Oh, oh! I had someone explain the full moon thing to me by saying it is obviously because the moon is bigger when it is full and therefore the gravity would be so much more. And this extra gravity pulls at the water in your head.
I started to explain that the moon isn’t actually getting bigger and smaller; then the water thing got to me.
It’s an old folk belief. I believe it goes along somehow with planting by the signs, and certain crops going with certain signs and that sort of thing. I’m sure he never really put much thought into tidal forces or anything; I’ve heard more than one older person mention it down here.
And as for the can thing, yeah, I think it used to be true, but not now. And anyhow, weren’t the olives in the can for months anyway?
My wife’s grandmohter insists that there is no global warming, in fact the earth is getting colder.
Why?
Because satallites are reflecting all the sunlight away.
Explain to her that satellites get really hot in space and transfer all that heat back to earth when they get old and burn up in the atmosphere. The fact that they “burn up” when they are that high should be proof enough. Ask her if it is hot or cold on top of a mountain.
I knew a middle-aged man who believed that gravity came from “the wind caused by the Earth’s rotation.”
He later clarified this to mean the downwards “atmospheric pressure” caused by the Earth’s rotation. According to him, this was something obvious that everybody knew – after all “there is no gravity on the moon,” due to its lack of atmosphere.
learn something new every day. Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.htm
search on Michael Palin coriolis effect and you get a lot of hits. Here’s an excerpt:
"There are charlatans operating at a tourist trap in Nanyuki, Kenya. In this little town, located right on the equator, a local mountebank works for tips as he glibly cons busloads of tourists into believing that the rotation of the Earth causes water draining from a container to spin clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere. (Yes, you read that correctly, the charlatan fakes it backwards. You would think that if he were going to sucker people, he would at least get his directions the same as what really happens in large weather systems.)
This man’s nonsense was captured (and endorsed) by Michael Palin in one episode of his BBC TV special, From Pole to Pole, which is often aired on PBS."
Not a school that pays much attention to the Nile, it would appear. Nothing worth studying there.
A coworker insisted once that helium was a very explosive gas. I bet he saw a hydrogen demonstration in high school chem class (like taking a match to a balloon filled with hydrogen) and just confused it with helium. No amount of explaining convinced him of the error. So I printed out a blurb on helium from a web periodic table, and hi-lighted the “inert” “noble gas” parts before pinning it to the bulletin board.
(I’m a HS chemistry teacher)
When talking about helium and noble gases, I like to say, "You know how everyone tells little kids to be really careful with helium balloons? ‘Don’t put that next to the stove!!!’ "
Blank, thinking looks from kids.
“Me neither, because it doesn’t happen. A kid would have to choke on the rubber to hurt himself with a helium balloon.”
You never jumped off a roof when you were a kid?
The balloons, they do nothing!
I think the solution there, in typical male fashion, is just to add more balloons.
Did you see Letterman hoist Paul Newman with big bunches of helium balloons? It would be really fun to be tied to just enough so that you fell slowly. You could jump off of tall buildings and kind of glide in.
Don’t you need to take a bb gun with you, so you can shoot a balloon occasionally to keep yourself from flying into the stratophere?
Mythbusters did that one too. Filled enough regular-sized balloons to lift a little kid a few feet off the ground. It was in the thousands, IIRC. Adam also tied 55 weather balloons to recreate ‘Lawnchair Larry’s’ flight, and flew to 100 feet.
Nah, this page: http://science.howstuffworks.com/helium2.htm says that a 3-foot diameter balloon will lift .9 pounds. So a 50 pound kid would only need 56 3-foot balloons to get him gently floating up.
This all reminds me that you can convince quite a number of people that fish are separating the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the water molecules. Most people have never thought about dissolving a gas in a liquid, even after they’ve seen so many sodas fizz over.
I like to tell kids the fish are separating the water, and when they agree, I say, “and that’s why on Animal Planet, you see the big hydrogen bubbles trailing along behind huge sharks.”
Them: Blank stares, trying to remember/picture that.
Me: “Oh, no it doesn’t. Because it’s not true.”
Regular party balloons don’t have a 3-foot diameter, do they? That’s what they filled to lift the kid, IIRC. Plus you’d have to factor in the weight of the balloons and strings (probably non-negligible once you have to use so many. . .)
Oh, man. Ok, you guys know Lilith? Adam’s first wife?
You know she’s supposed to have descended from demons?
Well, I know a couple who firmly believes that Lilith & her people were actually aliens, and are responsible for everything in this world. The pyramids? Lilith’s people. The Hanging Gardens? Lilith’s people. The state of the world today? Lilith’s people. Crop circles, probes-up-your-butt, alien abductions, The Straight Dope? Lilith’s people.
I questioned the hubby for a long time and was forced to conclude…it wasn’t a joke, and he really truly believed it. He even had a name for her race, something that started with a P, and I can’t remember what it was.
It isn’t just him. There were references to the same thing on Cheers and later Frasier.
FYI, it was the Mythbusters guys who did the balloon thing for Letterman out on 53rd Street. Newman happened to be a guest that night, and volunteered to go up. I think the original plan was for Dave to do it.
That reminds me of an old room mate of mine. She said that the reason that you had to regularly change the water in the gold fish bowl was because the fish would breathe all of the oxygen out of the old water.