About this project
Writing introductory posts on new blogs is pretty hard, but here goes.
Some time ago, I had the idea of compiling a collection of ‘popular misconceptions’ - those nuggets of information that get passed from person to person, told with an air of authority, but which turn out to be completely false, often quite obviously slow. I can’t even remember what gave me the idea any more, but I registered the domain a while back (over a year ago), started to keep notes, and then kinda forgot about it.
Faced with the choice of whether to renew the domain or not, I’ve decided to ressurect the project and just launch it in a fairly open, beta state, and to encourage contributions from anyone who has something to add.
Popular misconceptions are similar to urban legends, stories about unlikely or fantastical events that supposedly happened to someone (sometimes the ‘friend of a friend’ or whoever is telling the story). The collecting, and debunking, of urban legends has quite a history - most famously on the excellent website snopes.com and the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban. Popular misconceptions are different though, as they’re not cautionary tales but are instead perceived facts about how the world is. Often, they’re so pervasive that people will insist that they must be true.
Examples include the idea that giraffes evolved long necks in order to eat leaves from the tops of trees, that tv cameras add a stone to your perceived weight, and that water flows down the plughole in different directions depending on what side of the equator you’re on.
These popular misconceptions, and more, will be discussed, debated and debunked on an upcoming ‘wiki’ section of this website, where anyone can contribute by simply editing any of the pages. This blog, meanwhile, will track some of the significant finds and developments, as well as telling my story of how I go about discovering the truth behind these popular misconceptions - including occassional ‘guest posts’ from invited experts.
So that sums up this first post, and the start of the project. On my to-do list is getting together a proper logo and design for the site, but for now, the default themes will have to do…