All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
May 20, 2014 - Skeptoid
15:59
Skeptoid #415: In Which I Am the Very Picture of Error Personified

Skeptoid corrects another round of mistakes made 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
|

Time Text
Correcting Nuclear Disaster Errors 00:10:53
Time once again to clean up the messes I've made.
On a podcast that talks about a different urban legend every week, so much information comes through on so many disparate subjects that I'm bound to get a few facts wrong.
Today we've got some corrections on the vanishing village of Lake Anjikuni, the disappearance of young Australian pilot Frederick Valentich, and more.
And that's right now on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's HyperFixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com, in which I am the very picture of error personified.
Skeptoid is 100% free of errors.
There, I just made an erroneous claim.
I make mistakes all the time, in fact.
Each episode is the result of a full week's immersion in that topic.
But mistakes still creep in.
Everything from slips of the tongue while recording, to getting information from an erroneous source in which I put too much trust, to just plain being humanly wrong about everyday stuff that seems so obvious I don't even bother to check.
I've done over 400 Skeptoid episodes, and every one of them has been a lesson in the need to work harder.
Here is my latest batch of corrections, usually even more interesting than the original mistakes.
My favorite correction this time around had to do with the old tale of the vanishing village of Anjacuni Lake, which was the story of an old trapper in Canada who visited an Inuit village in Nunavut, where he'd been many times, only to find it deserted with no trace of wherever the people had gone.
It had many familiar story elements like meals half-eaten and evidence that people had left with no preparation.
My conclusion turned out that the entire story had been made up by author Frank Edwards, who gave it three pages in his 1959 book, Stranger Than Science.
He even came up with a backstory that the event had been reported in 1930 in the Halifax Herald by a newspaperman named Kelleher.
Kelleher's report had been thoroughly investigated by an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who concluded that Kelleher had made it all up.
A conclusion that remains their official one today.
Having brought enormous outside forces to bear, I found no evidence that Kelleher's article had ever existed, and thus claimed that Edwards himself was the fabricator of the entire story.
And then something happened that I absolutely love.
Kelleher's 1930 article surfaced.
But not in Canadian papers, in a place nobody thought to look.
It was in a 1930 newspaper called The Bee in Danville, Virginia, in the United States.
What probably happened is that it was indeed published in Canada, probably the Halifax Herald as cited by Edwards, and was then re-reported or syndicated in some small way.
Whatever Canadian articles from 1930 that may have mentioned it, and any articles at all by Kelleher, were probably either never microfaced or scanned, and eluded my researchers.
So my conclusion that the article did not exist was premature and ultimately wrong, though in my experience it was probably still the safer bet.
Therefore, I retract my charge that Frank Edwards made the story up, and I place the blame back onto Emmett E. Kelleher, where the investigating officers originally placed it.
RCMP1, Dunning 0 The episode about the disappearance of Frederick Valentich told the tale of a young Australian pilot who disappeared over water, with his final radio transmissions prompting many to speculate that his plane must have been abducted by an alien spaceship.
He was en route to King Island, a small Tasmanian island that's about halfway between Melbourne on the mainland and the main island of Tasmania.
Here was my terrible error that seemed to offend so many.
I said, King Island is about halfway between Australia and Tasmania.
Of course, Tasmania is part of Australia, so my wording, taken literally, doesn't make very much sense.
But if I told you something was halfway between Hawaii and the United States, you'd know that I meant mainland United States.
I doubt if very many Australians were actually confused by my wording, but nevertheless, the correction was offered many times.
So here it is.
I meant to say mainland Australia.
I also make other geographical errors that are not quite so excusable.
I did an episode on ancient mariners who came to the New World from Europe.
There are a lot of claims about who was first, but which one was it.
There are claims of attempts from Europe, Africa, Greenland, and elsewhere.
Most of these obviously would have crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
However, at least once in the show, I said Pacific when I meant Atlantic.
There's no excuse other than my own absent-mindedness.
My only hope is that many listeners were equally absent-minded and didn't catch it.
Here's one where I made a personal charge against someone that was wrong, without fully investigating it.
Pro tip to everyone, don't do that.
In 2008, I did an episode called 10 Most Wanted, Celebrities Who Promote Harmful Pseudoscience.
Among them was comedian Joe Rogan, along with a list of conspiracy theories that he has discussed at length on his own show over the years.
I went on his show as a guest in January 2014 to discuss this, and I blogged extensively about the conversation on the Skeptoid blog, which you can find on the transcript for this episode at skeptoid.com.
One of the list of things I characterized in the old episode as pretty nutty was, quote, he thinks men in black from Project Blue Book stole his friend's camera even though Project Blue Book ended over 38 years ago.
Blue Book, in case you don't know, was the U.S. Air Force's project to collect UFO reports in order to determine if they represent any threat to national security.
I read that he'd told that story, but failed to actually check Rogan's own words.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Malagas, 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.
Joe preferred not to give me the full name of the friend whose camera was taken by Blue Book officers so I couldn't look it up, but the important detail I missed was that the man is older now and was a young kid when the incident happened.
Confiscating cameras, said to contain pictures of UFOs, is one of the things that Blue Book actually did.
I'd very wrongly assumed that the friend was a buddy of his and that it had happened sometime during Rogan's adult life.
There's not a single detail I'm aware of that's implausible about the story Rogan has actually told.
So it was slipshod and irresponsible of me to rattle it off in a list of nutty things Rogan has said and continues to say.
Conspiracy theorists continue to love to hate me, so they were quick to point out this next mistake of mine in my episode about the Rothschild banking family.
You wouldn't have caught it by listening, but if you viewed the transcript page on the website, you'd have seen the episode was illustrated with a painting of Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the original patriarch of the family.
Here's the comment I received on the website.
I was going to read this, but when I saw that you didn't even get the correct portrait for Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the image above is for Amschel Meyer Rothschild, his second child and eldest son, I reasoned that this article was missing a competent fact checker.
I found that the picture I originally used was frequently misattributed on the web, and so found a portrait of Meyer Amschel to replace the wrong one of Amschel Meyer.
Both images are in the public domain, by the way.
I do work to ensure that Skeptoid doesn't violate any copyrights.
It was a significant mistake, but whether it was worth dismissing the whole of the content, as this web visitor says he did, is up to each individual to decide.
The Real Cause of Chernobyl 00:02:26
There were a pair of technical errors in my episode comparing the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima nuclear plant disasters.
Well, to be fair, there was nothing disastrous about Three Mile Island.
Nuclear plants come in a whole variety of designs, and even those of the same design have significant differences.
They're complicated machines, so it's not surprising I got stuff wrong, even though I did a lot of work to try and make sure I got everything right.
The first of these mistakes concerned what happened with the control rods at Fukushima.
Control rods are of neutron-absorbing material that, when inserted into the core, can slow or even stop the chain reaction by preventing enough neutrons from striking uranium atoms.
They can be thought of as the throttle of the nuclear reactor.
The tsunami that struck Fukushima was catastrophic, actually completely submerging some of the buildings.
All power was lost.
In the episode, I incorrectly stated that this power failure made it impossible to insert the control rods in order to turn the reactors off.
Not true.
Recall that the tsunami was preceded by an earthquake.
When the earthquake struck, Fukushima went into emergency shutdown mode and all the control rods were fully inserted into all the reactors before the tsunami hit.
But even though the reactors were throttled to minimum, they still get hot, and this older 1960s design required cooling water to be pumped.
All backup systems had been disabled by the tsunami.
No new cooling water reached the cores, water boiled away, and the cores melted down.
My error about Chernobyl pertained to the initial cause of the explosion that blew its graphite blocks all over the place.
Chernobyl was an atomic pile, literally a pile of graphite blocks, completely unlike any other commercial reactor types ever designed.
In the episode, I said the explosion was triggered by the combustion of the graphite due to heat expansion.
In fact, the explosion was triggered by steam that flashed when water was introduced, followed by a second larger explosion, and then the graphite became incandescent and fire was everywhere.
Net result, huge amounts of radiation exploded into the atmosphere.
Challenger Tank Explosion Myth 00:02:36
Okay, one more today.
It's not exactly a correction to something I said in an episode, but it does correct something that I, and probably most of us, always assumed.
In the episode discussing the untrue miracle claims that you can run your car's engine on water, I referenced the size of the explosion when the external tank exploded during the 1986 launch of the space shuttle Challenger.
I'd always believed Challenger was destroyed by the explosion, but it wasn't.
Turns out the explosion we all saw was more bark than bite.
The rupture of the main tank caused one of the solid rocket boosters to rip loose.
The main tank then disintegrated, leaving the two boosters and the Challenger flying along at anomalous angles.
Like any aircraft would, the Challenger broke up from aerodynamic forces when flying in a direction other than forward.
So there you have it.
The Challenger neither exploded nor was it destroyed by an explosion.
Listeners, keep me honest.
Keep those corrections coming.
The more we can find, the better a resource Skeptoid will become.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported non-profit program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
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.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection