The mysterious
Veil on phographs, Lifted
in this episode.
This episode was filmed in front of a live studio audience at this year’s Denver Skepticamp last weekend. The episode is a short version of a workshop that Bryan Bonner and I will be co-leading at TAM this summer. As such, feedback is solicited! (as usual)
I’ve posted the materials (slides and two movies) to the shownotes page for this episode.
Since this was a live talk, the normal other segments were not done.
This post is brief and was inspired by “Nigel’s” recent post on The Skeptical Review on what podcasts he listens to. And, I’ve been asked this question a few times by readers of this blog and listeners of the podcast.
Within their categories, these are listed in alphabetical order (so, no preference for one over the other is implied).
The Conspiracy Skeptic – I started to listen to Karl after he invited me on his show several years ago and now keep up with his (sorta) monthly episodes.
Dumbasses Guide to Knowledge – Started listening when he posted on the SGU forums about the new podcast and, as with Karl, he has a “when they’re ready” release schedule so I listen when they come out. It’s an eclectic show and it used to be that every-other-episode was about Ancient Aliens stuff.
Invisible Sky Monster Podcast – Same as the above, same guy, etc. This is an interview-style show with two other people talking with the host about their opinions on the latest news of the month.
The Skeptics’ Guide 5×5 and Guide to the Universe – Shouldn’t need explanation to this crowd. However, I listen to them in spurts where I usually accumulate around 10 and then listen all at once while cleaning, cooking, driving, exercising, etc.
Skeptoid – Also shouldn’t need explanation to this crowd. With Dunning’s guilty plea, however, we’ll see what happens to the podcast over the next year or so.
AstronomyCast – I listen to them the same what I listen to SGU, building up a catalog of around 10 new episodes and then listening all at once. I listen to AstronomyCast to remember all the astronomy I’ve forgotten or should have known.
I listen to this general category to stay abreast of what “the other side” is saying and putting out there and to get ideas for blog posts and podcast episodes. I choose not to link to them here.
Coast to Coast AM – Not every episode, just maybe 1/4-1/3 of them that deal with topics that are sorta relevant to what I do or care about (I suffer through the alt-med ones, for example, but refuse to listen to ones about political conspiracies). I’d say >50% of blog post ideas and podcast episode ideas come from C2C.
ID The Future – Put out by the Discovery Institute, the “think tank” (I use the word “think” rather loosely here) behind “Intelligent Design.” They put out, generally, 3 episodes per week but the majority of them are repeats from several years ago so I delete without listening.
Skeptiko – Alex Tsakiris, of whom I’ve written a few times on this blog, absolutely refuses to address what he claims to address and be interested in: Why he believes in the paranormal (and conspiracies, is a climate change denier, and believes in UFOs and psychic dogs) and “skeptics” don’t. Despite being told why numerous times — it has to do with the standard of evidence and not using arguments from authority and, well, actually understanding experiments. He can be hard to listen to, so I sometimes listen to his episodes in bits and pieces.
Dreamland – (out of order because it’s listed as “Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland” in iTunes) This, like C2C was started by Art Bell but taken over by a moron someone who doesn’t follow the original spirit/intent of the show. Basically a mini-C2C once a week.
Other than The Onion video stuff which doesn’t seem to be defunct but hasn’t released a new episode in half a year, really Rich Orman’s “Dogma Free America” and “US Supreme Court Review” are the two I listened to regularly that are now defunct.
This category is for podcasts for which I may have listened to 1-6ish episodes that someone suggested I may like or be interested in. I’m just going to list them without commentary: The Amateur Science Podcast, Paracast, QuackCast, Rational Alchemy (I was a guest a few times), Righteous Indignation, Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures, and The Unexplained. I think a few that are no longer in my iTunes feed for one reason or another, including Mike Bohler’s “A Skeptics Guide to Conspiracy” that I downloaded a few episodes of.
I don’t listen to a lot compared with some people. I generally listen when I’m doing work that doesn’t require thought (like crater counting or making figures for papers, or doing some other analysis … versus when I’m writing a paper or trying to program). Sometimes that’s my entire day, sometimes that’s not.
I also have an iPod nano and portable speakers that follow me throughout my apartment and into the car and I’ll listen when I’m doing other things like driving, cooking, or cleaning.
I think maybe once or twice a year, for an hour or so, do I not have a backlog of stuff to listen to. That said, if there’s something that you absolutely love that you think I should listen to, let me know in the comments!
P.S. Yes, I listen to my own podcast, but only when editing, and I download it to make sure it works correctly in iTunes.
This is a somewhat shorter episode, mainly because I’m working on three grants at the moment due next week. It’s about the Schumann Resonance, something you probably never heard of unless you’re an amateur radio operator or listen to way too much Coast to Coast AM. Listen to the podcast for more 
.
The main additional segment to this is the announcement I made a few days ago about me doing a workshop at TAM. Well, I also mentioned that the next episode will be about the meteorite that landed in Russia last week and the related conspiracies that cropped up within hours.
It was bound to happen at some point, that episode that’s just a hodgepodge of short, random bits of crä-crä that I put together as a clip show. This one features five bits of silliness — or maybe six, I lost count. Big-name stars you may remember from other episodes are Brooks Agnew and Gregg Braden, but making their first time appearance we also hear from Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, Ken Parsons, and Jeffrey Grupp. Coast to Coast AM clips feature heavily, so if you don’t like ‘em, you may want to skip this episode.
Other segments were Announcements and a Puzzler. You’ll need to go to about 24 minutes into the episode for the puzzler, it’s not in the usual place.
This post/podcast is going out as we pass through the December 21, 2012, solstice at 11:12 AM GMT. We’re still here.
That’s all.
This post is headed up exactly 11 days before the winter (in the northern hemisphere) solstice of 2012, assuming I got the time zones correct.
You know … THAT day. The one “everyone” is saying – or at least “everyone” is saying that the Mayans said – that the world is going to end. Or we’re all going to become higher vibrational spiritual beings. Or Planet X will swing by. Or some such other stuff.
In other words, only 11 more days people can suckle the milk from the teat of a meme that has frightened people, bilked them from money, made them see a pretty bad movie, and various other things.
If you’re just finding this blog through an internet search and don’t follow me regularly, perhaps you can tell that I clearly put zero stock in such things. In fact, the main purpose of this post is to create a “master” post for the majority of my 2012-related posts and podcasts. I’ve been known to suckle a bit myself, and there’s no harm in doing another post that’s just a bunch of links … it’s a public service, ¿ya know? to have ‘em all in one place.
After all, the majority of people coming to my blog these days are coming here due to searches for 2012-related doomsday stuff.
The main blog posts:
I have also written a few posts that are tangentially related to the 2012 subject:
And my podcast episodes so far on 2012 and Planet X:
And podcasts on which I have been interviewed on 2012:
Why would you be going to other sites?
Well, if you must, I highly recommend 2012 Hoax.org.
My one main regret is not doing my planned eBook on the subject. It was going to be free, but I just never got around to writing it. Even just as a compilation of blog posts. 
I suppose my other main regret is that I have yet to do a post or podcast episode on the sun and 2012. The podcast episode will be coming out in 5-6 days, though … so, still have time, and it’ll come out.
All that said, there are lots of people who have made several explatives’-worth of money on 2012 stuff. I have to think that some of them are going to try to save face and back-pedal and make excuses.
If you find any, PLEASE LET ME KNOW! You can do this very easily by posting a comment in the Comments section below this post. I want to do a podcast episode on it early in 2012 (like February-ish).
So far, I really haven’t seen too much escalation of this stuff now that we’re less than two weeks away. Supposedly some people in Russia are worried, but I don’t know if that’s just the press making a big deal out of a few people.
Even Coast to Coast AM hasn’t really ramped stuff up — I almost expected that the producers would be having a 2012′er or Planet X’er on several times a week, but that hasn’t happened. Looking at their schedule for this week, Dec. 9-12 (what’s posted), we have Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the fiscal cliff, some mob-JFK show, and the “Watchers” and a cosmic battle with L.A. Marzulli. Only the last one is remotely 2012-ish. Perhaps “not with a bang but a whimper” is apropos.
Oh, and NASA’s come out with their “nothing’s going to happen” stuff, but the people who believe that “something” in 2012 is going to happen are rarely going to believe anything that NASA or any other part of any government says. It’s perhaps unfortunate, but that’s the case.
So that’s that for now. See ya on December 22.
Edited to Add (11/12/2012): Apparently now, even the Vatican is getting in on this, saying nottin’s happenin’. Which makes sense, considering that their holy book contains text that states no human (fairly sure it says “man,” but I’m generalizing here) will know the day nor the hour of the end stuff it talks about. Well, and the Maya, to them, are pagans so nothing they do should be taken seriously since the Vatican has a monopoly on spirituality, or some such thing.
Sorry this is coming out a few hours late (though earlier than some), but the fact that I can speak clearly today was a surprise. Anyway …
This episode is the third of likely just three on photography claims people make that supposedly show the Apollo lunar landings were faked. Claims addressed are:
This is also a “full-fledged action-packed” episode featuring all other segments: New News, Q&A, Feedback, Puzzler, and an announcement.
The announcement is: Though it’s a bit early to say for certain we’re not all going to die this December 21, I’m starting to look for back-peddling by doomsday proponents for a follow-up episode very early next year. If anyone listening to this podcast happens to come across something by anyone who claimed stuff like Planet X would cause a pole flip, a big solar storm would wipe us out, or even on the positive side that we’ll all be able to levitate and do instant healing, and you see these people start to make up excuses for why it’s not happening, please send it in!
P.S. I tried a new noise removal setting in this episode as well as a different equalizer. I also saved it at slightly higher bitrate. Let me know if there are still issues, or if the audio at least sounds any better.
This was a listener-requested episode, how the moon formed. There isn’t too much pseudoscience in this one, though a few references are made to misconceptions in Mike Bara’s new book. And some misunderstandings by Bob Novella from episode 350 of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast.
Since I was trying to get this episode out quickly, several of the normal segments are not present, but I did have a bit of another run-in with David Nabhan, the very “passionate” guy from episode 50 on lunatic earthquakes. If you have maybe 10-15 minutes to kill, I highly recommend reading the exchange starting part-way down that thread on October 4.
The many times requested episode on Immanuel Velikovsky has arrived, and it’s arrived for the first anniversary of my podcast. Yup, the first episode, on the “dark side” of the moon, came out August 1, 2011. Hard to believe that it’s been a year.
This episode’s main segment is over 20 minutes long, and yet it’s an incredibly abridged episode discussing a distillation of his ideas from “Worlds in Collision,” his first book. I go over some of Velikovsky’s bio, the politics surrounding him when he introduced his book in 1950, and then a few of the lines of evidence he used plus several refutations of his argument.
This episode may seem a tad preachy at some points. It’s hard when talking about Velikovsky to address his evidence because there really is none for his claims, so I used it to discuss how one should and should not go about science, and how Velikovsky failed at it. Rather than using available observations and making his ideas, and then forming testable predictions from them, he instead threw out most branches of science and relied on scattered myths throughout the world for his evidence. Sorry, that ain’t how it’s done.
As the first anniversary episode, I go over some obligatory stats at the end. I’m relying on all of you to increase them for August 1, 2013.
In this episode, I return to the 2012 / Planet X mythos with another installment (at least 5 total are planned) about “The Fake Story of Planet X.” This particular one is a conspiracy claim where folks think that Planet X is coming from the south pole which is why we can’t see it. Except that the government knows about it so built a telescope down there to observe it.
This episode also includes a bit of new news, Q&A, a puzzler (yay!), and a single announcement. Since I’m writing next week’s episode today and need to record it today/tomorrow, I am holding off on Feedback likely until July 24. Note that the solution to this episode’s puzzler will be discussed in the July 24 one so that people have enough time to participate in the puzzler (hint hint, nudge nudge).
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