Cracking corn today, no work save for laundry…I started singing it after watching Bugs Bunny do it in a cartoon. I suppose I should get cracking on the wash, just to get it out of the way. No point in having the sword of damocles hanging over my head if I can help it.
Well, perhaps I’ll waste a little time by passing on a couple of widely believed scientific “facts” that are actually false… until proved otherwise again.
The age-old study in which they trained planarians to go through a maze, and then fed the trained planarians to untrained planarians and noticed that the recently-fed planarians learned the maze much more quickly than a control group of unfed planarians. No explanation was ever found for this property of flatworms.
Much later, another group of researchers figured out why this was. The fed planarians weren’t assimilating memories, they were simply better-fed than the control group, and so they learned faster.
I think it was just so embarrassing a find that it was largely ignored, and textbooks in the know stopped using the flatworm learning as an example of the scientific method. Of course, cannibals who eat their associates’ brains so as to gain their wisdom are largely ignorant of this fact as well, and they keep on using planarians to justify their actions.
Also, subliminal advertising doesn’t work…