Skepticblog

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…)

Those of us with an interest in the early days of the space race — won by Sputnik 1 in October 1957 — might need to broaden our disciplines a bit to get the whole story. It turns out that the race might have actually been won two months earlier, by the United States, with an entrant from outside the space program. Its name was Operation Plumbbob.

For six months in 1957, Operation Plumbbob put 29 thermonuclear devices to the test in the Nevada Test Range. They were the most varied in the program’s history; all sorts of devices, fired in the air, on the surface, underground, at pigs, near soldiers, and at all kinds of structures. Two of them were particularly interesting. Pascal-A and Pascal-B, on July 26 and August 27, were detonated at the bottom of 500-foot vertical shafts. Both shafts were covered with great heavy steel lids, some four inches thick and weighing some 900 kg. (continue reading…)

This shark tooth has a very surprising history.

It is from an extinct Giant Mako shark (Isurus hastalis) that died in the early Miocene epoch, at least 5,000,000 years ago. The shark’s remains settled into the silt that later became part of the Monterey formation in what is now Newport Beach, CA.

A long time later in 2006, my friend and chainmaille artist Chris Perley was poking around there for fossils. He’s found some 100 shark teeth of various species in this same spot, a well-known rocky promontory in town that probably wouldn’t benefit from this particular kind of publicity. But that’s not the surprising part. (continue reading…)

No nation concerned with the science of climate change should have ever given the Kyoto Protocol the time of day. Most of them did, and signed and ratified this plan to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of wealthy nations, while granting the two most polluting nations (China and India) immunity to produce as much CO₂ as they wish. (continue reading…)

Pitcairn Island (Photo: NOAA)

The year was 1808, and men of the American trading ship Topaz landed on Pitcairn Island, thus becoming the first to contact the colony founded by the infamous mutineers of the Bounty.

They found a tiny but prosperous village consisting of one remaining mutineer, a number of Tahitian women, and dozens of children. Life was well ordered; homes were clean and well built, the sabbath was observed, the log was meticulously maintained, and the calendar was wrong.

By one day. (continue reading…)

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…)

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…)

I’m sad that today I’m adding a slide to one of my live presentations, adding Steve Jobs to the list of famous people who died treating terminal diseases with woo rather than with medicine.

Seven or eight years ago, the news broke that Steve Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but considering it a private matter, he delayed in informing Apple’s board, and Apple’s board delayed in informing the shareholders. So what. The only delay that really mattered was that Steve, it turned out, had been treating his pancreatic cancer with a special diet [UPDATE] prescribed by the alternative medicine promoter Dr. Dean Ornish. (continue reading…)

My laptop's power adapter hovers right around the temperature needed to kill acne bacteria

Amazing new all-natural acne treatment! Just get out your credit card, and…

Oh, wait, no. You don’t need a credit card for this. In fact, you can be treating your pimples (assuming you have some) in the next five minutes, and you don’t have to buy anything. The application of a little home science is all you need. (continue reading…)

Drilling natural gas in Pennsylvania's Marcellus shale (Photo credit: Wikimedia)

This week my Skeptoid episode was about fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, the controversial mining technique for deep natural gas deposits. The shock doc Gasland put fracking into the public eye, and not in a very complimentary way. Gasland blamed fracking for putting flammable methane into tap water, for mysterious illnesses caused by its “toxic” fluids, contaminating ground water with poisons, and killing animals, in addition to a host of political conspiracy charges. If you’re wondering why this decades-old practice did not seem to cause any problems before Gasland came out, it’s because Gasland was largely fictional. Most of its charges are based on real phenomena, but fracking itself rarely has anything to do with them. That’s not to say there are no environmental concerns about the practice. There are, to be sure; and the EPA is in the midst of a major study to find out how serious these concerns are. Some of these were discussed in my episode. One, in particular, I omitted: the question of whether fracking causes earthquakes. (continue reading…)