Some of you may have heard of the brilliant British show QI (Quite Interesting) where they ask questions with interesting answers. Many of these answers are common knowledge and ... turn out to be completely wrong. It seems that at great amount of knowledge that we hold and were taught, is either very incomplete or utterly wrong.

So for the good of everyone, why not share some of these with eachother? Who knows of something that is considered to be common knowledge yet is wrong?

Here's a few of mine:

- shooting a hole in a window of a plane will not cause immense decompression where everything gets sucked through the hole

- coffee does NOT wake you up or give you an energy boost. To those who are addicted, however, the boost it gives is actually your body reacting to receiving its "fix". A similar thing goes for sugar.

- alcohol does not warm you up. When you're out in the cold, it actually makes it easier for your body to freeze by opening up your pores. In short: don't drink alcohol to warm up. Even though you'll feel warmer, your body will get colder much faster.

- speaking of warmth, dark coloured clothing is not warmer than light coloured clothing. Whether you wear a black shirt or a white one, there's no real difference in how hot you'll feel except maybe as a placebo.

I'm sure I'll think of many more but this should get us started!

Dogs can see in color, they are just red/green colorblind.
William Randolph Hearst did NOT try to get Citizen Kane destroyed. He just ordered Hearst papers to not cover it to minimize its box office.

For me it is about statues of people on horses. I always thought the stance of the horse was a universal way of expressing how the person died. EG, horse only on its hind legs means the person died in battle, etc.

This is wrong, very wrong :(

Egyptians did NOT have access to horses in the Old Kingdom
And the pyramids were NOT built in the New Kingdom, they were built in the Old Kingdom. The pyramids weren't used later on because #1 they were too expensive and #2 easy for robbers to plunder

Ooo there's so many myths about Egyptians and the main one is the question of slaves and Israelites. Evidence shows slaves did not build the pyramids or at least not to the extent that the Bible claims. There's been all sorts of evidence of regular settlements of workers, proper food, proper burials, etc. which slaves would not receive. There's also no evidence in hieroglyphs that mention any slaves even though they often depicted real life scenes. Neither is there any evidence of Israelites ever having served a Pharaoh and definitely not in the large numbers claimed by the Bible.

Q.I. is an excellent show and if you're not familiar with it, I urge you to check a couple of episodes out. Lots can be found quite easily on YouTube.

Also, here's a pretty good list of common misconceptions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

Ooo I love this one! Indeed, they did think it was round but also thought the globe was smaller than it was really was which is why Columbus wanted to sail across. Just like people think the Church are being daft idiots today, a lot of scientists back then went against what the Church claimed and basically ignored them as much as possible. The thing is, that monks were the main source of writing left over from that time (I guess they had the most time to write and monasteries would probably keep those books longer than regular people).

They are not the bible of myth debunking: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/18/stephen_frytard/ - Now Andrew Orlowski (the author) is definitely a biased source (he seems to hate Fry), it's a poor bit of explaining (funny thing is, I can't find the root source, and I don't trust Andrew Orlowski). I'll leave this Myth as unsolved.

In complete darkness yes. When exposed to visible light the darker clothing will convert more of the energy to heat. So in most cases the dark clothes are warmer.

EDIT: Looking this up the argument is that black clothes can result in the heat being concentrated on the surface of the body, and thus improving convection, but this depends on a large range of factors (light, ambient heat, wind, etc) and is certainly not an undisputed accurate position.

Interesting.

But I'd disagree with your opinion on black versus white clothing - then again, do you ever really get hot days in the UK? :-)

How about this: nothing is solid. I know, not really a myth, but most people take for granted that things are solid when there's actually quite a bit of space in everything.

QI is definitely not always right. Several times, I caught them stating something that is blatantly untrue based on just a single source "debunking" it. I wish I could remember what it was, but it was in my area of expertise (IT or graphic design) and I knew it to be wrong for a fact.

I do think Stephen Fry is great at explaining things eloquently and convincingly but that doesn't make him always right. Best thing you can do, is look something up on the Internet. There's a lot of sources which give conflicting results but if you look around for a bit, you can generally see some logic in the answers and decide for yourself. The coffee one is like that too: many sites disbelief that coffee would not give you a boost but those sites are all sites revolving around coffee so would you think they're unbiased? Yet the tests are pretty clear and when I switched the coffee at work from regular to decaf without telling anyone, no-one noticed a thing or felt any differently so, heck, I saw evidence of it myself.
They actually tested this and this is not the case. There's a tiny tiny tiny difference but it's really not worth noting because you couldn't feel the difference - and it's easy to check by wearing a temperature meter underneath your clothes. Heck, look at nomads who roam the desert and they wear pretty dark clothing.

As a resident of the great north woods of America I would be remiss if I didn't put to bed a common misconception regarding bear attacks...kind of.

The saying goes that if attacked by a bear the best idea is to play dead. The addage goes on that whatever you do, you should never run because you cannot outrun a bear. This is a travesty of factuation! Kind of.

Running is always the best defense in the case of bear attack; not because you can outrun the bear (which you can't) but because you DON'T HAVE to outrun the bear. You need only outrun whoever you are with.


Oh, I forgot.

The moon landing was fake. It was all done on a soundstage, which was located on Mars.

i love QI, you can grab a kindle book on amazon that has 1200+ facts for 20p (don't have a kindle but read it on the pc kindle program)

This seems like a very bitter article?

I think Fry's major was English literature - should he be an expert in IT? He's a figurehead for the program and has said time and time again how there's a team of people who actually research the facts used in the show - I don't think anyone expects him to actually know everything he presents on the show.

I think Q.I. is, at first, an entertainment show which gives out some pretty good knowledge I had no idea about before finding the show. I'm sure there have been mistakes done in their 10 seasons.

I hadn't heard of Andrew Orlowski before - might be because I don't live in Great Britain, but judging from a quick glance on things he has posted on his website, I would consider twice before using him as a source.