Napalmbrain
WiiChat Member
Inspired by the brilliant British panel show QI, I've decided to do a thread about common misconceptions. Feel free to add your own.
-Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees. According to theory of evolution, both humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor.
-Asteroid belts are not vast, dense swarms of rocks like in The Empire Strikes Back.
-'Inuit' is not synonymous with 'Eskimo'.
-There is no evidence that goldfish have a three-second memory.
-The largest desert in the world is not the Sahara, it is in fact Antarctica. By definition, a desert is a region which recieves less than 10 inches of precipitation per year. It does not have to be hot.
-Bats are not blind.
-Nero would not have fiddled while Rome burned. The fiddle hadn't been invented then.
-'Jihad' does not nean 'holy war'. It basically means 'crusade' or 'struggle', and can be used in both the physical or moral sense (e.g. "the war against drugs", "the struggle for women's rights").
-Humans do not only use 10-30% of their brains.
-No one said the line "Play it again, Sam" in Casablanca.
-Hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after death. What happens is that the skin retracts, giving the illusion of hair/fingernail growth.
-There are more than three states of matter- there around a dozen. Most baryonic matter (non-dark matter) in the Universe is in the form of plasma.
-You can fold a piece of paper more than seven times, if it is large enough.
-The Sun is not yellow, it is white. It appears yellow due to Rayleigh scattering by the Earth's atmosphere.
-Krakatoa is west of Java, not east.
-Timmy never actually fell down a well in Lassie.
-Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees. According to theory of evolution, both humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor.
-Asteroid belts are not vast, dense swarms of rocks like in The Empire Strikes Back.
-'Inuit' is not synonymous with 'Eskimo'.
-There is no evidence that goldfish have a three-second memory.
-The largest desert in the world is not the Sahara, it is in fact Antarctica. By definition, a desert is a region which recieves less than 10 inches of precipitation per year. It does not have to be hot.
-Bats are not blind.
-Nero would not have fiddled while Rome burned. The fiddle hadn't been invented then.
-'Jihad' does not nean 'holy war'. It basically means 'crusade' or 'struggle', and can be used in both the physical or moral sense (e.g. "the war against drugs", "the struggle for women's rights").
-Humans do not only use 10-30% of their brains.
-No one said the line "Play it again, Sam" in Casablanca.
-Hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after death. What happens is that the skin retracts, giving the illusion of hair/fingernail growth.
-There are more than three states of matter- there around a dozen. Most baryonic matter (non-dark matter) in the Universe is in the form of plasma.
-You can fold a piece of paper more than seven times, if it is large enough.
-The Sun is not yellow, it is white. It appears yellow due to Rayleigh scattering by the Earth's atmosphere.
-Krakatoa is west of Java, not east.
-Timmy never actually fell down a well in Lassie.