It’s October – time for spooooky post subjects!

OK, not that spooky. First, considering that every year local news agencies trot out stories about the dangers kids face on Halloween, and that many local police stations and hospitals offer free X-ray candy inspection, I suppose we skeptics can trot out the annual debunking that no such dangers really exist. The gist is that there have been very few, if any, legitimate cases of poisoning, deadly razor blade attacks, or other nefarious tampering with candy in the history of Halloween celebrations in the United States – especially when compared against the hundreds of millions of pieces of candy given out over that time. The majority of the documented cases of such behavior have generally been instances of fraud (hello, can anyone say “balloon boy“?), accident, or ultimately harmless (though mean-spirited) pranks – not psychotic, pre-meditated murder prevented by vigilant X-ray techs. The few cases where actual serious injury or death occurred have been inflicted by abusive or disturbed parents on their own offspring – apparently, if you’re worried about your children being poisoned or injured by Halloween candy, forget X-ray machines: make sure they don’t get any candy from inside your own house! And the story is similar for child abductions, assaults, or sacrifice in satanic rituals – injuries are much more likely to be inflicted on kids by other children or adults that they know, especially family members, and there is little evidence, if any, of an increase in abductions or satanic ritual cult sacrifices (despite a popular documentary on the subject) on or around Halloween.

And now for something completely different.

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe this week did an excellent 5×5 podcast on the so-called Lunar Effect – the belief that the full moon affects people’s behavior – pointing out that any proposed effect would presumably be tidal in origin, which force is based on the difference in distance across the object experiencing tides. So, whipping out the trusty calculator, the Earth, with a diameter of 8000 miles, experiences a relatively large tidal effect from the moon, while the human brain, with a diameter of about 6 inches, experiences a tidal effect roughly 6.02×10²³ times smaller (holy cow, that’s Avagadro’s number! Conspiracy!) Not to mention the problem that the tides have very little to do with the phase of the moon. Or else the causative force could be strictly gravitational, in which case the force exerted by the moon is 1/20^th that of a car you’re sitting in. Or else it could be caused by light, an effect that would be dwarfed by daylight. Or a flashlight. Incidentally, there is no actual evidence (other than anecdotal) that a difference in crime rates, suicide rates, hospital visits, or any other aspect of human behavior potentially tied to the full moon (other than perhaps the incidence of not walking into trees) even exists – i.e., there’s no reason to believe there’s even a phenomenon for which to search for arguments.

Finally, in closing, and by the way, who the hell comes up with the idea to make sexy Halloween costumes for pets? I blame childnapping satanist lycanthropes.

My new favorite podcast, MonsterTalk, has posted a new episode where they talk to Dr. Dave Martill, an expert on pterosaurs. The cryptozoological angle comes from the fact that Dr. Martill was on an episode of MonsterQuest, looking for the fabled ropen of Papua New Guinea. As is often the case with MonsterTalk, the cryptid is dispensed with fairly quickly (ropen sightings tend to describe an animal that matches the old conception of pterosaurs, not what we think they looked like today), but Dr. Martill’s run down of where pterosaur science currently stands is terrific listening. Also, I love the part where he starts yelling “How would that undermine my science?!” over and over when Ben Radford brings up the idea, much beloved by some cryptozoologists, that real scientists ignore evidence for cryptids because it clashes with their worldview.