Episode #579

News Items

  • Piltdown Case Closed
  • Black Hole Back Doors
  • Cupping at the Olympics
  • Other Olympic Pseudoscience

              • Science or Fiction

                • Item #1 Science

                  After the 1924 Paris Olympic games, fencers from Italy and Hungary fought a real duel to settle a scoring dispute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencing_at_the_1924_Summer_Olympics

                • Item #2 Fiction

                  Women did not compete in the Olympics until 1936. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_at_the_Olympics

                • Item #3 Science

                  Olympic officials will soon begin testing for a new kind of cheating, gene doping. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-08/acs-dan081016.php

                • Item #4 Science

                  The 1912 Stockholm games featured a competition in Arts and Literature, introduced by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who won the gold medal in that event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Coubertin

                Skeptical Quote of the Week

                “Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny — and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).” ― Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History