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.

The other glaring difference between the accounts of Herodotus and Exodus is the Exodus itself. Despite a few poor attempts by some Christian scholars to try and shoehorn other events recorded by Herodotus into excuses for an Exodus, it’s clear that the Biblical account, where Moses led hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees out from the Egyptian labor camps, is wholly absent from Herodotus’ version.

Whether they were slaves or not, Jewish or not, or had worked on pyramids or something different, no group that large could possibly have camped for even one day and left no archaeological evidence. We find prehistoric camps tens of thousands of years old where hunters spent a single night. To claim that a group of thousands (let alone hundreds of thousands) could camp for even a week (let alone forty years) and leave no archaeological evidence displays gross naivete. A group numbering anywhere close to a million would have constituted the world’s largest city in those times, and short of a tectonic subduction, entire cities do not disappear. Whatever the Exodus was, if it happened at all, was certainly not what was depicted in the Book of Exodus.

No, I’m not trying to be controversial, and not trying to rub Christians or Jews or anyone else the wrong way. But I would like to be enlightened as to why some who hold such texts dear sometimes regard them as mere lists of events, rather than being otherwise meaningful. Whatever value they have is demonstrably not as lists of events. Might it lie elsewhere?

The criticism I received has been of two general varieties. First, that I’m an “Exodus denier”. Well, sorry to say, it’s not me who’s denying it: It’s virtually every historian and archaeologist, based on the evidence. I merely report what has been thoroughly established – that the evidence that must necessarily exist if the Exodus happened has never manifested itself. Second, that the Egyptians never recorded their losses in battle, only their victories; and it is this that explains the lack of evidence for the Exodus. Whether this is true or just an apologetic argument is irrelevant. The lack of Egyptian corroboration is certainly consistent with the lack of archaeological evidence, but it is hardly the reason historians don’t support the Exodus story. Again, your beef is with the evidence, not with the researchers who report the findings.

I submit that all efforts to prove that which is to be taken on faith with scientific evidence are not only doomed to fail, they are ultimately illogical and counterproductive to the purpose of faith.

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>

OK, well enough. This is pretty much what has been publicly broadcast about the stunt. Nothing new here. But then another poster replied:

I love magic and I very much respect David Blane`s skill as an illusionist and the training he does for his stunts. The talk is, indeed, enthralling. Blane is a superb magician and , even though the people at TED took his talk at face value (including some aspects of his medical assistance), I do not. A number of David Blane`s and Chris Angel`s stunt-illusions (including the prolonged breath holding under water) have been recreated by the nefarious “masked magician” with a reveal of the underlying principles of the illusion. To me, the “face emersion in a sink full of perflurocarbons” and some of the other medical discussion add to the illusion but don’t give a cogent alternative explanation to the true aspects of the illusion. An important part of the fun/magic of an illusion is the magician convincing you that there is no other explanation to what you believe you are seeing. You can find the “reveal” of the illusion on the net if you are so inclined.

Well, neither do I take the perfluorocarbons explanation at face value. Another poster replied with this:

My father participated in some of the original experiments with the SEALS using perflurocarbons.  After watching James Cameron’s “The Abyss”, which attempted to show the liquid breathing effects on rats and people, he remarked it was reasonably accurate.  The ‘panic’ reaction of holding one’s breath for as long as possible until being forced to breath in the fluid was an issue, and once the subject was breathing the liquid, they were unable to perform tasks because it took so much effort to breathe.

There is good reason to be skeptical of David Blaine’s feats. His famous TV show “Street Magic” is widely known to have been largely accomplished with post-production editing. For example, his “levitation” was a cleverly edited conflation of a parlor trick called the Balducci and a demonstration of using a wire rig for flying onstage (and I don’t think I’m violating any magician’s trade secrets by pointing that out). Should we not be equally skeptical of his breath holding trick? It was performed on Oprah, for FSM’s sake; and it’s not like no magician has ever taken advantage of the limited view television offers its audience.

Pretty much all of the authorities accept Blaine’s record as legitimate, though short-lived (it was broken only a few months later). Blaine’s problem is that he has established himself as the boy who cried wolf. Whether his feat was genuine or a trick along the lines of the Masked Magician’s reveal, his audience has good reason to doubt its authenticity.

What do you think?

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.

This online form can be filled out to report online sales of fraudulent products that make specific health claims. If you claim that your product diagnoses, treats, prevents, or cures any disease, then your product is classified as a drug; and it’s illegal to sell unapproved drugs in the United States. Therefore, any web site that sells any form of alternative medicine, or  non-FDA approved gadgets or contraptions, and makeS specific medical claims about it, are breaking the law, and are fair game for this form to be used.

The form is short. Just be sure to state your complaint specifically and succinctly. An unapproved product must be offered for sale over the Internet, and a specific health claim must be made about it.

Bookmark it. Use it. Protect your neighbors from con artists and vultures.

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.

Sounds like a lot, I suppose. But I wanted to know how many birds died from other manmade causes. Here are those numbers (based on the most common annual estimates I found):

The granddaddy of human-caused bird population decline is habitat destruction. Numbers are not available, but it’s said to dwarf the causes listed above.

But even that pales in comparison to natural bird deaths. About one third of all birds die in collisions with natural objects, like rocks, trees, or the ground. Most of these are young birds learning to fly.

However, simply that more birds are killed by other causes doesn’t justify the incremental increase imposed by wind turbines. The entire argument is a non-sequitur, technically speaking. But it’s not completely irrelevant, in that it does put the issue into proper perspective.

It doesn’t even address the ongoing death toll to birds from particulate air pollution caused by coal and oil burning power plants, which is what we’re left with when alternative energy sources are taken off the table for “environmental” reasons. I couldn’t find a number for this, but I’ll wager it’s at least as much as it is for humans. As many 100,000 people die each year, in the United States alone, from particulate air pollution from coal and oil burning power plants. I don’t know how many are killed by the environmental effects of wind turbines, but I think it’s safe to say the number is lower.

Sources:

Sagrillo, Mick. “Putting Wind Power’s Effect on Birds into Perspective.” Wind Energy Technical Info, 2003. Web. Jan 6, 2010. <http://www.awea.org/faq/sagrillo/swbirds.html>

Curry & Kelinger. “What Kills Birds?” Curry & Kerlinger, LLC. Web. Jan 6, 2010. <http://www.currykerlinger.com/birds.htm>

Erickson, W., et. al. “Avian Collisions with Wind Turbines: A Summary of Existing Studies and Comparisons to Other Sources of Avian Collision Mortality in the United States.” National Wind Coordinating Committee. Aug 2001. Web. Jan 6, 2010. <http://www.west-inc.com/reports/avian_collisions.pdf>

ACS News Center. “Air Pollution Linked to Deaths From Lung Cancer.” American Cancer Society. American Cancer Society, Inc., 6 Mar. 2002. Web. 21 Dec. 2009. <http://www.cancer.org/docroot/NWS/content/NWS_1_1x_Air_Pollution_Linked_to_Deaths_From_Lung_Cancer.asp>

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.

So I’ve been studying the web video landscape for some time, seeing what models are making money. It’s an easy answer. None of them are making money. There are exceptions to every rule – every financial model for web video has a few standouts who make good money – but the rule for each is that it must be done at your own risk and at your own expense. Most sponsors are not seeing a worthwhile return. Investors have shifted their venture dollars from content to infrastructure. On the plus side, it’s a dynamic arena, so much so that this paragraph will very likely be outdated very soon. But that doesn’t offer much practical assistance to those like myself, who have good content and just want to get it out there.

The default offering for such content producers is ad revenue. Video sharing sites, of which YouTube is just one of many (albeit by far the most important), offer you a pittance. Ads are overlaid, or placed in front of, your video, and you receive a small share of any ad revenue. Unless you have huge traffic because you’re a celebrity or are driven by a popular television show, you’re unlikely to get enough traffic for the ad revenue to cover your costs. I’m neither, so that does not bode well.

Skeptoid is listener supported. About one half of one percent of listeners make a voluntary 99 cent per episode recurring payment. This covers the out-of-pocket expenses for Skeptoid and some of the travel and related costs. It certainly doesn’t cover my time, but then I never expected it to; Skeptoid is done strictly outside of business hours. I’ll ask the same for subscribers to inFact, most of whom I expect to come from outside the Skeptoid listenership. inFact will be enrolled in all the ad revenue programs, but it will also be offered as a video podcast so it can be downloaded through iTunes. As of this writing, those downloads are ad-free (and thus revenue-free); so it’s that market from whom I hope to get some viewer support.

You’ll see the new first season of 13 episodes of inFact appear early in the first quarter of 2010, unless something changes between now and then. When you do, it will be most widely distributed through ad supported channels. It will also be available for ad-free distribution as a video podcast. I fully expect that the first season will be produced at a near-total loss, but these are the kind of first steps that everyone needs to take if we’re going to find a profitable model. Yes, this was a difficult decision to make, and yes, I do have domestic support, if you know what I mean.

When inFact appears, I hope you’ll subscribe and enjoy it, but mostly I hope you’ll share it with others. It should be ideal for schools for all ages, and I promise there won’t be a single episode that you wouldn’t show to your mother. Listen to Skeptoid, or watch SkepticBlog, for further announcements. As I always say, supportive viewers and listeners are the critical link in the chain for spreading the value of critical thinking to those out there who need it most.

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.

Because of the cool-yet-creepy recordings, and I think also because of the fascinating true-life history involved, it’s been one of my most requested talks, and I’ve been able to refine and expand it since TAM. They tell me that Germans love their conspiracy theories, so I’m going to hit them with this one. If they ride me out of town on a rail and tar & feather me for questioning their conspiracy, then I’ll know I’ve done my job well.

A collateral perk of doing Skeptoid is that I get to learn all sorts of ancillary facts that never make it into an episode, usually because they’re off-topic. I learned one today while working on a few extra slides, dealing with the timeline of the female Cosmonaut program. The most dramatic of the recordings is a woman’s voice, in Russian, apparently in grave peril, pleading for help in her last moments of life (I say apparently, because I don’t want to spoil the talk for those who haven’t heard it yet). According to the timeline of events, there’s no way a woman Cosmonaut could have been in a capsule, or even training yet, at the time the recording was made.

But five women did make it into the training program. The principal skill sought by the program was parachuting ability, as bailing out of the returning capsule was the key life-or-death moment for a Cosmonaut. So five women with parachuting experience, and who were the right height and weight were selected. But who was to be the first? At the end it came down to two forerunners, textile worker Valentina Tereshkova, and pilot Valentina Ponomaryova, the wife of a Cosmonaut. Academic test were administered, and it wasPonomaryovawho was the winner. By their stated standards, Ponomaryova was the one who best fit their criteria.

But tests and experience were not all that mattered in the Soviet Union. An interview also came into the equation. The final question was “What do you want from life?”

Ponomaryova answered “I want to take everything it can offer.”

Tereshkova answered “I want to support irrevocably the Komsomol and Communist Party.”

Valentina Tereshkova flew into space on Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963. Despite strong support from the senior engineers who considered her best qualified, Ponomaryova was passed over.

But politics dealt Ponomaryova a double whammy, this time aided by flagrant sexism. She didn’t make it into space as the first woman, but she was scheduled for a flight a few years later, along with other women. During Tereshkova’s flight, a problem sent the craft into orbit 90 degrees out of rotation. Tereshkova reported the error and corrected it. It seems almost impossible to believe, but the accounts we have show that certain directors in the space program felt that she should have allowed herself to be killed rather than embarrass the program by reporting an error. These same directors went on to report that Tereshkova vomited during her flight (which is true but hardly unexpected), that she blanked out and couldn’t remember how to operate the controls, and criticized her for some injuries sustained during the ejection. Since, clearly, women could not be relied on to operate a spacecraft, the program was ended and Ponomaryova – whose greatest crime was wanting to be all she could be – never got her chance.

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.

They seem to be a fairly skeptical bunch. I’ve spoken with a number of people from the conference and even connected with a few Berlin skeptics, and the word is that nobody in Berlin is religious or believes in any weirdo New Age sheit. In my experience, this means one of two things: Either it’s completely true, or it’s completely false. I find that the people who identify themselves most strongly as skeptics believe only in that which cannot be proven, and passionately hate or distrust anything that can be proven.

This means that there are two probable outcomes to my talk: People will doze after hearing me assert that the sky is blue for the umpteenth time, or they will storm the stage and tear me limb from limb for challenging their cherished belief that an undetectable energy force surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the universe together.

Fortunately, I’m the first session on the last day, when everyone’s either sleeping one off or wishing they were. So it doesn’t really make all that much difference what I talk about. This is good, because if I can avoid bringing my computer and phone, all the better. This is a computer hackers conference, and look at this scary page of all the things you have to do to secure your phone and computer while you’re there. If that’s not enough to dissuade me from making a Keynote presentation that I can deliver from my MacBook, I don’t know what is.

I’m curious to know your thoughts, especially if you’re European, and most especially if you’re German. What are audiences there going to want to hear?

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.

So, as I often do in such cases, I put out a call for help to skeptoid-research. I asked for any Chinese speaking people to scan for articles in Chinese. And a helpful researcher found a great one. Nearly all of the information in the article has not, so far as I could find, ever been translated into English. The pipes were originally discovered by an author named Bai Yu who was traveling the region. Information on Bai Yu is hard to find; his book Into the Qaidam was not found on any book sales sites I searched, and his name translates into “whitefish” so it’s difficult to learn much about him when searching for his name.

This article ultimately opened the door for the actual scientific explanation of the Baigong Pipes: fossilized casts of trees, washed into the Qaidam basin as flood debris, and subsequently incorporated into sandstone. The Chinese scientists who made this final determination had not only the geologic background to confirm the deposition process, but they also found the original organic material in the “pipes” and found fossilized tree rings.

There are other such structures found elsewhere in the world. Notably, there are some in Louisiana that come from tree roots. They are somewhat gnarled and curved, like tree roots. Most accounts of the Baigong Pipes, however, are that they are long and straight, much more like piping than tree roots.

I received an additional email from a listener after the episode came out, who done academic work on the Baigong Pipes, and explained that (being in China) they were likely casts of bamboo. Bamboo is, of course, long and straight, and would produce casts much more pipe-like than would tree roots.

However, the Chinese article from which I got most of my information was clear that the scientists had found tree rings, which bamboo lacks. So we have a bit of a discrepancy, and at this point I’m not quite sure what type of plant the Baigong Pipes came from. Not that it makes much difference, but it is a detail that should have been correctly included in the episode. If I’d received this feedback before the episode came out, I probably would have been able to resolve the issue. I referred the listener to skeptoid-research, and hopefully he’ll sign up and keep me on the straight and narrow next time I delve into paleobotany.

By the very nature of Skeptoid, I’ve had to move on to future topics, and no longer have time available to work on the Baigong Pipes episode. I’ll gladly include a clarification if the information comes in, next time I do a “things I’m wrong about” episode. In the meantime, I’ll keep sending out questions when my own research fails me. If you’d like to contribute, feel free to join the mailing list.

Make no mistake: Having an excuse to spend so much time each week researching such diverse and engaging topics is fantastic. I love every minute of it.

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.

But, be that as it may, it’s still easy to identify what’s in the picture. He also included several completely black jpegs, which he said the camera also took in the mission. In response to Kevin asking me what I thought, I told him “Well, you’ve shown me a picture of two people and a black jpeg. I don’t think anyone would earn your respect if they considered either of those to be evidence of the supernatural.”

He replied:

Two people you say. I showed the picture to a National Geographic photographer and he said it was the background. He did something on photo shop and said whatever it is, it is not human.  I am the subject of the pic he said and the “person” is the background. Grey hair, skin, black clothes. It confuses me because he is a skeptic also.

This response is what I wanted to talk about today. Do you really have to be a National Geographic photographer to be qualified to tell whether a person in a picture is a person or a ghost? Does National Geographic offer some specific training in that area? And, especially, when the original photo is so far beyond the threshold of acceptable quality, is there even any point in trying to assert such a claim?

To my way of thinking, being a human being who lives and breathes is the only qualification one needs to know whether one is looking at a picture of a person or not. Having experience as a photographer (which I have as much as many people) does not confer one’s brain with any special human-identifying superpowers. If there were a skill that were helpful in such a case as this, I’d say Photoshop experience, not photography; but again, the picture’s so bad that any meaningful analysis is worthless.

Kevin was merely using the “argument from authority” to claim “my friend is right because he’s a National Geographic photographer” and because “he is a skeptic also.”  Even if we assume that to be true, it doesn’t make the friend right at all. Indeed, it suggests the friend is oddly predisposed to see ghosts in commonplace photos. This weakens his testimony, it does not strengthen it.

Bottom line, it’s a picture of two people, remarkable only for its poor quality. But it’s also so blurry that you could tell me the living history priest guy is a coat rack and I wouldn’t be surprised. Evidence of the supernatural? We need to do better than this.

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.

You may note that there are several of your favorite skeptical podcasts nominated in various categories, including the excellent SGU from our fellow SkepticBlogger Steven Novella. I encourage you to vote carefully: If skeptics split our votes, we may have a Ross Perot effect and some totally random podcast will beat us all. So I’m asking you to choose Skeptoid in the Education category, which is the category in which it has a plausible chance to win.

To vote, go to http://www.podcastawards.com/, and vote for Skeptoid in the Peoples Choice category (they misspelled it, but don’t be thrown off), and also the Education category. Then fill in your name and submit the form.

Heads up that there are two annoying things about the voting process. First, you have to enter your email in a form (don’t worry, no spam) and click a link in your email to confirm your vote. Second, you can vote once per day through November 30. While you don’t have to, other podcast listeners will, so your vote diminishes if you don’t also.

So please vote for me, and please set yourself an alarm to do it every day through the rest of the month. Show that you appreciate a good podcast, and that you like to see it recognized. Thanks!