What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Where Does Coffee Come From, for Starters?
The 2024 Global Risks Report , released this week by the World Economic Forum, identifies disinformation and disinformation as the greatest risk to humanity in the next two years. “People who believe strange bullshit” beat out “interstate armed conflict” (number 5), “social polarization” (number 3) and “extreme weather events” (number 2) for the coveted title.
The report warns that attackers will use artificial intelligence to flood the world’s news channels with false narratives and propaganda, potentially influencing elections on a scale never seen before, leading to civil unrest and encouraging draconian censorship as states try to control the flow of information. . With somewhere around half the world’s population expected to vote in elections in 2024 and 2025, there is a lot of money and power at stake, and AI’s ability to easily produce hyper-specific propaganda will undoubtedly be widely used to influence the power structures that influence the life of almost every person on earth. Since there’s nothing anyone can do to prevent this, I’ll focus on coffee instead.
Today I learned that coffee is not brewed from beans. “The beans you brew are actually the processed and roasted seeds of a fruit called the coffee cherry,” says the National Coffee Association of the United States . Correcting this little personal misconception about my favorite drink has helped me feel a little better in the face of the global tsunami of bullshit that the World Economic Forum is predicting, so here are six more things you may have always gotten wrong.
“The year of a dog is equal to seven years of a man.”
This oft-repeated “rule” dates back to the 1950s and has always been more about providing a rough estimate than an accurate measurement of a dog’s age. At the time, dogs (generally) lived to be about 10 years old, and humans lived to be 70 years old on average, so the math works. But different dog breeds have different life expectancies. Australian Cattle Dogs live an average of about 14 years, and the French Bulldog was lucky enough to see his fifth birthday. And in general, people are living longer now, so the whole equation no longer works, even as a rough estimate.
“Man has five senses”
“I’ve got one, two, three, four, five senses that’s working overtime,” XTC sang on their 1982 new wave “Feelings Working Overtime.” But in fact, we have several more senses besides sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. There is our sense of direction and our sense of object permanence. Balance is a feeling. We experience movement, warmth, pain, and the passage of time, all of which can be defined as separate senses. We can have as many as 33 senses. Some of this information comes from the World Economic Forum , which gives me a sense of foreboding and fear.
“Water conducts electricity”
Pure water is an insulator that does not conduct electricity. The difficult word in this sentence is “pure.” Pure water is distilled and contains no ions. It is usually only seen in laboratories for specific purposes. The water we swim in, drink in, and wish we could drown in as we read the news from the World Economic Forum is never clean. It is clogged with dissolved minerals, contaminants and especially ions. However, ions conduct electricity, not water. It’s formal and annoying, but it’s still true.
“Different parts of your tongue taste different.”
There used to be “language maps” that showed which part of the tongue had receptors for which tastes, but language research has come a long way since then, and we now know that taste buds for different tastes are scattered throughout the tongue, and you can taste everything and everywhere. This misinformation dates back to a scientific article published in German in 1875 , which was incorrectly translated into English in 1901. For over 90 years people believed this, even though we all have languages in our heads !
“Bleeding a Broken Nintendo Cartridge Fixes the Situation”
You can’t fix a Nintendo or other video game on a cartridge by taking it out and blowing into it. When a game doesn’t work, it’s usually because the pins don’t match up. Each time you remove the cartridge and put it back in, you give the pins another chance to align correctly, but there is no need to blow. However, you could see how this would work.
I find this myth fascinating because it was a common practice before the internet spread misinformation. How did everyone, everywhere get the idea to do the same thing at the same time? Perhaps some long-forgotten kid tried it on an Atari 2600 cartridge in front of his friends, and they spread it from there like a virus.
“Fortune Cookies – Chinese”
Fortune cookies didn’t originate in China. They originated in Kyoto , Japan in the 1870s. Makoto Hagiwara was the first person to sell fortune cookies in the United States at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco in the 1890s or early 1900s. They were initially known as “lucky tea cakes” due to their Japanese origins, but in the 1940s, when the US forced Japanese Americans into internment camps, it is believed that Chinese businessmen were able to take over production and distribution. confectionery, leading to its association with Chinese restaurants.