“A laughable claim, Mister Bond, perpetuated by overzealous teachers of science. Simply construct Newton’s laws into a rotating system and you will see a centrifugal force term appear as plain as day.” xkcd.com/123/
This is minor one, but annoys me how comnmon this is: light is made out of litle packets of energy called photons.
Here is a good video on the topic: youtube.com/watch?v=SDtAh9IwG-I (Too lazy didn’t watch: Light is an electromagnetc wave and is is not quantized. Only the interactions between atoms and light are quantized)
Similarly, when people talk about electrons “moving through wires” or other conductors. The electrons are not moving, they are passing energy from one atom to the next but the electrons themselves are not moving.
Every single rapist and murderer was found to have dihydrogen monoxide inside their body at the time they committed their crimes, and your friends and family may be using it recreationally without you knowing
As ice cream sales in the United States increase, so do deaths in in developed parts of Africa.
I use this fact to explain to students how true information can be used to mislead people into drawing wild, deranged conclusions.
The commonality in these events is the rise in temperature during the summer. But if you leave that out, there’s an absurd argument to be made about how purchasing ice cream is inherently evil.
I don’t think it’s an amazing example of what OP is talking about, but as an example, I like how simple and easy to follow it is. Great for junior high level kids.
Correlation at least tries to imply they’re related. As lottery sales go up in your household so does credit card debt. Not always a cause but they’re related
You’re looking for spurious correlations which is when numbers have no business even being used in a comparison
People use to say that you cant lie with statistics, but is a common practice to use statistics to lie.
We can take the infamous 41% suicide rate for trans people. Transphobes throw that out like a killing move implying that trans people are inherently unhappy and being trans is a mental illness (which is not true).
The reality is that the suicide rate is so high because of transphobia, kids getting thrown out of home, homelessness, unable to find a job, staying at the closet to avoid social consecuences, etc.
Trans people who live in more open and accepting environments are way less likely to be depressed and commit suicide. In progresive areas where trans people are more accepted the suicide rate is nowhere near 41%.
explanation, since this one might be more confusing than most:
Traffic congestion does indeed waste gas. However, any place worth driving to is going to have congestion–driving without congestion is easy, fast, and comfortable, so people generally won’t take other options until roads become congested. Thus, congestion actually reduces gas usage overall, because it is only once areas become congested that people stop driving places.
Trying to avoid congestion, on the other hand, usually involves expanding roads, something which increases driving, and makes other forms of transportation less useful/comfortable, thus increasing gas usage overall.
Yep but the point is the 1.2% represent millions of gene pairs and the ones we share are not always present or expressed in the same way. So just sharing genes doesn’t necessarily mean were the same or they do the same thing.
Still holds true either way. If the doctor is or is not at great risk of legal consequences, it will greatly impact your care. I have a complicated case with lots of small spinal damage that all adds up to partial disability. All reputable neurosurgeons here spend five minutes reading the radiology summary from a MRI and walk away from anything that is not easy like my case. It is just too much legal liability to take on hard cases. If you live in a region where it is safer for the doctor to treat difficult cases with impunity, you will likely get better, or at least more, care. In the real world, the legal system plays a major role in medical treatments. No one is throwing away or risking their entire career on your case. Skipping context, your healthcare really is determined by Judges either way. Learning this the hard way sucks.
When people say a politician “raised taxes.” More often than not it’s a tax that does not apply to 99.99% of the population and they raised it from 0.000001% to 0.000002%
I mean, yes. Women as a population are physically smaller than men as a population.
Women have smaller fingers than men. Smaller eyes. Smaller lungs. There is no “gotcha” that smaller skeletal frames with smaller skulls contain, by volume, a smaller organ.
Doesnt mean every man’s brain is larger than every woman’s brain either.
Doesn’t mean men are smarter than women.
It’s just a statistic, that while true, doesn’t imply what some people think it does.
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