MYTHBUSTING
Most people, upon hearing a good story that is presented as a fact by a trusted friend or relative wouldn't DREAM of researching the claim; to do so would imply that they did not trust the friend/relative. Sadly, this is the reason so many BS stories get spread, AND why so many people get away with spreading them: they know you won't look stuff up. I look it up. (Seriously, if someone tells you a thing is true but which seems too stupid to be believed—or ESPECIALLY AND MORE IMPORTANTLY if it seems too good to be true?—you should totally look it up! Your gullibility/vulnerability drops a ton when you are in the habit of looking stuff up.
• • • Every title/heading/headline below is a clickable link. • • •
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VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM.
Sometimes a false belief is merely amusing; There's no real harm in believing the moon landings were faked or that the earth is flat. But the fictional connection between vaccines and autism is SO DANGEROUS that sitting still while fools spew this nonsense is NOT AN OPTION for anyone of conscience, and certainly not a science teacher. Why is it dangerous? There's the immediate and obvious fact that if you're not vaccinated you're not protected from avoidable but TERRIBLE diseases. But worse than you getting sick and maybe dying is the less obvious fact is that when you have have an avoidable but TERRIBLE disease you're going to spread it to others wherever you may roam. "But Steve, if everyone else is vaccinated…" Yeah! If everyone else is vaccinated YOU get to sponge off the "herd immunity" without being vaccinated, right!? WRONG. NOT EVERYONE *CAN* BE VACCINATED: People on chemotherapy, very young infants, and people for whom regular vaccinations simply don't take. WHEN YOU REFUSE TO VACCINATE YOURSELF AND/OR YOUR FAMILY YOU PUT ALL THOSE PEOPLE AT RISK.
SO HOW DID THIS MENDACIOUS BELIEF START? It was triggered by ONE study by ONE doctor who was trying to discredit existing vaccinations so that the medical community would favor HIS vaccines!! His study linking vaccines to autism was
exposed
as a
fraud
and
has been retracted
and the relationship between autism and vaccination has been
studied exhaustively and found to be nonexistent.
OF COURSE it's first on my list. And as you can see this sentence was blown apart by the html gods because it contains four separate links. That was a long time ago on a crappier hosting site, but the fragmentation adds a dramatic effect that is, in the case of the BS claims against vaccines, warranted and in fact—given the harm the misconception is causing—not dramatic enough.)
Does this make Andrew Wakefield, or Jenny McCarthy, or Dr. Friggin' Oz the Typhoid Marys of our time, as some have claimed? I didn't used to think so, but that was before I knew Typhoid Mary Mallon's story. You see, I thought Mary Mallon was unaware of the effect she was having until long after she was considered Patient Zero. But in 1907 after outbreaks of typhoid fever occurred everywhere she went, New York doctors told her that she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever bacteria, but she didn't believe them; She wasn't sick, so how could she make others sick!? She finally quit working as a cook, but after a three year quarantine changed her name and went back to working as cook. This demonstrates a reckless disregard for the lives of others fueled by her delusional belief that she knew more than doctors did about her medical condition. How is this different from today's anti-vaxxers who think they know more about immunology and virology and bacteriology than immunologists, virologists and bacteriologists do, and more about autism than psychologists and neurologists do?
And since I mentioned it...
The moon landings were not faked.
Let's assume that the moon landings were indeed faked in some way. (This kind of thought experiment -- assuming something is true for the sake of argument -- has a name: reductio ad absurdum.) THIS WOULD MEAN THAT:
…the photos of the landing sites taken by currently operating lunar orbiters (let's set aside the photos of Apollo landing sites taken by subsequent Apollo missions) have all also been faked.
…the 400,000 people working for 20,000 separate companies that worked on the Apollo program are lying and have been since the "so-called" inception of the Apollo program in 1961, and not one of them has slipped up and let the truth out, or sold their story to a tabloid.
…the Russians/Soviets, who were going head-to-head with NASA in the space race and who stood to gain HUGELY from our failure, tracked our rockets, orbiters, and everything else we sent up there (as we tracked theirs) are lying and have been since the first Apollo-related flights in 1966, and not one of them has slipped up and let the truth out, or sold their story to a tabloid.
…the international amateur astronomers who tracked our rockets and orbiters are lying and have been since Apollo 7 in 1968, and not one of them has slipped up and let the truth out, or sold their story to a tabloid.
…the laser-ranging experiments utilizing mirrors that were left on the moon have all been faked. (OR mirrors were placed perfectly by unmanned probes at the exact points where all the landing sites are claimed to be, surrounded by reverse-engineered human footprints which also were placed there by the robots.)
…the lunar module blast scars and rover tracks (and the aforementioned footprints), viewable through today's powerful satellite telescopes orbiting the moon, have all been reverse-engineered by unmanned probes.
And there were six landings, so all this fakery had to happen six times.
(Here's the famous Mythbusters episode eviscerating deniers' claims.)
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STOP SAYING IT'S ALIENS ANYTIME NASA ANNOUNCES A PRESS CONFERENCE. Mashable.com delivers basically the same lecture I gave in class last week [mid-Nov, 2018?]: Desperate journalists cherry pick a dubious scientific paper—one that has not only not been published, but has not yet even been SUBMITTED for publication—for click-bait headlines. Don't fall for it.
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Hunching/Slouching over your cell, or iPad, or laptop, or book, or sewing machine, or wash basin...or anything else: WILL NOT CAUSE YOU TO GROW HORNS OUT THE BACK OF YOUR SKULL.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2019/06/20/no-your-kids-evil-cell-phone-wont-give-them-horns/
The claim is that people hunch forward, over their phones, for such long stretches of time that the muscles in the back of the neck that hold the head up (meaning, that keep your chin from plopping into your chest the entire time you're awake) these muscles, connected to the back of your skull, are slowly causing more and more bone to be created where the muscle joins the skull. SOUNDS LEGIT RIGHT? Sure, until you realize that these muscles are holding your head up—as I said a second ago—most waking moments. They exert the same forces on the heads of office workers who lean forward, of farmers, of librarians...anyone ever—going back into antiquity here—who does an activity where the head leans forward for long durations. If this "horn-formation" was a thing at ALL, we surely would've known about it by now.
And that's just the thought-experiment refutation. Read the linked article and see a textbook example of SCIENCE DONE ILL; gathered data being interpreted in asinine ways. (It's actually quite instructive!)
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The MERMAIDS show on the Discovery Channel, is fictional, AS THE DISCLAIMER AT THE BEGINNING SAID.
Mermaids are a product of human imagination, not evolution by natural selection. Human skin, facial features (sense organs), forelimbs and hands are not at all adapted to a freshwater aquatic environment, and certainly not to a high-salt marine environment. In fact, because the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet and The History Channel have made so many faux documentaries recently* I can no longer consider these networks as reliable education channels, which they loudly claim to be. Watch them for the kick that you get from any fiction, but not if you want to learn about how the universe actually works.
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* Mermaids • Not one but TWO Megalodon shows • "Submarine: the Shark of Darkness" • Russian Yeti • UFO Hunters • Nostradamus Effect [Scroll down for more on Nostradamus.] • Etc. And don't even get me STARTED on the travesty the "History" Channel has become. As as one writer sarcastically put it when discussing the show Ancient Aliens: "Nobody doubts the Greeks built the Parthenon, but no way could brown people in Bolivia build Puma Punku, 1000 years later? Come on."
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The claim that "we only use 10% of our brains" is pseudoscientific. Brain scans routinely prove that we use 100% of our brains. (A big part of why this myth has persisted for so long is that psychics and other supernaturalists grabbed the 10% idea with both hands and have not let go: what better way to explain psychic activity than to attribute it to the part of the brain "no one uses?" In addition to the main Scientific American link, Snopes chimes in as well.)
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Celery, and ice water, and anything else you can ingest, is/are not "negative-calorie" foods.
The theory sounds great: "Celery has so few calories that you'll burn more energy digesting it than you get from eating it." Oh would that it were true, but it is not. While it is true that you get very few calories from eating celery, you don't get zero, and the number you DO get is WAY larger than the number burned in the digestion of it. Same for ice water: zero calories, but so cold your body must burn energy to warm its innards back up. Again, a grain of truth, but in practice, not a chance. To notice any kind of weight loss from simply drinking ice water, you'd need to drink about 25 gallons of it, and I, as a 200 pound man, occupy about 24 gallons of physical space. (i.e. I'd have to drink my body weight in ice water, which, come to think of it, surely WOULD cause me to lose weight...after I died of water intoxication and hyponatremia after forcing down just one or two gallons.)
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Walt Disney's head/body was not cryogenically frozen
Snopes to the rescue again, right down to Walt's LA County death certificate.
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You will (and did) not float for three seconds on Jan. 4, 2015
As you didn't levitate any other time this boshay made its way around the interwebs, and won't if it comes around again.
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Jaden Smith is NOT having his penis removed
A fake article on the satire website NAHA Daily (which only existed for about five months and is now defunct) started this...or I should say, goofballs who don't bother to google stuff that seems ridiculous STARTED THIS, by emailing it to everyone they know as if it was from CNN.
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2012 Apocalypse Prediction BOSHAY
[I leave this one up -- receding into memory though it is -- because, well, it's receding into memory, and I think it's important to remember just how seriously certain people were about the Mayan Calendar somehow predicting the end of the world.]
When a car's odometer clocks over from 99999 to 100000, does the car blow up? OF COURSE IT DOESN'T. And yet, that is precisely what goofballs would have you believe about Dec. 21, 2012.
The Mayan Long Count calendar--it wasn't even their daily calendar--is "only" 394.25 years long. The current cycle ends on Dec. 21, 2012. Then you simply start the next cycle, which ends on March 26, 2407. After that cycle, you simply start the next cycle, which ends on June 28, 2801. Etc., ad infinitum. The Mayans (or Maya) made no apocalyptic predictions whatsoever about the endings of these cycles.
Reckless predictions like that were made--and always have been made--by people who either think they are smarter than they actually are, or want you to think they are smarter than they actually are.
ALSO, many people cannot handle the fact that most of the time unexpected coincidences are just that, unexpected coincidences, and they don't *MEAN* anything. (EXAMPLES: Did you see a face pattern on your toast? Or in passing clouds? Or on the surface of another planet? Or in the billowing plumes of a photographed explosion? [The human brain is hard-wired to find face patterns. Whatever you're doing at the moment you're reading this LOOK AROUND YOU. You likely can find DOZENS of face patterns -- two-eyes-and-a-mouth-plus-or-minus-a-nose -- all around you on walls, furniture, windows, etc., etc.] Or perhaps is a year with a nice round number coming up? Do you share a birthday, or a name, or ANYTHING with a famous person? Is your birthday the same day as a famous event? Did you have a dream that has something in common with something that happened later?)
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A lit candle will not mask bathroom stink, but a lit MATCH will.
Someone heard that lighting a match after you ruin a bathroom will un-ruin it, and concluded something pseudoscientific like "Oh, the fire must burn up the stinky methane, or something..." which has a grain of truth, but no. Turns out the ignition of a sulfur match-head releases not only powerful sulfur smells that mask the stink (some would say replacing one stink with another) but also some chemicals that slightly numb the smelling cells in your nose.
So. Light the match, throw it into the toilet (never into a trash can unless you've held it under water first!), and leave the bathroom with the fan on and the door CLOSED.
Truth be told, you can leave the door open OR closed, but if your goal is "odor containment/eradication" (the reason you lit the match in the first place) LEAVE THE DOOR CLOSED: The 3/4" to 1" gap under a closed bathroom door is the same sized "hole" (i.e., has the same cross-sectional area) as the ventilation tube that runs from the bathroom's fan to the house's exterior. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT*. Closing the door while the fan is on:
1. ...has NO EFFECT on the ventilating ability of the fan
2. ...confines stinky air to the bathroom (so the stink cannot flow back into the house)
3. ...ensures that fan-induced air flow will only be in one direction (so the stink cannot flow back into the house)
...OR YOU COULD LEAVE THE DOOR OPEN, if you simply want to un-stink the bathroom as quickly as possible and don't care if anyone outside the bathroom smells it. But then why would you have lit the match in the first place?
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*You'll also see this gap under closet doors too, but for a different air-flow reason. People like to "throw" a door closed as they walk away from it. IF THERE IS NO GAP under the door, throwing it closed will simply close the door to the point where the air inside the closet acts like a cushion and prevents the door latch from engaging. WITH THE GAP, there is a way for a little air to leave when you throw the door so the door closes all the way.
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Bigfoot? Loch Ness Monster? Flying Saucers? Ghosts? SETTLED.
XKCD, with a single panel, distills the point to its irrefutable essence. (This is the cartoon I have on both sides of my room door!)
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The Blue's Clues Guy--Steve Burns--is not dead.
- He plays in a band and acts in movies and TV.
- And occasionally tells hilarious stories about being, if not famous, then fame-ish. (NOTE: this link IS OKAY for kids, and and mixed company, but there are moments when it looks like it won't be. Fear not, if you've started watching it and are actively wondering. (He does say the phrase "fake boobs" once, but that's as risque as it gets.) It is really good, and really touching, with an ending you so won't see coming!)
- And occasionally talks about why he left Blue's Clues. And then some!
- Here's Burns himself poking fun at the myth by covering a They Might Be Giants song that just happens to be called (wait for it) "Dead!"
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Chewing gum does NOT stay in your digestive system for seven years
Chewing gum cannot be broken down physically or chemically in the human digestive tract, A) and B) *nothing* stays in your digestive system longer than it takes food to pass through it. (EXPERIMENT: Eat a good-sized helping of corn if ever you're curious about how long stuff stays in your digestive system.)
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Dip does NOT have fiberglas in it.
I couldn't tell you where this got started, but it's ridiculous. Dip and cigarettes are quite funky ON THEIR OWN; You don't need a fake story to make you any more queasy than you should already be!
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Persistent Boshay About EARS:
Ear Candling does NOT remove earwax (straightdope.com)
It's actually kind of funny: The so-called "removed wax" (at the bottom of the candle when you remove it from your ear canal) appears even if you burn the candle several inches away from your ear!
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Ear candling is ineffectual and DANGEROUS. (WebMD)
This is WebMD, one of the preeminent and trusted medical sources on the web. "Ear candling exposes the recipient to risks such as:
- starting a fire
- burns to the face, ear canal, eardrum, and middle ear
- injury to the ear from dripping wax
- ears plugged by candle wax [which, admittedly, seems a bit of a stretch - smr-]
- bleeding
- puncture of the eardrum [how skinny are your candles? Is someone using birthday cake candles??]
- delay in seeking needed medical care for underlying conditions such as sinus and ear infections, hearing loss, cancer, and temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorders. (TMJ disorders often cause headache and painful sensations in the area of the ear, jaw, and face)."
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Ear cleaning? Q-tips should NEVER be inserted into your ear canals!
*** "Q-tips are the leading cause of both impacted earwax AND ruptured eardrums." -WebMD-
In my class a couple years ago several students militantly defended their decision to stick Q-tips in their ears to clean out cerumen (ear wax). I said then and say it again now, take it from someone who had to pay an E/N/T doctor to remove impacted cerumen from both eardrums (yes, that would be me): there are many risks and NO benefits of inserting cotton swabs into your ear canals. "But Mr. R, clean ears are a benefit!" Define clean. Because if you can stick one of your fat fingers as far as possible into your ear and can remove it with no visible wax on your finger, you don't have too much earwax; you're FINE. If you have so much wax that it's affecting your hearing and you want to remove it, use ear drops or hydrogen peroxide. Your body makes earwax to trap dust and germs and ESPECIALLY to waterproof the ear canal and eardrum.
"Well, what do they make Q-tips for (if not to stick in your ears)?" was one student's rationalization. Which is a momentarily interesting point, until you ask what cigarettes are made for. (The better answer to "Why do they make them?" is of course "Because you'll buy them.")
In fact, I'd wager a year's salary that there is a warning ON THE SWABS' CONTAINER that says something like "never stick these in your ear canal." The manufacturer is not stupid enough to think that you WON'T...in fact, they are counting on it because they sell a zillion swabs to people who insert them into their ear canals every day. But the law is not on their side, and they'd better cover their fannies in case someone does three asinine things: 1) sticks a swab in his/her ear canal, then b) ruptures the eardrum, then c) sues the company.
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FOLLOW UP: The Wal-Mart store brand, Equate, places the following CAUTION on their box of 500 swabs:
"Do Not enter the ear canal. Use only as directed. Entering the ear canal could cause injury. Keep out of reach of children. To Clean Ears, Stroke swab gently around the outer surface of the ear." I have reproduced their words and capitalization verbatim. (Indeed, one human physically attempting to crawl into another human's ear canal would, I've no doubt, "cause injury." And as for the last sentence, if I'm cleaning my outer ear (the pinna), I probably could do that FAR more efficiently in the shower with a facecloth--if not my bare hands--than with a wad of cotton wadded around the end of a lollipop stick.)
*** REMEMBER: "Q-tips are the leading cause of both impacted earwax AND ruptured eardrums." -WebMD-
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HAIR AND NAILS DO NOT KEEP GROWING AFTER YOU DIE.
...but the illusion is real. (I always love saying "the illusion is real!") When you die, the flesh surrounding these things dessicates (dries) and loses volume, which does indeed make nails look longer. I don't think anyone ever thought head hair looked longer after you die, but recently shaved stubble probably does appear to grow a bit longer as the skin around it dries and shrinks.
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Speaking of Shaved Stubble! Here's a myth that has so much truth to it, you might as well say it's not a myth, just reframe the explanation...."Hair grows faster once you shave that first time. Why? Either the contact of the razor with your skin it causes hair to grow in thicker/faster, or the blade tugs each hair slightly which causes it to grow in faster/thicker."
"OK, so Mr R, where's the link here?" No link. This is all my own fevered observation and analysis. Nowhere on the web was I able to find an explanation more thorough than what follows (and believe me I friggin' LOOKED.) I mean, mayoclinic.org is one of my medical go-to sites, but here's their More-Economical-But-Hardly-Explanatory take on this. (So there is a link after all!)
THICKER = TRUE. FASTER = FALSE.
IT TURNS OUT THAT AFTER THAT VERY FIRST SHAVE THE HAIR THAT REGROWS WILL BE THICKER—MORE HAIR WILL INDEED GROW ABOVE THE SKIN SURFACE—BUT NOT BECAUSE IT'S SOMEHOW GROWING FASTER.
Here's what's up: A brand new hair, one that's never been shaved, has a pointed tip and a wider base; a super-elongated cone, if you will. [Some hairs can have an oval base and some hairs actually have a flat base which makes the hair look, under a microscope, much more like ribbons than shafts!] A cluster of these new hairs feels downy soft because they all have super-small, super flexible, wispy tips. I'm going to represent a side-view of this super-elongated cone structure with a keyboard slash ( / ) and a backslash ( \ ) put together so it looks like this:
/\
OK. NOW SHAVE. Afterward your skin is super smooth! Still! But as that stubble grows, the tips of the stubble are not pointy like cones, they're CYLINDRICAL, with flat tops that have the diameter of the full hair shaft. Like tree stumps!
I'll represent this a side-view of this post-shave cylinder with two vbar/pipes ( | ):
| |
And HERE is where you see the story: I'm going to put a soft wispy new hair /\ right in front of a cylindrical stubble hair | | like this:
|/\|
See the difference? It's geometry! We're talking about the difference between the volume of a cylinder and the volume of a cone. [NOTE: In two dimensions with my goofy keyboard characters (i.e. with a square and a triangle) you can see that that the square has 2x the area of the triangle: two inverted halves straddling a right-side-up whole. In THREE dimensions—with a cone and a cylinder— the ratio isn't 2:1 but 3:1!]
"But," I hear you say, "hairs are mostly very long skinny cylinders, and the cone part makes up a small portion at the end." TRUE, BUT WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT HOW HAIR FEELS FOUR MONTHS AFTER YOU SHAVED, WHEN IT'S LONG AND SKINNY. WE'RE TALKING ABOUT A YOUNG PERSON'S PEACH FUZZ, AND THE STUBBLE THAT RESULTS THREE DAYS AFTER SHAVING. Again: TREE STUMPS! Literally more hair molecules* are above the skin surface so OF COURSE it looks darker and thicker! (*Yes, molecules not cells. Hairs, like fingernails, are not made of cells. They're non-living substances made by your body. Mostly protein, it turns out.)
And set aside how this new "3x-more-hair-molecules-above-the-skin-surface" looks for a moment, and consider how it feels to the touch! The top edge of these tree stumps are not the wispy soft tips, they are the right-angles of the top of a cylinder, so when you run your fingertips back and forth across them it even FEELS thicker!
Think of it as the difference between brand new grass that you planted a few weeks ago, and watered, and now is a light a wispy bright green. When it reaches mowing length, first run your hands over it and feel those wispy tips! NOW MOW IT! And now feel it! Whaddaya got? Blades that have flat tops, and have their full width all the way from the tip down to the soil = THICKER.
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HUMAN BLOOD IS NOT BLUE (and neither are the veins that LOOK blue! Dig it!)
I've long known that deoxygenated blood was not blue, contrary to many myths. But what I did *not* know is that those blue veins that started the myths in the first place AREN'T BLUE EITHER, they just appear that way because of the very specific amount of skin through which the light has to travel before reaching the vessel, then again after reflecting off the vessel, traveling though the skin again, and returning to your eye. Even arteries containing fully oxygenated, bright red blood would look blue if they were this very specific depth below the surface of your skin (about 0.5 mm). Ask any surgeon, or better yet, look closely the next time surgery is shown on TV: when they slice the patient open, no blood vessels appear blue.
Another source: http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist/2008/04/why_are_veins_blue.php
"Yeah, blood is blue in your veins but turns red when air hits it." (No link needed here.) Here are five ways to prove your blood is red even when not exposed to air:
- Color seen through closed eyelids when facing the sun (or a bright flashlight)
- Color of thumb-index finger's "webbing" when flashlight is shown through it
- Color of conjunctival blood vessels in bloodshot eyes. (The eyeball is not bleeding, nothing is exposed to the air, but the blood is still red.)
- Color of healthy skin vs. a corpse's skin, drained of blood
- Color of a hand that's mostly drained of blood compared to color of a hand that's full of blood. In your chair, right now, do this quick experiment. Reach down and touch the floor with one hand while reaching WAY up with the other*. Your arms should look like a vertical post with two hands at each end. Count to 10 or 15. Look at your two palms.
(*If you do yoga, this is what your arms are doing in a Triangle pose.)
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The moon is not a hologram. (No link needed here.)
The moon was referenced in the Book of Genesis: Was it a hologram in 2300 BC when the Old Testament was written?
(The question shreds this BS claim instantly. But if you were of a mind to, you could keep going, for kicks-n-giggles: What causes oceanic tides? What happens during a solar eclipse? Etc., ad nauseam.)
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Lady Gaga is neither a man, nor a hermaphrodite.
A blurry performance video and a satire website combine with her admitted desire to "push boundaries" to give us one of the most persistent BS stories of the last few years. Snopes, as always, shreds it.
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Ciara is not a man, nor was she ever a man.
Like the Lady Gaga story: Absolutely ridiculous.
SPEAKING OF GUYS vs. GIRLS: I would guess that an observant person can tell when a biological male* is dressed in conventional female attire--or vice-versa--about 95% of the time: (*as of this moment, August 2016, socially acceptable ways to refer to--or address--a person who was born male but who self-identifies as female--and vice-versa--are changing often and significantly; apologies in advance for misuse of pronouns and other terms during this time of significant and long overdue cultural and linguistic flux. Heck, I'm happy I just used "self-identifies" correctly. ) (2018 update: I've researched it, and I'm still a little unclear, but I *THINK* in this context the adjective "biological" is occasionally if not commonly eschewed for the term "birth-assigned.") Especially in anatomy class, we'll discuss this at some length.
- SKULL. Almost everything about a male skull is fuller than its female counterpart: Jaw, brow, and especially the bottom of the back of skull and back of the neck. (You can see this in almost every movie scene that is a profile close-up of a man and woman kissing. Notice how big his head is compared to hers! I call it "Big Head/Little Head," and after you've seen it once it becomes almost comical from that point forward; You'll never look at close-up movie kisses the same!)
- SHOULDERS/HIPS. The pectoral girdle (shoulders) tends to be wider than the pelvic girdle (hips) on a male. (Fit and trim males--perhaps a majority of those wishing to present as female?--tend to have what is essentially a straight line contour from each armpit down the side of the body, below the hips.)
- HANDS. It's difficult to pass a male's hand off as a female's. Female fingernails tend to be narrower, possessing more "arc" across the width of the fingernail; male fingernails tend to be broader and flatter. (Mrs. Humbard had--for a very long time--a poster for the movie Becoming Jane in her room. In most of the movie's promotional posters Anne Hathaway's left hand has the pen and it rests on James McAvoy's chest. In Mrs Humbard's poster however the pen is in Anne's right hand and the pen touches her lower lip: No one will convince me that the hand that holds that pen is a female hand.)
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NOSTRADAMUS PREDICTS....well, nothing, come to think of it.
1. What we hear after ANY major disaster is how Michel de Nostredame predicted it. We NEVER (that's capital N, NEVER) hear a single thing about these events prior to their occurrence, which means Nostradamus adherents simply "post-dict" these events, matching them to enigmatic descriptions in Nostradamus's writing after the fact.
2. ANOTHER ENORMOUS NAIL IN THE COFFIN OF NOSTRADAMUS CLAIRVOYANCE CLAIMS: The words you read when you read Nostradamus's writing are not even his words. His original manuscript was lost, and when you read his book now you're reading whatever of his manuscript his many translators could recall. From memory.
3. The one Nostradamus claim that gets excerpted and quoted and otherwise highlighted more than any other is the claim that "he mentioned Hitler by name when discussing a great German war". He does mention a great German war, but what he says--immediately after a line about wild beasts crossing a river--the "fighting will be near the Hister." Hister is the Latin name for the lower half of the Danube river. (Never so much as HINTS at Adolph Hitler.)
ENOUGH. Nostradamus believers, just do this ONE THING FOR ME: Right now, find in Nostradamus's writing a prediction about any clearly definable event that has yet to happen. (Your email cannot have been sent after the fact, of course. And to avoid any international date line shenanigans* I would like to see a detailed, unambiguous prediction at least a week in advance of the predicted event.)
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* Oldest trick in the book: Something remarkable happens in, say, Singapore on Monday at 3 AM (that's 3 PM Sunday afternoon in North Carolina) and you email someone three hours later at 6 AM Monday, Singapore time (6 PM Sunday, Eastern time) saying you predict "something remarkable will happen '...9 hours later at 3 AM!' " But 9 hours later is 3 AM, Monday, Eastern time."
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What really happened at Roswell, New Mexico?
The relevant highlights:
- Sometime during the weekend of July 5-6, 1947, a Roswell rancher finds mangled wreckage of something unidentifiable. (NOTE: Roswell is the location of Boeing's test flight facility.)
- Rancher calls sheriff, who calls local military, which sends three officers to investigate and collect wreckage.
- On July 8 the local base, Roswell AAF (AAF = Army Air Facility. This was barely 2 months before the US Air Force formally was created, when aviation was under the authority of the Army) releases information to the local paper, which for some reason, publishes it as a front page story about flying "disks."
- Commanding General, stationed at Ft. Worth, TX, identifies the wreckage as that of an air balloon. (NOTE: the linked article identifies this base as Carswell Air Force base, but the Air Force didn't come into existence until two months later on Sept. 18.)
- NOTHING HAPPENS OR IS WRITTEN FOR THIRTY YEARS.
It's a cute story, so I'll tell it again:
- NOTHING HAPPENS OR IS WRITTEN FOR THIRTY YEARS.
- In 1978 a guy writes a book claiming government cover-up. Cites hundreds of interviewed witnesses, but of the 25 who are mentioned or quoted, (paraphrasing the article) only 7 are firsthand sources who claim to have seen "saucer debris," and one of these accounts is suspect. Of this 7, only 5 claim to have actually handled the material personally, and one of them is adamant that it was not from an extraterrestrial spacecraft. The remainder of the cited “witnesses” are either secondhand sources (i.e. simply hearsay) or people who saw no wreckage at all or were never present at the “debris field” during the critical time. In other words, they are not actually witnesses. Consider that these witnesses were interviewed by the author three decades after the event, and that many have substantially changed their stories...
....AND A COTTAGE INDUSTRY IS BORN.
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Planet X, Niburu
Every few years this hypothesis resurfaces. Can a rogue planet be wandering throughout the Solar System? The Solar System is a big place which, depending how you define it can be as little as 60 AU (earth-sun distances) in diameter if you stop at Neptune's orbit, or as large as 1 to 2 light years (63,000 AU to 126,000 AU) in diameter if you include the Oort comet cloud. All kinds of things COULD be out there, but the odds that something the size of a planet is a) still out there as yet undetected, and also b) on a collision course with earth, are too long to be considered even remote.
Planets move in elliptical orbits that are so unwavering, we can predict the positions of the planets thousands of years into the future.
The only object of significant size that does NOT behave in extremely predictable ways is...the Death Star!
PLANET NINE HYPOTHESIS
• JANUARY 2016: A claim of the existence of a "Neptune-sized" 9th planet, lying ≈ 200 AU from the sun and "shepherding" several dwarf planets (and other TNO's) has been made by none other than "Pluto-Killer" Mike Brown (and Konstantin Batygin) and is being researched not only by Brown and his associates, but by astrophysicists the world over. (NOTE THAT THIS CLAIM DIFFERS SIGNIFICANTLY FROM THE NIBURU STORY: There's no threat to Earth, and no violation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion.)
• AUG. 2017 UPDATE: Nothing new has been published about this topic. If Mike Brown is still studying it he hasn't released any conclusions or results.
• NOV. 2018 UPDATE: Still nothing.
• FEB. 2019 UPDATE: No discovery, but some helpful and positive analysis. The notion that "the observations fueling the hypothesis are affected by human bias" is being slowly, reassuringly discarded: "The Planet Nine hypothesis is founded on evidence suggesting {not proving} that the clustering of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy bodies that lies beyond Neptune, is influenced {not caused} by the gravitational tugs of an unseen planet. It has been an open question as to whether that clustering is indeed occurring, or whether it is an artifact resulting from bias in how and where Kuiper Belt objects are observed. [To test this question] Brown and Batygin developed a method to quantify the amount of bias in each individual observation, [determining that the probability that bias affects the data] is around one in 500. 'Though this analysis does not say anything directly about whether Planet Nine is there, it does indicate that the hypothesis rests upon a solid foundation,' says Brown."
• FEB. 2022 UPDATE: A Smithsonian Magazine article from about a year ago (could find nothing more recent out there). Lots of folks are following up on the initial research, and making new observations. Brown & Batygin are holding fast, but to hear these folks tell it, the hypothesis isn't on solid footing at the moment.
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Wikipedia is NOT worthless
Wikipedia (WP) pages can indeed be edited by just about anyone*, a fact you must consider when deciding to use WP as a citable research source. (If you need citable sources, the bottom of almost every WP page lists non-WP links that CAN be cited.) HOWEVER, if you're genuinely curious about something--and if you're anything like me you are ALWAYS curious about something--wiki is your best friend.
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* And it's not always easy, as you probably know if you've ever tried to edit a WP page...moderators get bristly and hyper-protective, probably because of WP's unfounded reputation.
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You cannot kill someone by punching his nose into his brain.
It's anatomically impossible. Nose cartilage is far too soft to penetrate skull bones (try to break a 2x4 with, say, a piece of apple) and even if it were made of titanium, it's too small to reach the brain from where it is. If you hit anyone ANYWHERE in the head hard enough you can maim or kill them, so sure, it is possible to kill someone with a super-human punch in the nose, but the death certificate will say "head trauma/brain injury," not "nasal-septal-braincase-incursion."
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A Slew Of Spider Stories!
Spiders are not lurking under toilet seats.
A student of mine announced to one of my classes that a "white spider has been discovered that's more dangerous than a Brown Recluse, and it lies in wait under toilet seats." Knowing that Black Widows and Brown Recluses are the only venomous spiders in North America at all dangerous to humans, I asked if this new white spider was said to have been found in North America. What in fact was me requesting more info based on my own first hand experience with North American spiders was interpreted by this student as me "trying to ruin his/her life because I hate him/her." (No kidding. 29 other people were in the room and heard it.) Turns out, my skeptical sense served me right yet again. A guy back in 1996 (or so), exasperated that so many BS urban legends were circulating on the then-new Internet, actually MADE UP a story about a spider lurking under toilet seats. He added fake names of restaurants and fake airports, but jackasses around the world changed his fake names and inserted real restaurant names (Olive Garden gets mentioned in one version of the hoax.) And here we are 15+ years later dealing with "new revelations."
Some credible internet sources:
Iowa State Dept. of Entomology: http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/iiin/agluteus.html
UC Riverside Dept. of Entomology: http://spiders.ucr.edu/debunk.html
SNOPES: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/insects/telamonia.asp
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Spiders do NOT lay eggs in your face!
Since the 1800s people have been having nightmares about spider bites containing eggs and baby spiders. This Snopes link cites no fewer than thirteen sources that all have a version of the story.
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You do NOT eat three spiders every year.
What lunatic created this story? You would notice if a spider crawled over your lips (among the most sensitive skin on your body) into your mouth (also supremely sensitive skin) while you were sleeping, and if you don't believe that:
- DO THIS EXPERIMENT: Next time you're about to tuck in for the night, pull a hair out of your head, crumple it into a ball, and put it in your mouth. Now, imagine it's wiggling around inside your mouth....and go to bed and try to go to sleep. See?
- OR DO THIS THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Imagine you're watching a movie, and in the movie a character is asleep. A spider is shown crawling ON HIS FACE, approaching his mouth. It is conceivable -- but hardly likely -- he would remain asleep though this. Now try to imagine the spider crawling into the character's open mouth -- on some of the most sensitive, moist skin in the entire human body -- and him not walking up. You would say "Yeah, right," and justifiably demand your money back. (And let's not even go down the "closed mouth scenario" where a spider forces your super-sensitive lips apart and crawls into your super-sensitive mouth. Come on folks.)
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OMG! August of 2014 had three Fridays, three Saturdays & three Sundays!
This happens any time the first day of a 31-day month falls on Friday. Every single year, seven of the twelve months have 31 days, so mathematically, EVERY YEAR should have at least one 31-day month that starts on a Friday. Even if we said ONLY AUGUST: When was the last time Aug. 1 was a Friday? 2008. And 2003. And 1997. And 1986. And 1980. You see a pattern forming? Yeah me too. It's called, "Holy Crap It Happens All The Time What Are You Even Talking About."
Most people, upon hearing a good story that is presented as a fact by a trusted friend or relative wouldn't DREAM of researching the claim; to do so would imply that they did not trust the friend/relative. Sadly, this is the reason so many BS stories get spread, AND why so many people get away with spreading them: they know you won't look stuff up. I look it up. (Seriously, if someone tells you a thing is true but which seems too stupid to be believed—or ESPECIALLY AND MORE IMPORTANTLY if it seems too good to be true?—you should totally look it up! Your gullibility/vulnerability drops a ton when you are in the habit of looking stuff up.
• • • Every title/heading/headline below is a clickable link. • • •
________________________________________________________________________________________________
VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM.
Sometimes a false belief is merely amusing; There's no real harm in believing the moon landings were faked or that the earth is flat. But the fictional connection between vaccines and autism is SO DANGEROUS that sitting still while fools spew this nonsense is NOT AN OPTION for anyone of conscience, and certainly not a science teacher. Why is it dangerous? There's the immediate and obvious fact that if you're not vaccinated you're not protected from avoidable but TERRIBLE diseases. But worse than you getting sick and maybe dying is the less obvious fact is that when you have have an avoidable but TERRIBLE disease you're going to spread it to others wherever you may roam. "But Steve, if everyone else is vaccinated…" Yeah! If everyone else is vaccinated YOU get to sponge off the "herd immunity" without being vaccinated, right!? WRONG. NOT EVERYONE *CAN* BE VACCINATED: People on chemotherapy, very young infants, and people for whom regular vaccinations simply don't take. WHEN YOU REFUSE TO VACCINATE YOURSELF AND/OR YOUR FAMILY YOU PUT ALL THOSE PEOPLE AT RISK.
SO HOW DID THIS MENDACIOUS BELIEF START? It was triggered by ONE study by ONE doctor who was trying to discredit existing vaccinations so that the medical community would favor HIS vaccines!! His study linking vaccines to autism was
exposed
as a
fraud
and
has been retracted
and the relationship between autism and vaccination has been
studied exhaustively and found to be nonexistent.
OF COURSE it's first on my list. And as you can see this sentence was blown apart by the html gods because it contains four separate links. That was a long time ago on a crappier hosting site, but the fragmentation adds a dramatic effect that is, in the case of the BS claims against vaccines, warranted and in fact—given the harm the misconception is causing—not dramatic enough.)
Does this make Andrew Wakefield, or Jenny McCarthy, or Dr. Friggin' Oz the Typhoid Marys of our time, as some have claimed? I didn't used to think so, but that was before I knew Typhoid Mary Mallon's story. You see, I thought Mary Mallon was unaware of the effect she was having until long after she was considered Patient Zero. But in 1907 after outbreaks of typhoid fever occurred everywhere she went, New York doctors told her that she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever bacteria, but she didn't believe them; She wasn't sick, so how could she make others sick!? She finally quit working as a cook, but after a three year quarantine changed her name and went back to working as cook. This demonstrates a reckless disregard for the lives of others fueled by her delusional belief that she knew more than doctors did about her medical condition. How is this different from today's anti-vaxxers who think they know more about immunology and virology and bacteriology than immunologists, virologists and bacteriologists do, and more about autism than psychologists and neurologists do?
And since I mentioned it...
The moon landings were not faked.
Let's assume that the moon landings were indeed faked in some way. (This kind of thought experiment -- assuming something is true for the sake of argument -- has a name: reductio ad absurdum.) THIS WOULD MEAN THAT:
…the photos of the landing sites taken by currently operating lunar orbiters (let's set aside the photos of Apollo landing sites taken by subsequent Apollo missions) have all also been faked.
…the 400,000 people working for 20,000 separate companies that worked on the Apollo program are lying and have been since the "so-called" inception of the Apollo program in 1961, and not one of them has slipped up and let the truth out, or sold their story to a tabloid.
…the Russians/Soviets, who were going head-to-head with NASA in the space race and who stood to gain HUGELY from our failure, tracked our rockets, orbiters, and everything else we sent up there (as we tracked theirs) are lying and have been since the first Apollo-related flights in 1966, and not one of them has slipped up and let the truth out, or sold their story to a tabloid.
…the international amateur astronomers who tracked our rockets and orbiters are lying and have been since Apollo 7 in 1968, and not one of them has slipped up and let the truth out, or sold their story to a tabloid.
…the laser-ranging experiments utilizing mirrors that were left on the moon have all been faked. (OR mirrors were placed perfectly by unmanned probes at the exact points where all the landing sites are claimed to be, surrounded by reverse-engineered human footprints which also were placed there by the robots.)
…the lunar module blast scars and rover tracks (and the aforementioned footprints), viewable through today's powerful satellite telescopes orbiting the moon, have all been reverse-engineered by unmanned probes.
And there were six landings, so all this fakery had to happen six times.
(Here's the famous Mythbusters episode eviscerating deniers' claims.)
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STOP SAYING IT'S ALIENS ANYTIME NASA ANNOUNCES A PRESS CONFERENCE. Mashable.com delivers basically the same lecture I gave in class last week [mid-Nov, 2018?]: Desperate journalists cherry pick a dubious scientific paper—one that has not only not been published, but has not yet even been SUBMITTED for publication—for click-bait headlines. Don't fall for it.
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Hunching/Slouching over your cell, or iPad, or laptop, or book, or sewing machine, or wash basin...or anything else: WILL NOT CAUSE YOU TO GROW HORNS OUT THE BACK OF YOUR SKULL.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2019/06/20/no-your-kids-evil-cell-phone-wont-give-them-horns/
The claim is that people hunch forward, over their phones, for such long stretches of time that the muscles in the back of the neck that hold the head up (meaning, that keep your chin from plopping into your chest the entire time you're awake) these muscles, connected to the back of your skull, are slowly causing more and more bone to be created where the muscle joins the skull. SOUNDS LEGIT RIGHT? Sure, until you realize that these muscles are holding your head up—as I said a second ago—most waking moments. They exert the same forces on the heads of office workers who lean forward, of farmers, of librarians...anyone ever—going back into antiquity here—who does an activity where the head leans forward for long durations. If this "horn-formation" was a thing at ALL, we surely would've known about it by now.
And that's just the thought-experiment refutation. Read the linked article and see a textbook example of SCIENCE DONE ILL; gathered data being interpreted in asinine ways. (It's actually quite instructive!)
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The MERMAIDS show on the Discovery Channel, is fictional, AS THE DISCLAIMER AT THE BEGINNING SAID.
Mermaids are a product of human imagination, not evolution by natural selection. Human skin, facial features (sense organs), forelimbs and hands are not at all adapted to a freshwater aquatic environment, and certainly not to a high-salt marine environment. In fact, because the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet and The History Channel have made so many faux documentaries recently* I can no longer consider these networks as reliable education channels, which they loudly claim to be. Watch them for the kick that you get from any fiction, but not if you want to learn about how the universe actually works.
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* Mermaids • Not one but TWO Megalodon shows • "Submarine: the Shark of Darkness" • Russian Yeti • UFO Hunters • Nostradamus Effect [Scroll down for more on Nostradamus.] • Etc. And don't even get me STARTED on the travesty the "History" Channel has become. As as one writer sarcastically put it when discussing the show Ancient Aliens: "Nobody doubts the Greeks built the Parthenon, but no way could brown people in Bolivia build Puma Punku, 1000 years later? Come on."
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The claim that "we only use 10% of our brains" is pseudoscientific. Brain scans routinely prove that we use 100% of our brains. (A big part of why this myth has persisted for so long is that psychics and other supernaturalists grabbed the 10% idea with both hands and have not let go: what better way to explain psychic activity than to attribute it to the part of the brain "no one uses?" In addition to the main Scientific American link, Snopes chimes in as well.)
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Celery, and ice water, and anything else you can ingest, is/are not "negative-calorie" foods.
The theory sounds great: "Celery has so few calories that you'll burn more energy digesting it than you get from eating it." Oh would that it were true, but it is not. While it is true that you get very few calories from eating celery, you don't get zero, and the number you DO get is WAY larger than the number burned in the digestion of it. Same for ice water: zero calories, but so cold your body must burn energy to warm its innards back up. Again, a grain of truth, but in practice, not a chance. To notice any kind of weight loss from simply drinking ice water, you'd need to drink about 25 gallons of it, and I, as a 200 pound man, occupy about 24 gallons of physical space. (i.e. I'd have to drink my body weight in ice water, which, come to think of it, surely WOULD cause me to lose weight...after I died of water intoxication and hyponatremia after forcing down just one or two gallons.)
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Walt Disney's head/body was not cryogenically frozen
Snopes to the rescue again, right down to Walt's LA County death certificate.
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You will (and did) not float for three seconds on Jan. 4, 2015
As you didn't levitate any other time this boshay made its way around the interwebs, and won't if it comes around again.
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Jaden Smith is NOT having his penis removed
A fake article on the satire website NAHA Daily (which only existed for about five months and is now defunct) started this...or I should say, goofballs who don't bother to google stuff that seems ridiculous STARTED THIS, by emailing it to everyone they know as if it was from CNN.
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2012 Apocalypse Prediction BOSHAY
[I leave this one up -- receding into memory though it is -- because, well, it's receding into memory, and I think it's important to remember just how seriously certain people were about the Mayan Calendar somehow predicting the end of the world.]
When a car's odometer clocks over from 99999 to 100000, does the car blow up? OF COURSE IT DOESN'T. And yet, that is precisely what goofballs would have you believe about Dec. 21, 2012.
The Mayan Long Count calendar--it wasn't even their daily calendar--is "only" 394.25 years long. The current cycle ends on Dec. 21, 2012. Then you simply start the next cycle, which ends on March 26, 2407. After that cycle, you simply start the next cycle, which ends on June 28, 2801. Etc., ad infinitum. The Mayans (or Maya) made no apocalyptic predictions whatsoever about the endings of these cycles.
Reckless predictions like that were made--and always have been made--by people who either think they are smarter than they actually are, or want you to think they are smarter than they actually are.
ALSO, many people cannot handle the fact that most of the time unexpected coincidences are just that, unexpected coincidences, and they don't *MEAN* anything. (EXAMPLES: Did you see a face pattern on your toast? Or in passing clouds? Or on the surface of another planet? Or in the billowing plumes of a photographed explosion? [The human brain is hard-wired to find face patterns. Whatever you're doing at the moment you're reading this LOOK AROUND YOU. You likely can find DOZENS of face patterns -- two-eyes-and-a-mouth-plus-or-minus-a-nose -- all around you on walls, furniture, windows, etc., etc.] Or perhaps is a year with a nice round number coming up? Do you share a birthday, or a name, or ANYTHING with a famous person? Is your birthday the same day as a famous event? Did you have a dream that has something in common with something that happened later?)
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A lit candle will not mask bathroom stink, but a lit MATCH will.
Someone heard that lighting a match after you ruin a bathroom will un-ruin it, and concluded something pseudoscientific like "Oh, the fire must burn up the stinky methane, or something..." which has a grain of truth, but no. Turns out the ignition of a sulfur match-head releases not only powerful sulfur smells that mask the stink (some would say replacing one stink with another) but also some chemicals that slightly numb the smelling cells in your nose.
So. Light the match, throw it into the toilet (never into a trash can unless you've held it under water first!), and leave the bathroom with the fan on and the door CLOSED.
Truth be told, you can leave the door open OR closed, but if your goal is "odor containment/eradication" (the reason you lit the match in the first place) LEAVE THE DOOR CLOSED: The 3/4" to 1" gap under a closed bathroom door is the same sized "hole" (i.e., has the same cross-sectional area) as the ventilation tube that runs from the bathroom's fan to the house's exterior. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT*. Closing the door while the fan is on:
1. ...has NO EFFECT on the ventilating ability of the fan
2. ...confines stinky air to the bathroom (so the stink cannot flow back into the house)
3. ...ensures that fan-induced air flow will only be in one direction (so the stink cannot flow back into the house)
...OR YOU COULD LEAVE THE DOOR OPEN, if you simply want to un-stink the bathroom as quickly as possible and don't care if anyone outside the bathroom smells it. But then why would you have lit the match in the first place?
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*You'll also see this gap under closet doors too, but for a different air-flow reason. People like to "throw" a door closed as they walk away from it. IF THERE IS NO GAP under the door, throwing it closed will simply close the door to the point where the air inside the closet acts like a cushion and prevents the door latch from engaging. WITH THE GAP, there is a way for a little air to leave when you throw the door so the door closes all the way.
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Bigfoot? Loch Ness Monster? Flying Saucers? Ghosts? SETTLED.
XKCD, with a single panel, distills the point to its irrefutable essence. (This is the cartoon I have on both sides of my room door!)
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The Blue's Clues Guy--Steve Burns--is not dead.
- He plays in a band and acts in movies and TV.
- And occasionally tells hilarious stories about being, if not famous, then fame-ish. (NOTE: this link IS OKAY for kids, and and mixed company, but there are moments when it looks like it won't be. Fear not, if you've started watching it and are actively wondering. (He does say the phrase "fake boobs" once, but that's as risque as it gets.) It is really good, and really touching, with an ending you so won't see coming!)
- And occasionally talks about why he left Blue's Clues. And then some!
- Here's Burns himself poking fun at the myth by covering a They Might Be Giants song that just happens to be called (wait for it) "Dead!"
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Chewing gum does NOT stay in your digestive system for seven years
Chewing gum cannot be broken down physically or chemically in the human digestive tract, A) and B) *nothing* stays in your digestive system longer than it takes food to pass through it. (EXPERIMENT: Eat a good-sized helping of corn if ever you're curious about how long stuff stays in your digestive system.)
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Dip does NOT have fiberglas in it.
I couldn't tell you where this got started, but it's ridiculous. Dip and cigarettes are quite funky ON THEIR OWN; You don't need a fake story to make you any more queasy than you should already be!
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Persistent Boshay About EARS:
Ear Candling does NOT remove earwax (straightdope.com)
It's actually kind of funny: The so-called "removed wax" (at the bottom of the candle when you remove it from your ear canal) appears even if you burn the candle several inches away from your ear!
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Ear candling is ineffectual and DANGEROUS. (WebMD)
This is WebMD, one of the preeminent and trusted medical sources on the web. "Ear candling exposes the recipient to risks such as:
- starting a fire
- burns to the face, ear canal, eardrum, and middle ear
- injury to the ear from dripping wax
- ears plugged by candle wax [which, admittedly, seems a bit of a stretch - smr-]
- bleeding
- puncture of the eardrum [how skinny are your candles? Is someone using birthday cake candles??]
- delay in seeking needed medical care for underlying conditions such as sinus and ear infections, hearing loss, cancer, and temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorders. (TMJ disorders often cause headache and painful sensations in the area of the ear, jaw, and face)."
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Ear cleaning? Q-tips should NEVER be inserted into your ear canals!
*** "Q-tips are the leading cause of both impacted earwax AND ruptured eardrums." -WebMD-
In my class a couple years ago several students militantly defended their decision to stick Q-tips in their ears to clean out cerumen (ear wax). I said then and say it again now, take it from someone who had to pay an E/N/T doctor to remove impacted cerumen from both eardrums (yes, that would be me): there are many risks and NO benefits of inserting cotton swabs into your ear canals. "But Mr. R, clean ears are a benefit!" Define clean. Because if you can stick one of your fat fingers as far as possible into your ear and can remove it with no visible wax on your finger, you don't have too much earwax; you're FINE. If you have so much wax that it's affecting your hearing and you want to remove it, use ear drops or hydrogen peroxide. Your body makes earwax to trap dust and germs and ESPECIALLY to waterproof the ear canal and eardrum.
"Well, what do they make Q-tips for (if not to stick in your ears)?" was one student's rationalization. Which is a momentarily interesting point, until you ask what cigarettes are made for. (The better answer to "Why do they make them?" is of course "Because you'll buy them.")
In fact, I'd wager a year's salary that there is a warning ON THE SWABS' CONTAINER that says something like "never stick these in your ear canal." The manufacturer is not stupid enough to think that you WON'T...in fact, they are counting on it because they sell a zillion swabs to people who insert them into their ear canals every day. But the law is not on their side, and they'd better cover their fannies in case someone does three asinine things: 1) sticks a swab in his/her ear canal, then b) ruptures the eardrum, then c) sues the company.
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FOLLOW UP: The Wal-Mart store brand, Equate, places the following CAUTION on their box of 500 swabs:
"Do Not enter the ear canal. Use only as directed. Entering the ear canal could cause injury. Keep out of reach of children. To Clean Ears, Stroke swab gently around the outer surface of the ear." I have reproduced their words and capitalization verbatim. (Indeed, one human physically attempting to crawl into another human's ear canal would, I've no doubt, "cause injury." And as for the last sentence, if I'm cleaning my outer ear (the pinna), I probably could do that FAR more efficiently in the shower with a facecloth--if not my bare hands--than with a wad of cotton wadded around the end of a lollipop stick.)
*** REMEMBER: "Q-tips are the leading cause of both impacted earwax AND ruptured eardrums." -WebMD-
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HAIR AND NAILS DO NOT KEEP GROWING AFTER YOU DIE.
...but the illusion is real. (I always love saying "the illusion is real!") When you die, the flesh surrounding these things dessicates (dries) and loses volume, which does indeed make nails look longer. I don't think anyone ever thought head hair looked longer after you die, but recently shaved stubble probably does appear to grow a bit longer as the skin around it dries and shrinks.
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Speaking of Shaved Stubble! Here's a myth that has so much truth to it, you might as well say it's not a myth, just reframe the explanation...."Hair grows faster once you shave that first time. Why? Either the contact of the razor with your skin it causes hair to grow in thicker/faster, or the blade tugs each hair slightly which causes it to grow in faster/thicker."
"OK, so Mr R, where's the link here?" No link. This is all my own fevered observation and analysis. Nowhere on the web was I able to find an explanation more thorough than what follows (and believe me I friggin' LOOKED.) I mean, mayoclinic.org is one of my medical go-to sites, but here's their More-Economical-But-Hardly-Explanatory take on this. (So there is a link after all!)
THICKER = TRUE. FASTER = FALSE.
IT TURNS OUT THAT AFTER THAT VERY FIRST SHAVE THE HAIR THAT REGROWS WILL BE THICKER—MORE HAIR WILL INDEED GROW ABOVE THE SKIN SURFACE—BUT NOT BECAUSE IT'S SOMEHOW GROWING FASTER.
Here's what's up: A brand new hair, one that's never been shaved, has a pointed tip and a wider base; a super-elongated cone, if you will. [Some hairs can have an oval base and some hairs actually have a flat base which makes the hair look, under a microscope, much more like ribbons than shafts!] A cluster of these new hairs feels downy soft because they all have super-small, super flexible, wispy tips. I'm going to represent a side-view of this super-elongated cone structure with a keyboard slash ( / ) and a backslash ( \ ) put together so it looks like this:
/\
OK. NOW SHAVE. Afterward your skin is super smooth! Still! But as that stubble grows, the tips of the stubble are not pointy like cones, they're CYLINDRICAL, with flat tops that have the diameter of the full hair shaft. Like tree stumps!
I'll represent this a side-view of this post-shave cylinder with two vbar/pipes ( | ):
| |
And HERE is where you see the story: I'm going to put a soft wispy new hair /\ right in front of a cylindrical stubble hair | | like this:
|/\|
See the difference? It's geometry! We're talking about the difference between the volume of a cylinder and the volume of a cone. [NOTE: In two dimensions with my goofy keyboard characters (i.e. with a square and a triangle) you can see that that the square has 2x the area of the triangle: two inverted halves straddling a right-side-up whole. In THREE dimensions—with a cone and a cylinder— the ratio isn't 2:1 but 3:1!]
"But," I hear you say, "hairs are mostly very long skinny cylinders, and the cone part makes up a small portion at the end." TRUE, BUT WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT HOW HAIR FEELS FOUR MONTHS AFTER YOU SHAVED, WHEN IT'S LONG AND SKINNY. WE'RE TALKING ABOUT A YOUNG PERSON'S PEACH FUZZ, AND THE STUBBLE THAT RESULTS THREE DAYS AFTER SHAVING. Again: TREE STUMPS! Literally more hair molecules* are above the skin surface so OF COURSE it looks darker and thicker! (*Yes, molecules not cells. Hairs, like fingernails, are not made of cells. They're non-living substances made by your body. Mostly protein, it turns out.)
And set aside how this new "3x-more-hair-molecules-above-the-skin-surface" looks for a moment, and consider how it feels to the touch! The top edge of these tree stumps are not the wispy soft tips, they are the right-angles of the top of a cylinder, so when you run your fingertips back and forth across them it even FEELS thicker!
Think of it as the difference between brand new grass that you planted a few weeks ago, and watered, and now is a light a wispy bright green. When it reaches mowing length, first run your hands over it and feel those wispy tips! NOW MOW IT! And now feel it! Whaddaya got? Blades that have flat tops, and have their full width all the way from the tip down to the soil = THICKER.
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HUMAN BLOOD IS NOT BLUE (and neither are the veins that LOOK blue! Dig it!)
I've long known that deoxygenated blood was not blue, contrary to many myths. But what I did *not* know is that those blue veins that started the myths in the first place AREN'T BLUE EITHER, they just appear that way because of the very specific amount of skin through which the light has to travel before reaching the vessel, then again after reflecting off the vessel, traveling though the skin again, and returning to your eye. Even arteries containing fully oxygenated, bright red blood would look blue if they were this very specific depth below the surface of your skin (about 0.5 mm). Ask any surgeon, or better yet, look closely the next time surgery is shown on TV: when they slice the patient open, no blood vessels appear blue.
Another source: http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist/2008/04/why_are_veins_blue.php
"Yeah, blood is blue in your veins but turns red when air hits it." (No link needed here.) Here are five ways to prove your blood is red even when not exposed to air:
- Color seen through closed eyelids when facing the sun (or a bright flashlight)
- Color of thumb-index finger's "webbing" when flashlight is shown through it
- Color of conjunctival blood vessels in bloodshot eyes. (The eyeball is not bleeding, nothing is exposed to the air, but the blood is still red.)
- Color of healthy skin vs. a corpse's skin, drained of blood
- Color of a hand that's mostly drained of blood compared to color of a hand that's full of blood. In your chair, right now, do this quick experiment. Reach down and touch the floor with one hand while reaching WAY up with the other*. Your arms should look like a vertical post with two hands at each end. Count to 10 or 15. Look at your two palms.
(*If you do yoga, this is what your arms are doing in a Triangle pose.)
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The moon is not a hologram. (No link needed here.)
The moon was referenced in the Book of Genesis: Was it a hologram in 2300 BC when the Old Testament was written?
(The question shreds this BS claim instantly. But if you were of a mind to, you could keep going, for kicks-n-giggles: What causes oceanic tides? What happens during a solar eclipse? Etc., ad nauseam.)
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Lady Gaga is neither a man, nor a hermaphrodite.
A blurry performance video and a satire website combine with her admitted desire to "push boundaries" to give us one of the most persistent BS stories of the last few years. Snopes, as always, shreds it.
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Ciara is not a man, nor was she ever a man.
Like the Lady Gaga story: Absolutely ridiculous.
SPEAKING OF GUYS vs. GIRLS: I would guess that an observant person can tell when a biological male* is dressed in conventional female attire--or vice-versa--about 95% of the time: (*as of this moment, August 2016, socially acceptable ways to refer to--or address--a person who was born male but who self-identifies as female--and vice-versa--are changing often and significantly; apologies in advance for misuse of pronouns and other terms during this time of significant and long overdue cultural and linguistic flux. Heck, I'm happy I just used "self-identifies" correctly. ) (2018 update: I've researched it, and I'm still a little unclear, but I *THINK* in this context the adjective "biological" is occasionally if not commonly eschewed for the term "birth-assigned.") Especially in anatomy class, we'll discuss this at some length.
- SKULL. Almost everything about a male skull is fuller than its female counterpart: Jaw, brow, and especially the bottom of the back of skull and back of the neck. (You can see this in almost every movie scene that is a profile close-up of a man and woman kissing. Notice how big his head is compared to hers! I call it "Big Head/Little Head," and after you've seen it once it becomes almost comical from that point forward; You'll never look at close-up movie kisses the same!)
- SHOULDERS/HIPS. The pectoral girdle (shoulders) tends to be wider than the pelvic girdle (hips) on a male. (Fit and trim males--perhaps a majority of those wishing to present as female?--tend to have what is essentially a straight line contour from each armpit down the side of the body, below the hips.)
- HANDS. It's difficult to pass a male's hand off as a female's. Female fingernails tend to be narrower, possessing more "arc" across the width of the fingernail; male fingernails tend to be broader and flatter. (Mrs. Humbard had--for a very long time--a poster for the movie Becoming Jane in her room. In most of the movie's promotional posters Anne Hathaway's left hand has the pen and it rests on James McAvoy's chest. In Mrs Humbard's poster however the pen is in Anne's right hand and the pen touches her lower lip: No one will convince me that the hand that holds that pen is a female hand.)
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NOSTRADAMUS PREDICTS....well, nothing, come to think of it.
1. What we hear after ANY major disaster is how Michel de Nostredame predicted it. We NEVER (that's capital N, NEVER) hear a single thing about these events prior to their occurrence, which means Nostradamus adherents simply "post-dict" these events, matching them to enigmatic descriptions in Nostradamus's writing after the fact.
2. ANOTHER ENORMOUS NAIL IN THE COFFIN OF NOSTRADAMUS CLAIRVOYANCE CLAIMS: The words you read when you read Nostradamus's writing are not even his words. His original manuscript was lost, and when you read his book now you're reading whatever of his manuscript his many translators could recall. From memory.
3. The one Nostradamus claim that gets excerpted and quoted and otherwise highlighted more than any other is the claim that "he mentioned Hitler by name when discussing a great German war". He does mention a great German war, but what he says--immediately after a line about wild beasts crossing a river--the "fighting will be near the Hister." Hister is the Latin name for the lower half of the Danube river. (Never so much as HINTS at Adolph Hitler.)
ENOUGH. Nostradamus believers, just do this ONE THING FOR ME: Right now, find in Nostradamus's writing a prediction about any clearly definable event that has yet to happen. (Your email cannot have been sent after the fact, of course. And to avoid any international date line shenanigans* I would like to see a detailed, unambiguous prediction at least a week in advance of the predicted event.)
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* Oldest trick in the book: Something remarkable happens in, say, Singapore on Monday at 3 AM (that's 3 PM Sunday afternoon in North Carolina) and you email someone three hours later at 6 AM Monday, Singapore time (6 PM Sunday, Eastern time) saying you predict "something remarkable will happen '...9 hours later at 3 AM!' " But 9 hours later is 3 AM, Monday, Eastern time."
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What really happened at Roswell, New Mexico?
The relevant highlights:
- Sometime during the weekend of July 5-6, 1947, a Roswell rancher finds mangled wreckage of something unidentifiable. (NOTE: Roswell is the location of Boeing's test flight facility.)
- Rancher calls sheriff, who calls local military, which sends three officers to investigate and collect wreckage.
- On July 8 the local base, Roswell AAF (AAF = Army Air Facility. This was barely 2 months before the US Air Force formally was created, when aviation was under the authority of the Army) releases information to the local paper, which for some reason, publishes it as a front page story about flying "disks."
- Commanding General, stationed at Ft. Worth, TX, identifies the wreckage as that of an air balloon. (NOTE: the linked article identifies this base as Carswell Air Force base, but the Air Force didn't come into existence until two months later on Sept. 18.)
- NOTHING HAPPENS OR IS WRITTEN FOR THIRTY YEARS.
It's a cute story, so I'll tell it again:
- NOTHING HAPPENS OR IS WRITTEN FOR THIRTY YEARS.
- In 1978 a guy writes a book claiming government cover-up. Cites hundreds of interviewed witnesses, but of the 25 who are mentioned or quoted, (paraphrasing the article) only 7 are firsthand sources who claim to have seen "saucer debris," and one of these accounts is suspect. Of this 7, only 5 claim to have actually handled the material personally, and one of them is adamant that it was not from an extraterrestrial spacecraft. The remainder of the cited “witnesses” are either secondhand sources (i.e. simply hearsay) or people who saw no wreckage at all or were never present at the “debris field” during the critical time. In other words, they are not actually witnesses. Consider that these witnesses were interviewed by the author three decades after the event, and that many have substantially changed their stories...
....AND A COTTAGE INDUSTRY IS BORN.
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Planet X, Niburu
Every few years this hypothesis resurfaces. Can a rogue planet be wandering throughout the Solar System? The Solar System is a big place which, depending how you define it can be as little as 60 AU (earth-sun distances) in diameter if you stop at Neptune's orbit, or as large as 1 to 2 light years (63,000 AU to 126,000 AU) in diameter if you include the Oort comet cloud. All kinds of things COULD be out there, but the odds that something the size of a planet is a) still out there as yet undetected, and also b) on a collision course with earth, are too long to be considered even remote.
Planets move in elliptical orbits that are so unwavering, we can predict the positions of the planets thousands of years into the future.
The only object of significant size that does NOT behave in extremely predictable ways is...the Death Star!
PLANET NINE HYPOTHESIS
• JANUARY 2016: A claim of the existence of a "Neptune-sized" 9th planet, lying ≈ 200 AU from the sun and "shepherding" several dwarf planets (and other TNO's) has been made by none other than "Pluto-Killer" Mike Brown (and Konstantin Batygin) and is being researched not only by Brown and his associates, but by astrophysicists the world over. (NOTE THAT THIS CLAIM DIFFERS SIGNIFICANTLY FROM THE NIBURU STORY: There's no threat to Earth, and no violation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion.)
• AUG. 2017 UPDATE: Nothing new has been published about this topic. If Mike Brown is still studying it he hasn't released any conclusions or results.
• NOV. 2018 UPDATE: Still nothing.
• FEB. 2019 UPDATE: No discovery, but some helpful and positive analysis. The notion that "the observations fueling the hypothesis are affected by human bias" is being slowly, reassuringly discarded: "The Planet Nine hypothesis is founded on evidence suggesting {not proving} that the clustering of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy bodies that lies beyond Neptune, is influenced {not caused} by the gravitational tugs of an unseen planet. It has been an open question as to whether that clustering is indeed occurring, or whether it is an artifact resulting from bias in how and where Kuiper Belt objects are observed. [To test this question] Brown and Batygin developed a method to quantify the amount of bias in each individual observation, [determining that the probability that bias affects the data] is around one in 500. 'Though this analysis does not say anything directly about whether Planet Nine is there, it does indicate that the hypothesis rests upon a solid foundation,' says Brown."
• FEB. 2022 UPDATE: A Smithsonian Magazine article from about a year ago (could find nothing more recent out there). Lots of folks are following up on the initial research, and making new observations. Brown & Batygin are holding fast, but to hear these folks tell it, the hypothesis isn't on solid footing at the moment.
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Wikipedia is NOT worthless
Wikipedia (WP) pages can indeed be edited by just about anyone*, a fact you must consider when deciding to use WP as a citable research source. (If you need citable sources, the bottom of almost every WP page lists non-WP links that CAN be cited.) HOWEVER, if you're genuinely curious about something--and if you're anything like me you are ALWAYS curious about something--wiki is your best friend.
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* And it's not always easy, as you probably know if you've ever tried to edit a WP page...moderators get bristly and hyper-protective, probably because of WP's unfounded reputation.
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You cannot kill someone by punching his nose into his brain.
It's anatomically impossible. Nose cartilage is far too soft to penetrate skull bones (try to break a 2x4 with, say, a piece of apple) and even if it were made of titanium, it's too small to reach the brain from where it is. If you hit anyone ANYWHERE in the head hard enough you can maim or kill them, so sure, it is possible to kill someone with a super-human punch in the nose, but the death certificate will say "head trauma/brain injury," not "nasal-septal-braincase-incursion."
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A Slew Of Spider Stories!
Spiders are not lurking under toilet seats.
A student of mine announced to one of my classes that a "white spider has been discovered that's more dangerous than a Brown Recluse, and it lies in wait under toilet seats." Knowing that Black Widows and Brown Recluses are the only venomous spiders in North America at all dangerous to humans, I asked if this new white spider was said to have been found in North America. What in fact was me requesting more info based on my own first hand experience with North American spiders was interpreted by this student as me "trying to ruin his/her life because I hate him/her." (No kidding. 29 other people were in the room and heard it.) Turns out, my skeptical sense served me right yet again. A guy back in 1996 (or so), exasperated that so many BS urban legends were circulating on the then-new Internet, actually MADE UP a story about a spider lurking under toilet seats. He added fake names of restaurants and fake airports, but jackasses around the world changed his fake names and inserted real restaurant names (Olive Garden gets mentioned in one version of the hoax.) And here we are 15+ years later dealing with "new revelations."
Some credible internet sources:
Iowa State Dept. of Entomology: http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/iiin/agluteus.html
UC Riverside Dept. of Entomology: http://spiders.ucr.edu/debunk.html
SNOPES: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/insects/telamonia.asp
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Spiders do NOT lay eggs in your face!
Since the 1800s people have been having nightmares about spider bites containing eggs and baby spiders. This Snopes link cites no fewer than thirteen sources that all have a version of the story.
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You do NOT eat three spiders every year.
What lunatic created this story? You would notice if a spider crawled over your lips (among the most sensitive skin on your body) into your mouth (also supremely sensitive skin) while you were sleeping, and if you don't believe that:
- DO THIS EXPERIMENT: Next time you're about to tuck in for the night, pull a hair out of your head, crumple it into a ball, and put it in your mouth. Now, imagine it's wiggling around inside your mouth....and go to bed and try to go to sleep. See?
- OR DO THIS THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Imagine you're watching a movie, and in the movie a character is asleep. A spider is shown crawling ON HIS FACE, approaching his mouth. It is conceivable -- but hardly likely -- he would remain asleep though this. Now try to imagine the spider crawling into the character's open mouth -- on some of the most sensitive, moist skin in the entire human body -- and him not walking up. You would say "Yeah, right," and justifiably demand your money back. (And let's not even go down the "closed mouth scenario" where a spider forces your super-sensitive lips apart and crawls into your super-sensitive mouth. Come on folks.)
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OMG! August of 2014 had three Fridays, three Saturdays & three Sundays!
This happens any time the first day of a 31-day month falls on Friday. Every single year, seven of the twelve months have 31 days, so mathematically, EVERY YEAR should have at least one 31-day month that starts on a Friday. Even if we said ONLY AUGUST: When was the last time Aug. 1 was a Friday? 2008. And 2003. And 1997. And 1986. And 1980. You see a pattern forming? Yeah me too. It's called, "Holy Crap It Happens All The Time What Are You Even Talking About."