Shitty Ask Lemmy

None of them, that what makes them facts.

You likely ask which seeming facts are actually false.

It that is so, here are some examples of "facts" I hear repeated:

• we only use 10% of our brains
• the sun is yellow
• Vikings wore horned helmets
• Cleopatra was Egyptian

And so on...

P. S.: don't forget to drink 8 glasses of water a day

All of them, including this one.

false

My pants are, and have always been, shit free.

pee is stored in the balls

[serious] For history, apart from all the anti-communist ones about democracy coming from the
"slave-owners on stolen land that wants to be free"
that are so numerous and so upside down,
it's hard to pick them out, but I'll take two that apply to their own country and continent.

"No taxation without representation" is a "fact" that like everything about the US,
that is upside down. It should be called "No representation without taxation"
if the Usonians were honest about themselves, but they are not.
You see, the British decided that since the Usonians pretend
to like not paying taxes so much, that they told the Usonians
that they were going to join in on their culture
and thus never pay any tariffs from now on,
because, you know, that's a tax.
The Usonians decided in return to dump all British tea into river,
as they are always posers that do in fact love taxes.

Another "fact" is that America is named after Amerigo Vespucci.
"America" likely does not refer to Albericus Vespucius,
as that's name that "Amerigo Vespucci" used for himself during his lifetime.
What likely happened is that a 16th century German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller made a guess where the name came from and that got copied ever since.
It's far more likely to be named after a gold-rich mountain range in Nicaragua,
mixed with Spanish word adjective for "rich", the "-rica" part of America,
like Costa Rica.
The 'Amerrisque' mountain range itself means "land where the wind often blows".
So America means "rich land where the wind often blows".
[/serious]

[serious] Before I go "off the rails", I'll go with a physics one that's luckily just a little less controversial.

It's the "airplane goes up because of the shape of the wing
causing one side to move faster" equal transit-time explanation.

This is because there's multiple effects working on a wing or sail
going on at the same time and it's difficult to determine which one
dominates.

Most importantly is the indirect way the wing hits the air particles.
The amount of air particles hitting the wing randomly is very high,
and this amount is slightly lower underneath the wing than above it,
causing the wing to want to go up the same way a piece of wood does in water,
while gravity pulls harder on it,
But the faster you move the wing horizontally,
the larger area of air particles per second hitting it underneath and above become,
thus causing the wing to go upwards more.
The direct 'bullet air particles' and 'equal transit-time' are bonuses.

On top of that, the "lateen sail goes faster because of equal transit-time of wind around the sail" is also wrong.
The real reason is that a sailboat is on water and when the boat is sailing halfway into the wind,
a lot of that wind wants to tip over the boat.
But the wind pushes the boat sideways and the boat starts to tip,
the foil (or substitute) underneath the boat acts as a second sail that pushes against the water
and the water pushes back on the keel, which in turn pushes the sail back,
and thus the sail gets squeezed on both sides
and then how the sail is positioned to the squeeze
can get it to push the whole boat forward.
[/serious]

[serious]
Here I'll go "off the rails" into Alice in Wonderland, so take it with a grain of salt if you will.

I think a lot of what is accepted about physics today as fact,
just doesn't work how people think it works,
and that physics today still dabbles quite a lot into the supernatural via reification,
even though people make the pretense that it isn't.
Reality is 100% material and thus all laws and theories of physics
should abide by that, of which many, especially the most famous ones do not.

Probably one of the biggest "fact" out there today is Newton's law of universal gravitation
and by extension Einstein's general theory of relativity.

The problem with that "fact" is that "things fall down, see?"
doesn't prove the law, was never contested,
and in fact was the very thing that people used
to argue why Newton's law of universal gravitation was false,
as "up" and "down" were laws of physics upon themselves,
before Newton's law of universal gravitation.

Since gravitation is about pulling things together and we already have an understanding what 'pull' is,
which is just 'push' via a chain of connected objects, one can use Occam's razor and
say that gravity works via a chain of connected objects that are somehow invisible,
thus eliminating the need for any law to explain why things fall down or towards each other.

Now one might argue that we already have Einstein's general theory of relativity for that,
but that theory has the very same issue, except doubled.
It uses Maxwell's equations which is like Newton's law of universal gravitation but for electromagnetism.
Like gravity, magnets also pull, therefore the same argument applies,
of that electromagnetism being a push from the same chain of invisible connected objects.
[/serious]

"The real McCoy" is not a reference to Elijah McCoy's oiler but predates Elijah's invention and seems to come from Scotland originally. The term has been misapplied to many McCoy's over the centuries.

Elijah McCoy was an inventor who was originally born in Canada to parents who had fled there to escape slavery in Kentucky. They eventually moved to Michigan where Elijah would go on to invent not just an improved oiler mechanism for machinery but also stuff like a folding ironing board and a lawn sprinkler. Despite an interesting and successful life the saying "the real McCoy" was never really a thing. It seems to have been applied retroactively around the 1960's.

I can tell you which 80s band is Simply Red

"The Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility."

Pancakes are better than waffles

i made god because i was tired of not having a god to order me around.