Feb 152015
Wandering through Youtube as you do, I happened to come across :-
.. and was immediately struck by how dumb the selection of "facts" were :-
- Antibiotics attack bacteria not viruses. In fact the belief that they attack anything nasty smaller than the eye can see is contributing to the issue mentioned as the fact – that antibiotics are becoming less and less effective as antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria evolve. So whilst the video is right in the broadest possible terms, the explanation is full of shit.
- Shellac has nothing whatsoever to do with bug shit. It's produced by collecting a different bodily fluid, but obviously the narrator was confused between the two words secrete and excrete.
- The fact about Caesar was nearly right except that old Julius asked for his ransom to be raised from 20 silver talents to 50 silver talents (an increase of 2.5 times not double which is quite a big difference), and whilst Julius did crucify the pirates, he also had their throats cut first.
- The sixth exictintion (us humans causing an extinction event) is treated as a fact whereas it is currently a plausible hypothesis, but by no means a fact. Not that we shouldn't improve our behaviour to our fellow planet dwellers!
- We all eat 12 pubic hairs a year, The narrator even admits nobody knows of a source for this "fact". Well guess what? If you don't have a source, all you have is an entertaining story.
- I couldn't be bothered to check, but I suspect the "fact" of big agriculture breeding huge workforces of children to work farms because there are US labour law loopholes is a bit far off base.
Out of a list of 15 so-called "facts" at least 50% were horse-shit and in the case of the remainder, there's a fair few I've not bothered checking. Best bet is when you look at a video claimimg to have a top 10 list of something is to take the whole thing with a pinch of salt.