Episode 50 - Looking into the Near Future

Recorded: 29 April 2016
Released: 30 April 2016
Duration: 109 minutes, 48 seconds

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Host Paul Carr welcomes panelists Sam Lichtenstein, Adam Smith, Patrick Festa, and Mike Bohler to

Phillip Tetlock of the Good Judgment Project

talk about the human relationship with the near future: predictions, forecasts, prediction markets, and super forecasting. What do we get wrong, and what can we hope to get right? Our panelists offer their own forecasts.

What is YOUR prediction?

Links

Philip Tetlock on Rationally Speaking
Tetlock's Book Superforecasting
PredictionBook.com - log your forecasts
GJOpen.com - The Open Good Judgment Project
The Hypermind Prediction Market
PredictIt Prediction Market
Alpha Cast
SportsCast

Robin Hanson's idea of Futarchy

Forecasts

Sam Lichtenstein: SpaceX to Mars

The Red Supergiant Betelgeuse (alpha Orionis)

Paul Carr: SETI Detection
Adam Smith: UK Police with Face Recognition
Patrick Festa: Betelgeuse exploding by 2046
Mike Bohler: SpaceX on Mars before 2021

Credits:

Host and Producer: Paul Carr
Panelists: Sam Lichtenstein, Adam Smith, Patrick Festa, Mike Bohler
Music: DJ Spooky
Hardware: Shure, Pro Art, Focusrite, Apple
Software: Reaper
Postproduction: Auphonic.com
Hosting: Libsyn
Betelgeuse: Aladin Sky Atlas

The Unseen Podcast is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license.

Episode 49 - The Billion Year Pyramid

Recorded: 15 April 2016
Released: 16 April 2016
Duration: 79 minutes, 8 seconds

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This guy.

Host Paul Carr welcomes panelists David Grigg, Marsha Barnhart, and Nick Nielsen to talk about preserving the artifacts of human culture and civilization of the very long term: why, what and how.

Links:

The Decipherment of Linear B
Murmurs of the Earth by Carl Sagan
The Corbis Photo Vault at Iron Mountain
The Digital Dark Age
The Swerve
The Star by Arthur C. Clarke
Corpus Juris Civlis
The Future of the Past
Svalbard Global Seed Vault
Omnilingual
Douglas Vakoch, Director of Interstellar Message Composition

Recommendations:

David: Murmurs of Earth by Carl Sagan
Nick: Lectures of Alan B. MacNeil on Evolutionary Psychology I
Marsha: Silent Running
Paul Carr: Vikings

Credits:

Host and Producer: Paul Carr
Music: DJ Spooky
Hardware: Shure, Pro Art, Focusrite, Apple, Sony
Software: Reaper, OS X Yosemite, Loopback
Hosting: Libsyn

We are on a 2 week tempo now.

We are going to try reducing our episode production rate from one every week, to one every two weeks. This will help reduce the time burden on the producer, but more important, it will help us concentrate our efforts on fewer upcoming episodes so that each one might be of higher quality.

If you want to see the schedule for upcoming episodes, please see our planning and stats sheet. The next "call for panelists" invitations will go out around 15 April, so we will have two sets of invitations active at any one time, instead of four.

We would have to consider returning to a 1 week tempo if enough people joined the panel pool, committed to energetically participating in an episode a few times each year (maybe every 6-7 episodes), and if there were a few more people like James Garrison or Adam Smith who were willing to occasionally step in as guest host. We'll see how it goes.

Episode 48 - Hoaxes: who doesn't like a good show?

Recorded: 1 April 2016
Released: 3 April 2016
Duration:82 minutes, 12 seconds

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Host James Garrison welcomes Mike Mongo, Mike Bohler, and Marsha Barnhart to talk about

The Project Alpha Perpetrators

hoaxes.

Erratum: It was the Stanford Prison Experiment, not Berkeley.

• The Patterson Bigfoot footage
• Piltdown Man and the Cardiff giant
• P.T. Barnum
• The Sokal Hoax 
• Anthropogenic Climate Change - who is being misleading?
• E-mail scams
• Martin Gardner's book "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" on pseudoscience and furthering a political agenda
• Pseudoscience on YouTube
• Mike Mongo discusses a student's UFO experience - was he delusional? Marsha is not so sure.
• Some scientists are religious
• Giant spiders
• Flat Earthers
• Hollow moons? Nope.
• Martian caves.
• Johann Beringer hoaxed by his students.
• Project Alpha, Randi and Banachek
• Poetry hoax
• Art hoaxes
• Steve Allen's music hoaxes

  

  Album Cover of one of Steve Allen's Hoax Records

• more discussion of the Sokal hoax.
• Cold Fusion
• Randi exposed Uri Geller who fooled scientists
• Stanford Prison Experiment
• Fitting in with preconceived notions
• Michael Cremo's cherry picking
• More on P.T. Barnum
• What is our current Freak Show? Donald Trump?
• The Microsoft Tweetbot
• Wrap Up and Recommendations

 

Links:

The Museum of Hoaxes

The Patterson Gimlin Bigfoot Film
Piltdown Man
P.T. Barnum
The Lying Stones of Johann Beringer
Project Alpha
The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax
The Paul Jordan Smith Painting Hoax
Hoax Cane Spider
The Microsoft Tweetbot

 

Recommendations:

David Grigg: Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin Gardner
Marsha Barnhart: practice discernment
Mike Mongo: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
James Garrison: Skeptic's Guide to Conspiracy

Credits:

Host: James Garrison
Producer: Paul Carr
Music: DJ Spooky