Tag: truth

A Pack Of Lies

Somebody (Hitler? Goebbels? Lenin? Trotsky?) once said, “If you tell a big enough lie loud enough and long enough people will eventually believe it.”  It’s terribly ironic that, in the Age of Information, there are quite a few of those kind of “truths” kicking around, and a lot of what we call common knowledge is just a load of crap.  Here are some glaring examples that just fall apart when you think about them:

1 – Einstein did NOT fail high school math.  Think about this for a minute!  The guy was a genius who E=MC2-ed himself to the top of the intellectual ladder, along with Newton, Copernicus and da Vinci.  What are the chances he had trouble with Grade 10 algebra?  Besides, the records show that he skipped most of what we would call high school, anyway.

2 – You can NOT see the Great Wall of China from space.  Here’s the deal.  Yes, the Great Wall is absolutely huge.  Yes, it’s the largest man-made structure on earth, and yes, it runs for thousands of kilometres, but — surprise — it’s less than 4 metres (12 feet) wide.  Your house is probably wider.  Looking down from space, the Great Wall of China is invisible — just like your house.

3 – You do NOT use “only” 10% of your brain.  The truth is, even with all our advanced technology, we know so little about the brain’s function that nobody knows how much of our brain’s capacity we actually use.  However, given some people I’ve worked with, 10% might be wildly optimistic.

4 – Coca-Cola™ does NOT dissolve teeth.  Folks, they use dental work to identify bodies that have been lying around for centuries.  Every museum on Earth has at least one set of Cro-Magnon chompers.  The corrosive elements that Mother Nature can throw at the human body make Coca-Cola look like a bubble bath.  This is just another Coke™ myth that circles our planet once a generation.

5 – Undercover cops do NOT have to tell you they’re police.  Police, undercover or otherwise, cannot entrap you into committing a crime, but they are under no legal obligation to identify themselves before you commit that crime on your own.  Use your head!  If undercover cops had to tell you they’re cops, it would kinda defeat the whole purpose of “undercover,” now, wouldn’t it?

6 – Jedi is NOT a recognized religion anywhere in the world.  Despite the best efforts of literally millions of Star Wars nerds, no national or international body outside a few fans clubs views Jedi as an organized religion.  The word is you can claim to be a Jedi on your income tax form and reap all the religious benefit and advantages.  You can’t.  Don’t believe me?  Try it!

7 – There are NOT more people alive today than have ever lived in all of history.  Do the math!  Even using the ten millennia of recorded history, fifty generations a millennium and the current reproductive rate of 23 per thousand (for most of history, it was closer to 80) the result is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 billion people.  Even counting all the lost Australian backpackers, at 7 billion, this generation isn’t even close.

8 – Mr. Rogers was NOT a Navy Seal sniper in Vietnam.  Quit saying that!  There is absolutely no evidence that Fred Rogers served in the military, nor even that he ever left the continental United States — although there’s an e-rumor that he went to Maui once, on vacation.

And finally

9 – You do NOT eat 7, 9, 12 or 16 spiders every night in your sleep.  Spiders prefer dry, still, quiet places where they can spin a web and catch themselves some breakfast.  Occasionally, maybe, a single spider might venture across your bed, but, unless they’re unusually stupid, the inhale/exhale of breathing air would scare them off.  I’m sure this lie gets retold so much because it’s a guaranteed gross out.

Just The Facts! 2021

Back in the day, we had something called facts.  They were amazing little immutable things that helped us figure out what was actually going on in the world.  They separated the truth from the bullshit and gave us an anchor on reality.  Those days are gone.  In the 21st century, facts are an endangered species.  We kinda prefer spin to the truth.  After all, it’s a lot easier to simply accept ideas than spend valuable Netflix time thinking about them.  Unfortunately, we’ve gotten to the point where we’re putting so much spin on the truth that even Meghan Markle’s getting dizzy.  But don’t despair.  Facts still exist, although they’re surprisingly hard to find.  Here are a few I’ve managed to ferret out.

The first birthday present you were ever given is your name.

If you’re trying to fall asleep, you have to pretend you’re asleep first – and sneak up on it.

More Americans have had sex with Taylor Swift than have died of Ebola.

You can’t burn anything twice.

Humans can’t actually “bite down” on anything.  The jaw is hinged the other way.  In order to move your top teeth down you have to move your whole head.  Try it!

(You just tried it, didn’t you?)

You can’t keep your eyes open when you sneeze unless you consciously decide you’re going to keep your eyes open when you sneeze — before you do it.

Somebody on this planet has eaten more kale than anybody else and should be in the Guinness Book of World Records.

If you say something is “indescribable,” you have, in fact, described it.

The make-believe CGI streetlights in video games are actually using electricity so you can see them.

There is only one possible way that the original moon landing was fake:  if it wasn’t filmed on location.

It’s not premarital sex if you never get married.  Face it, folks!  It’s just sex.

And finally, one philosophical little gem:

For the rest of your life, you’re never going to be as young as you are at this exact moment.

The Wheel — A History

wheel

Everybody yips about The Wheel as the greatest invention of all time.  What a media whore!  Think about it!  What can you actually do with a wheel?  Not much!  Try it!  Look around for something round, (pie plate, saucer, jar lid, even one of those ancient DVD discs — it doesn’t matter.)  Now, try and find a use for it.  Frankly, once you’ve done Frisbee, you’re pretty much finished.  The fact is, despite the hype, a wheel, by itself, is absolutely useless.  And whoever invented it must have been a dumbass.  Imagine the caveman conversation.

“Hey, Marvin!  What you got there?”
“I call it a wheel.”
“Cool!  What does it do?”
“Watch this!  I just give it a push, and look, it rolls all the way down the hill.”
“Cool!  And — uh?”
“And nothing.  I go down, carry it back up the hill and do it again.”
Serious silence.
“Dude!  We’re like friends and everything, but that is totally stupid.”
“That’s all you know.  The wheel is going to be a big thing, someday.  It’s goin’ be as big as like fire, probably.”
“Man, you gotta stop lickin’ those shiny frogs.”

Here’s the deal.  In order to do anything except roll away, wheels need other wheels.  Plus, they need something to control the spin and some way to attach the spin to something else (i.e. transfer the energy.)  In other words, they need an axle, and that concept it very complicated.  It took prehistoric humans 10,000 years of circular hit and miss just to figure out they could use tree trunks as rollers to move heavy stuff like stones.  And it was another millennium plus before Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II’s two-wheeled chariots kicked the crap out of the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 B.C.  However, it was actually a Roman genius, Vitruvius (who most people have never heard of, BTW) who unleashed the tireless potential of the wheel axle, when he built and used the first vertical waterwheel around the time of Christ.  Eighteen hundred years later, steam turned the wheels axles of the Industrial Revolution, and from there, it didn’t take very long (less than 200 years) for NASA’s Planetary Surface Exploration Device to be doing wheelies on Mars.

So even though the wheel gets all the credit, it’s really the tireless work of the axle that is one of the greatest human achievements of all history.