Podcast #144 4/23/2008
Interview with Simon Singh
News Items: Man Raised from Dead, Politics of Vaccines, Penis Theft Panic
Your Questions and E-mails: Oldest Plant, The SGU Drinking Game, Space Junk, Brain Gym
Science or Fiction

Here's a racist remark.  "Oh, my gosh, look!  It's already down to 9 inches!"

I'm tempted to actually spend money on alcohol to play the drinking game. Awesome.

Stranger than we can imagine...that was Vonnegut wasn't it?

Becky, have you arranged for a place for the police to sit at your party?

I still support the giant magnet plan for removal of space junk!


Lab mice FTW!

Hey there Sceptical rouges - as a sceptic from Britain (note the spelling of sCeptic), let me tell you your British accents suck

Naw, they were perfect and sceptic is too close to septic.  The K separates crap from kool!

On another note, Bob's discussion of the space junk seemed a bit alarmist.  Astronomy Cast Episode 82 was much more calm about it and Dr. Pamela Gay very much poo-poo'ed the idea of a cascade reaction in certain orbits.

Any chance you all could do a bit more checking and see where this really is?  I suspect that the articles that Bob was quoting were a bit more alarmist than where the science is currently.

Dr. Steve's thoughts were much more close to where Dr. Gay's thoughts were.

Here's a link to the appropriate episode from Astronomy Cast:

http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/planets/our-solar-system/ep-82-space-junk/

Dawkins claims it's J.B.S. Haldane. -> http://youtube.com/watch?v=1APOxsp1VFw

Have any of you guys been to england? 

Stafford is nowhere near Leeds!

Here's a link to Ben Goldacre's site, including a video of Brain Gym on Newsnight:

http://www.badscience.net/?p=652

Hey, once you can spell "rogue" then maybe we'll let you correct the American spelling of "skeptic." 

RE Space Junk: Being a bit of an otaku I thought I would mention there is an excellent anime series called Planetes which is about a group whose job is to collect space debris.  It is one of the most scientifically accurate scifi shows that I have seen:

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

"Planetes (Greek: ΠΛΑΝΗΤΕΣ (Wanderers), Japanese Katakana: プラネテス (Puranetesu)) is a Japanese hard science fiction manga by Makoto Yukimura. It was adapted as a 26-episode television anime by Sunrise, which was broadcast on NHK from October 2003 through April 2004. The story revolves around a team of space debris collectors based in the debris ship Toy Box in the year 2075. The manga is published in English in North America by Tokyopop, and the anime is distributed in North America by Bandai Entertainment. Both the manga and anime received the Seiun Award for best science fiction series."

Not to be nitpicky - but the way the penis-shrinking story was told it strongly implied that "this part of the world" was in close geographical proximity to the place where the "family holding onto penis" story happened.  If I recollect correctly (and I do love my shrinking penis story) wasn't the older story set in Indonesia and dealt with "koro" - and in this story it is set in The Republic of Congo.

Um, that's thousands of miles away culturally and geographically.

EDIT:  Nerdy update - one of the places where this "malady" occurs is the island of Flores - famous for its little men, Homo floresiensis.

Wow, that sounds really cool. On a side note, I was reminded of Space Quest.