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Popular Misconceptions

What about the common idiocy that there is no psychic activity? Let us see how far this goes. No stopping this.

Any idiot will let this go.

Smashing through the boundaries, lunacy has found me, cannot stop the Battery.




Truth or fail. I fucking dare you.


I am the consequence of genius.

No 1 can stop me. The "fer me" paradox is a set up bitches.


I'm asking for it, aren't I?

 
There are heaps of these myths. Just see Mythbusters for heaps more.
 
There are heaps of these myths. Just see Mythbusters for heaps more.

Oh yes, I am aware of that. I thought it might be fun to compile a collection here of our favourite ones.

For example, I was teaching sex ed to a bunch of 15 year olds and they thought they could shock me with their questions. One of the boys said 'Hey Miss, isn't it true that you cannot get a girl pregnant if you dry hump her leg?' I responded with 'No, actually if your penis is any where near her vagina, she could fall pregnant anyway as semen know where to go.' His girlfriend was sitting next to him and promptly jumped three feet away from him. We then spent the next 30 minutes debunking all of their myths.

So, what other misconceptions are you aware of that can be disproved?
 
My favourite one is that water rotates in a certain direction when it goes down the drain. This direction is dependant on which hemisphere you live. This is complete garbage which most people can debunk. Do it for two sinks and half of them will go different ways! If they go the same way it is not hard to get them to go down the other way. Just rotate the water slightly before pulling the plug.
 
My favourite one is that water rotates in a certain direction when it goes down the drain. This direction is dependant on which hemisphere you live. This is complete garbage which most people can debunk. Do it for two sinks and half of them will go different ways! If they go the same way it is not hard to get them to go down the other way. Just rotate the water slightly before pulling the plug.

It requires a hugely careful set-up to actually detect Coriolis forces in this way, but it can be done. You need a large diameter vessel, with an outlet in the centre - the larger the diameter the better. It needs to be as far as practical from the equator; and it needs to be sheltered from external forces such as breezes and drafts, and allowed to settle for at least a day after filling, in a temperature controlled environment. We did this with a 2 metre diameter vessel in Leeds (which is about 54o North of the equator); after three days of settling, and with the addition of a few drops of dye to make the movement more easily visible, the outlet was carefully opened, and the rotation was indeed in the anti-clockwise direction expected, in all three repeats of the experiment. It takes a long time for the rotation to be apparent at all; after about a third of the water has drained away, the conservation of angular momentum amplifies the effect enough for it to be noticeable.

I very much doubt that you could detect the effect in an ordinary sink, bathtub or WC, even using a statistical analysis of thousands of trials looking for a small bias in the expected direction.
 
I personally had someone mention the ''dark side of the Moon'' - quite seriously. When I pointed our that there is no dark side of the Moon, the nature of the Moon's orbit, etc, the guy continued to argue that I was wrong, that the moon in fact has a dark side...otherwise why would the term 'dark side of the Moon'' even exist.
 
I personally had someone mention the ''dark side of the Moon'' - quite seriously. When I pointed our that there is no dark side of the Moon, the nature of the Moon's orbit, etc, the guy continued to argue that I was wrong, that the moon in fact has a dark side...otherwise why would the term 'dark side of the Moon'' even exist.

There is no dark side of the Moon. It's all dark.
 
I personally had someone mention the ''dark side of the Moon'' - quite seriously. When I pointed our that there is no dark side of the Moon, the nature of the Moon's orbit, etc, the guy continued to argue that I was wrong, that the moon in fact has a dark side...otherwise why would the term 'dark side of the Moon'' even exist.

There is no dark side of the Moon. It's all dark.

:joy:
 
My favourite one is that water rotates in a certain direction when it goes down the drain. This direction is dependant on which hemisphere you live. This is complete garbage which most people can debunk. Do it for two sinks and half of them will go different ways! If they go the same way it is not hard to get them to go down the other way. Just rotate the water slightly before pulling the plug.

It requires a hugely careful set-up to actually detect Coriolis forces in this way, but it can be done. You need a large diameter vessel, with an outlet in the centre - the larger the diameter the better. It needs to be as far as practical from the equator; and it needs to be sheltered from external forces such as breezes and drafts, and allowed to settle for at least a day after filling, in a temperature controlled environment. We did this with a 2 metre diameter vessel in Leeds (which is about 54o North of the equator); after three days of settling, and with the addition of a few drops of dye to make the movement more easily visible, the outlet was carefully opened, and the rotation was indeed in the anti-clockwise direction expected, in all three repeats of the experiment. It takes a long time for the rotation to be apparent at all; after about a third of the water has drained away, the conservation of angular momentum amplifies the effect enough for it to be noticeable.

I very much doubt that you could detect the effect in an ordinary sink, bathtub or WC, even using a statistical analysis of thousands of trials looking for a small bias in the expected direction.

Yup. My uncle went to Africa recently, and said the natives had set up an "experiment" with a sink on each side of the equator (maybe about 20 feet apart). On one side of the equator, the sink drained clockwise, and the other, it drained counter-clockwise. They were just crappy old sinks pulled from a dump. I told him it was tourist trick and he was duped. He got kinda mad at me, so I let it go. Art history majors can be a little gullible when it comes to that sciency stuff.
 
I personally had someone mention the ''dark side of the Moon'' - quite seriously. When I pointed our that there is no dark side of the Moon, the nature of the Moon's orbit, etc, the guy continued to argue that I was wrong, that the moon in fact has a dark side...otherwise why would the term 'dark side of the Moon'' even exist.
My understanding is that at one time "dark side of the Moon" did have a real meaning although a different meaning than the meaning many people today think. "Dark" was a common term for map makers several hundred years ago for any area not yet explored and mapped. The far side of the Moon was not mapped so was "the dark side" the same as the interior of Africa had not been mapped so it was called the "dark continent".
 
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