Skepticblog

Don’t think for a minute that I didn’t know it would be controversial. When I recorded this week’s Skeptoid episode Did Jewish Slaves Build the Pyramids, I knew it was going to upset Christians who hold that belief dear. I wasn’t disappointed, as you can tell from the comments.

As you may or may not know, the Bible doesn’t even contain the word pyramid, at least not an online King James Version that I searched. This is quite interesting. All the evidence points to Herodotus of Halicarnassus as the originator of the tale of Jewish slaves laboring under Egyptian whips to build the pyramids [In fact Herodotus only mentions the number of workers on the pyramids, he did not identify them as either Jews or slaves. - BD]. However, the Book of Exodus was nearly exactly the same time as Herodotus wrote this in his book The Histories (about 450 BCE), and it seems strange that these two contemporaneous accounts would match up so well on all details except the one that should appeal most to storytellers: the pyramids. (continue reading…)

Like any good audience member, I’ve always been impressed by magician David Blaine’s 2008 world record feat of holding his breath underwater for 17 minutes. I’d never given it much more thought than the observation that a young, healthy guy can probably achieve any given world record if he dedicates enough resources to the effort, and Blaine certainly appeared to have done so.

I received a forwarded email from the University of Pittsburgh’s Critical Care Medicine Group email list:

Absolutely enthralling video of David Blaine explaining how he held his breath for 17 minutes! Interesting the assistance he received from the medical fraternity, including trying liquid ventilation with perflurocarbons.

Video here <http://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_for_17_min.html> (continue reading…)

Here is a link that you’re all going to want to bookmark:

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/email/oc/buyonline/buyonlineform.cfm

Selling crap online, and claiming that it has medical value, is illegal. This is just and proper, because it’s wrong to con sick people out of money. Yet it’s so profitable to do so that it remains a flourishing business. And those sellers who may genuinely believe their product helps people also deserve to be turned in and prosecuted. They’ve heard the research already, they’ve just chosen to ignore it. Well, they may find it a little harder to ignore a warning letter from the Food & Drug Administration. (continue reading…)

The main argument against wind turbines by environmentalists is that the spinning blades kill birds. When I heard this, I was skeptical.

Digging through the Intertubes, I found that it’s true. Each large, commercial wind turbine in the United States kills an average of about two birds per year. This varies a lot based on where the wind farm is. Some are right in bird migration paths, and some aren’t. But the average is about two per year per turbine. In 2001 there were 3,500 operational wind turbines in the U.S., for a grand total of 6,400 birds killed. (continue reading…)

As some of you may know, earlier this year I made three pilot episodes of a new web video series called inFact. The idea was to take the content from Skeptoid and repackage it for delivery to a much broader audience. If you’re wondering what the heck brand of paint I was sniffing to imagine I might have time in my schedule to make a weekly video series, you are on the right track. Of course I don’t have time, and don’t expect to find it any time soon. Video takes an order of magnitude more time and money to produce than an audio-only podcast like Skeptoid.

Therefore, the only way to produce inFact is to take time away from my regular professional career as a consulting computer scientist. This is the kind of career change that I’m looking to make anyway, to become of a full-time science journalist and skeptical outreach professional. But being the family breadwinner, I can only make such a change when there is sufficient money in the game. (continue reading…)

Some of the female Cosmonauts. The fat bonehead in the white shirt is Sergei Korolev, who led the charge to discredit the women and end their program.

So I figured out what I’m going to talk about in Berlin next week. At The Amaz!ng Meeting 7 this year in Las Vegas, I was lucky enough to give a 20-minute talk on the last day, and the topic was the Missing Cosmonauts. It’s been one of the most popular episodes of my Skeptoid podcast, and it concerns the urban legend that a number of Soviet Cosmonauts died in space, on flights that never made it into the history books, and who were subsequently erased from history. These tales are based almost entirely upon interpretations of some recordings made by two young Italian brothers who tuned their radio receivers in to pick up Soviet and American radio traffic during Cold War era spaceflights. (continue reading…)

So right after Christmas, I’m headed to Berlin to speak at the 26C3 conference. It’s the 26th (!) annual Chaos Communication Congress, the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club. Being a newbie I cannot speak from experience, but to me it sounds somewhat like an indoor Burning Man festival. Their page states that CCC “attracts a diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopians from all around the world.” I guess I fall into the Utopian category, evidenced by my affinity for futuristic jumpsuits.

Why me? Well, the slogan for this year’s conference is Here Be Dragons, and apparently, someone told them that I once made a video of the same name. They must have answered “Good enough for me,” because the next thing I knew I had a plane ticket in my hand. For all they know I could have made a documentary about Komodo. Or Wagnerian characters. Or recursive fractal curves. (continue reading…)

I thought that today I would share with you a bit of an insider’s peek at what went into the creation of last week’s Skeptoid episode about the Baigong Pipes. It was a particularly effective use of my research process, mainly the skeptoid-research Google Group mailing list.

In summary, the Baigong Pipes are popularly said to be a series of manufactured metal pipes buried in ancient rock in a cave in China. This example of an “out of place artifact” is sometimes claimed as proof of ancient alien visitation.

My time was limited on this particular episode, so all the research had to be done over the Internet. I didn’t have time to visit libraries or anything. Google Books can often fill in such gaps, but it didn’t turn up much in this case. Worse, I found very little information on the Internet. Oh, there are hundreds of articles all right, but they all contain the same information (which is minimal) and appear to all be sourced from the same original Chinese newspaper article, for which an English version is available. According to the English Internet, that little bit of information is all anyone knows about the Baigong Pipes. And it’s not nearly enough for a Skeptoid episode. (continue reading…)

The Ghost of La Purisima

I’ve been corresponding with a gentleman, Kevin, who visits allegedly haunted sites in southern California. As evidence of his paranormal experiences, he sent me this photograph, taken inside the La Purisima mission in Lompoc, CA.

Mision La Purisima Concepcion de Maria Santisima is one of the famous network of Spanish Franciscan missions stretching the length of California, established in the 18th century. Today it’s something of a living history museum. Unlike many of the California missions, La Purisima is no longer used for actual regular worship services.

Like so many “ghost” photographs, Kevin’s is of astonishingly poor quality. It’s not even close to being in focus, for one thing, and clearly should have been taken with a flash. I always marvel at such pictures, because in reality, it’s not even possible to buy a camera that automatically takes such bad quality. The world’s worst camera phone would have done a better job. You have to deliberately jack the settings, or blur it out in Photoshop. (continue reading…)

I’m excited to announce that Skeptoid has made it to the final round of the annual Podcast Awards for 2010! The real voting starts now.

As you may know, Skeptoid has been my labor of love for over three years. Unlike most other nominated podcasts, I do it almost entirely on my own: I have no co-hosts, producers, company, or sponsors behind me, like most. So I make my pitch that (if you like Skeptoid) it deserves your vote through all my hard work, even if there are other shows also nominated that you also like. (continue reading…)