Debunking 52 popular myths

Dude, you’re sleep browsing.

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Eschew is the word for which you’re looking.

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NUH UH!!

Each and every one of these things happened to my cousin, “Lucky.”

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Thank you!

This is my pet peeve with a lot of debunking: they’ll claim people do action X to achieve result Y, which won’t work. The thing is, people are often performing action X to achieve result Z which will work. It’s just a condescending, distorting attempt to look clever at someone else’s expense.

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Isn’t the whole earth about 2° when seen from the moon.
And for reference your little finger at arms length is 1°
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/7736/what-is-the-angular-diameter-of-earth-as-seen-from-the-moon&ved=0ahUKEwik16Sh9NXNAhVMJMAKHfDiD-YQFggeMAE&usg=AFQjCNHkuj5raDQ-uIIiyUR4z2NSQjNRSA&sig2=mam4KLYUT5bumathOEC3cQ

PROTIP: drink your beer before it goes flat.

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And drinking. Empiricism is important doncha know.

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Try a bitter in a standard pilsner glass and in a wide British-pub glass.

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Beer can go flat? I’ve never kept any around long enough to find out.

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Unfortunately, it sometimes arrives that way.
In which case, you grab another.

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While we’re piling on, iron maidens existed in several forms through the Middle Ages but many of the museum pieces of the 17th and 18th centuries were simply fabricated to make them more showy and deadly. There’s also executions through methods similar to iron maidens, though the torture was about bringing people to the limit of their endurance. As far as I can tell the name is made up to sound cool too.

If we are talking viking misconceptions how about the word “Viking”? Horned helmets are ceremonial, they pretty much used mail - but you go viking when you are a part of a cultures that plunders others. A “Viking” is a later romanticizing of the era and making a verb a noun and giving it a false cultural identity like Pirates.

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Nor I. But the right sort of glass can change the sort of head one can expect from a serving of beer. And even if your tongue doesn’t taste the difference, your mouth will feel the difference.

(Not to mention that the nose has an important role to play in how things taste. And that could well be affected by how food is served.)

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I only like pilsner in a pilsner glass, but it may be a psychosomatic condition caused by too much beer. Or, possibly, too little. And I only like Pilsner Urquell of all the pilsners I’ve ever tried, honestly, I normally stick to stouts and porters.

This is truly advice for the ages!

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It makes no difference that a human observer is going to detect without the aid of sophisticated equipment. Maybe that seems pedantic, but when people claim to be “debunking myths” I’d rather they not saying things that are obviously empirically false.

I was similarly annoyed by “The Coriolis effect doesn’t affect water in toilets” when they mean “The Coriolis effect isn’t strong enough to affect the direction that water swirls in a flushing toilet.”

They wanted to indicate that effects were much weaker than we believe and instead stated that they didn’t exist.

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In context, “makes no difference” refers to the cooking time of pasta. The only way the chart is misleading is that it implies sea water can make make your spaghetti faster to a practical degree.

I was a Theatre Arts major in college, and thankfully we were taught the origin of the term. The idea being the crowds exiting the auditorium or amphitheater through the voms made it look kinda like the venue was puking out its contents.

I believe it’s a specific kind of exit: the ones that go between (and usually underneath) seats.

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I think so too–that last picture could very well be from my alma mater’s auditorium. And I’m extrapolating wildly but I’ve long suspected “vomit” became a verb because of a resemblance to the way people flow out of those. Maybe someone came up with that after a performance of The Misanthrope, although it probably goes back farther.

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Well, to be fair, people have been vomiting since long before they ever went a-theatergoing. :wink:

From the Wikipedia article:

The Latin word vomitorium, plural vomitoria, derives from the verb vomō, vomere, “to spew forth”. In ancient Roman architecture, vomitoria were designed to provide rapid egress for large crowds at amphitheatres and stadiums, as they do in modern sports stadiums and large theatres.

So I think some Roman wag saw a crowd leaving the Colosseum or maybe some earlier amphitheater and it brought to mind vomere.

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I frequently describe crowds of people leaving a theatre or stadium as “vomiting forth” from it. Or at least I will.

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Oh, dear. Wrong information right off the bat. The design of a vomitorium is all about leaving an arena, not entering. People would dribble in over a period of time, but once an event ended, everyone tried to leave at once, That’s the reason for the design that could handle large groups existing at the same time.

And “badly made glass” isn’t an explanation for why old glass panes are often thicker at the bottom. Glaziers specifically installed the glass that way, because the thicker end could better support the weight of the glass pane.

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