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The rumor mill had been buzzing for days. Then last week, as many of us were at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas, it was confirmed:  former Playboy Playmate, has-been actor, and anti-vaxx leader Jenny McCarthy will join the cast of “The View” this fall. A number of Amazing Meeting speakers commented on it. The media were full of statements of shock and anger, not only from the prominent skeptics and bloggers like Phil Plait and Sharon Hill, but even from the mainstream media, who uniformly saw this as a bad move. The ABC network released a lame statement from “The View” founder Barbara Walters, “Jenny brings us intelligence as well as warmth and humor. She can be serious and outrageous. She has connected with our audience and offers a fresh point of view.”

I’ve seen McCarthy’s previous TV and movie appearances, and the best that can be said for them was they were outrageous. Whether her past efforts demonstrate  “intelligence,” “humor,” and “seriousness” is debatable. Most people found her humor (especially in her disastrous movie “Dirty Love”, often ranked as one of the worst movies ever made) stupid, lowbrow and gross. None of her TV efforts showed she was any more intelligent than any other Hollywood celeb who is promoted  for their good looks. Over the last 8 years, she has been  the principal spokesperson for the  anti-vaxxer movement, lending her celebrity (and that of her once-boyfriend, Jim Carrey) to spread and legitimize her deadly ideas. She is such a symbol of the movement that one of the leading sites criticizing her is called “JennyMcCarthyBodyCount.com” and keeps a constant tally of the number of unnecessary deaths and illnesses caused by the anti-vaxxers. (continue reading…)

Junior Skeptic #47 cover illustration by Chris Wisnia with Daniel Loxton

One of the great pleasures of writing Junior Skeptic is getting to answer the questions that bother me at the back of my mind—the questions I daydream on the bus, that fill me with excited curiosity when I should be settling into sleep. Another great pleasure is the discovery that scholars and scientists are extraordinarily generous with their time.

When I sat down to write the current Junior Skeptic, “Alien Invaders!” I was reminded of something that had long bugged me: is anyone concerned that our spacecraft might carry microbes that could contaminate other worlds? After all, bacteria are tough little buggers. And—consider The War of the Worlds as a cautionary tale. What if returning spacecraft carried dangerous microbes back to Earth? Could alien bacteria devastate our own planetary ecosystem, as H. G. Wells imagined terrestrial bacteria annihilating his Martians?

Turns out that there are people whose job it is to worry about those hypothetical contamination dangers—and to work to prevent them. With some pointers from Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait and the Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla, I soon learned that this is an entire field that dates back to the first tentative human steps beyond the Earth.

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A recent article in The Guardian has the provocative title, “American man wakes up with amnesia speaking Swedish.” The article itself contains some significant misconceptions about amnesia, and so is a good opportunity to discuss this interesting topic.

In brief, amnesia is a pathological loss of memories (not just normal forgetting). The most common type of amnesia is traumatic – caused by trauma to the brain. Trauma can cause retrograde amnesia, which is loss of memories prior to the injury, and anterograde amnesia, which is loss of memories following the trauma. Contrary to the common movie cliche, these lost memories cannot be recovered by subsequent head trauma (or by any other means).

Another cause of amnesia, especially anterograde amnesia, is drugs. Alcohol and benzodiazepines in particular can prevent the formation of memories while intoxicated.

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The “soundstage” of Mr. Deity: cameras and lights crammed into the kitchen, shooting into the living room

Almost two months ago, I had the opportunity to be part of the latest episode of the hit YouTube series, “Mr. Deity”. For those who have not seen this hilarious series of 3-minute episodes before, you can go to MrDeity.com, and most of the previous 5 seasons are freely available on line. The entire production is the brainchild of one man, Brian Keith Dalton. Brian writes the scripts, plays the main role as “Mr. Deity” (of which religion he does not specify), films all the episodes by himself with minimal help, then edits all the digital files to produce a tight, funny, fast-paced mockery of the sillier aspects of religion. As Brian has explained, the use of humor and gentle satire can be much more effective tool to get people to examine the absurdities of their religious dogmas than angry confrontational approaches. The “Mr. Deity” character is no awesome Jehovah, but instead a sloppy, feckless, distracted deity who doesn’t worry about details, and gets mad when humans misinterpret him. He constantly finds himself entangled in the complex web of confusion and contradiction that is the essence of religious dogma. After watching a few episodes, you will find that Brian’s scripts are uniformly laugh-out-loud funny as he and the other characters wrestle with this messed-up world of religion. The cast often includes Amy Rohren as “Lucy”, or Lucifer the Devil; Sean Douglas as  “Jesse” or Jesus; several other minions of Heaven, such as filmmaker Jimbo Marshall as “Larry”, the manager, who do the dirty work that Mr. Deity has no time for; and noted skeptic Jarrett Lennon Kaufman as Timmy the Tech Advisor. There is often a guest skeptic who plays a straight man for Mr. Deity’s sendup of the inanity of each religious idea. Some of these past guests have included Michael Shermer of the Skeptic Society, P.Z. Myers of the Pharyngula blog, skeptic and magician Jamy Ian Swiss, Carrie Poppy of the “OhNo, It’s Ross and Carrie” podcast, and a number of other skeptics and non-believers.

I got to know Brian during a Skeptic Society field trip in January 2012, and he said that he wanted me to be part of a future episode. After some illnesses, and trying to get our busy schedules coordinated, we finally managed to film in May 2013. He sent me the script, and I tried memorizing the lines and learning how to act them. Though I’ve memorized scripts before, I haven’t performed in a play since I was 12 years old. I’ve always been a good memorizer, yet I found it surprisingly hard to master my lines, despite days of rehearsal. Most of my past appearances on camera were to give academic lectures or appear on prehistoric animal documentaries, where I ad lib the lines rather than memorize them. (continue reading…)

What a utterly amazing weekend in Las Vegas! (continue reading…)

Abominable Science — due out August 6, but exclusively available to TAM-goers July 11-14

I’m thrilled to announce this morning, with my co-author Don Prothero, that our big new book Abominable Science (in stores August 6) will be available as a special pre-release exclusive at the James Randi Educational Foundation’s upcoming The Amazing Meeting 2013 conference in Las Vegas this weekend. Thanks to Columbia University Press and the Skeptics Society, TAM-goers will have the opportunity to get their hands on the book weeks before anyone else!

This has been in the works for months, but the schedule was so tight that we dared not share the good news until the books were safely shipped and on site. They came straight off the presses and straight into boxes to the South Point resort for TAM. Touch and go! Happily, they were delivered yesterday.

Don and I will both be at TAM to chat about monsters and things that go bump in the night. Find us at the Skeptics Society table, or anywhere on the convention floor. Looking forward to seeing you all!

And with that, I’m off to prepare psychologically to sit in a chair in the sky…

I’m on my way to The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas as this posts, but I wanted to write this as an addendum to our just-published book on cryptozoology, Abominable Science! (available at TAM this weekend, and on Amazon.com). Daniel Loxton and I will both be at TAM if you want to get a copy autographed by both authors.

Last February, the news and blogosphere was buzzing with excitement. Someone had claimed that they had sequenced the DNA of Bigfoot! Naturally, such a sensational story was reported all over the internet and even the mainstream media as if it were solid, confirmed research. If there was any skepticism displayed, it was at the very end of a story that mostly gave the claim uncritical coverage. A number of mainstream scientists and skeptics wrote critical blogs and articles about the way the discovery was announced and the fact that it was announced without a publication backing it up, but everyone had to reserve judgment until the paper was actually published—and even more importantly, when the results were double-checked by an independent lab.

There were lots of reason for doubting the reality of the report. To start with, the researcher, Dr. Melba Ketchum (a long-term Bigfoot advocate, so she is no neutral  party) did one of the worst possible things to convince scientists: she put out a press release before any peer-reviewed scientific publication of results. This always makes scientists suspicious, because it is a common strategy among less reputable researchers to get the press to cover substandard or even ridiculous research before scientists could weigh in.

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A Review of My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs

by Brian Switek
(Scientific American/Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 256 pp., 2013)

The dino-bug is now pervasive in American culture, so that kids between the ages of 4 and 12 are nearly all bitten by it. Most kids can name dozens of those tongue-twisting dinosaur names, and are full of all sorts of dino-trivia and tidbits. Dino-mania is a huge business, with millions of dollars being made in marketing books, toys, geegaws, and all sorts of dino-paraphernalia (none of that money, by the way, goes to support paleontology or dinosaur research). It was not always so: when I grew up in the 1950s, there was very little interest in dinosaurs, very few decent books or toys, and I was considered a freak in my elementary school because I knew so much about prehistoric life.

However, when those hormones kick in and the teen years begin, most kids lose their interest in dinosaurs or science, and move to interests in the opposite sex, along with being cool and hip to the trappings of teen culture. Some, like myself and most vertebrate paleontologists I know, never outgrow our love of dinosaurs, and were determined to become paleontologists. Most did not survive the brutal job market, where fewer than 20% of the Ph.D.s in paleontology get any kind of job remotely related to their training (mostly teaching in small colleges, or in medical school anatomy posts). Very few get to occupy the prime positions in the major museums and top universities (there are no more than 50 such jobs in the entire United States, and they are vanishing). (continue reading…)

Jake The Numbers Guy

About three weeks ago I was contacted by “The Numbers Game,” a program sponsored by the National Geographic Channel. As in the usual cases these days, I was called upon by the show’s producers to speak on psychic readings and how they work.  At first I was delighted to be asked, but as you will see, what came out of this situation speaks volumes for where we are in the continuing battle to get critical thinking backed by scientific facts on television. (continue reading…)

A clinic known as the Brain Treatment Center (BTC) is offering what they call Magnetic Resonance Therapy, or MRT™, as a treatment for autism and other disorders, including sleep disorders, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, emotional disorders, anxiety, addiction, and for athletic performance.

MRT (always be suspicious of a medical treatment that is trademarked) consists of transcranial magnetic stimulation along with other modalities:

…EEG, brain stimulation, Neurofeedback, EKG and other biometric techniques to provide a highly customized treatment personalized to how a patient’s brain takes in, processes, and communicates information.

I will discuss both the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for autism, and the specific claims made by BTC, starting with the latter.

BTC

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