Inspired by this thread
What is a “fact” that you see on the internet, email, hear from friends, in bars, etc. that is completely and absolutely wrong. Only rule is that you must provide a cite to show you are correct. The fewer people that know the correct answer = more points for you.
I’ll start. Al Gore did not win an Academy Award. It was Davis Guggenheim, the producer of An Inconvienent Truth, that won. Scroll down to “Documentary (feature)”
“Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy” is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin. The first time I saw it, I called bullshit, and did some research.
I’m impressed, though, that the original quotation isn’t too far off. But the first one I quoted is NOT what he said and it disgusts me that micro brewers and t-shirt printers are profiting from it…and that people swallow it like a pint.
On the subject of Al Gore, let me kill two more birds with two stones.
Myth: Al Gore said he invented the Internet.
Fact: What he did say:
Myth: Al Gore was not instrumental in creating the Internet.
Fact: What Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn did say:
Hmmm. Perhaps to keep the thread short, OP should exclude lies promulgated by Bush, Beck and their ilk…
Hmm, this thread could go on forever and ever if we only looked at sports record trivia. I have a trivia game from the 90’s where nearly half the sports questions are now false.
But, here’s a favorite of mine: Who holds the record for career home runs?
There is one more player who supposedly hit over 800 hr’s in his career including time in the Negro leagues, but recordkeeping was notoriously bad.
Mayonaisse not only does not give you food poisoning as easily as people think, but it can actually preserve the food it’s in, preventing food poisoning.
Charles Richard Drew, the founder of the blood banking system, was killed in a car accident. He was not refused treatment in an all white hospital. He arrived DOA.
[quote]
Mankind suffered a great loss in 1950 when, at the age of 45, Dr. Drew was killed in an automobile accident while driving to a scientific conference. His pioneering medical work has endured. How many lives have been saved because of his genius at turning basic biological research into practical production methods is impossible to determine. But it is a certainty that mankind owes a debt of gratitude to Charles Richard Drew.
Wow, really? Just a couple weeks ago mrs.kidneyfailure and I went out to have a picnic with her mother and I told her not to put any mayo on her sandwich. Why? Because my third grade teacher told us not to put it on anything once before a field trip years and years ago and I never bothered to see if that was true or not, I just believed it.
This was a problem with** home-made** Mayonnaise, which contains raw egg-yolk and may therefore be contaminated with salmonella. Industrially made Mayonnaise is a different story.
I don’t know how commonly believed it is, but it’s frequently quoted on the internet:
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
It’s attributed to Plato or to Philo of Alexandria. I got interested in it because Sarah Palin reduced it to “As Plato said, ‘be nice.’” in a speech, which set off my BS alarm. It turns out she was misquoting what she really thought the quote was (bolded above), as it’s reproduced in her book Going Rogue.
neither version sounded like Plato. I haven’t read Philo, but I was suspicious about that, too. And nobody who cited this gave a reference – where was the actual source of the quote?
it turns out to be by a little-known clergyman named John Watson (1850-1907), writing under the pseudonym Ian McClaren. And the original quote is:
Be pitiful – everyone is fighting a hard battle.
Incorrect cites:
http://quotationsbook.com/quote/21985/
Correct cites that uncover the true author:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquo...desk/Archive/2
http://www.literaturepage.com/forum/...ic.php?t=10957
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=559832&highlight=Philo+Plato&page=2
The Russians did not use pencils in space, and the U.S. did not needlessly develop an expensive space pen: CITE
There are good operational reasons for not using pencils in spaceflight. If you want to point out waste in the American space program, go ahead. But find something genuine to criticize.
A duck’s quack, does, in fact, echo.
If someone actually intends to include foreign leagues, Negor Leagues, Minor Leagues, Little League, or any other leagues, then you would be correct. But who the hell in America is ever talking about leagues other than Major League Baseball? Careers in different leagues should not be compared with each other since they are different. High School and College stats don’t carry over to Pros either.
This isn’t a “false statistic” in my opinion. I think you’re being a bit of a dick if you jump in with “Sadaharu Oh!!” when people are clearly talking about Major League Baseball. Why exactly is this a favorite of yours, anyway?
I still hear people say a 100-year flood happens once in a hundred years. For example if you experience such a flood, “oh it will be 100 years before that happens again!”.
That is not true, however. The probability is that we expect that magnitude of flood to occur at least once within that 100-year period; more properly, that maginitude of flood has a 1% chance of occuring within any given year. In fact, it has a 26% chance of occuring within a 30-year period of time.
This can really apply to anything dealing with basic probability. People are really, really stupid when it comes to even elementary probability. I doubt even a quarter of the population even truly understands that a fair coinflip is always 50/50.
Author Ann Rule did not get her first bok contract because she knew Ted Bundy She actually got the contract to write a book about the disappearances and murders of young women in Seattle BEFORE Bundy was even a suspect. As she wrote in her book “The Killer Beside Me” “I could not believe that I’d signed a contract to write the book and had the killer turn out to be my friend. No writer could make that scenerio work.”
“Chiggers burrow into the skin.” By the time you get the itchy bumps, the chiggers are long gone. Possibly it arose from confusion/conflation with chigoes, which do burrow.
Turkeys are so stupid that they’ll look up at the rain until they drown.
Agreed. I think the confusion about flooding causes a lot of grief, because often when people flood once, they then think that it won’t happen again in their lifetime, so they don’t properly prepare for the next flood.
The probability your airplane has a bomb onboard is 1 in a million. The probability of two bombs is therefore 1 in a trillion, which is almost impossible odds. That’s why I always carry a bomb with me: it’s then almost impossible there will be a second bomb.
Wow. Holding on a little tight there, buddy?