i am michael shermer the director of the skeptics society the publisher of skeptic magazine we investigate claims of the paranormal pseudo science and fringe groups and cults and claims of all kinds between
there's a lot of that out there some people call us debunkers which is kind of a negative term but let 's face it there's a lot
and we are like the bunko squads of the police departments out there flushing out well we're sort of like the ralph naders of bad ideas
it's the it's produced by the quadro corporation of west virginia it's called the quadro two thousand dowser rod
this was being sold to high school administrators for nine hundred dollars a piece it's a piece of plastic with a radio shack antenna
so the way it works is you go down the hallway
and you see if it tilts toward a particular locker and then you
the locker so it looks something like this
has kind of a right leaning bias so i'll show well this is science so we'll do a controlled experiment it'll go this way for sure
sir you want to empty your pockets please
so the question was can it actually find marijuana in students lockers and the answer is if you open enough of them yes
but in science we have to keep track of the misses not just the hits and that's probably the key lesson to my short talk here is that
i have an opinion of this myself because the business i'm in but in fact people it turns out are getting smarter three iq points per ten years going up sort of an interesting thing
what's the more likely explanation and before we say something is out of this world we should first make sure that it's not in this world what's more likely that arnold had a little extraterrestrial help in his run for the governorship or that the world weekly news makes stuff up
and part of that the same theme is expressed nicely here in this sidney harris cartoon for those of you in the back it says here then a miracle
occurs i think you need to be more explicit here in step two
this single slide completely dismantles the intelligent design arguments there's nothing more to it than that
you can say a miracle occurs it's just that it doesn't explain anything it doesn't offer anything there's nothing to test it's the end of the conversation for intelligent design
it's the beginning of the causal chain for science for intelligent design creationists it's the end of the chain
so again we can ask this what's more likely are ufos alien spaceships or perceptual cognitive mistakes or even fakes
this is a ufo shot from my house in altadena california looking down over pasadena and if it looks a lot like a buick hubcap it's because it is
so although it's possible that most of these things are fake or illusions or so on and that some of them are real it's more likely that all of them are fake like the crop circles on a more serious note in all of science we're looking for a balance between
data and theory in the case of galileo he had two problems when he turned his telescope to saturn first of all there was no theory of planetary rings and second of all his data was grainy and fuzzy and he couldn't quite make out what it was he was looking at
so he wrote that he had seen i have observed that the furthest planet has three bodies and this is what he ended up concluding that he saw so without a theory of planetary rings and with only grainy data
the solar system operated and then he had better telescopic more fine grain data in which he could figure out that as the earth is going around faster according to kepler 's laws than saturn then we catch up with it and we see the angles of the rings at different
and of course happy faces faces of all kinds are easy to see you can see the happy face on mars there if astronomers were frogs perhaps they'd see kermit the frog do you see him there little froggy legs
here 's our lady of guadalupe and our lady of watsonville just down the street or is it up the street from here tree bark is particularly good because it's nice and grainy branchy
black and white splotchy and you can get the pattern seeking humans are pattern seeking animals here 's the virgin mary on the side of a
this casino paid twenty eight thousand five hundred dollars on ebay for the cheese sandwich
but who does it really look like the virgin mary
we went down investigated just to give you a size that's dawkins me and the amazing randi next to this two two and a half story size image all these candles so many thousands of candles people had lit in tribute to this
so we walked around the backside just to see what was going on here where it turns out wherever there's a sprinkler head and a palm tree you get the effect here 's the virgin mary on the backside which they started to wipe off i guess you can only have one miracle per building
so is it really a miracle of mary or is it a miracle of marge
this with audio auditory illusions there is this film white noise with michael keaton about the dead talking back to us by the way this whole business of talking to the dead it's not that big a deal anybody can do it turns out it's getting the dead to talk back that's the
in this case supposedly these messages are hidden in electronic phenomena there's a reversespeech com web page on which i downloaded this stuff here is the forward this is the most famous one of all of these here 's the
very
right here it is backwards and see if you can hear the hidden messages that are supposedly in
can't miss it when i tell you
just end with
a positive nice little story about the skeptics is a nonprofit educational organization we're always looking for little good things that people do and in england
nine million bicycles in beijing it's a love story she's sort of the norah jones of the u k about how she much loves her guy and compared to nine million bicycles and so forth and she has this one passage here
that
nice at least she got it close in america it would be we 're six thousand light years from the edge but my friend simon singh the particle physicist now turned science educator and he wrote the book the big bang and so on
we know exactly how old how far from the edge you know it's twelve it's thirteen point seven billion light years and it's not a guess we know within precise error
bars there how close it is and so we can say although not absolutely true that it's pretty close to being true
and to his credit katie called him up after this op ed piece came out and said i 'm so embarrassed i was a member of the astronomy club and i should have known better and she re cut the song so i'll end with the new version
the
i
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