Skepticblog

Once in a while I come upon an old ghost story or monster story that I’d never seen before. It happened again on a recent father-son weekend trip to Death Valley, our favorite family destination.

Throughout Death Valley are remote cabins left over from the mining days. Many of them have been partially restored to various levels of livability, and are meticulously maintained by volunteers who frequent them. They’re often stocked with spare tools and supplies, and at least one I’ve visited even has running water piped in from a spring. Nearly all of them have shelves of knick knacks — bits and pieces of mining history collected from the surroundings — and always a lot of books.

We were at one such cabin in the Tucki Mine area. Visitors are always welcome in these cabins, and we signed the guest book. I flipped through some of the books on one shelf and found a small one I hadn’t seen before, a little storybook full of ghostly tales and legends of Death Valley. Here is the story I read:

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One thing that space enthusiasts keep hearing is frustration over why the Russians are the only ones able to launch people into space, forcing American and European astronauts to hitch rides.

Click to see full size

Attached is a chart I threw together showing the five major spacefaring powers (the US, Russia, ESA, Japan, and China) and their current heavy-lift capabilities, compared to the upcoming commercially developed Falcon Heavy from SpaceX. As you can see at a glance, the SpaceX craft has capabilities that far exceed those of anyone else. (continue reading…)

An animation I made of the northern end of Santa Catalina Island. The lighter, lower contrast frames were later in the evening. CLICK TO WATCH THE ANIMATION.

One of the benefits of living on the coast is that I’m frequently treated to some amazing mirages out over the ocean. I took the accompanying photographs in February, which is when this phenomenon is most dramatic. It’s the coldest water of the year, with an average temperature of 57F. The average high air temperature is about 69F, and that warmer air is blown out to sea by onshore winds in the afternoon. It’s at this time, when the warmest air is out there around sunset, that the effect appears. (continue reading…)

Before you read any further, click this link to bring up a long list (opens in a separate browser window).

National Marrow Donor Program kit

In the United States alone, about 10,000 people each year are diagnosed with a life-threatening illness for which a stem cell transplant is the best treatment option. The most common such illnesses are leukemia and lymphoma. Most of us know somebody who has had at least one of these: I have a friend who survived leukemia, and a close relative who did not. (continue reading…)

Pathological science is a term that refers to research characterized more by obsession than by results.

It’s something that most of us are probably subject to, to one degree or another. Many researchers, even hobbyists and enthusiasts, want for some one result in particular to be true. They’re always on the lookout for data that support their desired conclusion. This is not, by itself, pathological; but for some who take it to an extreme, it can become that way. Many famous cases of pathological science began as legitimate science, and often the researcher would become distracted by tiny results that suggested an effect when in fact there was none. Belief supplanted objectivity, and the science became pathological science. (continue reading…)

About a year and a half ago, I learned most of what I know about Morgellons Disease while spending a week researching a Skeptoid episode on the subject. It’s a bizarre condition in which sufferers believe that their skin is extruding strange fibers; sometimes colored, sometimes synthetic, always strange. Doctors and psychiatrists have compared it to delusional parasitosis, where imagined parasites are crawling in and on the skin.

Morgellons was invented (it would not be accurate to say diagnosed) in 2001, by a mom whose toddler son developed an unremarkable raw patch on his chin. When the scab collected fibers — almost certainly from the environment — she believed that they were being extruded from his skin. She took him to doctor after doctor, looking for one who would confirm her belief, but none would. A consensus rose among the doctors that she suffered from Munchausen by Proxy, in which an individual thrives on attention from doctors through presenting a family member as an extraordinary medical case. Reports are that she tried eight different doctors, and when none agreed with her claim, she coined the term Morgellons disease. An active community of Morgellons sufferers has grown worldwide ever since. (continue reading…)

So the other day I asked our goodly site admin William Bull for some stats by country, eager to see how it compares with Skeptoid podcast listener distribution. Turns out it’s pretty close. This graph (click to see full size) shows SkepticBlog.org page views over the past year per million of each population’s country. So it’s a fair indicator of this blog’s relative popularity in each country. (Any countries not listed had fewer than one page view per million population.)

Obviously this is an English language blog written by primarily American authors, so we cannot extrapolate this data to indicate the relative popularity of skepticism in general in each country. But there are two surprises. (continue reading…)

As many of you may know, one of my projects is to adapt some of the more popular Skeptoid podcast episodes for the world’s largest single audience venue: YouTube.

I’m posting this blog not so much to make you aware of it, but to solicit your feedback. The show is called inFact with Brian Dunning and is now in its second season. Today’s episode, season 2 number 8, is about conspiracy theorists. Must we assume that they’re nuts, or is there a more rational explanation for why belief in conspiracies is so widespread? See how I answered this question:

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In September and October of 2011, anti-GMO blogs began trumpeting the news that India was suing Monsanto for “biopiracy” (an example). The term biopiracy is something of a weasel word; all it means is the practice of finding useful chemical compounds in plants or animals located in other countries for research purposes, usually for developing new drug therapies based on native plants. Nearly all pharmaceutical companies do this, no matter what country they’re located in. When some group wishes to portray this negatively, it’s called biopiracy.

As you may know, I am a huge proponent of the technology of genetic engineering of crops (full disclaimer). Compared to old-school, trial-and-error cross pollination, GMO is like using a word processor instead of a manual typewriter. It’s the difference between a plant that’s naturally resistant to pests and naturally able to thrive in the native conditions, versus a plant that must be doused with expensive pesticides and fertilizers. So I wanted to know the true story behind these headlines. (continue reading…)

We’ve all heard of the code talkers, primarily Choctaw and Navajo native Americans deployed during both World Wars to simply speak over the radio — their language was sufficiently unintelligible to others that true encryption was unnecessary. Here is an article that reports on another group of native Americans employed during the Vietnam conflict for a different purpose: tracking.

I had never heard of this before, so I read the story with interest (and, of course, a touch of skepticism). It begins with a woman who reported that her husband, a psychologist, learned something extraordinary from his patients in the military:

I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from the contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again. What is more, the VA Medical center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example.

Why should psychologists and other professional men suddenly decide to stop cutting their hair? Surely there must be some compelling reason. I read on with interest. (continue reading…)