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name: paul
re: http://www.gullible.info/archive.php?m=2006-04#post535
type of message: Factual Error
comments: The cat thing is a little misleading. I believe the study only considers cats that survived for some period of time after the fall, but leaves out cats that "died on impact." Perhaps the statistics would still be remarkable, but to know that for sure, the study would need to include cats that died from the fall, but whose deaths were not reported.
-Paul
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I received this email the other day, and was somewhat amused by it. While Paul is very perceptive in his understanding of statistics and probability, it appears that he didn't look too closely at the date. That post was made on April 1st... ;-)
While we do pride ourselves on being a highly reliable clearing house of knowledge, sometimes we just have to have a little fun. For the record, all of those "facts" were just completely made up. And I have to say, it's a lot harder to make trivia than it is to find it.
That was really tricky! I got all the way down to the 5th fact before realizing that it was April Fools Day!
No one should have been fooled by that last one -- George Washington wouldn't have drunk liquor not only because he was an upstanding guy, but due to his wooden teeth, he would not have been able to drink from a bottle.
Good jokes, Kyle!
I should have made that last one more subtle...everyone knows George Washington didn't drink.
I looked up the Twinkie one, and it's true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie
Which in turn, causes me great confusion.
After all, it could be an April Fool's Day joke that Legatissimo said that all the facts were made up, whereas in truth one wasn't.
Needless to say, I don't know what to say.
instead of clearing anything up, I'm going to let this descend into the depths of meta hell
Wait. You say that you looked up the truth of the Twinkie one... on Wikipedia?!?!?! Wikipedia is well-known to be untrustworthy in terms of factual correctness. After all, they don't have any paid staff (like The Encyclopedia Britannica or Gullible.Info does) -- it's all written by a bunch of volunteers. How motivated could they be to get things "right" if you're not paid for it? I'm sure they're just spreading urban legends that they read about (and then cut-and-paste from) elsewhere on the web.
Yeah. I don't even need to start on Wikipedia. Especially after that whole John Seigenthaler situation, I just sort of assumed everyone knew wikipedia was bunk.
Wait a minute; I just checked the history page on the Wikipedia article on Twinkies. It looks like they got their information from-- none other than the April Fool's Day Gullible.info posting!
After some extensive research I found this on snopes:
Twinkies were created in 1930 as ladyfinger-shaped spongecakes enrobing a banana filling produced at the Hostess bakery in Schiller Park, Illinois. (Hostess is now owned by Kansas City-based Interstate Bakeries Corp.) The product's name was inspired by a billboard in St. Louis advertising Twinkle Toe Shoes. When the world's banana trade ground to a halt during World War II (this wasn't the first time war disrupted the banana trade — the popular ditty "Yes, We Have No Bananas" came out of World War I because of similar circumstances), Hostess substituted a vanilla cream filling not dissimilar to cake frosting
Thereby proving that even while trying to make a joke, gullible.info has posted another tidbit of factual goodness! And by seeing that gullible cannot lie even on april fools day we can assume that all info coming out of the dedicated researchers here is 100% true.
But Snopes.com is all urban legends and hoaxes...
Don't get me wrong, snopes.com cant come close to meeting Gullible in terms of factual accuracy, they do sometimes get things right.
A bit strange (yet entirely relevant) to question, but speaking only rationally, wouldn't you make a banana-filled Twinkie yellow?
That is in fact why Hostess, the original manufacturer, has dyed the cake of a twinkie yellow. In an official statement from the company they said, "We made a concious [sic] decision to keep the cake yellow. This is to remind all of us where this company came from, and that our heritage is important." So, there you have it they think that the yellow will boost company morale or something...
Yellow boosts my morale. I actually skip when I walk past McDonald's.
Did Hostess really spell "conscious" wrong...?
Ha! http://www.bananatwinkies.com/
Notice the words "...return of banana Twinkies."
I've also sent an e-mail to Hostess. I await a reply, for I MUST KNOW! As do we all.
Overreacting? I say not. It's impossible to overreact when it comes to Twinkies.
I appologize, I should have put a [sic] after "concious" because hostess did in fact spell it incorrectly. I have remedied this problem now.
That was the fastest reply ever! I commend you.
10 minutes... Wow...
I do what I can to better serve the scientific community. Not to mention the fact that your reply would now be the fastest ever with a time of 2 minutes.
I may just be an idiot, but I assumed all the April Fools Jokes were true based solely on the Twinkie one.
The twinkie one was printed in the book,
"Who knew? ; Things You Didn't Know Abou Things You Know Well"
by David Hoffman
That one was actually a little bit of a SNAFU, but the review process in getting a fact changed is so horrendous that I won't even bother. I just made up a bunch of true-sounding stuff for that day. And being the senior editor, I knew how to work them past the review board so as to get them on the front page without having them put through all the paces that normal facts are. Of course had they been subject to the usual scrutiny, there's no way corporate would have approved them to show. So it was an April Fool's joke on the readers, as well as one on the corporate staff.
But I just made up that twinkie one, and it turned out to be true. Like someone said, that spot on accuracy is a curse and a blessing. I guess you can't run from who you are.
Note to someone who is probably reading this thread: I'm just messing with you Sherri...all the writers love you, please don't hate me :-p
I looked up the Twinkie one, and it's true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie
Which in turn, causes me great confusion.
After all, it could be an April Fool's Day joke that Legatissimo said that all the facts were made up, whereas in truth one wasn't.
Needless to say, I don't know what to say.
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regardless of what you think of wikepedia...
I saw the same thing on the Food Network's "Unwrapped", where they looked at the history of Twinkies, toured the Twinkie factory, and talked to the Twinkie business people.....
it's true!
(I was also one who did not notice the April 1 things.... probably because it's a well-known tale that cats are safer falling from higher distances, and I KNEW the banana thing was true....)
Yeah the cat thing is due to the way their body moves/twists and terminal velocity.
Those are all examples of "urban legends", namely things that many people believe to be true, but aren't.
Didn't you notice that they were all posted on April Fools' Day?
No I do actually believe that the height from which the cat falls changes its probablity of dying in a non-linear fashion.... we could always perform an experiment? ;D
OK, I dropped 10,000 cats from various heights. Calico cats do best from 3 storeys, while long-haired Persians survived 85% from 5 storeys.
From the 2432 cats remaining after the first salvo, I deduced that, when you hit a cat on the head with a hammer, it will almost always blink.
The government paid me $1.3 million to conduct my research. And the local Corean restaurant paid me $1.50 / corpus felis. [No kidding: people in that country prefer the Co- spelling of their nation's name. Don't ask me why.]
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