered lie detector tests inadmissible in the United States.
And it was also used throughout the 1970s and 1980s when it was popular for defendants to claim they'd been brainwashed into committing their particular crime.
The Fry Standard states that expert testimony in court must be based on a scientific standard that is generally accepted by the majority of researchers in the relevant field.
Lie detectors were not, and brainwashing was also not accepted as a real phenomenon by the majority of psychologists.
Thus, they became inadmissible.
A number of lawyers contacted me to inform me that the Fry standard, which comes from 1923, has now largely been superseded by more modern standards.
A number of U.S. states, notably including California where many of the brainwashing defenses were attempted, still use the Fry standard.
But federal courts and most other states now follow the stricter standard of Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which is based on a 1993 case that established the Daubert standard.
Daubert incorporates general acceptance like Fry, but it also requires the judge to take a pragmatic look at the science to be sure it satisfies scientific standards for testing and validation, that it incorporates and has passed rigorous peer review, and that it has a known or discoverable error rate.
And if I can be permitted to head off a future criticism at the past, Daubert is indeed pronounced Daubert, not Daubert, according to the Daubert family who filed the case and are the namesakes of the standard.
Please continue to keep me on the straight and narrow.
If you find any other errors in any Skeptoid episodes, don't hesitate to let me know.
You can email me from the contact page of skeptoid.com.
My work is fallible, but it is usually well researched.
And if you want to show me where I was wrong, you'll need to present some good citations.
You can't learn anything if you already know everything.
So I look forward to hearing from you.
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You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
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