In no way does Mythbusters deserve its high reputation in the skeptic community for promoting skepticism or critical thinking. It doesn’t.

Mythbusters’ strength is in its presentation of how to apply basic science to answer questions, and for that it deserves great applause. Granted, people versed in experimental design often facepalm at their lack of controls, shoddy methodology, and poorly supported conclusions, but that’s not the point. It’s necessary to cut such corners when you’re trying to make a fast, punchy show that appeals to a broad audience, and cutting them is the right choice. For teaching the basic application of science, it’s one hell of a lot better than anything else on television, and that’s a huge step forward. They teach “Test stuff,” and that’s a message that’s desperately needed in our culture.

But here is what they don’t do: Mythbusters never truly challenges their audience. The title suggests that they do, but they never go after the cherished beliefs in our society that are wrong and that enable charlatanism to be so profitable. “How much dynamite does it take to blow a raccoon out of a drainpipe” is not a popularly held belief that causes loss and harm, and that deserves to be tested and busted. It’s explosion porn.

Mythbusters is not a courageous show, and it could be.

Whenever I make this point I often get the response “Oh, what about their episode proving the moon landings actually happened?” Well, OK, that was one episode out of hundreds, and even still, it’s not really that big of a myth. Six delusional nuts out there believe the moon landings were a hoax. It’s not all that harmful of a myth, it’s just not that important to bust, and it improved the lives of very few viewers.

During one earlier episode on pyramid power (again, an easy-target fringe claim that few people actually believe), Adam asked at the end “Can we not do any more of these ‘oogie-boogie’ myths, please?” And they haven’t. As a result, anyone can enjoy Mythbusters, without fear of having their beliefs in homeopathy, psychics, and magical Power Balance bracelets challenged.

Science shows have to be sensational to survive, which is the main reason so many of them have devolved into simply promoting the paranormal or showcasing explosives. To appeal to an audience, a skeptical show has to give people something amazing to talk about, and not just take something away. To have a lasting impact and leave an important legacy, a science show must truly change the world and not simply stroke our lust for tremendous crashes and computer graphics. Can a television show do all of these things? I believe it can, if the producers are willing to work hard enough.

Credit Mythbusters for what it is, but don’t think a gaping hole in television is filled.

The mystery lights as they appear on the horizon

I’ll admit it was a pretty long time ago, like a year and a half, but a while ago I did a blog post about some mystery lights that often appear off the coast here in southern Orange County. From my house, they can be seen on many clear nights, ranging from about 180 to 190 degrees south, magnetic. They swap around a bit, and if you leave and come back ten minutes later, you may find the lights have moved one way or the other.

Closeup of the light on the right

Each object has about a half dozen very bright lights, tending toward the orange. They look like a ship only superficially. Cruise ships have many more lights, much dimmer; and cargo ships run dark with hardly any lights visible at all. So really they don’t look like a ship. They do look quite similar to oil platforms though, which tend to have bright floodlights. They are out there quite often, though I couldn’t tell you exactly how often. Not every night, but some nights, on no apparent schedule.

Having sailed these waters most of my life and being familiar with them, I know that there are no offshore oil platforms in southern California south of Long Beach. This is easy for anyone to confirm with Google Earth or other online reference sites; and anyway, oil platforms don’t move around back and forth along the horizon. But nevertheless, when I posted the blog, more commenters suggested oil platforms than anything else. I could get up on my ear and assert that it’s perfectly obvious to determine that there are no oil platforms there, but still people insisted that’s what the lights had to be. OK, whatever.

Triangulating on the lights

The reveal can now be made. The lights are indeed ships, but not commercial. They are military. They come out of San Diego, and hover off the coast of Camp Pendleton (the huge Marine Corps base that dominates the coast of northern San Diego county). From what I’ve been able to determine, the ships stay on station within a rectangular area, and guys go back and forth from the shore by helicopter, hovercraft, what have you, and practice — well, going back and forth between a ship and the shore. Readers who are in the military and helped me out explained that the few bright spotlights on the ship are characteristic of these exercises.

Before posting this, I wanted to be able to give specific information about which ships these are, and of exactly what type, and precisely what vehicles are going out to them. However, I was thwarted. My military readers gave me a good start, telling me who to call and what to ask for, but alas, I finally conceded defeat. The experience was dominated by disconnected phone numbers, wrong phone numbers, unanswered messages, surly operators, and public affairs officers who didn’t know anything and didn’t want me to either. The Navy doesn’t know what the Marines do, and the Marines don’t know what the Navy does. But obviously they manage to work it out between themselves on the water.

Also, my repeated requests to go out for a joyride on a Mark V Special Operations Craft probably did not help my cause.

I was hoping to get the coordinates of the box station where they go, but I never got close to that. I can give you the three sightings that I made, however. They are illustrated in the accompanying graphic. If I were a professional researcher of paranormal claims and was trying to take this case seriously, I would (should) be run out of town for such a slipshod explanation with no real details. But hey, here at SkepticBlog, you get what you pay for. They’re military ships. Probably pretty cool ones, but I don’t know.

Why should this be expected to have any kind of therapeutic value? It’s quite simple. Here is the explanation on the Earthing Institute’s home page:

In an age of rampant chronic disease, reconnecting with the Earth’s energy beneath our very feet provides a way back to better health. We are bioelectrical beings living on an electrical planet.

I hope that clears it up.

There seems to be a fundamental disconnect within the Earthing community. Half of the descriptions of Earthing say that it’s about transferring the Earth’s “energy” to your body; while the other half say the exact opposite, that it’s about electrically grounding yourself. Oh well, perhaps the research is still in its nascent stages.

So what’s the angle? Well, obviously, the sale of goofy products and services. They sell bedsheets costing hundreds of dollars, bands and straps to connect to your body, pads and mats to sit on or lay on, travel kits, and my favorite, a pad to lay on your car seat that you sit on (it “neutralizes micro-electrical charges on the body”). And don’t forget your pets: They also sell pet beds, in case Rover is not feeling quite in touch with the Earth’s “energy field”. If you’d like to get in on this action yourself, here is a nifty service offered by the Earthing Institute:

The Earthing Institute is pioneering the research and application of safe and effective biological grounding systems. The institute has unique expertise to test the validity of products designed for consumer or specialized usage. Products submitted to us will undergo detailed testing procedures. Upon approval they will be certified by the institute and manufacturers be authorized to use our “Bio logo” on their products. Costs vary depending upon the level of expertise required and the time needed to test individual products.

But of course, one shouldn’t simply assert that a new idea is goofy based on its face-value silliness. One should look at the research. A cursory search of PubMed did, indeed, turn up an impressive sounding study (“The biologic effects of grounding the human body during sleep as measured by cortisol levels and subjective reporting of sleep, pain, and stress”) with the following abstract:

OBJECTIVES: Diurnal cortisol secretion levels were measured and circadian cortisol profiles were evaluated in a pilot study conducted to test the hypothesis that grounding the human body to earth during sleep will result in quantifiable changes in cortisol. It was also hypothesized that grounding the human body would result in changes in sleep, pain, and stress (anxiety, depression, irritability), as measured by subjective reporting. SUBJECTS AND INTERVENTIONS: Twelve (12) subjects with complaints of sleep dysfunction, pain, and stress were grounded to earth during sleep for 8 weeks in their own beds using a conductive mattress pad. Saliva tests were administered to establish pregrounding baseline cortisol levels. Levels were obtained at 4-hour intervals for a 24-hour period to determine the circadian cortisol profile. Cortisol testing was repeated at week 6. Subjective symptoms of sleep dysfunction, pain, and stress were reported daily throughout the 8-week test period. RESULTS: Measurable improvements in diurnal cortisol profiles were observed, with cortisol levels significantly reduced during night-time sleep. Subjects’ 24-hour circadian cortisol profiles showed a trend toward normalization. Subjectively reported symptoms, including sleep dysfunction, pain, and stress, were reduced or eliminated in nearly all subjects. CONCLUSIONS: Results indicate that grounding the human body to earth (“earthing”) during sleep reduces night-time levels of cortisol and resynchronizes cortisol hormone secretion more in alignment with the natural 24-hour circadian rhythm profile. Changes were most apparent in females. Furthermore, subjective reporting indicates that grounding the human body to earth during sleep improves sleep and reduces pain and stress.

And moreover, a paper on an alternative health web site briefly described several such studies. Wow! Pretty impressive, isn’t it?

Well, not so much. First, the above study was published in none other than the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, which means that it was either not submitted to, or was rejected by, journals that have any sort of legitimate reputation. I didn’t purchase the article, but going by the abstract and by the descriptions of other studies in that PDF, all of these studies suffer from the same fatal flaws: No blinding at all, and no control groups at all. This means that the test subjects might as well have been wearing paper hats, and if told it would reduce their stress, it probably would have had the same effect. The small size of the study, 12 people, renders any result statistically useless; and my experience in such matters suggests there’s a good chance that these 12 people were very possibly employees and friends of the company selling the products.

Is it true that grounding yourself to absorb the Earth’s peaceful energy will cure all your ills? Maybe, but we wouldn’t know from these studies. Maybe we should all buy the products to find out.

Dr. Ron McNair

Today I was in the mood for just a short post (OK, the real reason is that I’m currently vacationing in Oregon). I was relaxing and listening to music and thinking about the space program, as it’s a topic I’m currently researching. For me this is something of a convergence. I’m an old-school analog subtractive synthesis guy, as some of you may know, and enjoy the musical stylings of early synthesizer artists like Wendy Carlos and Jean-Michel Jarre. Any discussion of electronic music and the space program leads, inevitably, to Dr. Ron McNair, who, as one of the astronauts who died on the Challenger, is automatically one of my heroes.

Dr. McNair was also handy with a saxophone, and happened to be friends with Jean-Michel Jarre. Together they reasoned that Ron’s upcoming flight on STS-51 might be an ideal opportunity to accomplish a neat first: Ron would play saxophone on board the Challenger while Jarre recorded it live in session, and Jarre’s upcoming album Rendez-Vous would include the first original musical recording performed live in space.

Ron’s saxophone was duly packed on board Challenger. Sadly, as we know all too well, he never got the chance to record the music.

Jarre proceeded with his album, retitling the track Ron’s Piece, with the saxophone played in tribute by Pierre Gossez (ironically, the track’s original title was to be Last Rendez-Vous). If you can get ahold of a copy of the album, give it a listen. Close your eyes and enjoy the way it should have been.

They Just Don’t Learn: CDC Votes To Poison Children Again With Two Doses of Vaccines

Parents of children over 6 months and under 9 years beware. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is once again choosing to adopt policies which poison your children with what is now two doses of seasonal flu vaccine this fall.

So she emailed the guy the following:

Editors of PreventDisease.com,

It is this kind of fear mongering and sensationalism that lead me to unsubscribe. You should be ashamed to publish this. The use of “votes to poison” and “poison your children” is paranoid and unethical. As an educated, thoughtful person, mother and teacher, I feel your newsletter is insulting.

He replied:

From: dave.mihalovic@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: your article
cc: susan.mchilley@preventdisease.com

Are we talking about the truth or semantics here? Could you please explain to me what the “big difference” is between deliberately vaccinating children and poisoning children? Anybody who votes to inject any child with known neurotoxins, immunotoxins and sterile chemicals is, in my opinion a criminal and poisoning that child. I’m not using lies to get people to read the article…it is an unequivocal fact that vaccines are poison. If you are debating that with me, please provide your evidence that suggests the opposite.

Dave

I deal every day with people like Dave who simply deny science or medicine. Many of them are very much of the “Nothing can convince me” mindset: Dave has, quite obviously, been given all the information about vaccines time and time again; he simply denies it all and believes that his own notions are better founded. He’s probably not malicious and probably does not want children to die from preventable disease. He’s most likely just scientifically illiterate (like most people) and places more emphasis on anecdotal information that supports his ideology than on information that clashes with it.

My sense is that it’s probably futile for my friend to “provide the evidence” that he pretends to be interested in seeing. How, then, do we reach such people, people who are out actively advocating against public health? I put the question to you.

There has never been a better or safer time to be a human being. We live in climate controlled houses that protect us from wind, weather, and predators; we eat food that is safety tested and heavily regulated; we wear fire retardant clothing that wicks away moisture to regulate our body temperature; we have emergency services standing by to protect us from criminals, to rescue or resuscitate us, or to whisk us to a hospital; we drive cars that are basically rolling safety cells; and we have regulatory bodies and watchdog groups that constantly, round the clock, comb over every imaginable substance in the environment trying to figure out how to make things even safer. Today’s world is the safest it has ever been. No previous generation of humans has ever had it so good.

How, then, did we ever get this far without wearing hazmat suits?

Obviously Parents’ depiction of the hazmat suits is a little tongue-in-cheek (or so I hope, anyway) — even the dog is wearing goggles; so let’s turn to the actual article to see what they really want us to think. The article begins, keeping step with the popular formula, with a touching personal anecdote of someone whose life is shattered by toxins. “I was shocked to learn what my unborn baby and I were exposed to,” says the frightened mom.

And what was this? It turns out the levels of BPA and DEP in her blood place her in the top 10%. BPA (Bisphenol A) and DEP (Diethyl phthalate) are well-publicized endocrine disruptors: they bind to a living cell’s hormone receptors, thus taking the place of the body’s natural hormone that would normally bind there. Sounds scary!! What effect will that have on her unborn baby?

Well, none, in all probability. Simply being in the top 10% still places her far, far below dangerous levels. As far as is known, nobody has ever been found to have suffered any harmful effects from environmental levels of endocrine disruptors. The theory and the threat are certainly there: lab animal tests have proven the potential effects at high levels, and a few small studies find correlations (other studies fail to replicate these results); but so far, no victims. It’s still something to be concerned about, and this is why we regulate these compounds so closely, and such concerns are why the established safe level of BPA is currently being reduced even farther.

Endocrine disruptors are natural compounds that are found throughout the environment. They always have been, they always will be; even our natural-living forebears 100,000 years ago had to deal with endocrine disruptors. To put it in perspective, you get more from a single serving of sunflower seeds, soybeans or alfalfa sprouts than you do from a lifetime use of water bottles containing BPA.

Yet articles like this one still feel the need to trumpet calls like “Take Action for Tougher Chemical Laws”, which is the name of a sidebar in the article advising you to write your Congressperson and to join a variety of Internet activism web sites.

The article ends with a section called “Safer Swaps”, suggesting a variety of natural products instead of more common developed products. It says “Whether you make one, some, or all [of these recommended changes], your family’s health will benefit — and fast.” This is an outright lie. I challenge the editors to present even a single plausible example of a family whose health is currently proven to be impaired by any of the products in the list, and who make a dramatic, fast turnaround simply by switching to one of the alternatives offered. This is irresponsible shock-jock journalism, plain and simple.

The article concludes with:

…We wait for chemical-policy reform and for scientists to understand the full scope of these daily yet preventable (endocrine disruptor) exposures.

There are so many things wrong with this sentence that it’s hard to keep track. It starts with the weasel-word “chemical” which pretends that some compounds are evil “chemicals” while natural alternatives are not. That’s wrong. But let’s pretend that there is a “chemical policy” that needs “reform”. What does Parents magazine think the EPA and the FDA do all day? They regulate these things. These policies are constantly being revised and improved, and guidelines constantly changing as our knowledge improves daily. It is irresponsible and wrong to say that we need to write our Congresspeople to demand that somebody improve “chemical policy”. (Go ahead, post your comment charging me with claiming that everything about government is perfect.)

And, note the obligatory jab at scientists, who have yet to “understand the full scope” of endocrine disruptors. What, because they have not read this article? I would like to assure the readers of Parents that the scientists whose jobs are to study these things are much better informed than is the author of this article. It is due to the work of scientists that we know about the risks of endocrine disruptors to begin with.

Finally, the author suggests that exposure is preventable. As endocrine disruptors are found naturally throughout the environment, preventing such exposure is neither possible nor practical. They are part of our world. Manmade chemicals have certainly increased their levels measurably, and scientists and policymakers have been on the job ever since we learned about the problems. The products we use and the food we eat is tightly regulated by science-driven policy to ensure that it’s not a danger. Consumers do not need to panic and rush out to replace everything they own or put on hazmat suits.

Is the world perfect? No. Are you in grave danger from endocrine disruptors simply by living in our “toxic world”? No, and Parents’ editors should know better than to promote such baseless sensationalism. That is not serving parents.

My fellow blogger Michael Shermer wrote a column recently in Scientific American that discussed this in somewhat more detail, and if you’re not a subscriber, you can get his article online here. It rang quite true with me, so I wanted to take a look at Gardner’s thesis from the perspective of being a science outreach professional.

Gardner didn’t really put his points into the form of a list, so I’m taking some liberties here and rearranging them into bullet points. So here are the things you need to make sure you’re not doing:

• Cranks tend to work in isolation from their colleagues. This is conducive to drifting far afield. If you want to stay abreast of the latest developments, you usually want to be part of the community. If you’re not, you proceed unchecked, and you lack the checks and balances and corrections of peer review. Isolation is rarely or never the best way to insure that your work is on track.
• Cranks tend to be paranoid. They worry that their important discoveries are being spied upon, that evil forces are out to destroy their reputations, that colleagues are conspiring to suppress their discoveries. Nobody doing legitimate science, or working within the scientific method, has any plausible reason to be paranoid about such things. Can any legitimate scientist recall the last time they conspired to suppress good work?
• Cranks tend to consider themselves geniuses. Cranks tend to learn early on that their work is pretty unique. For some reason they often fail to consider the possibility that this uniqueness is for any reason other than its utter brilliance. “I’m the only one smart enough to see this” a pretty clear red flag. Beware of anyone who claims unique insight.
• Cranks tend to regard their colleagues and critics as stupid. The Dunning-Kruger effect (no relation to me) is expressed when people of mediocre ability are unable to perceive their own mediocrity, and unable to comprehend that others may be smarter or more capable than they. When a crank sees a colleague doing different work or coming to different conclusions, it may well be that his own incompetence prevents him from understanding that it’s possible for others to be smarter. Therefore, the colleagues’ different conclusions can only be due to their stupidity.
• Cranks tend to believe there is a conspiracy against them. Why will nobody publish their paper or invite them to speak at conferences? Is it because their work is poor? No, it must be a conspiracy to protect to status quo and to suppress innovation. A crank is so convinced of his own correctness that there doesn’t seem to be any rational reason for the community to dispute his work, therefore a conspiracy seems to be a better explanation.
• Cranks tend to criticize the work of big names in science. Einstein is usually the favorite. When a good scientist finds a flaw in established theory, that theory rarely happens to be from one of the big names in science; not because the big names are special or infallible, but simply because the huge number of scientists in the world dilutes the big names down to a tiny percentage. Cranks probably tend to go after big names because their own limited expertise makes them more familiar with the big names than with the actual science being done in the field. Have you ever doubted Einstein, at a time when you could genuinely claim to have a thorough understanding of all the work done since his time?
• Cranks tend to invent their own terminology, sometimes their own sciences, and tend to write in their own overcomplicated jargon. Beware of the article that discusses a science with terminology not found on Wikipedia. Beware of any scientist that invents his own name for a new science. Obviously all new sciences do originally need to be named, but the number of crank theories with made-up names is much, much larger. And beware of any article that is written with such jargon in an overcomplicated way that makes no sense. Don’t jump to the conclusion that the author is smarter than you; he may simply be a crank.

So really, folks, keep an eye on yourself. Gardner’s list is a good one. Do you ever feel yourself traveling down one of these roads? Don’t let it happen. Every crank out there started out as a little bit of a crank, and then a little more of a crank, and eventually becomes a full-blown crank if unchecked. Identifying with the “skeptic community” in no way makes you immune.

I don’t have an army of clones like Mr. Atoss, and I do not believe Lisa could consider herself a podcast widow, given my top prioritization of family time. So you might fairly ask (and many of you often do): How the heck do I manage to do all of this??

In an earlier career, I was a software project manager. The only truly valuable thing I took away from that was the concept of time management. There are various formal models and software tools, but none of those work for me; I don’t have the patience or attention for formalized methodologies. I took the part that does work for me and I incorporated into a curriculum that I sometimes teach to small businesspeople looking to become software entrepreneurs in addition to their current business. This means working two jobs at once, something they rarely realize, and rarely take seriously. Generally, they consider their software business to be a sort of side project, and they treat it as a hobby, working on it at odd hours, whenever they happen to find a spot of spare time.

Many podcasters and bloggers treat their project as a hobby as well. The difference between a hobby and a profession is that one is taken seriously, while the other is not. One is an obligation, the other is done at your pleasure. If you work on your podcast or blog whenever you feel like it, whenever it pleases you to do so, whenever some spare time happens to rear its head, you are doing what I call Farting Around. That’s a hobby. I always knew that’s not what I wanted Skeptoid to be.

When I set out to plan my daily schedule, to delineate projects I take seriously from hobby projects, there were four basic items I wanted to accommodate:

1. My full time job. I can’t control the hours I work, basically 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, so this the first thing on my calendar.
2. Being a dad. I only get one shot at this, so I assign it all the time that the kids and are both home. That’s every day after 5pm, and every weekend.
3. The Skeptoid podcast. After the above items, it’s obvious that not a lot of time slots are left. The time slots I found are in the early morning. My Skeptoid day starts at 5:30 in the morning, every day, and ends when the family gets together for breakfast.
4. All of my other projects are hobbies. I work on them whenever I get a chance. There are always short days at work, days off, times when Lisa and the kids are gone, or the kids are out with friends. All my random stuff is done at these odd times.

An exception is the inFact with Brian Dunning video series. This was a purely speculative project, and it required a considerable allocation of resources to do properly. So I talked with my family and we agreed that I would devote a series of Sundays — otherwise family time — to the production, plus two weeknights of editing for each episode. This was acceptable to all of us because it’s a finite project; it’s one season of 13 episodes. If it ultimately proves to be a worthwhile investment and continues, it will replace one or more workdays during the week, and will not affect my other scheduled time. If such a deal can’t be worked, then it’s a deal I won’t make.

I am not moved by the complaints of anyone who tells me they don’t have time for some pet project, but who sets their alarm clock any later than I set mine. If you’re serious about your project, treat it seriously; if you’re not willing to hard code it into your daily schedule, call it what it is: a hobby.

But all of this is only half the issue. Finding the time is one thing, but managing the time once you have it is something else. This is where project management comes in. At a minimum, you must at least delineate the steps and milestones and set deadlines for each. You must be prepared to redline any items you’re not going to have time to complete. The basic steps in a Skeptoid episode are research, writing, editing, recording, audio editing, referencing, posting, and promoting. I know how much time each of the latter steps takes, so sometimes I have to reluctantly cut short the research and writing. I plan for this in advance, and always start with a general outline, and I know what research is going to take the longest. Sometimes I have to make big decisions earlier. For example, the JFK assassination episode is still a long ways off because I know that research has to include reading Vince Bugliosi’s massive book.

So that’s the long answer to the question of how I manage to do everything I do. It’s simply basic time management, and the discipline to stick to a planned schedule. Although, if I could superposition and do multiple things at once, that would be pretty cool.

Their presentation purports that there are only three possibilities to explain the UFO sighting: Hoax or hysteria; experimental aircraft; or an object of extraterrestrial origin. Actually, that’s four possibilities, since a hoax and mass hysteria are two completely different things.

After we eliminate hoaxing, hysteria, and experimental aircraft, the only remaining possibility is that this was an extraterrestrial object. Let’s hope Australian television audiences are outraged by that insult to intelligence.

I’m going to help out the show’s producers. They left out the two overwhelmingly most likely possibilities: mistaken identification, and unknown. Their list should have read like this:

1. Hoax – Not very likely in this case, but always a possibility.
2. Hysteria – Highly unlikely. Mass hysteria does not create shared visual hallucinations.
3. Mistaken identification – Most likely. The witnesses did see something, they were simply unable to identify it. Maybe it was seen from an odd angle, maybe it was something weird looking they weren’t familiar with. This doesn’t mean nobody would have known what it was.
4. Unknown – We do not have an explanation for what the witnesses reported.
5. Extraterrestrial object – I’ve struck this one out because it’s not a supportable conclusion. In order to positively identify the Westall object, we’d have to be able to reliably test it against a known sample. We don’t have a known sample of an “extraterrestrial object” to compare it against, so there’s really no way to get past #4 on this list and make a positive identification of “alien spaceship”.

Before this “documentary” came out, I was able to scoop it on my Skeptoid podcast by a few days, thanks to a heads-up from Maynard in Australia, who also provided this screen capture (many thanks, sir). On that show, I found that there are indeed some good possibilities for what the witnesses saw. The first half of the sighting coincided with a weather balloon, known to be in the area at the time, and sounding quite a lot like what some of the witnesses reported. The second half of the sighting is harder to pin down, so I’m completely comfortable with calling it unidentified. I’m reasonably comfortable saying it was probably a misidentification, and there’s a good explanation of that if you want to check out my episode.

Remember: “I don’t know” does NOT mean “I do know, and it was an alien spaceship.” To those who say this is the only possible explanation, I invite them to show us exactly how they were able to match up the Westall story to what’s known of alien spaceships. If they can’t, I invite them to revise their conclusion to admit that maybe the explanation is unknown.

In terms of the ratio of dollar cost to environmental benefit, trading your existing car in for a Prius to take advantage of its marginally better mileage is probably about the worst thing you can do. A single-suspendered redneck who simply keeps his 15-year-old pickup is doing way more to protect the environment than you are. You see, any time anyone buys a new car, we are instructing that a new car be built that would not otherwise have been needed. When you consider the entire resourcing chain of every component on a new car, it’s clear that its environmental impact is significant. At the same time you order your new car, someone buys your used one, and somewhere down the line someone is sending an old clunker to the scrapyard, and another environmental impact event is created. The redneck’s higher emissions over the lifetime of the car are a drop in the bucket compared to your new car purchase. You elitist bastard.

Speaking strictly from the perspective of today’s immediate environmental impact, it almost never makes sense to buy a new car; and only then when an existing car is accidentally destroyed.

But even though the redneck and his pickup are the environmental champions of the day, there is still a reason to buy the Prius, Volt, Tesla, what have you. You’re investing in the future. And not because the Prius will have a better long-term impact, because with its giant battery even that is not necessarily true. I can think of a number of reasons why today’s Prius is a terrible solution; those aren’t the point.

This is a future investment in a much broader sense. Toyota realized that when they first introduced the car and were willing to lose money on each one sold. In order to do something well, we first have to do it badly. The Prius, the Volt, and all the other innovative cars are necessary stepping stones. We’re still in first grade here.

I’m learning to ride a unicycle. I suck. I’m going to have to continue sucking before I get good at it. No amount of advance planning can let me skip straight to skillful mastery of the unicycle on my first try.

It’s the same with next generation cars, fuels, energy sources, everything. If we want to get good at them, we’re going to have to be bad at them first. The innovators who get us to real solutions are going to be the ones who are willing to suck first. The more of us who participate in that experiment, the more we’ll learn how not to suck.

Suck away.