After the Peak

1. In the time of Columbus, most people thought the Earth was flat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Navigation_plans

Actually, most educated people, and especially anyone involved with nautical exploration (eg, Kings, scholars, ship captains, sailors) had known the Earth was round since the time of Ancient Greece.  Even more interesting, the story of Christopher Columbus being the kind of genius who thought outside of the conventional wisdom of his time and for that reason made his great discovery is also bogus.

In fact, the people who thought Columbus’ 1492 voyage would be suicidal thought so because they had a pretty accurate understanding of the circumference of the Earth, in particular that the distance traveling West from Europe to Asia was in fact farther than contemporary ships could travel without running out of provisions.  Columbus’ contrary belief was actually quite wrong as he thought that the Earth was much smaller than it actually was, such that the distance between Europe and Asia was much smaller.

Of course, while the contemporary scholars were right and Columbus was wrong, fortune favored Columbus and there happened to be two massive unknown continents in the middle of the vast ocean between Europe and Asia, and they were just close enough to Europe for him to reach before his ships ran out of provisions.

2. A frog placed in water that is very slowly brought to boil will not attempt to escape

http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp

I suppose this one persists because it is such a useful metaphor for the human trait that sometimes we don’t notice a chance that happens gradually over a long time, when we would be shocked if it happens all at once.  I say “sometimes”, because the weird thing about using this example as a metaphor for human behavior, is that if you infinitesimally raise the temperature of a swimming pool or a hot tub, it is a pretty safe bet that any people in the water will get out long before the water gets to a boil.  And that basic physical survival response is at least as old as our shared ancestor with amphibians.  So if you want to boil a live frog, the best advice is really to start the water boiling first, and hope that the scalding water disables the frog before it can respond.

3. You shouldn’t swallow chewing gum

http://www.snopes.com/oldwives/chewgum.asp

This myth actually has consequences, as used chewing gum is disgustingly littered so frequently that Singapore even banned it altogether.  If everyone swallowed their gum from the time they were kids, then a lot of litterers wouldn’t even think to spit it out.  You don’t see already chewed-up candy gumming up mailboxes and keyholes and the undersides of benches, do you?  I myself didn’t put any thought into this until a couple of years ago when I thought to check on snopes.  It used to be such a pain when flying Southwest when they would give me my bag of peanuts but no napkin and I’d have to wait for them to come back again with napkins before I could spit my gum out and eat the peanuts.  Now I just swallow the gum.  So easy.

Now I just need to find a way to convince girls to swallow their gum as well, so after they leave the next morning I don’t have to discover a nasty chewed-up piece of gum just sitting on my nightstand.

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