Skepticblog

I recently received the following e-mail:

I have a question about science into deception and detecting lies.

Particularly to do with the show, ‘Lie to Me’ and the Cal Lightman character. The show is supposedly based on some science about deception. Wikipedia says the lead character is loosely based on Dr. Paul Ekman.

The notion that because we’re hardwired to communicate our feelings through facial and bodily expressions making deception difficult (which would leave specific and unconscious tells) seems to me sensible and I would’ve liked to have believed it, bought the book by Ekman and tried to learn to read micro-expressions.

However I keep hearing that under controlled conditions that no one, not experienced detectives, scientists, judges nor average people of the street demonstrate can discern lies from truths any better effectively than pure chance.

Is this stuff about microexpressions and truth wizards based in any reality at all, and if so, how limited or useful is it really?

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Steve Jobs' super-secret Illuminati barcode license plate

So as long as we’re on the subject of Steve Jobs, how about a little conspiracy theory about him?

It was well known by obsessive Apple fans that Steve had a barcode instead of a license plate on his car. Some believed this was because he had some special deal with the state of California, and many said that there was some kind of secret club of superstar celebrities and business leaders that allowed them to have a futuristic barcode instead of a plate. I remember reading old articles where it was speculated that this gave him special privileges; perhaps immunity from traffic citations, or special services from the motor vehicle department.

Do you know the truth? If you don’t, think a moment before reading on. (continue reading…)

A Moment or Supreme Terror

If you get a chance to see myself and Brian Dunning (and the ghostly Susan Gerbic) on the recent episode of “Weird or What?” that is all about “Life after Death,” you will see convincing evidence for how easy it is to convince people that a seance is real. William Shatner is hilarious as the bemused and tongue in cheek host, making at least this episode tilted towards a skeptical viewpoint. Using infrared photography, the television audience sees what to each sitter in the desired total blackness of the traditional seance room never suspected. For those in the circle, the fear is real. For the viewers, the famous Scole Experiments are shown to be what they really were: a badly reported series of un-controlled magic effects that took place in the medium’s own home. Where were the skeptics? Happy Halloween!

And the Darkness Falls... Boom!

The Geological Society of America (GSA) is one of the largest organizations of geologists in the world (over 24,000 members). It holds not only an annual meeting every fall in a different city, but also five regional meetings around the U.S. regions (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountains, and Cordilleran) throughout the year. Although 97 different countries contribute members, it is composed mostly of U.S., Canadian, and some Central American geologists. The GSA focuses on the cutting-edge and pure research aspects of geology, performed mostly by academics and government geologists. Thus, it is very different from meetings of petroleum geologists or mining geologists or engineering geologists, who tend to be employed in for-profit enterprises and focus on purely practical local problems. The annual GSA meeting routinely draws 6000 or more people for a four-day session, so there are over 2000 talks and posters in at least 30 different sessions with talks every 15 minutes in at least 30 different rooms scattered around some  huge convention center. There SO much to see and hear for a broadly trained and wide-ranging geologist/ paleontologist like myself that I can’t even catch a fraction of what I want to see and hear. For me, it is crucial to make the annual meeting each year to keep up with the latest developments, as well as see old friends that I see only at the meetings, and also to keep up with my geology textbooks and my other books sold in the gigantic exhibits area. I attended my first meeting in 1978 in Toronto, and I have not missed a national GSA since then. I just returned from this fall’s meeting in Minneapolis October 9-12, which was my 33rd in a row.

Most of the time when I attend the meetings, there are plenty of controversial topics and great debates going on within the geological community, so the profession does not suppress unorthodox opinions or play political games. This is the way it should be in any genuine scientific discipline. I’ve seen amazingly confrontational knock-down-drag-out sessions about particularly hotly debated ideas, but always conducted in a spirit of honest scientific exchange and always hewing to rules of science and naturalism. To get on the meeting program, scientists must propose to organize sessions around particular themes, along with field trips to geologically interesting sites within driving distance of the convention city, and the GSA host committee reads and approves these proposals. But every once in a while, I see a poster title and abstract with something suspicious about it. When I check the authors, they turn out to be Young-Earth Creationists (YEC) who claim the earth is only 6000 years old and all of geology can be explained by Noah’s flood. When I visit the poster session, it’s usually mobbed by real geologists giving the YECs a real grilling, even though the poster is ostensibly about some reasonable geologic topic, like polystrate trees in Yellowstone, and there is no overt mention of Noah’s flood in the poster. But the 2010 meeting last year in Denver took the cake: there was a whole field trip run by YECs who did not identify their agenda, and pretended that they were doing conventional geology—until you read between the lines.

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JREF President D.J. Grothe coaches zombie horde. Photograph by Eduard Pastor

Just in time for Halloween, our colleagues over at the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) have enlisted a (rather modest) zombie horde to carry a serious consumer protection message: if psychics who accept money for communicating with the dead cannot actually do so, then they are taking unfair advantage of the bereaved. Led by JREF President D.J. Grothe, these volunteers carried the JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge to alleged spirit medium James Van Praagh.

Uncouth as zombies are known to be, Grothe and JREF Communications Director Sadie Crabtree assured me that this particular group of undead Americans excelled in politeness. Van Praagh’s event was not disrupted, and the group left when requested to do so.

“All of our volunteers were determined not to disrupt the event; we just wanted to get James Van Praagh to come out and talk to us, or to capture on video the fact that he’s hiding from our Million Dollar Challenge,” Grothe told me. “We stuck to the publicly accessible area and we left when we were asked. We didn’t do the action to disrupt an event, but to highlight the offense to reason and conscience that these stage mediums cause when they take advantage of people suffering from loss.”

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Daniel Loxton and Margriet Ruurs on stage at the 2011 Vancouver International Writers Festival during pre-show sound check.

I’ve just returned from the 2011 Vancouver International Writers Festival, where I shared the stage with veteran children’s author Margriet Ruurs at a sold out event at Granville Island’s Waterfront Theatre.

Our event was a behind the scenes tour of Margriet’s recent books (including Amazing Animals, beautifully illustrated by W. Allan Hancock) and my own new Ankylosaur Attack (illustrated by yours truly with Jim W. W. Smith).

Margriet’s talk introduced the audience to the production arc that takes an illustrated children’s book from idea to store shelves. My talk discussed some of the technical tricks and challenges of photorealistic CG dinosaur art that I’ve previously shared on Skepticblog and with Scientific American. I also took the audience through a number of step-by-step demonstrations of the modeling, texturing and compositing processes used in creating Ankylosaur Attack—and I thought I might share a peek at the compositing process here today.

On October 20th Nature News reported on a new analysis of land temperatures by an independent group. They found the same results as previous analyses – since 1950 the earth has warmed by about 0.9 C. The results have yet to be peer-reviewed, but already reports of their analysis are making some waves.

The analysis was designed to be what can be called a consensus study – an independent group is taking a thorough analysis of the data, accounting for prior criticisms, to arrive at a result that everyone can agree on. Prior to announcing the results, in fact, some global warming skeptics stated publicly that they welcome the independent analysis and would stand by the results. PZ Myers reports on Anthony Watts response – initially saying he would accept the study results, but now considering the study to be fatally flawed.

The point of a consensus study is to bring all sides of a scientific controversy together, account for all criticisms of existing data, and then try to specifically address those criticisms so that everyone can agree on the results. This actually does happen at times, although it does seem that there remain holdouts for the view that “loses” when the new data comes out. The consensus data, however, does tend to marginalize the holdouts.

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You’ve probably seen this video that’s been making the rounds lately:

What you’re seeing in this video is the Meissner effect, discovered in 1933 when a pair of researchers noticed that magnetic flux lines passed through a tin sample; but when it was supercooled, suddenly the lines bent around it. Two years later, superconductivity was discovered, and the dots were connected. It turns out that superconductors are not only perfect conductors of electricity, but they have this other property as well: when cooled to superconducting temperature within a magnetic field, they become “superdiamagnetic” and reject the magnetic field by creating an opposing one of their own. Within the superconductor, the magnetic flux density is zero. (continue reading…)

As skeptics, it is frustrating for us to see the con artists and snake-oil salesmen hammer us with their pitches about “herbal remedies” and “natural cures” and homeopathy and all the other false medical claims that are made on TV, on the Internet, and nearly everywhere you look (not to mention all the spam ads that promise penis enlargement or enhanced sexual stamina). Most of the time there seems to be no regulation or oversight on these obviously useless products that prey on desperate people and give them false hope for a “cure”—and no one seems to check whether these people have ever successfully cured anything. Even more frustrating is watching the flim-flam art of faith healing, where modern-day Elmer Gantry types prey on people exploiting not only their vulnerabilities from their poor health, but also their religious blinders. Most of us have heard about the time when James Randi exposed the crooked Rev. Peter Popoff on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. As this video shows, Popoff seemed to know amazing little factual details about  his flock as he “healed” them, and was making millions of dollars off them—until Randi  and his collaborators used their own radio receiver to pick up and record the transmissions that Popoff’s wife was sending to the Reverend’s tiny  hidden earpiece. She was prompting him with details that these same people had filled out on “prayer cards” just before the service, and Popoff promptly used this information to amaze and dupe his flock. You would think that Popoff would be completely discredited and his career finished after being exposed as a crook, but apparently not so. After going bankrupt and spending only a short time out of sight, he’s back and raking in millions again ($23 million in 2005 alone) doing the same thing. Now his con is selling little vials of “miracle water” and “prayer bracelets” and asking for donations with promises that God will bless you if you pay him. And his flocks are apparently unaware or uninterested in his previous exposure as a crook. (If you want a good laugh, take a look at this hilarious video of faith healer Benny Hinn recast as the evil Sith Lord and Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars movies).

So it was with great joy that I saw in the Sept. 28 Los Angeles Times that one of these con artists had finally been caught and punished. Her name is Dr. Christine Daniel, and she ran a clinic in the San Fernando Valley not far from here. For years, she had been marketing her snake oil as “C-Extract”, “the herbal treatment”, and “the natural treatment”, and other bogus names, when it turned out  these products were no more than sunscreen preservatives and beef extract. She has a legitimate MD (Temple Med School, 1979) but is also a Pentecostal minister. She peddled her products on evangelical networks like TBN, promising both that these treatments would cure people with terminal cancer, and that she was doing God’s work. She charged her customers up to $6000 a week for treatments with completely ineffective substances. Apparently enough bilked patients were mad at her that the law finally took action last year. On September 27, 2011,  a federal jury convicted her of peddling expensive phony treatments to desperate patients, and sentenced her to 150 years in prison and a $5.5 million fine.

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Estimating the number of people who have
experienced the paranormal or supernatural

The Drake Equation is the famous formula developed by the astronomer Frank Drake for estimating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations:

N = R × f_p × n_e × f_l × f_i × f_c × L where…

• N = the number of communicative civilizations,
• R = the rate of formation of suitable stars,
• f_p = the fraction of those stars with planets,
• n_e = the number of earth-like planets per solar system,
• f_l = the fraction of planets with life,
• f_i = the fraction of planets with intelligent life,
• f_c = the fraction of planets with communicating technology, and
• L = the lifetime of communicating civilizations.

The equation is so ubiquitous that it has even been employed in the popular television series The Big Bang Theory for computing the number of available sex partners within a 40-mile radius of Los Angeles (5,812). My favorite parody of it is by the cartoonist Randall Munroe as one in a series of his clever science send-ups, entitled “The Flake Equation” (on xkcd.com) for calculating the number of people who will mistakenly think they had an ET encounter. (continue reading…)