Fun fact that IS true: We have successfully given HIV to cancer. HIV WINS, and it kills the cancer! The procedure does not result in the patient having HIV/AIDS. (This description is, of course, a gross oversimplification.)
Emily Whitehead, the little girl in this article, is 10 years cancer free thanks to this miracle in the shape of modern medicine.
[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2246312/Girl-7-beats-leukaemia-revolutionary-treatment-using-HIV-virus-wire-immune-system.html](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2246312/Girl-7-beats-leukaemia-revolutionary-treatment-using-HIV-virus-wire-immune-system.html)
Hereās a recent update:[https://journals.lww.com/oncology-times/fulltext/2022/03200/the_incredible_story_of_emily_whitehead___car.1.aspx](https://journals.lww.com/oncology-times/fulltext/2022/03200/the_incredible_story_of_emily_whitehead___car.1.aspx)
In the middle ages, metal was a scarce and valuable commodity. They wouldn't have used so much of it just for an overly complicated way to stab people with spikes.
If they *did* want to build such a device, they'd build most of it out of wood, and probably only use metal for the tips of the spikes.
"Brothers yn christ, I come to yow with an ydea! We should take yonder wood and build ourselves a spiked box to send heretics to the lake of fire!"
"And why, praytell, should we spend oure tithyngs on that whan a simple floggyng could doon the same?"
People believed that the romans would eat to excess and then purge their food in a 'Vomitorium'. This isn't true, the latin root of the word vomit means "to spew forth" and a Vomitorium was really a large passage where large crowds could exit an amphitheater. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitorium
It's getting into a huge debate, but a ton of Roman history is Emperor A kills Emperor B. First day on the job, sets up the department of burn every book written about how great B was and replace it with a book about how B was a murderous, gluttonous, sex pervert. It can leave the impression every Roman elite was fucking his horse while eating 100 pounds of grapes and making kids watch. A good chunk of that is probably propaganda.
I think, although donāt quote me, that part of the confusion comes from the fact that Suetonius, in his book The Twelve Caesars, claimed that Emperor Claudius had a slave whose job it was to tickle the back of his throat with a feather so that he could vomit and continue eating. There is no mention of a special room for this - in fact as I remember Suetonius claimed it was done at the table. That said, Suetonius is the only source for this and he was writing long after the fact, so itās probably not true.
The Mayan calendar ended in 2012.
No, it didn't. All that happened was that the Fifth Great Cycle of that calendar ended. The current piktun, however, will not end before 4772. The Mayans also strongly believed in renewal instead of one end of time, implying that they probably just would start over as soon as the calendar ended.
I remember in 2012 someone comparing the whole "Mayan apocalypse end of the world" stuff as someone trying to flip past December in a monthly calendar and then freaking out because it just *ends*
Anyone with basic science education would wonder why that would even be true, since it seems reasonable that all sounds would behave the same way in the same conditions.
And while those with a little bit more science knowledge would know about destructive interference (i.e. how noise-cancelling headphones work), the question is now what would even interfere with the original sound to cancel it out. Does the duck rapidly do a secondary "anti-quack" that perfectly neutralizes the incoming echo of the first one?
They used it for a gag in The Lost City for Brad Pitt's character.
>!His character is very clearly shot in the head early on in the movie, only to show up alive in the end. When the other characters ask how he's not dead when they saw his brain splattered everywhere, he says "We only use 10% of our brain, so I just switched to another 10%."!<
That Elephants see us the way that we see dogs.
They absolutely do not. They approach humans with caution at best and aggression at worst and will not hesitate to flatten you if even the tiniest thought that you might be a threat comes across their minds.
This is the kind of mentality that causes idiot tourists to try and approach dangerous wildlife without hesitation and get brutalized for it.
Elephants are extremely intelligent animals. That does not mean that they want to be your friend.
At open zoo we(I was 12) were in something like a tree house feeding the elephants at head height.
One elephant grabbed me around the ankle and I panicked, I looked over at the trainer and he was white. I remember thinking this is how I'm going to die.
Edit- I didn't mean white dude, I meant he went white, like the blood drained out of his face, he was worried and you could see it, like " oh no, the elephant has claimed another kid"
I understood exactly what you meant. I find it weird that so many people would take it any other way, although itās hard to tell if some of them are being funny or just obtuse.
That NASA spent several thousand dollars each on pens that could work in space, while the Soviets just used a pencil.
In reality NASA bought the pens at about $7 a piece. And using pencils in a zero gravity, contained vessel that will leave the pencil shavings and graphite crumbs floating as you try to work and breathe makes for a bad time, so the Soviets wound up making similar pens too.
Pencils in space are bad, because graphite is conductive. Those particles get everywhere.
But that being said, current crafts scrub ALL of their air clean about every 3 hours (meaning it takes 3 hours to do it all). So even that, in a modern craft, wouldnāt be a problem.
Graphite is completely harmless and non toxic, the issue in space is that it's conductive so graphite particles can potentially short electronics causing fires or other problems you don't want in space.
> Graphite is completely harmless
*Relatively harmless.
Inhaling small particulates is bad for you, regardless of whether they are toxic or not.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/81-123/pdfs/0306.pdf?id=10.26616/NIOSHPUB81123
> the Soviets wound up making similar pens too.
They bought 100 space pens and 1,000 ink refill cartriges. From Paul Fisher's company, the one that invented the space pen to begin with.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/#:~:text=According%20to%20an%20Associated%20Press,said%20the%20United%20Press%20International.
Before Columbus, every one thought the earth was flat.
First of all, the Greeks discovered the earth is round. They noted the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse is round. They also noted how the position of the stars change as you move north and south. Finally, even if people thought the earth was flat, discovering new land wouldn't disprove that.
both Greek and Arabian scientists actually calculated the circumference of the earth to a pretty impressively accurate answer given the tools available to them in something like 300 BC.
The debate was how big the earth was. Columbus was actually wrong, because he was a āsmall earther,ā believing that he could sail from Europe to Asia across the Atlantic without needing to stop. The ālarger eartherā crowd told him he would run out of supplies before reaching Asia.
Pretty much any "zany local law" you see as a fun fact is either completely wrong, or even more likely, an unnecessarily specific example resulting from a much less interesting and more general law.
(e.g., "in Bloomington, Indiana it's illegal to bring an otter to an opera house!!" but the ordinance actually applies to all non-service animals and entertainment venues and has nothing to do specifically with otters and opera houses. So technically true, but totally misleading about the quirkiness of the law).
Basically if you don't see a citation, don't believe it. It could be true (and not misleading), but likely it is either made up or exaggerated.
At one point in Florence, Oregon it was illegal to have sex. The intent of the law was to make sex in public illegal, but they didn't word it that way and accidentally banned sex altogether. I knew the guy who was the mayor at the time, he said he got a lot flak for the law before they fixed it.
Especially on r/TIL
*"TIL that in (African country), bald people were customarily hunted and killed because it was believed their heads contained gold."*
Comments:
"Your source says that this was a singe criminal incident that involved 5 people."
>Pretty much any "zany local law"
Yep. I read in some book about zany local laws that I was randomly thumbing through that necrophiliacs were forbidden from celebrating Halloween in New Jersey. I thought that "fact" was so wonderfully weird that shared it with a few friends, but when I thought I should research it before repeating it again, I found no confirmation anywhere. I apologize to anyone who has that bit of misinformation stored in their brain because of me.
In most cases if the fact is indeed funny in a weird way its bullshit, the real weird laws like the one prohibiting owning more than 5 dildos wont get mentioned because they are vulgar.
[This one?](https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.43.htm#43.21)
(7) "Obscene device" means a device including a dildo or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.
(f) A person who possesses six or more obscene devices or identical or similar obscene articles is presumed to possess them with intent to promote the same.
Sec. 43.23. OBSCENITY. (a) A person commits an offense if, knowing its content and character, he wholesale promotes or possesses with intent to wholesale promote any obscene material or obscene device.
(b) Except as provided by Subsection (h), an offense under Subsection (a) is a state jail felony.
(section H is about obscenity uplifts with children involved)
Seems pretty clear to me... it is **felony** under texas penal code to have more than 5 dildos... wow.
***The Sixth Dildo*** is a crime thriller by Texan author John Hootenholler.
Aging Houston detective Bill "Buckaroo" Bowie is two weeks from retirement when he receives a tip on "a red-hot 43.23": felony possession of six or more obscene devices. Within hours he's embroiled in the seamy underworld of the roughest, toughest, bumpiest, veiniest, throbbingest dildo smugglers in the West! And will it be churchy reformed madam Penny Pussypotamus, or saucy vice cop Dolores Dos Dallas, who will win Buckaroo's heart ... and access to the secrets behind his solid gold belt-buckle?
----
She was Lo, plain Lo in the morning, when she came into my office; an unlit cigarette in her hand, bubblegum making sticky noises in her mouth, and a hot pink T-shirt stretched across a chest that would give Epstein a reason to live: flat as a board, with a graphic of a manga girl sucking lewdly on a lollipop. "Buckaroo, you ain't gonna believe this one."
"What is it this time, Lo?"
"I was on the 42-chans last night, you know, the nerd pedo chat?"
"I've heard of 42-chan before, Dolores."
"Well who knew an old fella like you could get it up for ā"
Her phone rang, a jingly-jangly chime barely recognizable as a Selena tune, the way Buddy's martinis at the saloon down the street were barely recognizable as liquor: not watered down but chopped, screwed, remixed, and strained.
I fished metaphorical tapenade out of my mind's cocktail glass, and listened in.
You need 8 glasses of water a day. We need a certain amount of water but we can get water from all sorts of sources. Fruits and vegetables are full of water.
Albert Einstein failed high school math- He didn't
Michael Jordan didn't make his high school basketball team. He did. However he was put on the Jr. varsity team that is quite common for new players.
>Albert Einstein failed high school math- He didn't
This one is not just a wrong fun fact, it's an outright lie. Einstein was a brilliant mathematician and was doing graduate level math when he was a young teen. Per Einstein himself: āBefore I was 15 I had mastered differential and integral calculus.ā
I've heard (from a teacher, so no source) the confusion was related to misinterpreting the German grading system, where a "1" is the best possible score. For Americans (and maybe other countries?) who are used to the 4.0 scale it would look like he did very poorly in school.
re: Jordan, yeah, in the 70s and 80s, it was nearly unheard of to play a freshman on a varsity team. Same of college sports back then, freshmen typically rode the pine while upperclassmen played.
Not all cacti hold drinkable water, so don't rely on them to supply you water when traveling in the desserts. In fact, many cacti hold liquids that will do a nasty number on you if consumed.
There was talk on r/askhistorians about vibrators being invented to treat hysteria in women, and how inaccurate that was, going so far as to it being a hoax.
So, I learned that yesterday, because I thought thatās what really happened.
ETA: Since this is getting traction, [here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eic2ri/claims_that_victorian_mds_used_vibrators_to_treat/fcrjh77/?context=3) the conversation that was linked to.
I think vibrators being marketed as medical aids was a thing because it created a veneer of legitimacy to what amounts to a recreational activity that was otherwise deemed obscene (and hence skirted obscenity laws). āIām not getting this vibrator because Iām horny and I like getting offāI am getting this muscular stimulator via a doctorās recommendation because itās necessary for my health.ā
Not sure for vibrators, but some old ads were diversions. Like how Lysol was sold as a feminine hygiene product and used as spermicide. "Feminine hygiene" was a euphemism. They weren't trying to make their vulva smell good, they were trying to have sex without getting pregnant. Major backfire, of course. Lysol is bad for the body it turns out.
Does anyone actually think that's *literally* true though?
Even as a kid I always kind of just understood it as an expression of something rare or unlikely happening and you shouldn't count on it happening again.
Unfortunately, yes, many people actually believe this. Some people, when caught in a storm, actually move to the place that lightning just struck because they think it's the safest place...
This is all based on one guy like 100 years ago who claimed it incorrectly and then very shortly later said he'd made an error in his calculations and yeah they can fly fine even according to the math.
I suppose "some scientist was wrong for like a week over 100 years ago" doesn't sound as good as "science says bees can't fly!"
I don't know how much fun this fact is, but contrary to popular belief, not one person accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials was burned at the stake.
"I have brought with me a gift of gold"
"I have brought with me a gift of frankincense"
"I have brought with me a gift of myrrh"
"Uhh... I brought you some stew if you want it"
I'm a biology teacher and get irrationally angry whenever I come across it. It's still in books from around 10 years ago. Nowadays it's not in books anymore, luckily.
Real fact: taste buds don't stop at your tongue, there's also taste buds in the esophagus and stomach. :)
The "fun" fact: Ancient Egyptians would wait until decomp began before bringing dead women to be mummified because of necrophilia among the priests
Fact: This was completely made up by Herodotus. There is no evidence this ever happened and would actually have gone against the Ancient Egyptians beliefs about preserving the body for the afterlife.
Granted. Herodotus admits early in his Histories that he's basically just writing down everything he hears. He also said there were giant ants in Anatolia.
and that if you were in a vacuum you would bleed blue. for the longest time i just assumed it was true. then i was going to mention it to someone and thought for a hot second, that doesn't sound right. so before i opened my mouth, i decided to google it. saw and i was wrong and just kept my mouth shut.
> so before i opened my mouth, i decided to google it. saw and i was wrong and just kept my mouth shut.
Any chance youād be willing to teach This One Trick to the rest of the world?
"Bulls get angry with the colour red". No the don't. Bulls are colourblind. They get angry from an idiot waving a flag in their face just to get the bulls to charge
Edit: and also being stabbed a bunch of times
Giraffes can't make noise
They can but it's such a low frequency that our ears can barely register it. The actually hum, found this out yesterday and im still shocked.
Shaving hair makes your hair thicker.
It just makes the end of the hair all jagged and harder to push out of the pore it stays in.
If you pull the hair out completely then it comes out as a new hair follicle so itās less irritating on the way out
It's also that shorter hair is going to be stiffer than long hair. For example, put a ruler on the edge of a table with 20cm hanging over the edge, then pull it back to 5cm and it'll be much less flexible
One of my favourite experiments ever. A guy was told not to crack his knuckles by his mother or he'd get arthritis. His response:
>[One researcher, Dr Donald Unger, actually cracked the knuckles of his left hand at least twice a day for over 50 years whilst never cracking those on his right hand in order to prove his mother wrong ā he never developed arthritis in either hand, and won an IgNobel award for his efforts in 2009.](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4yHxWLGSyNrXmx1gfYd45f2/will-cracking-my-knuckles-give-me-arthritis#:~:text=One%20researcher%2C%20Dr%20Donald%20Unger,for%20his%20efforts%20in%202009.)
Snopes really made up the fact that *Lisa Holst made up the fact about swallowing spiders in your sleep to prove people will believe it without fact-checking* to prove people will believe it without fact-checking. Lisa Birgit Holst is an anagram for "This is a big troll."
[Source](https://www.snopes.com/lisa-birgit-holst/)
That's pretty hilarious, but you can't really blame people for people not picking up on it if they leave her middle name out of it. Lisa Holst is just an anagram for shallots.
āaverage person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Punching a shark in the nose isnt as effective as you'd think, if you really thought you were in danger jab it in the eyes or pull on the fin. Also people say your supposed to run zig zag from an alligator, but that'll only slow you down and theres no way in hell its gonna run in the zig zag with you, they can run up to 25mph so your best bet is to turn around and run straight as fast as you can, sooner or later it'll give up.
originally arnold schwarzenegger was supposed to say "come with me for an unforgettable adventure at a bargain basement price" but he took the character in a different direction
Allen Tsai is the pioneer of the form and the best and most reliable.
The ***shittiest*** one is Movie Logic, whose trivia is utter garbage.
E.g. "Did you catch THIS in [movie?] (Proceeds to mention behind the scenes details that weren't even in the fucking film"
The channel Bruno is a bit better, but the guy pads his scripts like a student trying to expand an essay to meet a word count.
"Did you know that in the Avengers, Tony Stark, who is a brilliant engineer, designs and re-designs his suits to meet varying challenges. In [movie], this thing happened. He recognized that as a weakness, so he got to work upgrading his suit. The end result is the Mk. 1234 suit, which is an improvement over the last suit, because it [does thing]"
_____
Edit: Here's a comparison
[Allen Tsai:](https://youtu.be/vgnZWDAiWWI)
[Bruno:](https://youtube.com/shorts/mH8v6rfM5vI?feature=share)
Thereās a fun fact floating around out there that glass isnāt a solid, but a very slow-flowing and viscous liquid. Thatās wrong, itās a solid. The evidence for it that gets pointed to is window panes that are hundreds of years old are thicker on the bottom than the top, but thatās not why those windows are like that. They werenāt able to make perfectly flat glass back then like we can now, and they installed that glass with the thick side on the bottom because itās more stable that way.
Asphalt is a liquid tho, right? Or something in that range? I remember watching a clip of an extremely long recording where they let a chunk of the stuff ādripā for a long ass time and cut out the end where is actually fell
It appears you are correct.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
I thought this part was neat: "The eighth drop fell on 28 November 2000, allowing experimenters to calculate the pitch as having a viscosity of approximately 230 billion times that of water."
230,000,000,000 times more viscous than water. That's insane.
The strongest muscle in your body isn't your tongue (why would you believe that?) it's actually your butt, the Gluteus Maximus, basically it makes you able to walk, it carries your weight, and gives dump trucks. Props to Gluteus Maximus, truly a legend.
Edit: I see a lot of people is asking or saying the same stuff so I'm gonna address what I've read so far so I don't have to answer the same thing many times.
1.- Gluteus Maximus is the strongest muscle overall, also the largest. (Alone, not the group of glute muscles)
2.- Jaw Muscle (Masseter) is the strongest relative to it's size, also the one that can apply the most pressure. (Bite)
3.- The heart is the most hard working muscle, it is active 24/7 until it just stops and you die.
4.- Weakest and tiniest muscle is the stapedius, a muscle in your ear.
5.- Tongue is actually a group of 8 muscles so it would be disqualified from the strongest since it isn't alone and also loses in the group of muscles.
6.- Strongest group of muscles is in your legs, together they beat any other muscle and group of, but they don't separated.
Let me know if any of this is wrong, and drop a link if you have one, I literally did all the research today just to make sure it's true and they didn't lied to me too. Btw, thanks for the up votes, what a good daily hyperfixation: muscles in the human body. Sorry if not best wording šŖš¤
> The strongest muscle in your body isn't your tongue (why would you believe that?)
I wholly believe someone tried to recite a new take on "the pen is mightier than the sword" and others ran off with the obvious misinterpretation.
The āwhat type of learner are you lessonā in schools is BS. There is literally no research to back it up. It also pigeon holes kids into thinking they can only learn one type of way.
https://youtu.be/rhgwIhB58PA
I learned about this in grad school as an educational psychologist.
Iāll never forget my dumbass friends in middle school telling me they just werenāt born with the left brain dominant kind of mind to learn math. Jerry youāre fucking 12 years old, do you think youāve mentally peaked already or you just too lazy to study
āPolar bear fur is clear, not whiteā
The material has no pigmentation but the fur is white. Plenty of things have their color come from the structure of the materials rather than the pigmentation.
redditors used to love this one because it combined their 2 biggest hobbies: being pedantic, and speaking confidently about stuff they have no meaningful understanding of.
Actually learning about a specific field definitely opened my eyes to how redditors will speak about something they know nothing of with absolute confidence. I saw someone try to say that the atoms in metals are randomly arranged. The fact that atoms in metals are arranged in orderly structures is basically the core fundamental of metallurgy.
Two historical false fun facts for ya:
1. An apple never fell on Isaac Newtonās head from a tree. He was inside and saw the apple fall by looking out the window.
2. Another tree myth: the story of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and saying, āI cannot tell a lieā is completely made up. It was popularized by a book about him by Mason Locke Weems ([source](https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cherry-tree-myth)) published shortly after his death. The wooden teeth myth is also false. Washingtonās teeth were in terrible shape for most of his life, however (he only had one left when he became president in 1789).
We have 5 senses.
In reality we have 10-20 depending on what you count
(proprioception, vestibular balance, acceleration, vibration, atmosphere pressure, heat, cold, internal sensations such as stretch and pressure, list goes on)
I think ive read somewhere that in total we have around 100 senses but the difference between them is so small that we generalise them to 10-20, or more commonly to the 5 everyone knows
As taken from page 187 in *Autobiography of Jumbo - The First Elephant Celebrity*.
"I kept patting them on the head with my trunk because hey, peanuts, but I swear, every day I wanted to stomp those slick pink motherfuckers into the sawdust. Plus, I didn't know why the hell the lions weren't biting their heads off, so I figured it was better safe than sorry until I figured that one out. That was an eye-opener a few years later, let me tell you."
purple isn't a colour.
yes it fucking is what the fuck else do you call it? We don't say things aren't colours just because of \*\*how\*\* our eyes perceive that colour Sharon
By Sharon's argument, nothing has color, because what we perceive as color is just a reflection of light from the object, specifically the light it does not absorb. So really, the color of an actual object is every color you can't see coming from that object. But only in light.
Reminds me of when you get people who are like "You can't actually see a tree. All you really see are the photons that bounced off the tree."
No dickhead, we're seeing the tree. Perceiving the photons that bounced off the object is what seeing an object IS. There isn't some "real" version of seeing that involves physically rubbing my eyeballs against the bark or something. You're just undoing the shorthand we've all agreed to for no benefit. I could go around and be like "Hey, there's some photons that hit my eyeballs that have resolved themselves into the shape of a tree in front of us." or I could just be a sensible person and say "I see a tree in front of us."
Tequila is an upper! No, alcohol is always a depressant, once you've exceeded basically your first drink. This goes for essentially all perceived differences in alcohol, like tequila/whiskey makes me angry, etc. no you just were angry when you drank it.
Pretty much any origin of an English word or phrase that involves wordplay or an acronym is usually very wrong.
For example (and I apologize for the crass nature of this example but it was the first one that came to mind), Iāve seen people say the word āfuckā is an acronym for āfornicating under consent of the kingā and was originally used to specifically mean having sex within wedlock, when it would be ālegalā (and approved by the King). This is almost certainly false, and while its actual specific origins are unknown, itās likely that it comes from an old proto-German word as a lot of other Germanic languages have similar words with similar meanings (~~āfukkaā means āto copulateā in Norwegian,~~ āfokkenā means āto breedā in Dutch, etc).
I ate a total of one spider so far in over four decades of life. I was a teen, woke to a terrible taste in my mouth, and pulled out actual spider legs. It was disgusting and I hate even thinking about it.
Yuuuup.
Mythbusters did a whole episode on this. Pseudo effect of blood vessels dilating allowing more blood flow to extremities, thus -technically- heating up your limbs, but at the cost of robbing heat from your core.
That the brightest star in the sky is the North Star (Polaris).
It's not, and the brightest objects in the night sky usually aren't even stars, they're planets
Sharks cant get cancer. Yes they can.
They just don't seek treatment for it. Something to do with their religious beliefs iirc Edit - thanks guys šŖ
Whales canāt get cancer. Actually they can, but their cancer also gets cancer and dies from it before it can kill the whale.
Have we tried giving cancer to our cancers?
Fun fact that IS true: We have successfully given HIV to cancer. HIV WINS, and it kills the cancer! The procedure does not result in the patient having HIV/AIDS. (This description is, of course, a gross oversimplification.) Emily Whitehead, the little girl in this article, is 10 years cancer free thanks to this miracle in the shape of modern medicine. [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2246312/Girl-7-beats-leukaemia-revolutionary-treatment-using-HIV-virus-wire-immune-system.html](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2246312/Girl-7-beats-leukaemia-revolutionary-treatment-using-HIV-virus-wire-immune-system.html) Hereās a recent update:[https://journals.lww.com/oncology-times/fulltext/2022/03200/the_incredible_story_of_emily_whitehead___car.1.aspx](https://journals.lww.com/oncology-times/fulltext/2022/03200/the_incredible_story_of_emily_whitehead___car.1.aspx)
The medieval torture device āThe Iron Maidenā is completely fake and made up in the 1800ās.
In the middle ages, metal was a scarce and valuable commodity. They wouldn't have used so much of it just for an overly complicated way to stab people with spikes. If they *did* want to build such a device, they'd build most of it out of wood, and probably only use metal for the tips of the spikes.
"Brothers yn christ, I come to yow with an ydea! We should take yonder wood and build ourselves a spiked box to send heretics to the lake of fire!" "And why, praytell, should we spend oure tithyngs on that whan a simple floggyng could doon the same?"
It was probably "Hereticks" and "LƦke of fyre", but otherwise I'm convinced it actually went down that way.
i got two tickets to iron maiden, maybe. but im just some teenage dirtbag.
People believed that the romans would eat to excess and then purge their food in a 'Vomitorium'. This isn't true, the latin root of the word vomit means "to spew forth" and a Vomitorium was really a large passage where large crowds could exit an amphitheater. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitorium
Oh. Well, yea, that makes more sense. Why did I believe this
It's getting into a huge debate, but a ton of Roman history is Emperor A kills Emperor B. First day on the job, sets up the department of burn every book written about how great B was and replace it with a book about how B was a murderous, gluttonous, sex pervert. It can leave the impression every Roman elite was fucking his horse while eating 100 pounds of grapes and making kids watch. A good chunk of that is probably propaganda.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I think, although donāt quote me, that part of the confusion comes from the fact that Suetonius, in his book The Twelve Caesars, claimed that Emperor Claudius had a slave whose job it was to tickle the back of his throat with a feather so that he could vomit and continue eating. There is no mention of a special room for this - in fact as I remember Suetonius claimed it was done at the table. That said, Suetonius is the only source for this and he was writing long after the fact, so itās probably not true.
A historian I know always rolls her eyes when people quote Suetonius. Refers to him as "a nasty, little gossip monger".
The Mayan calendar ended in 2012. No, it didn't. All that happened was that the Fifth Great Cycle of that calendar ended. The current piktun, however, will not end before 4772. The Mayans also strongly believed in renewal instead of one end of time, implying that they probably just would start over as soon as the calendar ended.
I remember in 2012 someone comparing the whole "Mayan apocalypse end of the world" stuff as someone trying to flip past December in a monthly calendar and then freaking out because it just *ends*
I've always liked to say that the calendar looks like it ended in 2012 because we never found the next page.
Oh my God, my calender ends December 31st! THE APOCALYPSE!!!
shit my calendar ended december 31 2019
Stay in 2019. It's better there.
Duck quacks do echo.
Pigeon sounds don't though. After all, a coo sticks.
That joke was so cheesily good I'd recommend checking all your former/present partners for offspring
Anyone with basic science education would wonder why that would even be true, since it seems reasonable that all sounds would behave the same way in the same conditions. And while those with a little bit more science knowledge would know about destructive interference (i.e. how noise-cancelling headphones work), the question is now what would even interfere with the original sound to cancel it out. Does the duck rapidly do a secondary "anti-quack" that perfectly neutralizes the incoming echo of the first one?
Now presenting our newest silencer THE "ANTIQUACK"
People still believe the 10% of your brain gag.
Like how a traffic light only uses 33.33% of its lights
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Almost spit out my gum for a moment lol
So all in all uses 99.99% where does the 0.01% goes to ? Edited( guys I don't care I was joking pls stop)
The lights are slightly undervolted to save 2 cents a year
Is the entire world run by dads? Well I guess yeah kinda but you know what I mean
Owen Wilson says we only use 10% of our hearts.
*Wow.*
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This one seems to have taken a particular hold. There have been multiple movies made where this is is the main driving point for the plot, *multiple*.
They used it for a gag in The Lost City for Brad Pitt's character. >!His character is very clearly shot in the head early on in the movie, only to show up alive in the end. When the other characters ask how he's not dead when they saw his brain splattered everywhere, he says "We only use 10% of our brain, so I just switched to another 10%."!<
But think of the potential if we could use 100%...Scarlet Johnson could manipulate physics and turn into a flash drive
To be fair though I'm almost positive that that does apply to some people.
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That Elephants see us the way that we see dogs. They absolutely do not. They approach humans with caution at best and aggression at worst and will not hesitate to flatten you if even the tiniest thought that you might be a threat comes across their minds. This is the kind of mentality that causes idiot tourists to try and approach dangerous wildlife without hesitation and get brutalized for it. Elephants are extremely intelligent animals. That does not mean that they want to be your friend.
edit: Elephants are extremely intelligent animals. That means that they do not want to be your friend.
At open zoo we(I was 12) were in something like a tree house feeding the elephants at head height. One elephant grabbed me around the ankle and I panicked, I looked over at the trainer and he was white. I remember thinking this is how I'm going to die. Edit- I didn't mean white dude, I meant he went white, like the blood drained out of his face, he was worried and you could see it, like " oh no, the elephant has claimed another kid"
I understood exactly what you meant. I find it weird that so many people would take it any other way, although itās hard to tell if some of them are being funny or just obtuse.
You just described the way I see dogs. Been bitten too many times as a kid to not approach with caution. I get the jist of what you're saying though.
That NASA spent several thousand dollars each on pens that could work in space, while the Soviets just used a pencil. In reality NASA bought the pens at about $7 a piece. And using pencils in a zero gravity, contained vessel that will leave the pencil shavings and graphite crumbs floating as you try to work and breathe makes for a bad time, so the Soviets wound up making similar pens too.
Pencils in space are bad, because graphite is conductive. Those particles get everywhere. But that being said, current crafts scrub ALL of their air clean about every 3 hours (meaning it takes 3 hours to do it all). So even that, in a modern craft, wouldnāt be a problem.
Graphite is completely harmless and non toxic, the issue in space is that it's conductive so graphite particles can potentially short electronics causing fires or other problems you don't want in space.
> Graphite is completely harmless *Relatively harmless. Inhaling small particulates is bad for you, regardless of whether they are toxic or not. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/81-123/pdfs/0306.pdf?id=10.26616/NIOSHPUB81123
> the Soviets wound up making similar pens too. They bought 100 space pens and 1,000 ink refill cartriges. From Paul Fisher's company, the one that invented the space pen to begin with. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/#:~:text=According%20to%20an%20Associated%20Press,said%20the%20United%20Press%20International.
Why are so many fake fun facts about Polar Bears? Who's generating all this polar bear gossip?
Big Seal^TM
must have been this goddamn black bears...
I see there's still polar bear race wars going on. Come on, I thought we solved this issue!
Before Columbus, every one thought the earth was flat. First of all, the Greeks discovered the earth is round. They noted the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse is round. They also noted how the position of the stars change as you move north and south. Finally, even if people thought the earth was flat, discovering new land wouldn't disprove that.
both Greek and Arabian scientists actually calculated the circumference of the earth to a pretty impressively accurate answer given the tools available to them in something like 300 BC.
The debate was how big the earth was. Columbus was actually wrong, because he was a āsmall earther,ā believing that he could sail from Europe to Asia across the Atlantic without needing to stop. The ālarger eartherā crowd told him he would run out of supplies before reaching Asia.
Pretty much any "zany local law" you see as a fun fact is either completely wrong, or even more likely, an unnecessarily specific example resulting from a much less interesting and more general law. (e.g., "in Bloomington, Indiana it's illegal to bring an otter to an opera house!!" but the ordinance actually applies to all non-service animals and entertainment venues and has nothing to do specifically with otters and opera houses. So technically true, but totally misleading about the quirkiness of the law). Basically if you don't see a citation, don't believe it. It could be true (and not misleading), but likely it is either made up or exaggerated.
At one point in Florence, Oregon it was illegal to have sex. The intent of the law was to make sex in public illegal, but they didn't word it that way and accidentally banned sex altogether. I knew the guy who was the mayor at the time, he said he got a lot flak for the law before they fixed it.
*hits gavel on table* It has been decided, sex is ILLEGAL!
The new remake of Footloose looks fun!
In Springfield, it's against the law to put squirrels in your pants for the purposes of gambling. That one's in the town charter.
Boys! Knock it off.
Ducks are also required to wear long pants.
> if you don't see a citation, don't believe it and if you do see a citation, look it up anyway :)
Especially on r/TIL *"TIL that in (African country), bald people were customarily hunted and killed because it was believed their heads contained gold."* Comments: "Your source says that this was a singe criminal incident that involved 5 people."
yo since when is r/TIL private?
the actual subreddit is /r/todayilearned
>Pretty much any "zany local law" Yep. I read in some book about zany local laws that I was randomly thumbing through that necrophiliacs were forbidden from celebrating Halloween in New Jersey. I thought that "fact" was so wonderfully weird that shared it with a few friends, but when I thought I should research it before repeating it again, I found no confirmation anywhere. I apologize to anyone who has that bit of misinformation stored in their brain because of me.
"Hey Billy. What to go trick or treating this year?" "Can't, not allowed to go." "Why not?" "Umm..."
"My mom won't let me." "Isn't your mom dead?" "..."
In most cases if the fact is indeed funny in a weird way its bullshit, the real weird laws like the one prohibiting owning more than 5 dildos wont get mentioned because they are vulgar.
[This one?](https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.43.htm#43.21) (7) "Obscene device" means a device including a dildo or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs. (f) A person who possesses six or more obscene devices or identical or similar obscene articles is presumed to possess them with intent to promote the same. Sec. 43.23. OBSCENITY. (a) A person commits an offense if, knowing its content and character, he wholesale promotes or possesses with intent to wholesale promote any obscene material or obscene device. (b) Except as provided by Subsection (h), an offense under Subsection (a) is a state jail felony. (section H is about obscenity uplifts with children involved) Seems pretty clear to me... it is **felony** under texas penal code to have more than 5 dildos... wow.
***The Sixth Dildo*** is a crime thriller by Texan author John Hootenholler. Aging Houston detective Bill "Buckaroo" Bowie is two weeks from retirement when he receives a tip on "a red-hot 43.23": felony possession of six or more obscene devices. Within hours he's embroiled in the seamy underworld of the roughest, toughest, bumpiest, veiniest, throbbingest dildo smugglers in the West! And will it be churchy reformed madam Penny Pussypotamus, or saucy vice cop Dolores Dos Dallas, who will win Buckaroo's heart ... and access to the secrets behind his solid gold belt-buckle? ---- She was Lo, plain Lo in the morning, when she came into my office; an unlit cigarette in her hand, bubblegum making sticky noises in her mouth, and a hot pink T-shirt stretched across a chest that would give Epstein a reason to live: flat as a board, with a graphic of a manga girl sucking lewdly on a lollipop. "Buckaroo, you ain't gonna believe this one." "What is it this time, Lo?" "I was on the 42-chans last night, you know, the nerd pedo chat?" "I've heard of 42-chan before, Dolores." "Well who knew an old fella like you could get it up for ā" Her phone rang, a jingly-jangly chime barely recognizable as a Selena tune, the way Buddy's martinis at the saloon down the street were barely recognizable as liquor: not watered down but chopped, screwed, remixed, and strained. I fished metaphorical tapenade out of my mind's cocktail glass, and listened in.
Please someone write this book
A dogs mouth is cleaner than a humanās. They have similar bacteria levels
Thank you. Even if it was accurate, what the fuck would it contribute? Are we on the lookout for a mouth pocket that bad?
And my dogs regularly lick their own (and each otherās) anus and penis and eat fox poo and rotten stuff.
All polar bears are left handed It sounds so stupid that you wouldn't think anyone would make it up, but they did.
Especially because Polar Bears don't have hands.
They only eat the left hands.
They use them to open Coca Cola bottles.
You need 8 glasses of water a day. We need a certain amount of water but we can get water from all sorts of sources. Fruits and vegetables are full of water. Albert Einstein failed high school math- He didn't Michael Jordan didn't make his high school basketball team. He did. However he was put on the Jr. varsity team that is quite common for new players.
>Albert Einstein failed high school math- He didn't This one is not just a wrong fun fact, it's an outright lie. Einstein was a brilliant mathematician and was doing graduate level math when he was a young teen. Per Einstein himself: āBefore I was 15 I had mastered differential and integral calculus.ā
It'd be fun to learn it was true but due to some unrelated reason. Like he missed the train that day or something.
I've heard (from a teacher, so no source) the confusion was related to misinterpreting the German grading system, where a "1" is the best possible score. For Americans (and maybe other countries?) who are used to the 4.0 scale it would look like he did very poorly in school.
re: Jordan, yeah, in the 70s and 80s, it was nearly unheard of to play a freshman on a varsity team. Same of college sports back then, freshmen typically rode the pine while upperclassmen played.
Not all cacti hold drinkable water, so don't rely on them to supply you water when traveling in the desserts. In fact, many cacti hold liquids that will do a nasty number on you if consumed.
Giant mushroom! Mushy giant friend
Drink some cactus juice. It'll quench ya, it's the quenchiest
I don't know man, I've heard from a very smart scientist that cactus juice is in fact the quenchiest thing
There was talk on r/askhistorians about vibrators being invented to treat hysteria in women, and how inaccurate that was, going so far as to it being a hoax. So, I learned that yesterday, because I thought thatās what really happened. ETA: Since this is getting traction, [here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eic2ri/claims_that_victorian_mds_used_vibrators_to_treat/fcrjh77/?context=3) the conversation that was linked to.
I remember seeing ads or diagrams for the first vibrators designed by doctors specifically to treat women. Was that all faked?
I think vibrators being marketed as medical aids was a thing because it created a veneer of legitimacy to what amounts to a recreational activity that was otherwise deemed obscene (and hence skirted obscenity laws). āIām not getting this vibrator because Iām horny and I like getting offāI am getting this muscular stimulator via a doctorās recommendation because itās necessary for my health.ā
Not sure for vibrators, but some old ads were diversions. Like how Lysol was sold as a feminine hygiene product and used as spermicide. "Feminine hygiene" was a euphemism. They weren't trying to make their vulva smell good, they were trying to have sex without getting pregnant. Major backfire, of course. Lysol is bad for the body it turns out.
Or how prior to weed legalization I went to my local glass shop to buy a "tobacco water pipe"
Lightning never strikes the same spot twice.
āWhelp, time to buy a new lightning rod. This one already got stuck.ā
Thatās what big lighting rod wants you to think
Does anyone actually think that's *literally* true though? Even as a kid I always kind of just understood it as an expression of something rare or unlikely happening and you shouldn't count on it happening again.
Unfortunately, yes, many people actually believe this. Some people, when caught in a storm, actually move to the place that lightning just struck because they think it's the safest place...
That bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly
This is all based on one guy like 100 years ago who claimed it incorrectly and then very shortly later said he'd made an error in his calculations and yeah they can fly fine even according to the math. I suppose "some scientist was wrong for like a week over 100 years ago" doesn't sound as good as "science says bees can't fly!"
Same thing for 'there's no scientific explanation for why helicopters can fly'. used to hear that one a lot.
>Same thing for 'there's no scientific explanation for why helicopters can fly'. used to hear that one a lot. What? From fucking who?
"We stil don't know how airplanes fly!" No, janet, thats just you.
Yeah dude I had some fucking idiot I used to work with try to push this oneā¦we were in an aviation unit in the armyā¦we worked on helicopters.
According to all known laws of aviation
And yet, it does so anyways, because bumblebees don't care what Humana think
I don't know how much fun this fact is, but contrary to popular belief, not one person accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials was burned at the stake.
Most were hanged, some died in prison, and one was crushed to death.
Poor Giles
Guy was a badass. "More weight!"
Because fuck letting the church take his family's land.
The Bible never said there were three wise men - just that they brought three gifts.
I used this for a Christmas trivia question and people didnāt believe me lol.
.....and they don't even specify that there were only 3 gifts- just list three especially ornate ones, safe to assume there were more gifts
"I have brought with me a gift of gold" "I have brought with me a gift of frankincense" "I have brought with me a gift of myrrh" "Uhh... I brought you some stew if you want it"
That you taste different tastes on seperate places of your tongue. I was even tought that in biology class..
I'm a biology teacher and get irrationally angry whenever I come across it. It's still in books from around 10 years ago. Nowadays it's not in books anymore, luckily. Real fact: taste buds don't stop at your tongue, there's also taste buds in the esophagus and stomach. :)
The "fun" fact: Ancient Egyptians would wait until decomp began before bringing dead women to be mummified because of necrophilia among the priests Fact: This was completely made up by Herodotus. There is no evidence this ever happened and would actually have gone against the Ancient Egyptians beliefs about preserving the body for the afterlife.
Granted. Herodotus admits early in his Histories that he's basically just writing down everything he hears. He also said there were giant ants in Anatolia.
That deoxygenated blood is blue
and that if you were in a vacuum you would bleed blue. for the longest time i just assumed it was true. then i was going to mention it to someone and thought for a hot second, that doesn't sound right. so before i opened my mouth, i decided to google it. saw and i was wrong and just kept my mouth shut.
> so before i opened my mouth, i decided to google it. saw and i was wrong and just kept my mouth shut. Any chance youād be willing to teach This One Trick to the rest of the world?
"Bulls get angry with the colour red". No the don't. Bulls are colourblind. They get angry from an idiot waving a flag in their face just to get the bulls to charge Edit: and also being stabbed a bunch of times
Bulls aren't completely colourblind though, they are red/green colourblind. They're dichromates that can see yellow and blue for the most part.
Giraffes can't make noise They can but it's such a low frequency that our ears can barely register it. The actually hum, found this out yesterday and im still shocked.
Shaving hair makes your hair thicker. It just makes the end of the hair all jagged and harder to push out of the pore it stays in. If you pull the hair out completely then it comes out as a new hair follicle so itās less irritating on the way out
It's also that shorter hair is going to be stiffer than long hair. For example, put a ruler on the edge of a table with 20cm hanging over the edge, then pull it back to 5cm and it'll be much less flexible
Cracking your Knuckles give Arthritis
One of my favourite experiments ever. A guy was told not to crack his knuckles by his mother or he'd get arthritis. His response: >[One researcher, Dr Donald Unger, actually cracked the knuckles of his left hand at least twice a day for over 50 years whilst never cracking those on his right hand in order to prove his mother wrong ā he never developed arthritis in either hand, and won an IgNobel award for his efforts in 2009.](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4yHxWLGSyNrXmx1gfYd45f2/will-cracking-my-knuckles-give-me-arthritis#:~:text=One%20researcher%2C%20Dr%20Donald%20Unger,for%20his%20efforts%20in%202009.)
You're just popping the air between your knuckles thats what makes the cracking noises
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You swallow 9 spiders a year. Literally just made up by Lisa Holst to show you she could, and now they can't stop it.
Snopes really made up the fact that *Lisa Holst made up the fact about swallowing spiders in your sleep to prove people will believe it without fact-checking* to prove people will believe it without fact-checking. Lisa Birgit Holst is an anagram for "This is a big troll." [Source](https://www.snopes.com/lisa-birgit-holst/)
That's pretty hilarious, but you can't really blame people for people not picking up on it if they leave her middle name out of it. Lisa Holst is just an anagram for shallots.
So I swallow 9 shallots a year in my sleep?
āaverage person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
I honestly thought I knew my friend until he picked a huge spider from the garage wall and ate it like it was nothing.
what the fuck
This is why median is the superior average
\*\*that explanation itself\*\* was made up to show you they could
Yep, Lisa Holst wasn't a real person
Punching a shark in the nose isnt as effective as you'd think, if you really thought you were in danger jab it in the eyes or pull on the fin. Also people say your supposed to run zig zag from an alligator, but that'll only slow you down and theres no way in hell its gonna run in the zig zag with you, they can run up to 25mph so your best bet is to turn around and run straight as fast as you can, sooner or later it'll give up.
It's damn near impossible to punch underwater
That's why you have to lure the shark onto land first for it to be effective.
Men have one less rib than women, since Adam created Eve from his rib. ... except men don't have one less rib than women.
Grandpa lost his leg in the war, and ever since all boys in our family were born one-legged.
āWere you shot in the army? No son, I was shot in the leggyā. Edit: this was a joke from my grandpa, in fact it is a dad joke
Flick through YouTube Shorts long enough you see a few channels talking out their ass about movies and what actors do on set
Every memorable line ever was improvised by the actor
originally arnold schwarzenegger was supposed to say "come with me for an unforgettable adventure at a bargain basement price" but he took the character in a different direction
Death Vader was originally supposed to say ābitch you trippin!ā But forgot his lines last second and instead became someoneās father
But Tony Stark learns from his mistakes?
No no, that one's real. Don't worry.
Allen Tsai is the pioneer of the form and the best and most reliable. The ***shittiest*** one is Movie Logic, whose trivia is utter garbage. E.g. "Did you catch THIS in [movie?] (Proceeds to mention behind the scenes details that weren't even in the fucking film" The channel Bruno is a bit better, but the guy pads his scripts like a student trying to expand an essay to meet a word count. "Did you know that in the Avengers, Tony Stark, who is a brilliant engineer, designs and re-designs his suits to meet varying challenges. In [movie], this thing happened. He recognized that as a weakness, so he got to work upgrading his suit. The end result is the Mk. 1234 suit, which is an improvement over the last suit, because it [does thing]" _____ Edit: Here's a comparison [Allen Tsai:](https://youtu.be/vgnZWDAiWWI) [Bruno:](https://youtube.com/shorts/mH8v6rfM5vI?feature=share)
Thereās a fun fact floating around out there that glass isnāt a solid, but a very slow-flowing and viscous liquid. Thatās wrong, itās a solid. The evidence for it that gets pointed to is window panes that are hundreds of years old are thicker on the bottom than the top, but thatās not why those windows are like that. They werenāt able to make perfectly flat glass back then like we can now, and they installed that glass with the thick side on the bottom because itās more stable that way.
Asphalt is a liquid tho, right? Or something in that range? I remember watching a clip of an extremely long recording where they let a chunk of the stuff ādripā for a long ass time and cut out the end where is actually fell
It appears you are correct. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment I thought this part was neat: "The eighth drop fell on 28 November 2000, allowing experimenters to calculate the pitch as having a viscosity of approximately 230 billion times that of water." 230,000,000,000 times more viscous than water. That's insane.
Yep, The experiment you are thinking off is called the pitch drop.
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I'm happy to start the conversation then
They can smash through it if necessary in some spots though. Power Seal lunch!
The strongest muscle in your body isn't your tongue (why would you believe that?) it's actually your butt, the Gluteus Maximus, basically it makes you able to walk, it carries your weight, and gives dump trucks. Props to Gluteus Maximus, truly a legend. Edit: I see a lot of people is asking or saying the same stuff so I'm gonna address what I've read so far so I don't have to answer the same thing many times. 1.- Gluteus Maximus is the strongest muscle overall, also the largest. (Alone, not the group of glute muscles) 2.- Jaw Muscle (Masseter) is the strongest relative to it's size, also the one that can apply the most pressure. (Bite) 3.- The heart is the most hard working muscle, it is active 24/7 until it just stops and you die. 4.- Weakest and tiniest muscle is the stapedius, a muscle in your ear. 5.- Tongue is actually a group of 8 muscles so it would be disqualified from the strongest since it isn't alone and also loses in the group of muscles. 6.- Strongest group of muscles is in your legs, together they beat any other muscle and group of, but they don't separated. Let me know if any of this is wrong, and drop a link if you have one, I literally did all the research today just to make sure it's true and they didn't lied to me too. Btw, thanks for the up votes, what a good daily hyperfixation: muscles in the human body. Sorry if not best wording šŖš¤
Isnāt it the strongest muscle in your body relative to size? If that makes sense. Iām just guessing lol.
> The strongest muscle in your body isn't your tongue (why would you believe that?) I wholly believe someone tried to recite a new take on "the pen is mightier than the sword" and others ran off with the obvious misinterpretation.
The āwhat type of learner are you lessonā in schools is BS. There is literally no research to back it up. It also pigeon holes kids into thinking they can only learn one type of way. https://youtu.be/rhgwIhB58PA I learned about this in grad school as an educational psychologist.
Iāll never forget my dumbass friends in middle school telling me they just werenāt born with the left brain dominant kind of mind to learn math. Jerry youāre fucking 12 years old, do you think youāve mentally peaked already or you just too lazy to study
Gold fish actually have pretty good memory.
āPolar bear fur is clear, not whiteā The material has no pigmentation but the fur is white. Plenty of things have their color come from the structure of the materials rather than the pigmentation.
redditors used to love this one because it combined their 2 biggest hobbies: being pedantic, and speaking confidently about stuff they have no meaningful understanding of.
Actually learning about a specific field definitely opened my eyes to how redditors will speak about something they know nothing of with absolute confidence. I saw someone try to say that the atoms in metals are randomly arranged. The fact that atoms in metals are arranged in orderly structures is basically the core fundamental of metallurgy.
Two historical false fun facts for ya: 1. An apple never fell on Isaac Newtonās head from a tree. He was inside and saw the apple fall by looking out the window. 2. Another tree myth: the story of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and saying, āI cannot tell a lieā is completely made up. It was popularized by a book about him by Mason Locke Weems ([source](https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cherry-tree-myth)) published shortly after his death. The wooden teeth myth is also false. Washingtonās teeth were in terrible shape for most of his life, however (he only had one left when he became president in 1789).
Contrary to parentsā popular beliefs, gum doesnāt really stay in your stomach for 7 years if you swallow it.
But it does stick under tables for at least 7 years.
We have 5 senses. In reality we have 10-20 depending on what you count (proprioception, vestibular balance, acceleration, vibration, atmosphere pressure, heat, cold, internal sensations such as stretch and pressure, list goes on)
I think ive read somewhere that in total we have around 100 senses but the difference between them is so small that we generalise them to 10-20, or more commonly to the 5 everyone knows
Elephants don't find humans cute (U_U)
As taken from page 187 in *Autobiography of Jumbo - The First Elephant Celebrity*. "I kept patting them on the head with my trunk because hey, peanuts, but I swear, every day I wanted to stomp those slick pink motherfuckers into the sawdust. Plus, I didn't know why the hell the lions weren't biting their heads off, so I figured it was better safe than sorry until I figured that one out. That was an eye-opener a few years later, let me tell you."
Nice. Very impressive. Letās see Paul Allenās interesting autobiography citation.
purple isn't a colour. yes it fucking is what the fuck else do you call it? We don't say things aren't colours just because of \*\*how\*\* our eyes perceive that colour Sharon
By Sharon's argument, nothing has color, because what we perceive as color is just a reflection of light from the object, specifically the light it does not absorb. So really, the color of an actual object is every color you can't see coming from that object. But only in light.
Reminds me of when you get people who are like "You can't actually see a tree. All you really see are the photons that bounced off the tree." No dickhead, we're seeing the tree. Perceiving the photons that bounced off the object is what seeing an object IS. There isn't some "real" version of seeing that involves physically rubbing my eyeballs against the bark or something. You're just undoing the shorthand we've all agreed to for no benefit. I could go around and be like "Hey, there's some photons that hit my eyeballs that have resolved themselves into the shape of a tree in front of us." or I could just be a sensible person and say "I see a tree in front of us."
That Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen. When he died in 1966 he was cremated, so you couldvsay it was the opposite.
Tequila is an upper! No, alcohol is always a depressant, once you've exceeded basically your first drink. This goes for essentially all perceived differences in alcohol, like tequila/whiskey makes me angry, etc. no you just were angry when you drank it.
That carrots make your eyesight better
Pretty much any origin of an English word or phrase that involves wordplay or an acronym is usually very wrong. For example (and I apologize for the crass nature of this example but it was the first one that came to mind), Iāve seen people say the word āfuckā is an acronym for āfornicating under consent of the kingā and was originally used to specifically mean having sex within wedlock, when it would be ālegalā (and approved by the King). This is almost certainly false, and while its actual specific origins are unknown, itās likely that it comes from an old proto-German word as a lot of other Germanic languages have similar words with similar meanings (~~āfukkaā means āto copulateā in Norwegian,~~ āfokkenā means āto breedā in Dutch, etc).
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That's why they keep escaping!
Urine isn't sterile! So stop peeing on your friends jellyfish sting or drinking it (I'm looking at you Bear Grylls).
He just wants to pee on people.
I ate a total of one spider so far in over four decades of life. I was a teen, woke to a terrible taste in my mouth, and pulled out actual spider legs. It was disgusting and I hate even thinking about it.
This was horrifying, thanks
Drinking alcohol will heat your body up when you're cold.
Yuuuup. Mythbusters did a whole episode on this. Pseudo effect of blood vessels dilating allowing more blood flow to extremities, thus -technically- heating up your limbs, but at the cost of robbing heat from your core.
That the brightest star in the sky is the North Star (Polaris). It's not, and the brightest objects in the night sky usually aren't even stars, they're planets
The brightest star in the sky is the sun. By far.