cute factoids/trivia that you used to accept as truth but (oops) later found to be 100% false and a little bonkers: post them here

not trolling; this zelda sword i got from etsy was really cruddy.

i thought it was to 'become an expert' rather than to just 'learn' something

that's what it said in expert journalist malcolm gladwell new book

gladwell has certainly put in the required 10k hours to become an expert in spurious factoids.

right -- it's expertise. still fuzzy, but in that book and others there's all sorts of surveys where they noticed that even child prodigies ended up spending about 10 years worth of time getting to jedi-level, which is a very encouraging thing -- you don't have to be 'blessed' or 'gifted'; you just have to be willing to put in the time. (which is now weirdly the opposite lesson Lucas gives with midiclorians and everything)

wiki:

Some characteristics of the development of an expert have been found to include:

At a minimum usually 10 years of consistent practice, sometimes more for certain fields[citation needed]

In fairness to Gladwell, that 10-year thing was in some of our psych texts long before he started evangelizing.

I just learned the ponies thing just now, on this very thread. In fact, I was at the Cleveland Zoo this weekend, and overheard a guy say to his wife, "Oh, there are the ponies," and I nearly said, "Oh, those aren't ponies, they're really small horses." Boy, would I have felt stupid.

what do you call small horses if not ponies?

Someone who takes seven hits or more of LSD is considered "legally insane."

I don't know how much I ever really believed this, but I never really thought to research/argue it and just kind of went along with the crowd. And now that I think about it, I never really found out it wasn't true. I just stopped taking acid and realized how stupid it sounded and decided that it must be false.

I thought ponies were immature horses.

ponies are small horses, just not baby horses.

I mean, not all small horses are ponies, ponies are a variant of the horse - you can get different breeds of pony, and you can get small horses that aren't ponies. But they are small, and horses.

someone please bust out a venn diagram because i thought i had this pony thing licked but now not so sure.

Licking pony things is a little weird.

http://i237.photobucket.com/albums/ff28/beatonna/pony2.jpg

That is one chunky pony!

BTW, google charts is amazing!
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=v&chs=200x100&chd=t:100,30,60,100,30,50,100&chco=FF6342,ADDE63,63C6DE&chdl=horses|ponies|small

(I think it's a little off, but you can change the overlap values and sizes by renaming the image URL)

Haha, I didn't imagine my pony factoid would come as revelation to anyone else!

Just in case it's unclear to someone:

foal = baby horse
pony = small-sized horse breed

Thinking ponies are baby horses is kinda like thinking dwarves are baby humans.

Tuomas, please, only one mind-blowing factoid per day.

i always love it when tuomas brings content

Tuomas PWNied us.
(sorry)

i have a old old book at home entitled "PONIES and All About Them" at home that explains all of this... and more!

pony = generaly a horse breed under 14.2 hands

this is a great thread.

^ statement of fact; not fake-fact.

generally but not exclusively. Now I am going to stop being a pony-bore

xpost

cauliflower is just broccoli that has been deprived of sun while growing

broccoli is a modern cross of cauliflower and spinach, named for the james bond producer

One can catch a cold simply by being under-dressed in cold weather.

^ my mutha still tries to convince me of this.

I worked with a guy who agreed that cold weather does not cause colds, but then insisted that the real culprit was wind.

And the corollary, one can catch cold by going outside in cold weather with your hair still wet.

i kind of grew up believing the old miasma/proximity sickness line, not transmission through fluid/contact/etc. i suspect a lot of people i work with still feel this way.

if you swallow a watermelon seed it will grow in your stomach.

One can catch a cold simply by being under-dressed in cold weather.

― musicfanatic, Thursday, April 8, 2010 6:15 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

tbf I do notice a 'correlation' between when I'm underdressed for cold weather and when I catch a cold...I think cold weather lowers my immune system.

I used to believe that earaches were caused by some builtup earwax or water in your ears or something else ear-related. Wrong! The sensory organs for your ears are actually in your throat! That's why you always get an earache when you have a cold: because your poor throat is trying to deal with all the dripping snot and it irritates your ear-sensors!!

if you swallow a watermelon seed it will grow in your stomach.

― armando white (dyao), Thursday, 8 April 2010 01:57 (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

rugrats episode once upon a time taught me this was true and i refuse to believe otherwise.

^ Yeah, I've read that the reason cold/flu season correlates with cold weather is because cold weather makes people stay indoors more, thereby causing one to be in contact with infected people.

Kind of like how the correlation between ice cream consumption and the number of deaths by drowning are positively correlated. Eating ice cream doesn't cause an increase in drownings, both events just occur more frequently in the summer months. Yada yada.

If you swallow fingernails or chewing gum, they will stay in your stomach for over a year. Wrong!

"There are plenty more fish in the sea"- I checked and there aren't, it's actually a really big problem

cauliflower is just broccoli that has been deprived of sun while growing

While thats not the case, you do deprive cauli of sun when it is growing to ensure it is nice and white (the leaves are grown up and covered over the cauli florets). If you dont do this it grows kind of a brown or greyish colour I think.

bond fans: you shouldn't order your martini "shaken not stirred" if it's made with gin. shaken gin gets bruised. vodka is ok.

it takes you 10,000 hours of practice to learn a skill/it takes 10 years to learn a skill

From what I remember I'm pretty sure one or both of those is supposed to be mastering a skill, not just learning it. Obviously it takes less time to learn a skill.

that drinking Kool Aid makes your cock bigger

shaken gin gets bruised

Did not know this (not that ive ever asked for a shaken martini)

how can you bruise a liquid?

I, for one, have gotten cramps/upset stomach from swimming after eating.

I knew that cold+dry weather didn't cause colds but still believed until recently that getting drenched + wearing wet clothes was a bad idea

actually I still sorta believe this even though I have now been berated for clinging on to this old wives' tale, cz being rain-soaked and not having a chance to dry off is not nice and makes you feel shitty and headcoldy IME, can't quite convince myself that in fact you may as well just tell yrself you're perfectly comfortable because there's nothing wrong with staying like that all day

that drinking Kool Aid makes your cock bigger

― Phoenix in Flight (Cattle Grind), Thursday, April 8, 2010 6:13 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that drinking Kool Aid doesn't make your cock bigger

how can you bruise a liquid? Yeah I did wonder.