Skepticblog

A hydrogen explosion destroys the outer shell of a reactor building at Fukushima Daiichi. Hydrogen, which is normally properly vented, is the natural product of the interaction of cooling water and the material encasing the fuel rods.

Skeptics tend to take their personal ideologies pretty seriously. And so do others, as it turns out. Perhaps a little too seriously.

The recent nuclear crisis in Japan, triggered by a 9.0 earthquake that caused the plant to quickly & properly shut down, but was followed by an unprecedented tsunami that destroyed the equipment needed to maintain the shutdown status, brought this to the foreground. I’ve spent the time since posting updates on Twitter. It’s been bad, it’s been scary, and there have been some frightening setbacks; but they’ve managed to keep a lid on things about as well as can be hoped for. Although two people at the plant were killed and a number were injured by the tsunami and by a couple of subsequent hydrogen explosions, there have (so far) been no serious injuries from the radiation. So far we don’t predict any future cancer cases, but the crisis is far from over and it’s too early to know the extent of the radiation that will ultimately have been released. So this number may change. I really hope that I won’t be looking back at this blog post a year from now and ruing how wrong this prediction was at the time, but it’s entirely possible. (continue reading…)

We are thrilled to announce that Skepticblog has added a new regular blogger, Dr. Donald Prothero, a world class geologist and paleontologist who teaches at both Occidental College and Caltech. Don is one of the most respected scientists in his field having won the award for the best geologist under 40 (the same award won by Stephen Jay Gould), and one of the most popular science writers today, having just penned the incredibly timely book Catastrophes: Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Tornadoes, and other Earth-Shattering Disasters, which found him on numerous television news shows the day after the Japanese disaster. Dr. Prothero is on the scientific board of advisors for the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine, lectures regularly for the Skeptics Society’s Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, leads the society’s wildly popular field trips, and writes and reviews for Skeptic regularly as one of the world’s expert debunkers of creationism and Intelligent Design. Don’s bio is a stunning tribute to his erudition and productivity as a scientist and public intellectual. We are fortunate to have him in our pantheon.

READ Prothero’s first post on SkepticBlog.

Order the book from shop.skeptic.com

The great Sendai earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, generated not only huge coverage in all the media, but also brought all the crazies out of the woodwork (as any major earthquake or natural disaster does). I’ve discussed the geophysical and geological details in a separate post, but the storm of misinformation and myths flying around the media and internet was overwhelming. My email box was filled with questions about these events, because I’ve been doing publicity for my new book Catastrophes: Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Tornadoes, and other Earth-Shattering Disasters (Johns Hopkins University Press). There were not only the usual myths about earthquakes, but also an additional layer of apocalyptic speculation and “end of the world” prophecies, plus the crazies who believe the 2012 myth.
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On April 9th, 2011, I’ll be honored to speak at Edmonton’s Telus World of Science as a featured part of the lineup for LogiCON 2011. Billed as “Critical Thinking for Everyone,”  LogiCON is a new conference with a novel approach. It attempts to combine the accessibility achieved by the wildly successful SkeptiCamp model with the strengths of a curated event. To help with accessibility, all LogiCON sessions are open at no extra cost to anyone who pays the general admission price for the Telus World of Science on April 9th.

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I love scientific mysteries of all kinds – ones where competent experts can legitimately disagree on the interpretation of the evidence, and all agree on what evidence would most likely settle the debate. It’s like a cliffhanger of a great mystery series, except you don’t know when the new season will begin. You just have to wait for new episodes to pop up unexpectedly.

One such debate is the question of how and when were the Americas peopled. This is a story of our recent pre-history. Knowledge of this time has not survived to the present, so we have to reconstruct the past from the clues left behind. And it is recent enough in the past that there is likely to be good physical evidence for archaeologists to find.

For a time the Clovis culture was considered to be the first people in the Americas. They likely crossed the land bridge from Asia to North America about 13,500 years ago, and then worked their way down to South America. They are called the Clovis culture because they are defined by the artifacts they left behind – their projectile points have a very distinctive feature that defines the Clovis. They are fluted at the base on both sides – the stone is precisely carved to be made thinner at the base to allow for better hafting to a wooden spear. These points were designed to hunt the large game of North America, like mammoths. Wherever Clovis points are found – you have Clovis culture.

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Nothing can say it as well as the video itself, so attend:

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Every week I receive invitations to speak at various venues around the world. On March 15, 2011, I received the following invitation to speak in London. As I was running out the door to go on my morning bike ride, I missed the obvious cues that this was a scam:

Dear Michael Shermer,

My Name is Prof. Peter Kopelman from the London Youth Community Here in London UK. We want you to be our guest speaker at this Year ST’ GEORGE UNIVERSITY , which will take place here in UK. We are writing to invite and confirm your booking to be our Guest Speaker at these year ST’ GEORGE UNIVERSITY Event.

The Venue as follows:
VENUE: St George’s University of London,
Cranmer Terrace, London, SW17 0RE.
Email:stgeorgeuniversityoflondon@gmail.com
Expected audience: 500 people
Duration of speech per speaker: 7PM-8PM
Name of Organization: ST’GEORGE UNIVERSITY
Topic:MEDICAL
Date: Wednesday 30 March 2011.

We came across your profile on http://www.amazingmeeting.com/speakers and we say it’s up to standard and we will be very glad to have such an outstanding personality in our mist for these overwhelming gathering. With your multi talented speech more lives will come close , Sorry about our late invitation it is due to the fact that our Speaker had back out because of her sudden illness. (continue reading…)

I was recently asked about this video in which Doug Konzen claims to have invented an overunity machine. I guess such claims will never go away – there seems to be a subculture of overunity fans that are blissfully disconnected from reality.

For a quick background – an overunity machine is one that produces more energy than it consumes, or has greater than 100% efficiency. Such a machine would be a perpetual motion machine and produce limitless free energy. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics mean that such claims are simply impossible. The first law of thermodynamics states that you can never get more energy out of a process than you put into it, and the second law states that you cannot even get the same amount of energy out – there will always be some loss of the amount of energy capable of doing work.

You can also think of this in terms of the conservation of mass/energy – energy cannot simply come from nowhere. There has to be a source of the energy.

These laws are so well established that…well, they are laws. They are not mere theories or guesses, they are as well-established as anything in science. Sure – scientific knowledge is always finite. But the claim that the laws of thermodynamics have been broken would be the most extraordinary of claims, requiring rock-solid evidence in order to be taken seriously.

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Yes, you heard me right. So states the newsletter from Australia’s “Homeopathy Plus” online store, flagrantly exploiting the fear surrounding Japan’s nuclear accident to con people out of money. I feel comfortable using the word “con” because even an honest homeopath (albeit misguided) knows that an X-ray cannot be diluted with water (as it does not consist of matter), so they’re selling something that they know does not exist. Probably, they read an article online that compared microsieverts of radiation with what you’d get from an X-ray, and decided that therefore an X-ray is a scary enough sounding “toxin” that it might as well be tacked onto the list of evil compounds that homeopathy’s “law of similars” says will cure you of its real-world effects. Anyway, here’s the text of the newsletter (the original may be available here for a limited time): (continue reading…)

What does the democratic uprising in Egypt and other Arab nations have to do with IBM’s Jeopardy champion Watson in determining the fate of civilization? Think bottom up, not top down; think exponential growth, not linear change; think crowd sourcing, not elite commanding; and think open access and transparency, not closed entree and secrecy. Under the influence of these four forces, such seemingly unconnected events are, in fact, connected at a deeper level when we pull back and examine the overall trajectory of the history of civilization. (continue reading…)