There is a book called "50 things you are not supposed to know" which I have not read but supposed contains these claims. Just in relying on general knowledge a fair portion are true, but are they ALL true? Which ones are false?
Boy, you don’t ask for much do you?
I’m not looking for anyone to take the whole thing on, I’m really just interested in the ones that are demonstrably false or highly questionable. In scanning the list it appears that that the large majority are true, or could be true, in some form or fashion.
Things like “The Auschwitz Tattoo Was Originally an IBM Code Number” is one thing I have a little trouble swallowing, and also “For Low-Risk People, a Positive Result from an HIV Test Is Wrong Half the Time” seems a pretty high false positive.
38.The Suicide Rate Is Highest Among the Elderly
I will take this one on. Actual suicides are highest among teens and young adults due to the fact that this age group is more emotional and impulsive. Of course, short of a note, many accidents could be ruled as suicide.
The trouble with this list is that a lot of the statements are not provable one way or the other. Exactly how do you almost start World War III, and what would World War III even be? Or how does the US plan to provoke terroristic attacks? By being in Iraq and Afghanistan?
SSG Schwartz
On the HIV thing. Suppose the test is 99% accurate. 99% of the time if you have HIV, you’ll test postive and 1% of the time you’ll test negative. 99% of the time if you don’t have HIV you’ll test negative and 1% of the time you’ll test positive.
It’s easy to see that in a statistical universe where HIV is uncommon you’ll get a lot more false positives than true positives.
Say, if you test 10,000 people and of those people 100 actually have HIV. 9900 are HIV negative, the test is 99% accurate, so you get 9801 negative results from them, and 99 postive results. 100 are HIV positive, so you get 99 postive results and 1 negative result.
So in this universe, half the people who test positive are actually negative, even though the test is 99% accurate.
True, but misleading. They didn’t detonate due to safety mechanisms.
No, the highest suicide rate is the age group between 75 and 84:
I’ve read the book and mostly it’s pretty accurate. Is there any particular claim that you’re saying isn’t true?
Well, some of them are sufficiently vague or untestable. For instance:
The HIV test thing: just look up the probability that the test will show an incorrect result, given a certain HIV status. If an individual’s probability to be HIV positive is equal to this probability (prior to taking the test), and the test then shows positive, then the probability of the positive being false is one half.
Carl Sagan is an avid pot smoker: we just need to define the word avid appropriately
Most scientists don’t read all the articles: does that include cases where they only read parts of it?
World War one almost started in 1995: “almost” can be stretched quite a bit.
I guess we’d need the full explanations from the book to be able to evaluate the claims.
O.K., you asked specifically about the Auschwitz tattoo being an IBM number. Try this: Google on “Auschwitz,” “tattoo,” and “IBM.” You’ll find a lot of pages talking about it. You know, astro, you ask a lot of questions, and you don’t seem to do any Googling to find the answers yourself very much. You know, you can learn to be a good researcher yourself if you’d just try.
Well this one “The Virginia Colonists Practiced Cannibalism” is an eyebrow raiser. “Practiced” means (to me) that it was a somewhat planned or organized activity. I know there was some cannibalism in early American failed colonies but I always thought it was from dying people crazed with hunger with no forethought involved.
Furthermore, why don’t you read the book? Do you think that your time is too important to read a book?
Here’s the page that you would have found if you’d Googled on “Virginia,” “colonists,” “practiced,” and “cannibalism”
Really, you can answer most of your questions much faster by Googling on them rather than asking them on the SDMB.
I suppose I could take it to pieces and after several hours or days could come back here with a big report on the specific details of what I’ve found, or I could open up an interesting list of claimed facts for general discussion by the SDMB on a slow Sunday afternoon before working it over to see what people think. Sometimes a conversation is just as interesting as a lecture.
I’ll take on as many as I can say something intelligent about.
This is meaningless. The Roman Catholics and Lutherans, the Jews, the Orthodox Catholics, and the Anglicans and other Christian denominations each have their own version of the Ten Commandments. The only difference is which rule goes with which commandment. Wikipedia has a good overview.
So? Look up the Borgia Popes if you want tales to make each individual hair stand on end like quills on the fretful porpentine. Let’s summarize by saying that during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the office of the Pope was highly political in a culture accustomed to solving political matters using poisons, swords, and siege weapons.
First: How the hell could anyone outside the CIA know this?
Second: Crimes according to whose laws?
It was an accident. The plane carrying them crashed and the bombs fell out.
This is wrong in terms of most real-world politics and only correct in the stupid, nit-picky way some trivia answers are. There was never a formal peace treaty signed, only a cease-fire, so, by some measures, the war still has not ended. Nobody has violated the cease-fire, though, so the war is over.
This sounds like jury nullification to me. Mentioning it in a court will likely make everyone pretty damned mad at you, because it causes a mistrial (AFAIK).
Rephrase this: “The police have no obligation to individually protect every single person in their jurisdiction.” It’s really obvious when you say it that way: There aren’t enough police in the world. See Castle Rock v. Gonzales for a specific case.
“Age of consent” for what? Sex? If so, this is true: Sixteen is more common, assuming heterosexual sex.
Yes. His name is James Lovelock.
But those are the major problems likely to kill you, so they’re the ones everyone cares about. Life is funny like that.
So? Most doctors wouldn’t know how to fix a CAT scan machine, either. That isn’t their job.
More people work than fight. This is news?
One the list-maker undersold! ‘Heroin’ was Bayer’s trade name for the drug, which has passed into the public domain. The name came about because it was supposed to be a morphine alternative that was ‘heroically’ free from morphine’s addictive potential. Addiction-wise, we didn’t know our ass from our endorphins in the late 19th Century.
Indeed this is true. Here’s Cecil’s column on the matter.
It’s what, 39 cents now? ‘No-cost’ mailing would either be COD or email.
#28 is interesting, about Pasteur. I’d like to see what the author is claiming there. The Pasteur legend has taken a bit of a bruising in recent years with revelations about his self-promotion and less than equitable sharing of credit wth with fellow scientists. This is largely through the efforts on one academic (Geison), who has thoroughly examined Pasteur’s notebooks. It reads like typical legend ankle-biting tbh - the guy may be the father of microbiology and immunology, and discovered chirality, but did you know he was a bit of a cunt? WGAF, really?
In any case, Pasteur’s principle theories have been shown to be correct - which experiments is he alledged to have suppressed? The best known allegation of scientific impropriety on Pasteur’s behalf is to do with his preparation of the anthrax vaccine (discussed on his wikipedia page, where he claimed one method whilst secretly using a competitor’s, possible for commercial reasons). That’s not the same thing at all as suppressing an experiment.
Thanks for posting the list in any case Astro- some interesting factoids. The one about the bombs falling on NC is a good one that I’d not heard of.
I have nothing substantive to add. But am I the only one who thought of the scene in History of the World: Part One where the empress is picking out escorts from the legion?
“Yes, no, no, no, no, no, no yes…”
Here you go, first link on google for this too
Which is a very important distinction, since many of the most-cited articles are hundreds of pages long, and it’s quite reasonable that a scientist might only need information from two or three pages of that. Or you might cite a paper written by a colleague, where you only skimmed through the paper itself, but got most of the paper’s content from seminars or discussions over lunch.
A lot of these statements are misleading at best when condensed into a one-liner, but might make sense given a page or three of elaboration. Really, to fact-check them, we’d need the entire book, not just the table of contents.
Some of these definitely seem :dubious:
I don’t think the CIA does 100,000 things of any sort in one year’s time.
Several aid groups predicted in 2001 that the war would kill hundreds of thousands of people via famine, but that never happened, and I’ve certainly never seen actual policy toward that end.
Wouldn’t other massacres have been similarly huge news?
There is a S.Ct. decision ruling that the government cannot criminalize simply “being an addict.”
Isn’t this a good thing?
44 cents, right? Who doesn’t know this?
A lot of these seems to be written in a provacative or vague way designed to make you think one way when in fact the real story was much more mundane. For example the nuclear bomb headline was written to make one think they were purposefully dropped as in Hiroshima, but a more accurate (and boring) headline would be “Plane carrying nuclear bombs crashes”
Ok so it wouldn’t be THAT boring, but still less vague and interesting than the original headline
“Wanted”, “planning”, “considered”, and “almost” are words you can throw in any statement and make it seem like it was really going to happen.
Didn’t they change their names? I recall a story I read about Hitler’s relatives a few years ago
Eminent Domain. Kelo vs. The City of New London
Haven’t doctors been able to eliminate certain illnesses in the womb for a while?
Testified, yes. Doesn’t mean its the official position or that its true