Popular delusions R Us....

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So, kiddies, does the water swirl down the plughole anticlockwise in the northern hemisphere, clockwise in the southern? Did you think non-stick saucepans were the justification for the space program? Are there any other popular delusions you'd like to shatter?

-- Nicholas E. Grinder (eda@impolex.demon.co.uk), July 21, 2000

Answers

I have just now checked the Southern Hemisphere swirl of water down the plughole but I do not want to shatter any illusions. Well ok, it goes clockwise but I try to get out of the bath well before that happens so it doesn't really effect my life that much...

Wasn't Velcro supposed to be the pinnacle of achievement for the space program? Can't remember hearing that lovely tearing sound in the '60s. Then suddenly the 1970's arrived and all these fools were wandering around opening Velcro wallets and doing up then undoing their trainers in public. Velcro - the mobile phone of the '70s.

What ever happened to the digital watch? Just to hear that beeping in a cinema would take me back...

-- James Ferguson (jamestax@xtra.co.nz), July 22, 2000.


I just found this: http://math. ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/bathtub.html which says,um, yes and no. The earth's rotation does has an effect, but local forces are much stronger.

And Velcro has been around since the 1940s: see http://www.velcro.com/kids/ kids.htm for dates. Didn't know it was a French invention - it's not the sort of thing you associate with French haute couture....



-- Nicholas Grinder (moi@impolex.demon.co.uk), July 22, 2000.


I heard that it's all a big fat lie that lemmings commit suicide by jumping off cliffs, that a Disney wildlife film crew back in the sixties herded some off a cliff and then passed the footage off as proof of their suicidal instincts, and that the myth subsequently took on a momentum of its own.

Well, that's what I heard, anyway...

-- mavis (precious_puss@yahoo.com), July 22, 2000.


This is documented at Urban Legends Reference Page: Disney.

A handy checklist of Urban Myths exploded or found true can be found at the alt.folklore.urban FAQ page.

-- Nicholas Grinder as was (moi@impolex.demon.co.uk), July 22, 2000.


Check Coriolis effect for the full skinny on this bathtub swirl jiggery-pokery

-- Mark Preston (donkeylasher@rose-hill.demon.co.uk), July 23, 2000.


The bathwater thing is the Most Often Asked Question in my forays Up Over to the States. They've all seen a Simpsons episode, apparently, built around this fascinating fact/myth.

Although I've been over there on a number of occasions, I've never felt moved enough to check. I did, however, feel moved enough to post here about it. That no doubt says something about me.

cheers

-- anna (anna@lucidity.au.com), July 24, 2000.


Actually, the water swirls the same way in both hemispheres - the International Union of Plughole Engineers see to it by subtle design factors.

The myth of the different direction of swirling started because of the little-known fact that clocks appear to run the opposite way south of the equator, due to the fact that they are upside down.

Oh, and for the space program... don't forget the contribution of bigger and more accurate ICBM's.

-- Bill Chance (chancew1@aol.com), July 24, 2000.


My favorite popular delusion is the "equilibrium of nature." Those cheap nature shows that air late night on the minor cable channels (here in the U.S.) always talk about human intrusion disturbing some ecosystem's "equilibrium," or how in the aftermath of some volcano or flood the trees and animals are all coming back.

Anybody who passed ninth grade earth science knows that there is no "equilibrium," and that the history of the world is of animals exploding in population, then going extinct, and of ice ages followed by hot spells. After a traumatic event like a volcano, it's anybody's guess which local plants are going to take over the damaged site -- there's no guarantee that the fir forest will grow back on Mt. St. Helen.

But the poor idiots who have no way to make their livings except producing cut-rate nature television never read a text book in their lives. They saw the movie "Bambi" in their stunted childhoods, and the only idea that they took from it (beyond "fire bad") is that somehow the forest would stay all pristine and nice if only people didn't interfere with it. These same people are convinced that if they could help a lion understand its bad childhood, they could somehow convince it to be vegetarian. Pah.

-- Tom Dean (tsd@ogk.com), July 24, 2000.


ok. after some deep transcendental meditation in which I dreamt i left the realm of my bed, i got one. You know how carrots contain a special vitamin of indeterminate letter which helps us and rabbits see in the dark? That's all bullshit. The truth is, friends, it was all just a big laugh. I wish. No the real truth (as I heard it from an old Religious Studies teacher) is that 'the carrot plan' was an allied bluff during the second world war to make jerry think that we could see the Luftwaffe at night-time because we ate wagonloads of carrots...fantastic eh? Nothing to do with radar at all...nibble for victory and so on and so forth. Another universal truth I gleaned from this bearded sage who went inconspicuously by the name of Mr. Johnston, was that Cumbrian farmers in England had underground pipelines to and from (which is the same pipe essentially, because the direction pipe flow was on a rotational basis) the nuclear energy plant BNFL, which carried streams of cows who were subjected to nuclear testing, that's where the BSE virus came from and hence may be the reason why we're all going to die...although I may have dreamt that one while he was talking about jesus being a travelling salesman for Zig-Zag cigarette papers...

-- mick spliff (neo_dimes@hotmail.com), December 14, 2000.

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