
List of Common Misconceptions - huhtenberg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_misconceptions
======
_delirium
Somehow I end up reading many of these backwards, due to the wording. When I
see a "list of common misconceptions" containing bullet points like:
"Christopher Columbus's efforts to obtain support for his voyages were not
hampered by a European belief in a flat Earth." and "Napoleon Bonaparte was
not especially short.", my immediate interpretation is that these listed
claims are misconceptions (they appear in a _list of misconceptions_ after
all), and so the opposite is actually true: Christopher Columbus _was_
hampered by a European belief in a flat earth, and Napoleon Bonaparte _was_
especially short.

I do quickly realize it was backwards, but it reads very weirdly to me. If
it's a list of misconceptions, shouldn't the misconceptions be the things in
the list, with the corrections following each one as explanatory text?

~~~
tome
Especially since the introduction says:

"This list of common or popular misconceptions contains some fallacious,
misleading, or otherwise flawed ideas"

------
nicara
>However, the normal convention when stating a nationality or, for instance,
saying one is from Berlin, would be to leave out the indefinite article "ein."
Though JFK's intention would have been, and was, understood by Berliners, he
should have said, Ich bin Berliner.

Funny how in an article about common misconceptions a myth like that gets to
live on (by being replaced with a new one).. I can't speak for Berlinerisch,
as I've never lived in Berlin myself, but in standard German both versions -
with and without the indefinite article - are 100% correct. The version
suggested in the article might be slightly more common ("Ich bin Berliner"),
but for JFK's speech I'd even go as far and say his version was better, simply
because it stresses that he's "ein Berliner", just like all the other people
listening to his speech. As I said, though, both versions are correct, and
neither of them sounds better/worse. (Sorry, no source, but I know a bit of
German.)

~~~
jonasvp
I'm German and you're 100% correct.

~~~
vog
I'm also German, living near Berlin, and I had to analyze Kennedy's speech in
an exam at school.

I fully agree that "Ich bin ein Berliner" was the correct variant. The
alternative phrase "Ich bin Berliner" wouldn't have fit well into the context
of his speech.

~~~
gruseom
_The alternative phrase "Ich bin Berliner" wouldn't have fit well into the
context_

Why not?

~~~
ugh
I think the indefinite article adds emphasis. (I’m definitly not a grammar
expert but I’m German.) He not just somehow happens to be a Berliner, he
affirms to be a Berliner.

(I have an alternate hypothesis: like all Germans I heard that sentence a few
dozen times, saw it again and again repeated on TV. Maybe the sentence just
made that usage correct by sheer force of its existence. I would say that’s
unlikely, but it’s possible. What I’m sure about, though, is that everyone who
listened to JFK knew what he wanted say.)

~~~
johnaspden
Is it perhaps the same difference as between "I am English" and "I am an
Englishman"?

Presumably you'd need to be a true bilingual to tell if they feel the same,
and even then, your thought processes aren't going to be the same as either
type of monolingual.

~~~
vog
_> Is it perhaps the same difference as between "I am English" and "I am an
Englishman"?_

Yes, that's a very good analogy.

If you say "Ich bin Berliner", it just means that you live in Berlin. I
doesn't put any emphasis on identifying with a certain group of people. It
merely says that you belong to this group, maybe just by accident.

However, if you say "Ich bin ein Berliner", especially in the context of his
speech, it means that you identify yourself with the group, i.e. with the
people of Berlin.

That's why I disagree with that point of the Wikipedia article. "Ich bin ein
Berliner" was a perfect formulation. I guess Kennedy got the help of a native
German speaker or had a very good translator.

~~~
gruseom
This is so opposite to the view that we were all taught in North America
(namely that Kennedy's statement was a gaffe that made him a laughingstock)
that I wonder how the misconception even arose. No one ignorant of German
would have come up with the idea that JFK said he was a jelly doughnut, but
from what you guys are saying, no one who knows German would have thought that
either. Perhaps it was clever Soviet disinformatsia!

~~~
vog
_> Perhaps it was clever Soviet disinformatsia!_

Either that, or it was the usual cause for rumors: sciolism.

It could also have started as a dumb joke, which was then taken seriously by
people who didn't know better.

------
tumult
I always get a chuckle when I see this list. Other than literacy and
arithmetic, it's like the curriculum from kindergarten to fourth grade.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I think it's a good reminder that there are some things you believe that are
not true.

Some things I believe, some things you believe.

No matter how informed or educated or logical we believe ourselves to be.

It's something to keep in mind.

~~~
asdflkj
I think just about everything anyone believes is false, or at least arbitrary
and unfounded. We lack the frameworks to examine the vast majority of things
that determine our decisions, and are thus de facto beliefs.

------
augustl
More common misconceptions are debunked in "Don't Swallow Your Gum!: Myths,
Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health".

[http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Swallow-Your-Gum-Half-
Truths/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Swallow-Your-Gum-Half-
Truths/dp/031253387X)

~~~
augustl
Why was this downvoted? It's a great book, and it's on topic.

There should be a law against downvoting without giving a reason :)

------
portman
_"While putting metal in a microwave can damage the magnetron by causing an
impedance mismatch, it depends on the shape and size of the metal and the time
it is in the microwave. Electrical arcing may also occur on pieces of metal
that are not smooth, or have points (e.g. a fork). Distributed metallic
surfaces that are not subject to arcing and do not appreciably alter the
magnetron's RF load can be used in a microwave with no danger; examples
include the metalized surfaces used in browning sleeves and pizza-cooking
platforms."_

I learned something today! I had always thought that ALL metal in the
microwave was verboten. Fascinating that it's the _shape_ of the metal, not
its material, that matters.

~~~
rdtsc
There even some microwaves that are sold with a metal plate/ grate that can
inserted inside to cook fish or vegetables on.

I guess the metal will absorb the microwave energy and heat up and then the
food will get seared by contact with the metal, instead of directly receiving
the microwave radiation.

My parents have one of those microwaves and when I saw it I was just as
perplexed about it.

~~~
encoderer
My understanding along with the comments in the article is that non ferrous
metals are acceptable.

------
billswift
>It is not the color of the cape that angers the bull, but rather the movement
of the fabric that irritates the bull and incites it to charge. [from the
Sports section]

I worked for the University of Maryland's Dairy Barn on the College Park
campus for a couple of years in the early 1980s, and I discovered you do _not_
want to try rounding up cows in the pasture wearing a rain poncho. It
terrifies them so much they run all over the place rather than going into the
barn like they were supposed to. The color was immaterial - tan and brown were
as bad as yellow.

~~~
furyg3
But _why_!? What happened during the course of bovine evolution that would
result in cattle being so terrified of large swaths of fabric.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Evolutionary pressure from
<http://redwinggreen7.livejournal.com/96599.html#cutid2-end>, what else?

~~~
dkersten
It seems to have worked! Bovine are plentiful, but you rarely see cloakers :-D

------
humbledrone
Interesting -- it turns out that the truth about the makeup of George
Washington's dentures (gold, hippopotamus ivory, lead, and human and animal
teeth) is actually much weirder than the common misconception (wood).

~~~
moolave
Looks like he was the 18th Century Million Dollar Man.

------
techiferous
What, no geography?

* The largest freshwater lake (by surface area) is not lake Superior, but lake Michigan-Huron.

* North America contains more than three countries (I'm lookin' at you, Jon Stewart!), including St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

~~~
huhtenberg
> _The largest freshwater lake is not lake Superior, but lake Michigan-Huron._

It's actually neither if they are compared by volume and not the surface area,
in which case the largest lake is Baikal.

~~~
techiferous
I went back and edited my comment to include the qualification figuring that
someone was eventually going to clarify this. Looks like you commented at the
same time I was editing. :)

------
Goladus
_Scientific Method_

Honestly I would not call this one a misconception. In fact I'm pretty close
revising that section or just removing it altogether.

The "textbook definition" is simple only in that it is _abstract_. It's not
rigid at all, in fact it's extremely flexible. If what you are doing can't
ultimately be described by the scientific method then what you are doing is
not science and you probably shouldn't pretend that it is. Paleontology, and
astronomy, for example, still involve observation and hypothesis, even though
many predictions cannot be tested with existing technology. Just because
discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered accidentally
doesn't mean it's not an empirical observation.

Yes, reality has more details. But in my experience, so many people fail to
understand even the simple scientific method that worrying about the realities
of how actual professionals practice science is rather silly.

~~~
mbateman
A big part of the reason that so many people fail to understand even the
simple scientific method is because of the way the textbook version of that
method is presented. The way the scientific method is often taught in public
schools in America is as a rigid formula, or at best a recipe.

Among other things, this leads people to misunderstand the iterative nature of
science, the nature of an on-going scientific investigation, the particular
creative difficulties that come with doing science, and so on.

It is not taught as something abstract. To do that, you'd have to provide a
series of disparate examples from different sciences and show how they all
involved observation and hypothesis in a way that made sense of the method as
defined.

Here's an alternative presentation by people who are concerned about this sort
of thing:

<http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/howscienceworks_02>

~~~
Goladus
Right, "the people who are concerned about this sort of thing" and push that
agenda on the wiki page. Next to misconceptions like Columbus proving the
world was round and that the daddy-longlegs is the deadliest spider, arguments
about about how precisely to simplify elementary education of the scientific
method are rather out of place.

Seriously, is it worth piling on concepts like peer review and publication to
education of the scientific method? Peer review and publication are specific
contemporary terms used by professional scientists. If you're a regular person
and want to learn something, for example, how a particular feature of a
programming library works, or how much load your servers can handle, or how
spellcasting works in your favorite MMO, it's far more useful to understand
the so-called 'rigid' scientific method than it is to understand peer review
and scientific journals. It's not a "misconception."

~~~
ramchip
I would say it's important, although the base is of course also important by
itself.

People in general rarely understand how science really works. It's glaring in
journalism where often an article takes some non-reviewed research and cites
it like it's an established truth, or in vague quotes like "some scientists
believe X", where the scientist is actually in a domain not at all related to
X. I also see a lot of people who cannot grasp how a given source may be more
reliable than another one, even if both are written by "scientists". Things
like the "evolution is just a theory" would also be less prevalent if people
understood how science works.

~~~
Goladus
Journalists don't write articles like that, though, because they are thinking
in terms of the textbook definition of science. They write like that when they
have less interest in knowledge and intellectual rigor than emotions and
gossip, in which case the meaning of science is not important one way or the
other.

Comments like "evolution is just a theory" would be less prevalent no matter
which definition of science was applied: the simple, elegant textbook
definition or the complicated, several-page Berkeley definition. The problem
is not that one is applied over the other, the problem is that neither is
applied..

------
PidGin128
It's almost as though some common myths are being busted. (less kaboom.)

On topic: Wikipedia's lists are usually fun. WP has become my search engine of
choice for things apart from error messages, or when I think I know what I'm
looking for (or close).

------
cousin_it
Here's some more, many of you probably still believe those:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_made_from_human_corpses>

<http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/carrots.asp>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_seigneur>

------
huhtenberg
I just cannot get over this one (it is 3rd on the list in the Physics section)
-

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_transit-
time_fallacy#.22P...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_transit-
time_fallacy#.22Popular.22_explanation_based_on_equal_transit-time)

------
jpwagner
I had never heard of Thomas Crapper. That's one misconception that must live
on...

~~~
ygd
I'd always thought that it was Alexander Crapper. I got the important part
right, though.

------
powrtoch
Talk about an article with potential for vandalism... people will believe
anything you label a historical misconception. I would know, I do this to my
friends all the time.

------
coderdude
Of all the misconceptions on that page that I had been exposed to, I was
exposed to them in public school. I wonder if they're still teaching kids this
stuff.

