Browsing the archives for the hoaxes tag.
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Some Common Misconceptions

Just generally interesting

This has little to do with willpower or with writing, but it’s worthwhile regardless. Here’s something I read on the site XKCD.com the other day:

Misconceptions comic

"Misconceptions," from the Web comic XKCD.com

Reading it, I was of course intrigued and went straight to the Wikipedia article on “Common Misconceptions,” mainly to see if there could possibly be anything there I didn’t know. Which, uh, there was. A couple of highlights:

  • Napoleon wasn’t particularly short
  • Pilgrims didn’t wear buckles on their shoes and hats
  • Scientists do in fact understand how a bumblebee can fly
  • Different flavors are not detected solely on separate areas of the tongue

A couple of these were things I only learned recently (like the lemmings thing, though I had suspected that was made-up for a long time. There’s a gruesome fact in there about Disney, though). One (“People do not use only ten percent of their brains”) is something I’ve blogged about on this site. Highly recommended reading!

On a related subject, in case you don’t already know about it, I’d like to recommend Snopes.com for any time you question an urban legend or get an e-mail that you think might be a hoax. Snopes.com is the one site that I can think of that is so useful that I am willing to go there even though it features a lot of annoying pop-up ads.

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