The brilliant blog Kottke has been lately delving into memory holes of Wikipedia, the stubs and the recursive list of lists, and shares an interesting and compact catalog of common misconceptions, including their origins and less romantic or panicky truths.
There are a lot of myths to dispel, but some of my favourites (and facts I was not disabused of) include how the vomitorium was not a Roman powder-room to extend a lavish feast but rather was the name for the broad entrance and egress of an arena or similar public structures for spewing out large crowds quickly, black holes only have the gravitational influence that they inherit from their former solar body—in other words, posing no threat to nearby objects in orbit unless they were on a collision course with the star already, and the notion that humans only use ten percent of their brains was meant metaphorically, when causally used by first by American philosopher and psychologist William James, son of writer Henry James, but was hence taken as a science-fact, since neurologically, we only observe a fraction of the synapses firing at any one given moment. What's your favourite popular myth here or what would you nominate?
