Tru Fax!!!!! That Get It Wrong

Either widely accepted stories that are passed on as factual, while being nothing of the sort, or better still, stories where the facts as generally reported are true, but still are used in a misleading manner or to support false conclusions.

For the first variety there's the claim that the doctor who pioneered blood transfusions died because the closest hospital was white only and wouldn't take him. The truth is quite the contrary: Dr. Charles R. Drew, while a pioneer in the administrative work necessary for blood banking did not invent nor pioneer the transfusion process itself; and while he did die after an automobile accident in North Carolina the survivors of the wreck all claim that they got prompt and excellent care.

For the second variety a lot of people who get tired of being told to run for their health take a sardonic pleasure in pointing out, "Jim Fixx died while running!" While I don't think this is strictly true, he died a couple hours later, after suffering a massive heart attack while running, it's close enough that I don't think that the claim is false. The implication, however, for most of the smug couch potatoes who point this out, is that running killed him. Which is about as far from the truth as you could get. Fixx had been obese, a smoker, and suffered from congenital factors that left him very vulnerable to heart failure. It can be argued that his running was a very large factor in what allowed him to live as long as he did.

Sorry, fellow couch denizens, you'll need to find a better reason to stay sessile! :D



Anyways, share your own favorite Tru Fax! That aren't, really!

Well since I have seen this claimed all over the internoodles -- no, drinking ice water does not burn any calories. No, not even the tiny number you get if you divide by 1000 (to convert between regular calories and food calories, which are actually 1000 calories.) Your body doesn't control its temperature by amping up and down your metabolism, primarily. It will amp it up to warm you up -- that's called shivering. So if you drink enough ice water that you're shivering, you'll burn a very few extra calories. But for the most part the body controls temperature through means that don't consume enough calories to be useful at all to the dieter.

Wow, I have heard Loki's and one is just an old story (UL) and the other exactly what he described but Exy, what you related is just inexcusable stupidity. People actually believed this could make a difference? :smack


Oh, I forgot to add one. My timely example, Fidel Castro is reported to have failed in a tryout with the Yankees in the 1940s. This never happened. Castro never even played baseball at a high amateur level. It has been repeated as fact (or "now you know the rest of the story") for years.

Most of the stories about what Mother Goose rhymes and fairy tales "really mean" are pure nonsense. For a good example, see Snopes demolition of the idea that "Ring around the Rosies" is about the Black Death.

Here in Florida, it is a widely circulated bit of folk wisdom that a person can escape an attacking alligator by running in a zigzag pattern. The reasoning is that alligators are supposedly too clumsy to turn on a dime and so can't easily chase a person moving like this.

I suspect that this notion originated as a particularly cruel prank played on tourists by native Floridians, and has simply been in circulation so long that even the locals have forgotten the joke.

Well, a surprising number of people still seem to think that Columbus made his famous voyage to "prove that the earth was round", not to discover a shorter route to India.

Ancient Greek mathematician Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth as 250,000 stadia, which is around 25,000 miles (the actual circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,902 miles, so he was amazingly close). So where does the idea of a “flat earth” come from? In the United States, it comes from Washington Irving, of all people. In 1828, Irving published A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which is a highly romanticized and grossly inaccurate depiction of the explorer. In particular, the anti-Catholic Irving discusses a meeting between Columbus, Ferdinand and Isabella, and several high-ranking members of the Catholic Church, in which the religious types insist that Columbus’ voyage will fail due to the earth being flat. The reality was much more interesting: the Church had accepted Eratosthenes’ number for centuries, and it was Columbus who was the crackpot, relying on the much smaller circumference calculated by Marinus of Tyre in AD 114. It was the Church who told Columbus that he was wrong, and he, in fact, was. Had Columbus not run into the New World he would have starved to death. Because he was wrong and the Church was right.

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Originally posted by What Exit?

Wow, I have heard Loki's and one is just an old story (UL) and the other exactly what he described but Exy, what you related is just inexcusable stupidity. People actually believed this could make a difference? :smack

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It's been argued rather passionately in some locales.

For a long time I thought Sarah Palin really did say that she could see Russia from her window. I was quite disappointed to find out it was only Tina Fey in an SNL sketch who said that.

On lists of "surprising facts" the tongue is often listed as the strongest or largest muscle in the human body. This isn't true by any definition, because a) the tongue is actually comprised of sixteen muscles, not one, and b) there's no measure of muscular strength in which the tongue outdoes all other muscles.

The gluteus maximus is the largest muscle, by the way. Which, really, should have been obvious.

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Originally posted by Zuul

The gluteus maximus is the largest muscle, by the way. Which, really, should have been obvious.

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Usually very obvious.:smug:

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Originally posted by Glazer

Usually very obvious.:smug:

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"I resemble that remark" is an unusually apt response in this case.

When I first heard the fact!!! that we only use 10% of our brains (and of course if we could use 40% we would be psychic geniuses), my first thought was "okay, why did evolution go to the effort of making our necks thicker to support a massive brain that does mostly nothing?"

The truth is we only use a small proportion at any one time - listening to someone speak uses different parts of the brain to learning how to drive. No shit.

The other beauty - men think about sex every 7 seconds. No way to measure that, and I'm pretty sure I go for hours at a time not thinking about sex, then think about is 7 times a second for a while.

I like when people try to tell me that tea (or cola) has more caffeine than coffee. Sure, you could make a cup of tea that had more caffeine than a weak cup of coffee. But as they are typically made and consumed there is no comparison.

You know, a lot of people are really ignorant as to caffeine content of drinks, Lagomorph. I'm always sort of shocked when people divulge drinking Red Bull, because the whole point of it is that it has caffeine, but a can, aside from tasting like the urine of a diabetic horse, has way less caffeine that a cup of coffee.

Oh, on that caffeine topic, chocolate. Most people seem to believe that chocolate has some sort of stimulant power due to caffeine. But even in straight-up dark chocolate, the caffeine content in any reasonable serving is minuscule. And the related chemical, theobromine, which is sometimes brought up and which chocolate has a larger amount of, isn't known to have any effect at all.

"It's not the heat, it's the humidity"


Uh, no. I'm pretty sure it is in fact the heat.

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Originally posted by Laughing Lagomorph

"It's not the heat, it's the humidity"


Uh, no. I'm pretty sure it is in fact the heat.

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There's at least some basis in fact for this one, though. When the relative humidity is above a certain point (In my experience anything above about 50% relative humidity.) evaporative cooling, i.e. sweating, becomes a lot less efficient a way for your body to lose heat and maintain a comfortable body temperature.

It's not dangerous, as long as you stay hydrated and pay attention to your body. There are other ways to lose heat, after all. But it does make for a sticky and uncomfortable situation for people.

If the relative humidity is down to something like 10% or so, however, evaporation is very effective and you won't feel so sweaty or muggy.

So while the heat is the primary cause, the factor that dictates how well you can tolerate that heat is often the relative humidity.

Speaking as someone who recently went from a hot and humid climate to a hot and dry climate, I agree that the humidity is a big, big part of it. It was the same thing when I moved in wintertime from a cold dry climate to a cold humid climate - in Utah, it was bearable, in New York State, I thought I was going to die, and never did get through a winter without much layering of socks.

Btw, summer in Utah rocks. It was 100 today and honestly, not that bad. 100 in Houston is like being in a sauna. No, a sauna is pleasant. It's lime being in someone's mouth.

Speaking as someone who recently went from a hot and humid climate to a hot and dry climate, I agree that the humidity is a big, big part of it. It was the same thing when I moved in wintertime from a cold dry climate to a cold humid climate - in Utah, it was bearable, in New York State, I thought I was going to die, and never did get through a winter without much layering of socks.

Btw, summer in Utah rocks. It was 100 today and honestly, not that bad. 100 in Houston is like being in a sauna. No, a sauna is pleasant. It's lime being in someone's mouth.

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Originally posted by artifex

It's like being in someone's mouth.

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Welp that is actually an excellent, and horrifyingly disgusting, summary. (88 degrees, 93% relative humidity today.)

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Originally posted by Exy

Welp that is actually an excellent, and horrifyingly disgusting, summary. (88 degrees, 93% relative humidity today.)

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Oh, God, it's headed my way.

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Originally posted by Laughing Lagomorph

"It's not the heat, it's the humidity"


Uh, no. I'm pretty sure it is in fact the heat.

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No, it's definitely the humidity. I'd rather be in New Mexico when it's 100 than Michigan when it's 85.

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Originally posted by artifex

It's like being in someone's mouth.

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artifex! You are my long lost humidity sister! This is how I always describe it. Like just sitting on a big tongue all moist and hot. Neugh. :mad:

Speaking of heat, another TRU FAXT : "You lose 90% of your body heat from your head, so wear a hat if you're cold and you'll be tons warmer!"

Sometimes it's not stated to such an extreme, but you lose nowhere near the majority of your heat through your head. Heat is going out from anywhere and everywhere. Maybe it might get significant if you counted respiration as 'loss from the head' but wearing a hat won't help that unless you're wearing it wrong.

There's this old claim that the word "testify" is related to "testes" -- because supposedly Romans used to swear oaths on their balls. I just read that it's not true, and I consulted an etymological dictionary, and apparently it isn't -- "testify" (and "testament", etc.) actually just come from the same Indo-European root as "three", as in a disinterested third party.

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Originally posted by Exy

There's this old claim that the word "testify" is related to "testes" -- because supposedly Romans used to swear oaths on their balls. I just read that it's not true, and I consulted an etymological dictionary, and apparently it isn't -- "testify" (and "testament", etc.) actually just come from the same Indo-European root as "three", as in a disinterested third party.

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This certainly makes far more sense.

Could somebody compile these into a list and post them as an article on the front page?

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Originally posted by The Original An Gadaí

Could somebody compile these into a list and post them as an article on the front page?

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Go for it.

Shall we take a moment to debunk the various acronym work origins that get passed around? Found Under Carnal Knowledge, Ship High in Transit, Chalk River Unknown Deposits.

Oh, wait, that last one is true. For all that it's a bit esoteric.

Found Under Carnal Knowledge was claimed to be the origin of our good, old fashioned Anglo-Saxon fuck. The story as I'd heard it was that rather than explaining that a nun, pregnant with child was being expelled from the order for conjugal relations, they'd simply record the reason for the novice or sister leaving the order as F.U.C.K. Of course, this ignores so many realities of both language and record keeping within the Catholic Church. First off, the Catholic Church, until very recently, kept all official records in Latin. So the idea of a series of prudish Mothers Superior to develop an acronym using the vernacular is ludicrous. Then, it's worth remembering that acronyms are essentially a twentieth century phenomenon. Prior to that time, people just didn't make neologisms out of a collection of abbreviations for a longer phrase.

Similarly, shit is sometimes described as coming from a practice of shipping bales of manure aboard old sailing ships. But if the manure got wetted by salt water, so the story goes, it could express explosive quantities of methane gas. So the bales would be labeled "Ship High In Transit," abbreviated to S.H.I.T., to keep them free of the bilges. Simply recognizing that Scheiße is the current German word for shit, should be enough to point out to any critical thinker that it's far more likely to be a word that came from the normal roots of English.

Which brings us to CRUD. CRUD, the acronym, is a technical term in nuclear power circles for corrosion and wear products that build up in low flow areas of the piping, often activated by passing through the core, and then causing localized radiation hot spots in the piping. First recognized at one of the Chalk River experimental reactors, the theory of operation had never expected the build up of radioactives in low flow areas in the piping. Often enough this would be in piping outside the secondary shield, so the hot spots that developed were a real concern. At first, the origin of the deposits were unknown, and it wasn't until after they were first described that the origin and mechanism for their activation and placement were understood.

And even then, CRUD was just such an evocative name for a substance that was highly radioactive, blackish goo. :)

The reasons I believe this origin story to be valid, first off it's clearly a Twentieth Century origin, which is well within the period when people started creating neologisms from abbreviations. Secondly, it's properly a backronym: A phrase chosen so that when abbreviated it fits an existing word that is evocative, if not a perfect description, of the stuff in question. Of course, these days, like SONAR, RADAR and many other long standing acronyms, when used the term isn't often capitalized to make clear it is an acronym. With SONAR and RADAR, without an existing word from those letters, it doesn't create much confusion. With CRUD, it does.


I will let the interested reader look for themselves for the origin of the Shutdown Control Rod Ax Man. :)

"Rule of thumb" almost certainly does not refer to a law that a man could only beat his wife with a stick narrower than his thumb. While the etymology is not entirely clear, the phrase probably comes from the practice of using the first knuckle of the thumb as a measure, or something similar.