# Ever been shocked at what some people believe? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 18, 2012, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369 "2012-05-18T22:14:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![GameHat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ed655f/32.png) [@GameHat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GameHat)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 4:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/182 "2012-05-30T04:52:22Z")
> [@thelurkinghorror](#): > > Is this related to the above, or is he just too cheap/lazy like me to go to a professional place all the time? Probably both? He’s cheap, and has no care for personal appearance. But he also has a weird phobia about people touching his head. ---
**Author:** ![manila](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e5b9ba/32.png) [@manila](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/manila)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/183 "2012-05-30T12:50:26Z")
That the “wind chill factor” is not purely an effect felt by warm blooded mammals but is an actual phenomenon. An “Engineer” I worked alongside insisted on increasing the anti-freeze content of water containing control lines in winter when the wind forecast increased. Listen dude, the wind may make it feel like 10 degrees below zero to you but if it is actually 2 degrees above zero then it can blow as hard as it likes and the actual temperature is never going to drop lower than the actual 2 degrees it is. How did he not know this? ---
**Author:** ![Barkis\_is\_Willin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a183cd/32.png) [@Barkis\_is\_Willin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Barkis_is_Willin)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/184 "2012-05-30T14:42:28Z")
The professor in my last MBA class threw out a couple nuggets that made me question his credibility. One, which I actually started a thread here about, was that China (and others) keep loaning money to the US, despite our increasing debt, because we have such large gold reserves. ??? Another thing he stated quite factually, with chalkboard illustrations, was that the symbol originated from overlapping the letters U and S, for United States. I knew that wasn't right, but I didn't say anything, just exchanged incredulous glances with a few other classmates. Others, of course, were like, "wow, I never knew." The thing is, information about the true origin of is so easily obtained, I don’t know why he wouldn’t research it before telling that to his classes. ---
**Author:** ![Sister\_Vigilante](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@Sister\_Vigilante](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sister_Vigilante)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/185 "2012-05-30T15:26:00Z")
My high school teacher taught us that “la plume” is the word for plum in French. As in the fruit. Then he swore up and down that the english spelling, for the fruit, is “plumb”. Wrote it on the board and everything. The class was first incredulous but then decided to just let it go. He insisted we’d gotten it wrong all these years (we were 15). ---
**Author:** ![Testy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c37758/32.png) [@Testy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Testy)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/186 "2012-05-30T16:34:17Z")
The two older gentlemen up-thread that claim various seeds can cure cancer probably picked this up from the laetrile scams in (IIRC) the late '60s or early '70s. Laetrile was some derivative of peach or apple or cherry pits that contained a cyanide compound that magically migrated to tumors and then released the straight cyanide into the diseased cell, killing it stone dead. Of course, it was a scam or at the very least wishful thinking back then and it’s no better now. I do believe it killed a few people and hospitalized many more with cyanide poisoning. I’m sure this is up on Quackwatch. Regards Testy ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/187 "2012-05-30T17:06:16Z")
> [@Barkis\_is\_Willin](#): > > Another thing he stated quite factually, with chalkboard illustrations, was that the $ symbol originated from overlapping the letters U and S, for United States. I believed that until just recently. I learned it in school. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Excellent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f19dbf/32.png) [@Mr.Excellent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Excellent)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/188 "2012-05-30T17:56:05Z")
> [@Malleus\_Incus\_Stapes](#): > > So if someone has a harmless wacky belief, it might be better for their mental health to just let it be? Seems more like the takeaway is to subject one’s beliefs to regular scrutiny - note the name of that magazine - so that by the time you’re well-invested in a belief psychologically, it’s unlikely that this belief runs contrary to facts. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Excellent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f19dbf/32.png) [@Mr.Excellent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Excellent)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/189 "2012-05-30T18:05:30Z")
> [@bahia\_hombre](#): > > I had a co-worker that once talked about how girls nowadays are growing bigger breasts because of the chicken they eat. The reason being that chickens are now being given more hormones to produce larger chicken breasts. I didn’t bother explaining that chicken breast is not quite homologous to human breasts.. My AP US History teacher once said he was pretty much convinced of this, noting that the girls he was teaching seemed more, ah, “developed” than the ones he’d gone to school with as a kid. In retrospect, I wish I’d asked him about changes in clothing style. Or, alternatively, why he was spending so much time staring at his students’ breasts. /shrugs/ ---
**Author:** ![rogerbox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/76d3ee/32.png) [@rogerbox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rogerbox)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/190 "2012-05-30T18:07:30Z")
> [@Testy](#): > > The two older gentlemen up-thread that claim various seeds can cure cancer probably picked this up from the laetrile scams in (IIRC) the late '60s or early '70s. Laetrile was some derivative of peach or apple or cherry pits that contained a cyanide compound that magically migrated to tumors and then released the straight cyanide into the diseased cell, killing it stone dead. Of course, it was a scam or at the very least wishful thinking back then and it’s no better now. I do believe it killed a few people and hospitalized many more with cyanide poisoning. I’m sure this is up on Quackwatch. > > Regards > > Testy Thanks, it’s interesting to know where it came from but the 72 year old guy I hear this nonsense from hasn’t accepted new information into his brain for about 40 something years, so it’s not possible to disprove what he already knows. ---
**Author:** ![Beware\_of\_Doug](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Beware\_of\_Doug](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beware_of_Doug)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/191 "2012-05-30T18:26:36Z")
> [@Sister\_Vigilante](#): > > My high school teacher taught us that “la plume” is the word for plum in French. As in the fruit. > > Then he swore up and down that the english spelling, for the fruit, is “plumb”. Wrote it on the board and everything. > > The class was first incredulous but then decided to just let it go. He insisted we’d gotten it wrong all these years (we were 15). Wise decision for 15y/os. Your teacher was telling you, in not so many words, that _you better believe what he told you._ Whether _he_ believed it was probably beside the point. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/192 "2012-05-30T18:44:16Z")
> [@manila](#): > > That the “wind chill factor” is not purely an effect felt by warm blooded mammals but is an actual phenomenon. > > An “Engineer” I worked alongside insisted on increasing the anti-freeze content of water containing control lines in winter when the wind forecast increased. > > Listen dude, the wind may make it feel like 10 degrees below zero to you but if it is actually 2 degrees above zero then it can blow as hard as it likes and the actual temperature is never going to drop lower than the actual 2 degrees it is. > > How did he not know this? This certainly doesn’t strike me as worthy of ridicule. So you have a pipe with water in it, and it’s surrounded by much colder air. The pipe is not a great insulator, so due to conduction, the water in the pipe starts to cool down, and the air around it starts to heat up. Eventually the air and the pipe will both end up at some temperature somewhere in the middle. Except that if there’s lots of wind, the air is constantly being blown away and replaced by different air which is as cold as the initial air was. Now, I suspect there are about 90 reasons why what I just wrote doesn’t really work and has no actual connection with “wind chill”, but I think there’s enough plausibility there that it’s not worthy of scorn. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/193 "2012-05-30T19:06:04Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#): > > Except that if there’s lots of wind, the air is constantly being blown away and replaced by different air which is as cold as the initial air was. It’s pretty well accepted that the best way to cool wort or other hot liquid is to surround it with a cold liquid _flow_. ---
**Author:** ![Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/earl_snake-hips_tucker/32/3269_2.png) [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/194 "2012-05-30T19:24:37Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#): > > . . .Except that if there’s lots of wind, the air is constantly being blown away and replaced by different air which is as cold as the initial air was. . . . But the air is still above freezing in his example. So the fluid will still be above freezing. No such thing as wind chill either in this example or in all the ships at sea. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/195 "2012-05-30T19:27:51Z")
> [@Testy](#): > > peach or apple or cherry pits … stone dead I see what you did there. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/196 "2012-05-30T19:46:35Z")
> [@Sailboat](#): > > It was only later, in other conversations, that I discovered her strong anti-abortion position, and realized that what had viscerally horrified her about egg-painting was the idea that _a fetus was being killed by the government_. She didn’t care about the welfare geese; she didn’t care about golf course management or wildlife issues. But the idea of egg-painting was close enough to the horror of abortion that she became dramatically emotional. > > Knowing that she drew that parallel, I find her suggestion to kill adults instead of eggs takes on a somewhat sinister cast. Huh. A friend of mine once insisted that he refuses to eat eggs. He wants to eat a chicken that’s been hatched and grown, because, “it got to live.” I think he was joking. Maybe. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/197 "2012-05-30T20:30:58Z")
> [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](#): > > But the air is still above freezing in his example. So the fluid will still be above freezing. No such thing as wind chill either in this example or in all the ships at sea. But the point is, it’s a complicated topic involving actual knowledge of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics and probably other kinds of dynamics… not something where we should point and laugh at someone who isn’t up to speed on it. ---
**Author:** ![zoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zoid/32/336_2.png) [@zoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zoid)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/198 "2012-05-30T20:55:10Z")
[The rate of heat loss by a surface through convection depends on the wind speed above that surface: the faster the wind speed, the more readily the surface cools.[why?] For inanimate objects, the effect of wind chill is to reduce any warmer objects to the ambient temperature more quickly. It cannot, however, reduce the temperature of these objects below the ambient temperature, no matter how great the wind velocity.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_chill#Explanation) Wind chill definitly exist for inanimate objects under the conditions above. It doesn’t make the object colder than the ambient temp, but the rate of cooling for an object above ambient temp is definitely affected. Wind chill will also speed up evaporative cooling of a body of water. ---
**Author:** ![Laggard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/9de053/32.png) [@Laggard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Laggard)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/199 "2012-05-30T20:56:36Z")
> [@tellyworth](#): > > I’ve had several people tell me that hotdogs contain no actual meat, so they’d be fine for me to eat (I’m vegetarian). At first I assumed they were joking about the dubious ingredients in cheap sausages. But on further questioning it seemed they believed they contained some kind of counterfeit meat substitute, a cost-saving conspiracy by devious food corporations. I was staying with a family in Honduras who a few minutes after I told them I was a vegetarian served me hotdogs. Now I sorta understand why. ---
**Author:** ![Testy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c37758/32.png) [@Testy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Testy)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/200 "2012-05-30T22:05:02Z")
> [@rogerbox](#): > > Thanks, it’s interesting to know where it came from but the 72 year old guy I hear this nonsense from hasn’t accepted new information into his brain for about 40 something years, so it’s not possible to disprove what he already knows. I understand, I’ve got my own set of relatives that stopped learning anything new many years ago. Still, it must be nice to know that the old boy was sorta kinda marginally right at one time but just didn’t update his info. I remember when they were testing laetrile and it was supposed to actually work and this was a HUGE deal. A shame it was all wishful thinking. Regards Testy ---
**Author:** ![Testy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c37758/32.png) [@Testy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Testy)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2012, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369/201 "2012-05-30T22:06:10Z")
> [@KneadToKnow](#): > > I see what you did there. 😛 Testy [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369.md?page=9) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-been-shocked-at-what-some-people-believe/622369.md?page=11)