Glass Isn't A Liquid

There's a common misconception (I just saw it in a book by Bill Bryson, for crying out loud) that glass is a fluid, or a liquid. People claim that old windows will be thicker on the bottom, because the glass has flowed downward. They do not seem to realize that if glass hundreds of years old flows down, then glass over a thousand years old would have large gaps in it. This is not the case.

In fact, old glass has a thicker end because of the way glass was made in the past; glass wasn't quite flat, so there had to be a thicker end, and sometimes, that end was on the bottom.

So, please, stop repeating this one, people.

Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

The psychological concept of Repression (the blocking of traumatic memories) is not a real condition. People who suffer trauma have the opposite problem; they are unable to forget the memories that haunt them.

Apparently, the idea arose from psychologists who relied on a formulaic theories of input/output along the lines of, "If the victim has problem X, then they had history Y." The problem with this theory is that people don't necessarily have that history. In this case, the psychologist attempted to "draw out" this memory from the patient's subconscious. Unfortunately, humans are extremely suggestible, and patients were easily persuaded into memories of events that never happened.

Knock-Out Darts? No Such Thing!

If you are a human being, then you're probably aware of "knock-out" darts: small, painless darts that knock out a human in a few seconds after being shot with no serious after-effects.

Like the knock-out punch, which has similar literary and film uses, (I'm looking at you, Lost!) the knock-out dart doesn't exist. Although it is possible to knock out a human with a dart, you cannot have that injection be both fast and safe. If you want to knock out a human in seconds, his heart will stop in minutes. Soldiers would kill for a dart that worked like the one in the media (and they've often killed for lack of it), but no amount of funding has produced this miracle.

PS. I saw Ratatouille again. Excellent.

Cavemen Don't Exist

Some people say that modern television is bad. I think this is terribly inaccurate. In fact, modern television is unacceptably poor. The fact that someone is turning a commercial which mentions cavemen into a program is the latest symptom of the disease that is modern television.

Anyway, the program seems to think that cavemen are a separate race from us human beings. They are not. In fact, the "cavemen" of this program seem to lack the defining characteristic of cavemen. They do not live in a cave. The writers are probably thinking of Neanderthals, who have two advantages in my mind:

1) Neanderthals are a separate race from us.
2) Neanderthals are real.

See, cavemen are not real in the generally accepted sense of the term. At no point in human history were humans limited to living in caves. Caves have always been a shelter for man, and they remain so today, but never has man been limited to living in caves alone.

So why do we think of cavemen as being a class of historical persons? Because artifacts are perfectly undisturbed in caves. A group of prehistorical men could camp in a cave for a week and we could find that camp today, relatively undisturbed. When prehistoric man left a camp next to a stream, it would quickly be destroyed by wind and water erosion (and a variety of other factors). Since the proof of cave life was so much more preserved, it may have seemed that early man lived there exclusively.

Anyway, I already saw Cavemen when it was called 3rd Rock From the Sun.

"Look! We're from outside your culture, so we're doing something that someone in your culture wouldn't do!"

(laugh track brays)

Cow Tipping

This is going to blow your mind. There is NO SUCH THING AS COW TIPPING.

That's right. Cow tipping, like the boogie man and eskimoes, doesn't exist. I offer you an eloquent piece of proof: if you do a search on YouTube, the internet's cloaca, for "cow tipping", you will find no film of people tipping over cows.

There are other compelling arguments for the claim, like the physical problem of a 200 pound guy knocking over a 1,500 pound cow, the fact that cows don't sleep standing up, etc., but I think it's much more compelling that not one person has uploaded a video of themselves doing it.

People have videos of themselves dancing and lip-syncing to popular songs. And those are some of the popular videos.

At least cow tipping is moderately believable, unlike eskimoes. I mean, honestly. People are supposed to live up in a place that's very cold, then build a house out of ICE? Ice is cold! They'd end up freezing faster!

The things that some people believe!