Mental Floss is healthy for your brain – John Green blows 50 misconceptions out of the water in about 5 minutes. As I watched this, I realized how many sermons I’ve heard where misconceptions in need of mental floss were trotted out as amazing facts. I’ve heard at least a half-dozen of these in church including numbers 1,2,3,5,7, and 9 below. Here are the top 10 myths he busted for me:
- Marie Antoinette never said “let them eat cake,” when told peasants were starving due to lack of bread.
- Napoleon wasn’t a shorty. He was 5’7″ – slightly above average at his time.
- Albert Einstein did not fail math in school. When asked about it he said, “Before I was 15 I had mastered differential and integral calculus.”
- Sushi does not mean raw fish, it means sour rice.
- The Great Wall of China is not the only man-made object visible from space. Many man-made objects are visible from space & the Great Wall isn’t one of them.
- Throwing rice at weddings does not lead to birds eating the rice, the rice expanding in their bellies and killing them.
- Humans have more than 5 senses, including a sense of time, acceleration, and limb position.
- Shaving does not cause hair to grow back thicker.
- People do not use only 10% of their brains.
- If you throw a penny off the Empire State Building it will not kill somebody. Terminal velocity of a penny is 30 mph.
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