Skeptoid - Skeptoid #314: Botches and Bungles Aired: 2012-06-12 Duration: 15:39 === Correcting Past Mistakes (06:08) === [00:00:03] Today we've got another round of corrections to past episodes, keeping it real and keeping things accurate. [00:00:10] Today we're going to clarify the difference between brewing and distilling, some important dimensional issues concerning the German World War II monster tank P-1000, and a logical error over just how long the Earth has been exposed to cosmic rays. [00:00:27] Botches and bungles are coming right up on Skeptoid. [00:00:37] A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006. [00:00:48] With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief. [00:00:55] And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way. [00:00:58] And now we're even offering a little bit more. [00:01:01] If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid. [00:01:10] The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content. [00:01:15] These episodes are a few minutes longer. [00:01:18] We get rid of the ads and replace them with more Skeptoid. [00:01:23] The Extended Premium Show available now. [00:01:26] Come to Skeptoid.com and click Go Premium. [00:01:36] You're listening to Skeptoid. [00:01:38] I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. [00:01:41] Botches and Bungles. [00:01:43] Try as I might, no Skeptoid episode is perfect. [00:01:47] They're all too short to be comprehensive, which is expected fallout from the short format. [00:01:51] They're colored by my own personal biases and preconceived notions, which is a fact that I have to be honest about since I'm the one who's always advising everyone that they're probably guilty of the same thing. [00:02:01] But most significantly, they have errors. [00:02:04] I'm only one guy. [00:02:06] I have to crank out an episode a week, and the depth to which I'm able to dig each week only goes so far. [00:02:11] And I even make straight-up typos and misspeak. [00:02:15] So whenever I can, I correct such errors in an episode like this one. [00:02:19] So let's turn back the clock and give me a retroactive wrist slap wherever appropriate. [00:02:26] One of the dumb typos came in my recent episode about the Rothschild banking family. [00:02:31] Its founder, Meyer Rothschild, sent his five sons to five major financial cities across Europe to open new branches of the family business. [00:02:40] In listing which of the sons went to which cities, I screwed up and sent two of the sons to Vienna and never caught the error even when I recorded it. [00:02:48] Salomon Meyer, the second son, went to Vienna, where his Rothschild banking family of Austria did well until the entire affair was seized by the Nazis. [00:02:58] Jakob Meyer, the youngest son who went by the name James, went to Paris and founded the Rothschild banking family of France. [00:03:06] With one slip-up, I nearly handed a second 20% slice of the entire Rothschild fortune over to the Nazis, which certainly would have altered the course of the war. [00:03:16] I'll be more careful next time. [00:03:19] And speaking of Skeptoid drastically affecting the world's population, let's go all the way back to 2008 for my ever-popular episode on the alleged 2012 apocalypse. [00:03:30] In part of the episode, I discussed things that actually do happen in 2012, including the London Olympics, a U.S. presidential election, the transit of Venus, and the 11-yearly reversal of the sun's magnetic field. [00:03:43] But I also threw one more event in there that didn't belong, the Earth's population passing 7 billion people in October. [00:03:51] My notes don't include a record of where I got this, so I'm not sure if I misread something or if I found a bad source. [00:03:57] But as you probably know by now, the population passed 7 billion in October of 2011, not 2012. [00:04:06] The United States Census Bureau estimates that it happened in March 2012, but October 2011 had been probably the best known prediction for a long time. [00:04:16] In more than four years, nobody ever caught this. [00:04:20] At least not that got back to me, which is kind of amazing in itself. [00:04:25] Less amazing to particle physicists was the observation of faster-than-light neutrinos at the Opera Particle Detector in 2011. [00:04:33] I did a student questions episode in which I said this was a really exciting possibility. [00:04:38] If not quite an error, this was a total overstatement. [00:04:42] It turns out that few people in the know were actually moved by the odds of this being true. [00:04:47] The speed of light as an impassable barrier is so firmly established that almost everyone was convinced the observation would turn out to have been an error. [00:04:56] And so it was. [00:04:58] The very next day after my episode, OPERA announced that they'd traced the fault back to a defective computer cable. [00:05:05] It had been slowing down a signal just enough to make it look like the neutrinos were arriving at the target just slightly too soon. [00:05:12] Something like this was pretty much what most particle physicists expected would find. [00:05:17] Not too many would have agreed with my description of very exciting times. [00:05:23] But what would really have ticked off the physicists was my confusion of brewing and distilling in the episode about the Brown Mountain Lights. [00:05:31] One of the solutions that a few authors have suggested over the years for the cause of the lights is that the moon could have reflected off of moonshine stills hidden on the hillside. [00:05:41] I made a crack about how the shrewd brewer would not be likely to hide his still in such a public place. [00:05:47] Brewing is the fermentation of a steep starch solution to make beer. [00:05:52] Distillation is the boiling of a fermented solution to produce an alcoholic beverage. [00:05:57] Distillation is, of course, what said moonshine producers would be up to, not brewing. [00:06:04] In penance, I shall strip myself of my right to sip Lafroue whiskey for one full week. === Spreading Good Ideas (03:05) === [00:06:11] And while we're on the subject of grains, attend my episode on the gluten-free diet fad, wherein I characterized gluten-bound bread as the invention that made it possible for humans to migrate, for armies to march, and for history to be made. [00:06:27] Prior to the cultivation of strains of grain that contain gluten, bread made from corn or roots was crumbly and couldn't be effectively stored or transported. [00:06:37] While what I said was true in the larger picture, bread was not the first transportable, storable food. [00:06:44] That would have been dried meat. [00:06:46] What little tribal scuffles humans may have had prior to the development of wheat agriculture some 10,000 years ago would have been fueled primarily by dried meat. [00:06:56] Populations weren't really large enough yet that you could have accurately referred to those bands as armies on the march, but it is a worthy footnote in the history of bread's importance. [00:07:12] In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact. [00:07:19] Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking. [00:07:32] And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media. [00:07:44] It's an easy ask. [00:07:45] Just send a quick message to your station's programming director. [00:07:49] By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction. [00:07:57] Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address. [00:08:02] You can even use the telephone. [00:08:05] I know that might sound crazy. [00:08:06] It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication. [00:08:11] I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option. [00:08:14] The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless. [00:08:17] When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction. [00:08:22] And that's how we shape a better future. [00:08:24] In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless. [00:08:31] Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding together. [00:08:35] Get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is. [00:08:49] An unworthy footnote is my inexplicable citation of 0 to 55,536 as the numeric range of a 16-bit word in my episode comparing vinyl to digital sound recordings. [00:09:04] As a computer scientist, I've known the exponents of two up through at least 16 backwards and forwards since I was a teenager, and properly received avalanches of guff for this bizarre error. === Defending Reason and Truth (04:01) === [00:09:17] 0 to 65,535 is correct, giving a total of 65,536 possible values in a 16-bit word. [00:09:28] In penance, I shall strip myself of my right to use an RPN calculator for... [00:09:33] Well, I can't go a full week on that one, but I will restrict myself to Infix immediate execution mode for the rest of the day. [00:09:41] I think there's an app for that on my phone. [00:09:44] While I have the majority of you beginning to drift off and lose interest, here's one that could only hold the attention of the most obsessed of World War II weaponry junkies. [00:09:54] In my episode about Nazi Wunderwaffen, I discussed the P-1000 Ratte and P-1500 Monsta tanks and described their principal armament as the 800mm railroad gun. [00:10:08] This gun, of which the Nazis actually used two during the war, were the largest caliber rifled weapons ever used in the history of warfare. [00:10:17] The shell was 80 centimeters wide, almost 3 feet, and weighed 7 tons. [00:10:24] The gun itself weighed over 1,300 tons, and so was actually designed into the P-1500 tank, designed to weigh a total of 1,500 tons, and not the P-1000, designed to weigh a total of only 1,000 tons. [00:10:39] The P-1000's main armament was planned to be a pair of 280mm naval guns, similar to those used on their Scharnhorst-class battleships. [00:10:49] My assertion that the P-1000 would have carried a gun weighing more than the complete vehicle would have been possible only if it was also four-dimensional. [00:10:59] Perhaps we'll look into that possibility in a future Wunderwaffen episode. [00:11:04] I also twisted the laws of nature a bit in my episode about the supposed danger of using Wi-Fi and other common radio devices. [00:11:12] In comparing the relative strength of natural sources of radiation, I mentioned cosmic rays. [00:11:18] This is not really an appropriate comparison, since cosmic rays are particles and not electromagnetic radiation. [00:11:25] I also said they can penetrate the Earth. [00:11:28] Not so. [00:11:29] Cosmic rays penetrate the atmosphere, causing collisions that produce other particles, and some of these, such as muons, can penetrate a little bit into the Earth, but only a few kilometers at the most. [00:11:40] Neutrinos are about the only particles that can actually go all the way through the Earth. [00:11:45] They go through us too, but do not interact and so are harmless. [00:11:51] I also gave cosmic rays a bit too much credit in my episode on whether CERN's Large Hadron Collider can be expected to destroy the Earth. [00:11:59] It still can't, so don't worry, that's not the correction. [00:12:02] What needs correcting is that I said cosmic rays have been hitting the Earth for 14 billion years. [00:12:09] Cosmic rays have indeed been zapping around out there for 14 billion years, but for most of that, there was no Earth to strike. [00:12:17] The Earth's only been around for four and a half billion years, so it would have been quite a trick for it to be struck by cosmic rays or anything else for the past 14 billion. [00:12:29] Moving on to the Georgia Guide Stones, a conspiracy-laced erection of granite monoliths, I made yet another language error, confusing written and spoken languages. [00:12:39] The stones bear an inscription given in eight different languages, but the eight that were selected don't seem to conform to any discernible criteria. [00:12:48] I noted that one of the languages is Mandarin, when one of the eight most common languages spoken in the United States is Cantonese. [00:12:56] In fact, in written form, Mandarin and Cantonese are the same, at least over as short a manuscript as this inscription. [00:13:03] It's only when spoken that they are different. [00:13:06] I wasn't aware of this, and the Guidestones documentation calls it Mandarin. [00:13:11] Really, the inscription is in Chinese and is legible to both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. === Clarifying Language Confusion (02:20) === [00:13:19] So keep those corrections coming in. [00:13:21] If you catch an error in a Skeptoid episode, email it to me, which you can do through the contact page on skeptoid.com. [00:13:29] Make sure you send proper citations. [00:13:31] I'm going to check. [00:13:32] So if you send me a citation that represents a minority opinion, it's not going to make the cut. [00:13:38] It's easy to find a reference that supports anything you want to come up with. [00:13:42] And a big part of my job is making sure that the info I present truly does represent the best accepted scientific or historical understanding. [00:13:50] So if you expect me to do my homework, do yours as well. [00:14:00] Skeptoid is made possible only because almost enough of you have become members by supporting it financially. [00:14:07] The recurring micropayments make it really easy for you to make it possible for the show to continue. [00:14:12] Come to skeptoid.com, please, and click on Support Skeptoid and see the cool free gift you'll receive for joining. [00:14:22] You're listening to Skeptoid. [00:14:24] I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. [00:14:33] Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose. [00:14:42] And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month. [00:14:51] And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles. [00:14:55] And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar. [00:14:59] Why support Skeptoid? [00:15:01] If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you. [00:15:08] If you want to support a worthwhile non-profit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the teacher's toolkit, then sign up today. [00:15:21] Remember that skepticism is the best medicine. [00:15:26] Next to giggling, of course. [00:15:28] Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill. [00:15:38] From PRX.