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

Ponies are horse children.

still argue with my gf about that

Chicago was nicknamed the Windy City due to all the "hot air" its politicians blow.

When I was maybe 21 or 22, a friend of mine mentioned in a pub conversation that she only found as an adult that ponies aren't the children of horses, and I was like, "They aren't?!".

When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.

Ponies are horse children.

I fucking love this sentence.

what foal doesn't know that

nag nag nag

Ponies are horse children.

My Little Horse Child

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

this is true! at least in the sense in that it hasn't been systematically proven false yet.

I don't know how they decided on "10,000 hours", but I guess it's snappier than "a long period of concentrated effort".

thread title makes it sound like one particular ilxor is responsible for calling bs on all of these. what a servant to humanity.

Until you have a better descriptor than 'oh it just takes some time', 10k hrs/10 yrs is as good a rule of thumb as any, and even if it is mythical by some measure, it's a myth worth propagating.

Mount Everest is in England

getting zinged by a 7 year-old is cute, but they can't pull Bobby Fischer-level zings till 5th grade or so, and that's assuming they've been zinging from the womb.

skills i learned in <10 years:

walking wanking

― The Toxic C@v3nger Part IIIJJJ: The Last Temptation of Toxie (history mayne), Thursday, April 8, 2010 1:41 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah um don't most trade apprenticeships take 5 years or less?

You want your Zelda swords made by a master craftsman or some drifter straight out of forging academy who's applying to law school next semester?

you need more practice trolling imo

the ponies (non-)fact has blown my mind.

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.