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

where I come from it's the rule of redwood xxxp

but it's actually for husband beating

Elephant and Castle comes from Infanta de Castille, Spanish princess who stayed in the area in them middle ages.

http://i43.tinypic.com/30rtaf5.jpg

dyao, gettin ready to whip sum ass

I don't have a husband :o

you'l;l find someone some day, don't worry. enjoy ur youth

eh carrots are high in beta carotene and other antioxidants, which in the long term are good for your eyesight

Carrots contain lots of beta-carotene, which the body converts into vitamin A, which is required to produce the substance required for night vision. But plenty of other foods contain vitamin A too. Blindness due to vitamin A deficiency is still a problem in developing countries, but I don't think extra carrots will make any difference to, well, anyone alive now who was ever told that carrots would help them see in the dark.

(not a nutritionist)

from my understanding the area in your eyeball responsible for converting light into electrical signals contains a lot of free radicals as a byproduct of the conversion process (makes sense, as light = energy). over time these free radicals wear down the receptors in your eye, which leads to gradual blindness. so eat your vegetables, kids.

n e way the carrot thing was wartime propaganda, im told by snopes

Janet Leigh wasn't in the shower scene in Psycho, it was a double (she was!)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/29/psycho-body-double-marli-renfro says otherwise

my chemistry teacher told us that you don't grow any new brain cells but i have recently discovered that this was a lie.

(or at least a misconception)

the shower scene includes hecka shots (70?) and leigh was in some of them, maybe not all of them

'"eskimos" have over 100 words for snow'

if you could somehow collect all the gold ever mined since the beginning of time, it would form a cube 40 feet on a side

(wikipedia says the cube would be 66-½ feet on a side, but I'm still not buying it)

The US military take all possible actions to avoid civilian casualties

The way I heard it was "the cube would fit underneath the Eiffel Tower"

I'd always believed the swimming after eating advice is because your body is doing more work after a meal, so you are more likely (although not that much) to get too tired to continue swimming/stay afloat, and end up drowning. This is going to be a bigger problem if you are swimming in a large body of water – like a sea or a lake – and are a long way from shore.

But I could be wrong.

I thought it was to stop you getting cramp and drowning.

Some people say that those supposed "cramps" were actually heart attacks.

SMOKING A CIGARETTE TAKES X MINUTES OFF YOUR LIFE, WHERE ( 3 < X < 15 )

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?

Banana answered 2 years ago
Yes. I've heard that it's even illegal today to name a child Benedict Arnold in the United States

yahoo answers

feel like fucking Snopes here

My daughter is quite a history buff, and in particular a fan of the Arnolds. [...] She tells me that there is an old Federal law which prohibits the the name of Benedict Arnold from being 'cut in stone or cast in iron'. Benedict Arnold was actually Benedict Arnold V and the graves of his father and grandfather were razed in response to this law. This is also, in part, why monuments to Arnold's victories do not bear his name. The only citation to the law she could give me was from an A & E documentary though. Perhaps someone with a legal background, or access to a legal database could check to see if this fellow is in violation of the law.
16 posted on 4/1/2004, 12:38:05 PM by cephalopod

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1109343/posts

There are few names as reviled in American history as that of General Benedict Arnold. However, through much of the Revolutionary War, Arnold was considered one of the fledgling country's greatest heroes, with a number of successful campaigns against the British under his belt and the unparalleled devotion of his men to his credit. This biopic takes a look at what caused this man to betray his country in such a brazen manner that Congress ordered that his name never be carved in stone or metal.

from a review of the A&E biopic Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor (2003)

Smoking marijuana seeds will leave you sterile, unable to have children. I remember when I high school friend and I wouldn't take the time to clean the seeds out, we would both feel a little stress out after smoking.

did you know that we only use about 10% of our brains? makes you think, huh?

(bafflingly enough, I heard this from a philosophy professor, of all people, years after I learned what utter crock it was)

― broa super (unregistered), Wednesday, April 7, 2010 3:48 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Obviousy Luc Bresson believes it or he'd have no story for Lucy.
Bet I'm not the first person to say that.

I think one fits here..

I read one time (I feel sure) that in rape trials, the judge is obliged to say that female defendants 'may lie'. I mentioned this many years ago here on ILX, but it seems it's complete bol.

.. The judge is obliged during summing up to the jury, to say (etc)

A law was passed making it illegal to have his name in rock or in metal.

lazy ilm zing here