Killing Mind

Look, I know the truth spoils this kind of stupidity, but in the hope of spreading just a sprinkle of education, allow me to rebut. It seems to me that the information to follow will suit two types of people - those healthy sceptics lacking the evidence to refute the claims, and secondly, those not so far gone towards the ignorant gullibility that pervades our generation, that they may be convinced that there occasionally exists misleading statements in heavily forwarded emails.

For the sake of the few remaining sane people, will people please exercise some scepticism before the news is completely replaced by the Today Tonight Current Affair propaganda machine. I recall learning about wartime propaganda compaigns in High School History classes, and to me the lessons always seemed to be describing some artificial world where people were susceptible drones. I now realise that for similar propaganda to work all we need is the same kind of spoon fed, blissfully ignorant population we have now.

1. Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.

Tried it? Apples work to boost your attentiveness because they are full of sugar, which is about as close to useful energy for the body as you can get. Caffeine works because it blocks the receptors that would normally allow our brain to become relaxed and slow. There is nothing special in an apple - a banana or even an energy bar or energy drink will have the same effect.

I suspect the reason this rumour is spreading is because less and less people are eating breakfast. Eat anything in the morning and it will help to wake you up. Its called breakfast for a reason (it breaks the night's fast). The energy in breakfast is critical for functioning during the day. Caffeine is a very effective drug in keeping people awake. Unfortunately you can grow a tolerance to it, and generally, it's not quite as healthy as an apple. So if you routinely eat very little in the morning, an apple is going to work wonders - particularly when launched at your head. If however, you need to stay awake, you can't beat a concoction of caffeine and amphetamines.

Actually you can... check out the story behind modafinil if you're after the good stuff.

2. Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button.

Well of course he did - he was born a human.

It's possible it was obscured during surgery later in his life, but I can't find any reliable evidence of this. I suppose the rumour may have originated from a joke that one could imagine being told, relating Alfred's alternate method of attachment to his mother's woom, and his last name...

3. A pack-a-day smoker will lose approximately 2 teeth every 10 years.

Actually it's closer to 3 for men and 1.5 for women, according to the Academy of General Dentistry, which this is obviously an insufficient paraphrase of. The subtle change is from the study's conclusions about pack-a-day smokers "on average", to the one-liner's claim that "a smoker will lose", is the kind of deceitful sensationalism that drives that drivel they put on commercial TV stations. A very large number of people will lose none. That's how averages work.

There's no evidence that this trend continues for "every" 10 years either, and it is important to put the figure into context: according to the same study, non-smokers lose 1.3 teeth on average in the same period.

The AGD's summary of the study is here: http://www.agd.org/consumer/topics/tobacco/cigarettes.asp

4. People do not get sick from cold weather; it's from being indoors a lot more.

Once again, the context is gone, so the conclusion to be drawn is blurred. What was actually said, by NBC News medical correspondent Dr. Ian Smith, was “The reason why colds are more common in fall and winter is because people are inside more often during those seasons. When you’re inside it’s easier to spread disease and germs because you are inhaling them in the air. During warmer weather people are outside more and thereby taking in fresh air.� (check the MSNBC website for the article).

True that, I say. This should not really come as a shock to anyone. Every since we've known about germs and bacteria and so forth, we've known that you don't catch a cold from the cold. You catch it from germs in the air. However, if you should consider hypothermia a method of "getting sick" then I'd suggest cold weather is probably a significant factor.

5. When you sneeze, all bodily functions stop, even your heart!

Hardly worth the rebuttle. If your heart stops, you're in a really bad way. I quite enjoy sneezing, and it doesn't seem to have a lot in common with the near death experiences I've read about. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest sneezing attack was 978 days. That's quite a period of time for your heart to be stopping, and your bladder and your stomach and your everything stopping.

Sneezes are freaking cool, but what makes them so special that they might stop everything? What about all the muscles moving in concert to blast the air out through your nose? Do they stop working? How can we hear the noise of our own sneeze if our ears have shut down? And besides, how do we even live if our brain shuts down? My, what a paradox. Unless..... it's total bullshit.

6. Only 7 per cent of the population are lefties.

According to the "Left-handedness" paper by Hardyck & Petrinovich, published in the Psychological Bulletin, 8-15% of people are left handed. Basically, the "7 per cent" statistic is absolutely true, for some definiton of "population". Since the definition is not supplied however, it is quite worthless.

Incidentally left-handedness is associated with lots of fascinating correlations. Unfortunately there have been few studies with large enough samples to confidently determine statistically significant results, hence the rampant rumour mongering and even prejudice and superstition. It's a pity this pasttime is so appealing to many.

7. Forty people are sent to the hospital for dog bites every minute.

Lets do some estimation. According to an article published by The Medical Journal of Australia titled "The public health impact of dog attacks in a major Australian city" by Peter G Thompson, 7.3 per 10 000 people per year seek hospital treatment as a result of dog attacks. Extrapolating to a guess of 3 billion people worldwide who live near dogs, we find that means about 4 hospitalisations per minute. Out by a factor of 10, but lets step into the world of an American before we shoot this one down.

A survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (published in the Injury Prevention 1996 journal as "Dog bites: how big a problem") concluded that dogs bite more than 4.7 million people (~2% of USA population) annually. About 1 in 6 of those require medical treatment and in 2001, an estimated 368 245 victims went to hospital emergency departments (from the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report July 4th, 2003 article). That makes about 1008 incidents a day and about 42 an hour. I suspect America probably slightly over-represents the dog population of the world, given its relatively low population density and high personal wealth (and the fact that various statistics I found seem to support this). Therefore, erring well on the side of caution we could extrapolate this statistic to the world by multiplying by 20 (America represents 4.6% of the world population) to arrive at an estimate of 14 per minute. Considering that much of the world's population outside America do not come into contact with dogs very often, and may not have hospitals that are available for treating such things, I suspect the original statistic is bogus. Further, I'd suggest that somewhere along the line an American has forgotten the rest of the world exists, and either that person, or one of their helpful peers, has mixed up their hours and their minutes, arriving at the 40 per minute figure that appears.

8. Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until they are 2-6 years old.

Healthy babies certainly are born with kneecaps. They appear around 4 months after conception. They don't ossify until the 2-6 year period however, so aren't particularly bony until then. This is similar to other bones in an infant.

Why not check with your friendly local baby. Have you not seen a baby's knobbly little knees? If the silly critters could stay on their feet long enough you would have probably noticed. But no, they're too busy crawling on their hands and.... hang on, their knees! No wonder they're crying and throwing up all the time - the spastics are crawling around without any kneecaps.

No, unless your precious little mess is suffering from "Nail Patella Syndrome" their kneecaps are probably quite intact.

9. The average person over 50 will have spent 5 years waiting in lines.

Since the average life expectancy is around 78, the average person over 50 is probably about 64. Five years is 7.8% of their life. That means on average, this person has waited in a line for 112 minutes every day. Every week that's over 13 hours in a line. How's your week been?

I just can't figure out who these average people are. Actually I was waiting in line for ages the other day. It was Autonomy Day and I lined up for a drink for 15 frigging minutes. Twice. And I whinged about it for yonks. Half an hour of lining up. I was pissed. I reckon I'd be one cranky mofo if I was "the average person".

10. The toothbrush was invented in 1498.

A certain type was, yeah. According to various reliable sources on dentistry and history, the Chinese used a handle of bone or bamboo tied to the hairs from the back of a hog's neck. It seems widely agreed that this appeared in 1498. Civilisations have been using frayed sticks for millennia before that, and the nylon bristled brush we use today was invented in 1938.

In any case, it's certainly a bold claim to stick a year of invention on "the toothbrush".

11. The average housefly lives for one month.

Yeah, was reading about this recently actually. I'd heard various claims about their life span and it seems there is a common misconception that they only live for a day. The answer is a little tricky, which probably has a lot to do with the misinformation buzzing around (ho ho).

The time a fly lives for varies greatly depending on its species and environment. The mayfly, which is not actually a fly at all (belongs to a different order that, incidentally, is named for its unusual life history pattern) only flies around for about 24 hours. Another difficulty is that a fly goes through several significant life stages, so it is not at all clear what is meant by "lives for", and the answer is often different to the "life cycle period". That said, female houseflies live as flying adults for 3 to 4 weeks. The male houseflies, give up about only a couple of weeks, most likely because they are sick of the females flapping around making so much noise.

12. 40,000 Americans are injured by toilets each year.

One must first consider the fact that a toilet is usually a fairly peaceful creature, not prone to injuring anyone. I hazard a guess that in fact, no toilet has ever injured an American. But given that many American's discount their own behaviour in matters of injury, let us pursue a little more.

According to various sources that actually publish this inane data, people are often treated with injuries caused from contact with a toilet because they have: been spewing up in it all night and copped the seat in the back of the head or forgot to continue to hold their head up; blindly planted their arse down on the unseated throne, wedging themselves in the bowl; become stuck in the goose neck attempting to retreive a prized possession; managed to catch their dicks in the falling seat or lid; or slipped getting out of the bath, landing unpleasantly on the bowl. I am sure many of these Americans would be children, new to the delights offered by the toilet and prone to sticking fingers where they shouldn't be while executing less than graceful maneuver.

Is it 40 000 Americans every year? That's less than 1 in 7000 Americans and sounds plausible to me. I reckon in a random group of 7000 Americans you could find one that is young, clumsy, fat, sick or inquisitive enough to earn themselves an injury during the year.

13. A coat hanger is 44 inches long when straightened.

That's fucking amazing.

14. The average computer user blinks 7 times a minute.

I can't find the relevant study, but this seems reasonable. An adult blinks around 10 times a minute, but there is widespread variation, with some adults blinking up to 15 times a minute. A newborn actually blinks less than two times per minute. When we are excited or concentrating (on a book or a computer screen for example), we blink less. Seven times a minute sounds about right. Good-o - perhaps the blinking rate of a computer user is significant to someone.

15. Your feet are bigger in the afternoon than any other time of day.

Usually, yeah, but it's not the time of day that is significant. People tend to sleep horizontally where fluids in the body can be moved around the body with relative ease. Generally, people will be more upright during the day. By the time the afternoon comes around, gravity has had all day to work on your bodily fluids, and if you have a poor diet, a hormone imbalance, a muscle injury, varicose veins, high blood pressure, or taken too many laxatives, diuretics or other drugs, your body has a hard time pumping it all up the body. Even in a healthy body, you're fighting a tough battle. Naturally then, most people's feet have swollen by the afternoon. This is why you should probably try new shoes on in the arvo.

This is also why some fat, irresponsible wankers whinge about Deep Vein Thrombosis on long flights. If you sit upright in the same spot for 20 hours, expect to be causing your body some grief. It's not the plane's fault, it's your fault for being a lazy shit.

16. Most of us have eaten a spider in our sleep.

This "fact" is the result of a most successful demonstration. In 1993, Lisa Holst wrote a column in PC Professional about the ready acceptance by gullible recipients of nonsense "fact lists" that were circulating via email at the time. To prove her point, she made up her own list of completely ridiculous "facts" and sent it out. One of her gems of nonsense concerned the frighteningly regular occurance of the accidental swallowing of spiders by humans. Ironically, this tidbit is circulated and widely believed as fact, over 10 years later.

Consider this: spiders hate breath - in general arthropods avoid the breath of a vertebrates because vertebrates are harmful to their health. It'd be a mighty silly spider to go wandering in the air passages of a human. Most people sleep with their mouth closed anyway, and there aren't many spiders that would fit through your nostril. Besides, how many studies do you think have been conducted where a large group of people have been filmed while sleeping, where the film was long enough to capture the event and studied closely enough to count the events? Bugger all, I'd say.

It's much more likely that someone, somewhere has consumed a spider in parts by eating normal packaged food - small insect bits often become part of processed food. Perhaps the parts could eventually make up a whole spider, but I wouldn't be too concerned about it.

17. The REAL reason ostriches stick their head in the sand is to search for water.

They simply don't. Or at least there are no recorded observations of such behaviour, despite decades of study of the creatures. The popular mythology of them hiding their head in sand in the presence of danger may have arisen from the fact that when feeding, ostriches will swallow sand and pebbles to help with digestion, which may look from a distance like they are burying their head. But how long do you think a creature that buries its head in the sand would last? I'd give it about a minute before it suffocated and about 30 seconds before some lucky carnivore ate the stupid bird.

18. The only two animals that can see behind themselves without turning their heads are the rabbit and the parrot.

True! Unless you count flies, jumping spiders, chameleons, pigeons, woodcock, cuckoos, some crows, octopuses, squids, flatfish rays and cuttlefish.

19. John Travolta turned down the starring roles in "An Officer and a Gentleman" and "Tootsie."

Based on separate accounts from a few fairly reliable sources, this is probably true. The former more so than the latter. Again, this probably has significance to someone, somewhere, and couldn't possibly be worthless filler to pad out a list of sketchy "facts".

20. Michael Jackson owns the rights to the South Carolina State anthem.

Probably not. It appears South Carolina has had two state anthems, "Carolina" in 1911 and "South Carolina On My Mind" in 1984. The latter has a name similar to a James Taylor song, "Carolina In My Mind". James Taylor had a relationship with the Beatles, and Paul McCartney helped out with the song. Now Wacko Jacko owns some rights to a large proportion of the Beatles songs, and perhaps this has been wrongly interpreted as having a hand in the South Carolina State anthem.

21. In most television commercials advertising milk, a mixture of white paint and a little thinner is used in place of the milk.

"Most" is a big call. Certainly, pure milk is often not used. According to various sources in the advertising industry, it is common to use milk that has been thickened with cream or ice cream or something, to give it that luscious, creamy texture and aid in a bit of good old milk moustache formation. However, I couldn't find any documentation of paint and thinner being used, and it would seem awfully unsuitable, given paint's tendency to make a mess and its rather unpleasant taste.

22. Prince Charles and Prince William NEVER travel on the same airplane, just in case there is a crash.

Maybe. But per kilometre, plane travel is very safe. I'd be more worried about them travelling in a car together, or appearing in public together. Never seems a little strong, but this sort of behaviour is not too unusual for VIPs. There are reports of the British media releasing statements about the lads travelling separately.

23. The first Harley Davidson motorcycle built in 1903 used a tomato can for a carburetor.

This is probably actually true, although taken a little out of context. The first motorised bike built by Bill Harley and Arthur Davidson (and a small bunch of their mates and coworkers) was pulled together in Davidson's shed. At that time, petrol engines were in their infancy, and carburetor technology was basic. One way to make a carburetor was to insert a wick into a metal can, fashion it to the intake of the engine, and wish for luck. It appears the first attempt by Harley and Davidson used something like a tomato can as the basis for their carburetor. Keep in mind that a carburetor needs to draw, retain, mix and deliver the petrol, so we're not talking about hanging an empty tomato can off the side of a Harley and calling it a Holley. These boys were quite particular about their designs and strived for excellence. The design for the carburetor however, came from Ole Evinrude, of the outboard boat motor frame. He may have used something resembling a tomato can - unfortunately there appears to be no documentation of the specifics. In any case, their 1903 prototype worked, powering a bike with two horsepower of ball tearing grunt. Soon the boys had developed an engine that could actually carry them up hills, and a frame to survive the journey. The Harley Davidson motorbike company naturally followed.

24. Most hospitals make money by selling the umbilical cords cut from women who give birth. They are used in vein transplant surgery.

Technically there's no such thing a vein transplant surgery. Sometimes, veins are used from cadavers, but this not called a transplant. There are experimental techniques involving the use of animal veins however. More commonly, the patient's own veins are used. Excusing the technicality, the ridiculous part of this "fact" is the use of a umbilical cord as a vein. They'd make pretty damn useless veins. Clearly, they look quite different, and besides, they don't have any valves to aid the flow of the blood.

25. Humphrey Bogart was related to Princess Diana. They were 7th cousins.

And P.T. Barnum is Bogart's 6th cousin. President Fillmore is his 7th cousin, Lucille Ball is his 8th, President Cleveland is also his 8th, as are the Wright brothers. Bing Crosby and Peter Fonda are two of his 9th cousins. By the time you get to the 7th generation, your extended family is getting pretty damn big. Interesting perhaps, but not particularly amazing.

26. If coloring weren't added to Coca-Cola, it would be green.

Despite my confidence in this answer at trivia a couple of weeks ago, this is also a product of urban legend. The caramel in the mixture gives Coca-Cola its rich brown colour. The recipe has changed over the years, but the colour has not. The brown helped to hide any impurities, which would often exist in the mixture thanks to the less than sterile brewing vessels. This rumour may have originated from the fact that many of the early bottles had a green tinge.

Got it figured out?????????

Yes thank you.

They are all true....

Okay.

Now go back and think about #16

Done.

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