As I understand it, these organizations only exist because of the stubborn persistence of the urban legend.
I throw it into the Harbor.
I break my spaghetti twice to make it even smaller.
Many older Koreans believe that fans consume oxygen, drop the room’s temperature to dangerous levels, or blow air in a way that suffocates the sleeper. Known as “fan death”, this cultural superstition says that leaving an electric fan running in a closed room while you sleep can lead to suffocation, hypothermia, and death
In fairness, the person who taught me this process (late 80’s, early 90’s?) said it was a way to drive full engagement. And I will say that brainstorming sessions did get even the quietest members speaking up and contributing. I can’t speak to how useful that was in the end though, having nothing to compare it to.
I’d always valued brainstorming as a process for getting ideas out for discussion, and I have never heard any refutation. Can you cite a couple of references? I can see how the process might be more valuable as an engagement tool - as opposed to a problem solving tool - in a working group to break the ice and foster discussion, but am interested in how it would hinder problem solving. TIA.
Some people still prefer to be home by dark. I imagine even more so 100+ years ago. Nobody wants to risk getting mugged for the sake of a five cent cigar.
Similar to this is the recurring myth that drunk drivers are more likely to survive car accidents, usually with the reason given that drunk drivers don’t brace for impact and that somehow keeps them from getting injured. In reality, drunk drivers are more likely to get hurt. “Drunk driver killed in accident” is less of a news story than “drunk driver kills sober driver in accident” so you really only hear about the second.
This is not exactly brainstorming. But we had an exercise at work where we broke into small groups, and were directed to find a solution to a ficticious emergency situation.
IIRC imagine you’re in a car out in the woods you hear on the radio that a massive snowstrorm is coming soon. Temperatures will plummet to below zero. You’ll be stranded a few days. You have a couple of items, like a knife, duct tape, etc.
Each of us was to work the problem individually, and then get together and solve it collectively.
The collective solution was invariably better than most, if not all, the individual ones.
The point being: listen to others’ suggestions, and don’t assume you have all the expertise.
I thought it was an effective exercise.
Although that might simply be the result of leveraging the not-insignificant amount of person-hours spent by all the participants working on the problem individually. It doesn’t prove that a collective “brainstorming” session where the participants haven’t previously devoted a bunch of time to individual solution efforts will come up with a better solution than the individuals would have produced.
That sounds a lot like the ‘lifeboat exercise’.
This is what I remember as actually having happened.
It was cemented in the public imagination by photos of a women’s liberation protest of the 1968 Miss America contest. There was a trash barrel for discarding symbols of female oppression like housekeeping items but also things like makeup, eyelash curlers, high heels, and other impractical and uncomfortable pieces of women’s attire. Of all the photos, the media naturally chose the most prurient one; a bra being tossed into the trash can which was at some point during the protest repurposed as a burn barrel. Perhaps not the only time a bra has been burned at a Women’s Lib protest, but the practice was not as ubiquitous as many people believe.
I was shown a handy method for cooking long pasta like spaghetti, linguine or other noodles that doesn’t require breaking for medium size sauce pans. When the water has reached a boil, hold the noodles in a bundle and place them vertically into the center of the pan, then release them with a slight twisting motion. The noodles will fan out in a spiral and after a few seconds will have softened enough to slip completely into the water. Easy peasey and visually pleasing.
Damn.
No, you had to swab the photo with the provided fixing solution. Then wave it. The later sealed Polaroids were not wet.
Anyway, one very robust urban myth that springs to mind is the claim that the biblical account of the Star of Bethlehem appearing around the birth of Jesus refers to some astronomical phenomenon that really historically occurred: a comet, a nova, a major conjunction, etc.
Nope. Of course, all those phenomena did actually occur from time to time in the ancient world, but there is no convincing hypothesis that any such event occurred in a way consistent with the description in the Gospel of Matthew at the time in question or was associated with the birth of the historical Jesus in his own lifetime.
Ancient writers and audiences knew that anomalous celestial phenomena sometimes appeared, and they expected the births of great men to be attended with striking celestial portents, so the author of the Gospel of Matthew put one into his story of the Nativity. The efforts that have been devoted over the centuries* to attempted astrochronological reconstructions of a specific historically attested datable phenomenon represented by the “Star of Bethlehem” legend are all inconclusive speculation.
* Seriously. Efforts to interpret the Star of Bethlehem accounts astrochronologically as descriptions of a verifiable phenomenon began with Kepler in 1614.
An additional view on the seat belts:
One thing I’ve heard posited was that lap-only belts were more dangerous than no belt at all because in the event of a crash, all the impact force would be concentrated on the head, where in the case of no belt, the impact would be at least a little more distributed over a wider area.
There was an intermediary stage where the camera automatically dispensed the fixing solution onto the photo by bursting a solution-filled sac, but you then had to peel off a layer of plastic to expose the wet photo to the air.
Reminds me of another concept that was a corporate darling at one time and may still be: ‘multitasking’. “A strong ability to multitask” has probably appeared on millions of resumes over the years.
In reality, when people ‘multitask’ they are really switching back and forth quickly between two tasks, in the process completing each task less accurately and efficiently than if they had completed the tasks in sequence.
The only way true multitasking that is more efficient than doing the tasks separately may work is if the two tasks take up completely different brain space-- like, for example, watching tutorial videos while doing some mindless manual task, like folding laundry or something.