I tell you what; if you want to see some classic examples of dumbassery like this, check out Yahoo Answers; really, It’s like The Straight Dope on a high dose of stupid pills.
My aunts believe:
That Satya Sai Baba really has performed miracles.
That if you do the yoga on a certain tape that they have it will cure cancer and fix broken bones.
In those magnetic bracelets.
I can’t think of what else. I just smile and nod. I’m not going to criticize, you know? Damn fine ladies otherwise.
I had a frustrating 20 minute conversation with a pal last night about all those evil toxins that your body stores up. Apparently the only hope for humanity is some special green tea and supplements that you can buy off the internet. He knows it’s true because he read it somewhere.
He works around acetones and he thinks that the fumes are stored in his muscle and fat tissue. He may be right, he may be wrong. I asked him for proof, evidence, what are the mechanisms, anything. He got mad.
They got teaching degrees. With a couple of exceptions, the best instructors I’ve had were engrossed in the topic of study, e.g., mathematicians & economists. With a couple of exceptions, the worst instructors I’ve had were teachers.
It’s hard for me to imagine how that would qualify as a debate. Regardless, did you try an experiment. I was about seven when, watching from the chairlift as skiers jumped and landed, I noticed that I saw then land before I heard them land. Who knows? That may have been my first advanced discovery. You don’t need that much distance to make the effect apparent, and something that makes a loud noise with an easily visible action should do the trick.
And you still probably wouldn’t convince them.
can jellyfish run on land?
if swimming is so good for you, why are whales so fat?
Why is it when I type in this box people send me email?
Why do people believe in Pangaea theory?
do u belive in alinez??
Does the Earth rotate or is it rotated by someone?
What Will HAPPEN IF ALL THE DEAD BODIES AND GARBAGE ARE THROWN IN THE GALAXY SO AS TO SAVE LAND?
(that last one must be really urgent or something)
I say we nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
When my son was in 1st grade or so, some of his classmates were talking about a bomb that could “blow up half the world.” Not render uninhabitable, but literally split it in hald so the remaining half would continue orbiting like in a cartoon.
My son has always been interested in military history and technology, so he countered with facts (throw weights and blast areas of various nuclear warheads), as well as logic (where would they put such a bomb?) And it bugged my son that these kids would maintain that something so clearly unrealistic and impossible were true.
Naturally, when the kids realized their talk of this bomb bothered my son, they teased him with it unmercifully, insisting such a weapon actually existed.
One of the kids was our next door neighbor. We attempted to enlist his mom, in getting her kid to stop from teasing ours (as well as trying to get my kid to develop a thicker skin.) When we explained the matter, we were dumbfounded when she asked, “Isn’t this something about which the boys can agree to disagree?”
Uh - no.
That particular bit of quackery was espoused by Robert Barefoot, and it’s the same sort of snake oil chicanery peddled by career scam artists like the infamous Kevin Trudeau, around whom numerous threads here have centered.
Rick Jay (Posting #31)
I think what you meant to say is that the Moon has one eightieth of the mass of the Earth. (precise value: Earth Mass = 81.347 Lunar Mass).
Before somebody corrects me on the following, I’ll make it clear that it is a “whoosh”.
[whoosh]
You know why the astronaut’s were bouncing around on the “zero gravity” Moon like that? Because the Moon landing was a big hoax and all the “Moon” activity was done right here on our gravity bound Earth. Don’t you people watch television?
To make the hoax more realistic, I’ve always wondered why they didn’t put the astronauts in NASA’s weightless room? You know that room where you see people floating around being tested for space flights? I think Ron Howard used it for adding realism to Apollo 13. My own guess is the weightless room isn’t big enough to accomodate the huge “Lunar” landscape that the Moon landing hoax required.
Oh and since I mentioned NASA, remember to pronounce it “Nassau” as they do in all those great made for cable and made for TV movies such as “Doomsday Rock” and “Rockets Red Glare”.
[/whoosh]
Total OT hijack, but I had a dream like that many years ago. It seems I was chasing down some evil criminal genius and had tracked him down to a suburban dwelling of a decidedly japanese pagoda flavour. He had a gun, and was firing it at me as I took cover behind a low partition. He seemed to have an unlimited supply of bullets inside that gun, and I saw no way of escaping, so I pulled out my secret weapon – an inauspicious looking thing intended to shake the ground in an earthquake-like fashion, the intention being to knock my arch-enemy off his feet and rush him. I fired it into the ground as was its method of operation, but it had much more of an effect than I’d intended. The very ground began to split under my feet. I ran outside as the whole world shook and then split clean in half. I watched the other half of the world, the edge of which was barely a few hundred feet from where I was now. The other half slowly rotated out into the blackness of space. The sky was clear, not a cloud in it, as the atmosphere dissipated into the inky darkness. I walked to peer over the edge, seeing the craggy remnants of Earth edge-on. Then I looked up – and saw that apparently gravity was pulling the other half of the world back – right on top of me. Dream karma’s a bitch.
My dreams, they don’t particularly care 'bout the finer points of science or physics. 
Years ago I shared an office with an otherwise moderately intelligent fellow who insisted that ice could not be any colder than the freezing point of water. Keep it a 10 degree F freezer for as long as you like, it would never get colder than 32. I tried every argument, analogy and illustration I could think of, but he never budged.
The site is Yahoo.
Yahoo - Bumpkin - Yokel - Lowbrow
I think I might have seen someone argue that position here on the SDMB (with equal tenacity.
Comes to the same thing. If you’re in orbit around the Moon six thousand miles from its centre, your orbital speed will demonstrate that you’re being attracted with something like one-eightieth of what you’d experience in orbit six thousand miles from Earth’s centre. It’s just that on the surface of the Moon you’re that much closer to the centre of mass of the planetary body of the thing that’s attracting you. If you could condense the Earth to the diameter of the Moon and still keep all its mass, you’d experience a lot more than one Earth gravity on the surface of the resulting compact sphere.
I really, really hope the guy was just very good at keeping a straight face and whooshed you. I’ve used this myself a few times. Unfortunately, it’s entirely too possible that he genuinely believed this traditional drunkard’s joke.
Funny thing is, I sort of half believe that one myself. Intellectually, I know it’s not true, but I once heard that and part of me still wants to believe it. I guess it’s a pretty pervasive myth.
There are a lot of people who think that seasons are a result of the earth being closer to the sun in summer and farther away in winter. I had this discussion with my dad once. He looked at me as if I was crazy when I tried to explain to him about the tilt of the earth. Even when I asked him how his explanation accounts for the fact that it is summer in Australia when it is winter here in the U.S., he didn’t get it. Maybe science classes weren’t the same back in the 40s when he was in grammar school.
My high school health teacher taught us that the only way a woman could get pregnant is if she and the man both orgasmed simultaneously.
Given that she was a phys ed teacher corralled into “teaching” health, we gave her a pass on that one.
sounds like a misremembered interpretation of the fact that melting water will not rise above 0C until all the ice in the container is gone (assuming no focused heat sources on a single point).