Everyone Knows
"Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out."
Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1471-1530)
Except for that shard of wisdom, Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, never contributed much to the spheres of science or education. That one statement, though, has often led me to till the soil of ideas, and to question everything. I'm annoyingly skeptical of nearly everything, from science to media to politics. I usually don't settle for easy answers.
The flags of skepticism start flying for me every time I hear someone begin a statement with, "Everyone knows that....". This is often the way we're taught, and we're just as often given very bad, very wrong information by those who should know better. Even worse, over time, bad information takes on a life of its own, and, with our help, actually repels the truth in favor of the more comfortable assurances of myth, assumption and fable.
Here's one that a lot of people will defend to the end: The Full Moon Effect - the notion that crime and medical emergencies increase with the appearance of the full moon. This is pure myth, and continues to survive in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary. Ask any emergency room nurse or police officer. They'll probably be willing to swear an oath that all the stories you've heard are true. Why? Two systems are at work here. One is the reinforcement of myth, repeated legends that are never looked at critically. The other is a willingness to participate in the myth. We remember the times when circumstances reinforce our prejudicial thinking, but dismiss our wrong guesses as unexplained occurrences. The nurses and cops really believe what they're saying, but they also expect the results they believe in. The fix is in. A number of studies into the effects of the full moon on human behavior, however, don't reinforce the myth. A recent study at Missouri Western University, "... found no significant difference in criminal activity and fire and emergency calls between the full moon phase and the other lunar phases..."
Anything repeated often enough takes on a ring of truth, or at least a cozy familiarity. I was taught in school - elementary school, high school and what little college I could sneak into - that water circling a drain in the Southern Hemisphere swirls in the opposite direction of water circling an identical drain in the Northern Hemisphere. The Coriolis Force - the effect of the spinning planet - was called into action, the idea took root in my head, and has stayed there for decades. I have defended the "facts" of this effect at great length, in spite of the fact that it's completely and totally bogus. The rotation of the earth isn't strong enough to affect a bowl of water, regardless or where it is.
Another strange idea that gets reinforced year after year, particularly by TV weathermen, is the notion that, on the first day of Spring - the Vernal Equinox - then and only then, can you balance an egg on end. As I write this, we're barely three days past Groundhog Day, and I tonight successfully balanced not one, but three different eggs in the Flyover Test Kitchen. My grandson balanced an egg on its small end last August. To celebrate this seemingly impossible feat, we scrambled the egg with a few of its carton mates and made some totally delicious French Toast. Eggs are easy to balance, any day of the year, and pretty tasty at that.
Where is this guy going with all this, you might ask. Is he an insufferable know-it-all or does he just enjoy making hamburger from sacred cows? Neither really, although both ideas have some basis in reality. You and I live in an age when information comes at us so fast, and from so many directions at once, that it all starts to blend together. This same glut of input also provides us access to a lot of good information on demand. The ability to question what goes into your head before it gets stuck there becomes more important as so much information becomes available. Questioning ideas keeps bad information from forming a solid foundation for still more bad ideas.
Shaving doesn't make hair grow back thicker, humans use all their brains, not just ten percent; brain cells do regenerate, the seasons have nothing to do with our distance from the sun, swallowed chewing gum doesn't stay in your digestive tract for seven years, space is not really an empty void, hair and fingernails don't continue to grow after you die, and if you stop feeding the birds in your back yard, they won't all drop dead from the co-dependent relationship you heartlessly walked away from. Myths can be hard to walk away from, too, unless you first hold them up to the light and see how little truth shines through.
My advice, worth every last cent you paid for it, is to question everything, especially "common" knowledge. You may find an uncommon revelation hiding somewhere. But whatever you do, don't take my word for it. Dig a little deeper. It won't make the beauty of a full moon any less magical to behold, but you might see it a bit differently. Enlightenment doesn't come from answers, but from questions.
The flags of skepticism start flying for me every time I hear someone begin a statement with, "Everyone knows that....". This is often the way we're taught, and we're just as often given very bad, very wrong information by those who should know better. Even worse, over time, bad information takes on a life of its own, and, with our help, actually repels the truth in favor of the more comfortable assurances of myth, assumption and fable.
Here's one that a lot of people will defend to the end: The Full Moon Effect - the notion that crime and medical emergencies increase with the appearance of the full moon. This is pure myth, and continues to survive in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary. Ask any emergency room nurse or police officer. They'll probably be willing to swear an oath that all the stories you've heard are true. Why? Two systems are at work here. One is the reinforcement of myth, repeated legends that are never looked at critically. The other is a willingness to participate in the myth. We remember the times when circumstances reinforce our prejudicial thinking, but dismiss our wrong guesses as unexplained occurrences. The nurses and cops really believe what they're saying, but they also expect the results they believe in. The fix is in. A number of studies into the effects of the full moon on human behavior, however, don't reinforce the myth. A recent study at Missouri Western University, "... found no significant difference in criminal activity and fire and emergency calls between the full moon phase and the other lunar phases..."
Anything repeated often enough takes on a ring of truth, or at least a cozy familiarity. I was taught in school - elementary school, high school and what little college I could sneak into - that water circling a drain in the Southern Hemisphere swirls in the opposite direction of water circling an identical drain in the Northern Hemisphere. The Coriolis Force - the effect of the spinning planet - was called into action, the idea took root in my head, and has stayed there for decades. I have defended the "facts" of this effect at great length, in spite of the fact that it's completely and totally bogus. The rotation of the earth isn't strong enough to affect a bowl of water, regardless or where it is.
Another strange idea that gets reinforced year after year, particularly by TV weathermen, is the notion that, on the first day of Spring - the Vernal Equinox - then and only then, can you balance an egg on end. As I write this, we're barely three days past Groundhog Day, and I tonight successfully balanced not one, but three different eggs in the Flyover Test Kitchen. My grandson balanced an egg on its small end last August. To celebrate this seemingly impossible feat, we scrambled the egg with a few of its carton mates and made some totally delicious French Toast. Eggs are easy to balance, any day of the year, and pretty tasty at that.
Where is this guy going with all this, you might ask. Is he an insufferable know-it-all or does he just enjoy making hamburger from sacred cows? Neither really, although both ideas have some basis in reality. You and I live in an age when information comes at us so fast, and from so many directions at once, that it all starts to blend together. This same glut of input also provides us access to a lot of good information on demand. The ability to question what goes into your head before it gets stuck there becomes more important as so much information becomes available. Questioning ideas keeps bad information from forming a solid foundation for still more bad ideas.
Shaving doesn't make hair grow back thicker, humans use all their brains, not just ten percent; brain cells do regenerate, the seasons have nothing to do with our distance from the sun, swallowed chewing gum doesn't stay in your digestive tract for seven years, space is not really an empty void, hair and fingernails don't continue to grow after you die, and if you stop feeding the birds in your back yard, they won't all drop dead from the co-dependent relationship you heartlessly walked away from. Myths can be hard to walk away from, too, unless you first hold them up to the light and see how little truth shines through.
My advice, worth every last cent you paid for it, is to question everything, especially "common" knowledge. You may find an uncommon revelation hiding somewhere. But whatever you do, don't take my word for it. Dig a little deeper. It won't make the beauty of a full moon any less magical to behold, but you might see it a bit differently. Enlightenment doesn't come from answers, but from questions.
