Myth: Dropping a Penny from the top of the Empire State Building is Dangerous. You’ve probably heard people say how if you drop a penny off the top of the Empire State Building, it will accelerate to such a speed that if it struck someone, it would kill them. This simply isn’t true at all, not by a long shot. […]
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Myth: Vikings warriors wore horned or winged helmets. To date, there is no evidence that any Viking warrior wore a horned helmet and there is significant evidence that they didn’t wear such impractical headgear. So how did this myth get started? A probable source is found in romanticized versions of the Vikings appearing around the mid17th century to 18th century, […]
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Myth: Microwaves cook from the inside out. Microwave ovens do not “cook from the inside out”, as many people say. Microwaves actually heat from the outside in, very similar to other heating methods. Microwaves are actually pretty simple devices. The core components needed for a microwave are simply a magnetron and a high voltage source. If you want to make […]
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Myth: Goldfish have a three second memory. In fact, goldfish actually have very good memories for fish. They can be trained to respond various ways to certain colors of light; different kinds of music; and other sensory cues. Not only that, but they seem to be able to remember things they are taught as much as a year later. Researchers […]
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Myth: Lemmings commit mass suicide. So when did this myth get started? Well, nobody knows exactly, but it was a 1958 documentary by Disney, which won an Academy Award, by the way, that appears to have popularized the myth. In the wildlife documentary White Wilderness, a few dozen lemmings were imported to Alberta, Canada so that they could be filmed […]
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Myth: “Hot dog” was coined at a New York Giants baseball game. You’ll often hear that the name “hot dog” comes from a cartoon drawn by T.A. Dorgan during a New York Giants baseball game at the Polo Grounds around 1902-1906 (date varies depending on who’s telling the story). At this game, he supposedly observed a vendor, Harry Stevens, selling […]
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Myth: It has been 823 years since the last time October had 5 Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays You may have seen this spread about in little cartoon pictures and on twitter/facebook/etc. In fact, it’s actually not rare at all for this to happen (last time it happened was 2004). It actually happens in the following pattern for months containing 31 days, not just […]
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Myth: The reason there is no Nobel Price for Mathematics is because Alfred Nobel’s fiancée wife had an affair with a mathematician. You’d be hard pressed to take any upper level university level mathematics course and not hear some variation of this story at least once per term from your mathematics professor (I personally have heard it from three different […]
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Myth: Listening to Mozart will make you smarter. This myth was popularized by an experiment published in Nature in 1993 by the University of California at Irvine. In this study, they had 36 students listen to 10 minutes of Mozart before taking a spatial IQ test. Their claim was that this increased the spatial IQ score of the students by […]
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Myth: Alcohol kills brain cells. Now, to qualify that title, pure alcohol will absolutely kill brain cells and many other types of cells, which is why it is used as a disinfectant. However, recent research has shown that the quantity of alcohol you could possibly take in, without killing yourself, does not introduce enough alcohol into your bloodstream to kill […]
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Myth: It is possible to swallow your tongue. Contrary to popular belief, it is not possible to swallow your tongue. Well, unless of course if you cut it off and then swallowed it… In any event, the tongue is rooted to the floor of the mouth by the lingual frenulum. This makes getting the tongue far enough back in the […]
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Myth: The Who song with “teenage wasteland” in the chorus is named “Teenage Wasteland” The song “Baba O’Riley”, written by Pete Townshend and performed by The Who, is often incorrectly called “Teenage Wasteland”. The actual name of “Baba O’Riley” was chosen in tribute to famed spiritual leader, Meher Baba, and musician Terry Riley, who provided the philosophical and musical influences […]
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Myth: Daddy Long Legs are the most poisonous spider in the world. Daddy Long Legs are not the most poisonous spider as you’ll often hear people say. We’ll just ignore the fact that there’s a big difference between “poisonous” and “venomous”, which makes the previous sentence even more ridiculous and assume people mean “venomous” when they make that statement. We’ll […]
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Myth: George Washington had wooden teeth. George Washington never had wooden teeth. Washington lost most of his teeth at a relatively young age and opted for dentures made by Dr. John Greenwood (maybe where the “wooden” teeth came from: “Greenwood teeth?”) In any event, they were carved from ivory and also contained quite a bit of gold and some lead. […]
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Myth: Diamonds are formed from coal. According to evolutionists and geologists, diamonds were formed about 1–3 billion years ago, that’s way earlier than any known record of even the Earth’s first land plants let alone coal. Coal, known as a fossil fuel is formed from the dead remains of vegetation like trees, ferns and other plants and life. The formation […]
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Myth: De-oxygenated blood turns blue. The common misconception that blood that lacks oxygen turns blue probably comes from the fact that veins appear blue and blood in the veins is typically heading back to the lungs, hence depleted of oxygen. It is also possibly from the fact that when people are suffocating or the like, their lips and complexion seem […]
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Myth: Caesar Salad was named after the Roman Emperor title. Caesar Cardini was an Italian born chef who immigrated to the United States after World War I. Despite having a home in San Diego, the Cardini family operated a restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, primarily because of prohibition. Many Americans would go to Tijuana to drink, so business for restaurants at […]
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This, of course, is because “PS” stands for “postscript”. This comes from the Latin “post scriptum” (sometimes written “postscriptum”), which translates to “written after”, or more to the point, “what comes after the writing”. Thus, PSS would mean “postscript script”, which doesn’t really make sense in this context. Rather, the correct way to write this abbreviation is “PPS” for “post-postscript” […]
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