There are some things people should just know
Like, for example, that no-one does a study just to discover how many arachnids are consumed by the average person in a year. This has been a sticking point between a friend of mine and I in the past. I am aware that this “fact” has been purported as true around the internet for years. That doesn’t mean it make any fucking sense whatsoever.
People are not very clever. Or rather, cleverness no longer seems to be a barrier to being fooled by utterly ridiculous nonsense. Is the world so fantastical now that we can no longer discern reality? Take for example, the spiders.
First off, no-one has ever decided to do a study on this particular topic. Do I know this for sure? No, I must admit that I do not. But I will officially bet fifty quid right here and now that no such study has ever occurred, or produced any, not to mind conclusive, results. Anyone? I’ll give you a month to dig out any information on one. If I’m wrong, I’ll apologise profusely to a certain swedish person, and give you the money, but I somehow doubt it.
A pity really because what a wonderful thing it would have been to recruit for. “We’d like to monitor you every night for a year, along with a hundred others”… “Why?”… “To see if you should happen to eat any spiders while asleep, and how many on average that works out as per person. Its for the good of mankind, really”…
Or perhaps one day a group of scientists were conducting a sleep study, which for some reason was taking place in a completely open and normal home environment, and suddenly one of them realised that one sleeper had eaten a spider, and that it could be essential to the future of science to count the number of spiders that everyone ate and thus calculate the average consumption rate. Uh huh. Yeah.
So why is it so damn easy for people to believe this? Why do people take random completely unrealistic nonsense, and behave as if it is a foregone conclusion? I’m a cynic, and I don’t believe things unless they make sense. I have come to the inevitable conclusion that people do not think. Perhaps they feel they do not have to, as long as someone is there to think for them. By definition, this idea is grossly flawed, but to people who don’t think, that fact is unlikely to become apparent.
I suspect that gullibility is a contagious disease.
May 11th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
I know you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet, but according to http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.htm your money is safe
May 12th, 2006 at 12:34 am
Did you know that they’ve taken the word gullible out of the dictionary? It’s true!
May 13th, 2006 at 11:20 am
Ya see, the problem is people will believe ANYTHING a scientist tells them, mainly because people never seem to understand what science people are saying and scientists just talk in big words and acronyms and wave about pages of graphs and statistics. It’s great…..
May 13th, 2006 at 11:21 am
Also don’t know if you’ve seen this before but you might enjoy it. The guy writes for the Guardian and is good…
http://www.badscience.net/
May 16th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
All of that shite about eating insects in your sleep is just that— SHITE!!!
Insects are sessile cryptozoic animals and would go almost anywhere except into a 37 degree centigrade human mouth, So there!!
May 18th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Doesn’t sessile mean “not able to move”, like oysters?
and isn’t “cryptozoic” just another name for the Precambrian era?
Are you trying to peddle fibs as fact by using big words?
so many questions, so little time…..
May 18th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
Oh boy, who said ignorance is bliss? Sessile means means slow moving as opposed to let’s say a cheetah. Cryptzoic means preferring dark, damp, cold places. Can someone show this person how to use a dictionary? Buy them one perhaps?
May 20th, 2006 at 9:28 am
dictionary.com, Miriam-Webster and Wiktionary agree with me for sessile, but your right on Cryptzoic [well half right, because it is also another term for the Precambrian era, I assume the joke centring around the whole darkness thang..]
May 20th, 2006 at 9:35 am
Christ, i’ve just become the worst kind of internet nerd, arguing over the meaning of words on someone elses blog….
if you don’t mind, i’m going away and cry now :)
May 26th, 2006 at 10:40 am
“I suspect that gullibility is a contagious disease.”
Yes, if I’m not mistaken its a particularly virulent form of bird flu that’s sweeping the globe, especially in coastal areas.
June 28th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
gullible has been put back in the dictionary… I checked