I have conspiracy-minded friends who think the Moon landing were faked. I once got into this conversation with one of them:
Him: “Moon landing was faked.”
Me: “Which one?”
Him: “What do you mean?”
Me: “Are you aware that there was more than one Moon landing?”
Him: “Um, yea, sure.”
Me: “Do you know how many times we put people on the Moon?”
Him: “Um, no, not offhand.”
Me: “So you’re absolutely sure we never went to the Moon, but you have no idea how many times we have been to the Moon?”
Him: “All I know is that they were faked.”
Me: “We put people on the Moon six times (six missions). Are you saying just the first mission was faked (Apollo 11)? Or are you saying all of them were faked?”
Him: “Uh, they were all faked.”
Me: “Do you think we orbited the Moon before we put people on the Moon?”
Him: “Uh, I don’t know. Probably not.”
Me: “Do you think we orbited the Earth before we put people on the Moon?”
Him: “Uh, yea, sure.”
Me: “So you’re saying we had the technology to orbit the Earth but not the Moon? Why would that be?”
Him: “I don’t know. Maybe we did orbit the Moon.”
Me: “So you’re saying we had the technology to orbit a person around the Moon and land back on Earth, but did not have the technology to land on the Moon? Why would that be?”
Him: “I don’t know. I just know the Moon landing was faked. Watch this video.”
Wrong reasoning, but somewhat sensible behavior. If the house is struck by lightning, lights that are turned on and appliances that are plugged in may be fried, while those turned off and unplugged are likely to survive unharmed.
I once had a guy tell me that he didn’t drive Corvettes because Corvettes don’t win races. First of all, he didn’t drive a Corvette because he worked a minimum wage job at a gas station. Second, he completely failed to realize the disconnect between a “Corvette” – actually a vaguely Corvette-shaped car – that is raced, on a course, by a professional driver, at speeds he’s never going to legally achieve on the roads, and whatever driving conditions he’s likely to encounter in real life. And yet somehow that’s informing his decision to not buy a Corvette (which he can’t buy anyway).
A couple told to me by schoolteachers when I was a kid (I reckon that could be a spinoff thread):
Fainting is a deliberate mechanism to get more oxygen to the brain. You fall over, your body is horizontal, problem solved.
I wouldn’t be rich if I found a ton of platinum in my back garden, because it would tank the price of platinum (aside from the logical problems, note that about 200 tonnes of platinum is mined per year).
When I was a kid, we would always unplug the coaxial tv cable from the tv (connected to an outdoor antenna about 60 feet in the air) during lightning storms. During the storms you could often hear the pops when we had lightning strikes and see the sparks jump across.
One thing I’ve been told several times including an old timer at NASA was that when stepping out on the moon for the first time, Neil Armstrong flubbed his line pretty badly and so the tape was doctored. I don’t remember what they claimed he actually said.
Whether or not that is true, he was supposed to say “A small step for a man …” but said “A small step for man …”.
That’s one of my least favorite Cecil columns. There is no pause, no “beat” between “for” and “man”. But there is a big pause between “one” and “giant”. You can almost hear Armstrong’s thoughts “One…(did I forget the “a”? I did, didn’t I? Oh well, maybe no one will notice)…giant leap…”
In also disagree with Cecil’s final word, “don’t write what he said, write what he meant. “A man” it is.”. Nope, sorry, facts is facts.
I’ve sometimes seen it written as “One small step for [a] man”, which I like because it conveys that the “a” isn’t part of the direct quote, but that was the intended meaning.
Yes, I can definitely see the wisdom in unplugging things. (@thorny_locust mentioned it also.) But I remember him saying that turning off lights and other things will help reduce the odds of getting struck, which of course is wrong.
My mother believed that filling out your information (name, address, etc) on warranty paperwork for things that you bought would get you robbed or burglarized. It was because the bad guys used these fraudulent info-gathering cards to figure out who had the money to buy things like a toaster or TV, and then used the address you wrote down to know where to come steal the item later.
Any free warranty that came with something we bought would never get used; she refused to provide anyone our address or names. That’s how the bad guys find you afterall.
I thought it might have been a cautionary tale she told kids when they were young to learn how to be aware and not blindly trust people… or maybe a variation of the “don’t put the empty box of your new expensive item on your front lawn in a bad neighborhood”.
But no, she really believed it to the day she died. Burglars exclusively use warranty cards to plan which houses they break into. How they got them from the washing machine store I don’t know, nor was it explained why the washing machine store would ask you to fill out a form they knew told burglars where to come steal from you.
I wonder if it’s a variation on the idea that bad guys will notice if you have a box from a new TV out in the garbage and break in to steal it? Though that one sounds more plausible.
My high school best friend had a couple of weird ideas. We argued over them, but I couldn’t convince her she was wrong. What was weird is that she got better grades than me, but was ignorant of some basic facts of the natural world.
Those little beelike insects that hover are “baby bees”. I told her that they were actually hoverflies. I told her that bees are fully-sized adults when they emerge winged and ready to fly from the honeycomb. She said that her dad had told her that they were baby bees, and who was I to contradict her dad?*
Muscles were those long gristly things in a cut of meat. I said that the meat itself was the muscle, and the long gristly things were tendons. She was adamant that I was wrong - that meat was just meat. I asked her “Then what’s the biological purpose of the ‘just meat’?” She had no answer, but was still unconvinced.
*When I got a little older, it became clear that her dad was a major alcoholic and an ignoramus to boot.
I had a friend who’s dad also claimed that Jupiter was bigger than the Sun so my friend repeated it as fact even though he was 15 and we had the internet.
His dad’s reasoning? When he was in high school and college every solar system chart he saw clearly showed Jupiter bigger than the Sun (obviously ignoring the fact those were to scale and that if they were to scale the Earth would be microscope, so they had to shrink the Sun immensely to show planet fine detail)