Here’s the story: during the 1960s as NASA was sending the first astronauts to space, they realized that pens don’t work in zero gravity (or actually microgravity), so they spent years and many millions of taxpayer dollars to develop a “space pen”, which means a pen that can write in the microgravity. Meanwhile, the Soviet cosmonauts simply used pencils.
As Curious Droid pointed out in the video below, “the moral of the story to many is that NASA was a wasteful government organization that would be giving your hard-earned tax dollars to some greedy contractors charging sky-high prices for seemingly trivial objects whereas the enemy (the Soviet Union) was common sense and practical.”
Tag Archives: Hoax
A hoax is a deliberately fabricated falsehood made to masquerade as truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment, or rumors, urban legends, pseudosciences or April Fools’ Day events that are passed along in good faith by believers or as jokes.
The English philologist Robert Nares (1753–1829) Robert Nares defined the word hoax as meaning “to cheat”, dating from Thomas Ady’s 1656 book “A candle in the dark”, or a treatise on the nature of witches and witchcraft.
Source: wikipedia
Man Who Befriended a Great White Shark – Not a True Story
In the last few years, a series of photos circulating over the Internet via email and online, usually with the title of “Man Who Befriended a Great White Shark”, showing close encounters between a man and a great white shark. The sites who publish these photos (and sometimes PowerPoint presentations) claim that an Australian fisherman named Arnold Pointer once freed a great white shark from a fishing net, and the shark has followed him around ever since.
Yes, sometimes -very rarely- that kind of unique friendship between a man and a wild animal do occur. But not this time. The photos attached to the story are real, but the story itself is a hoax. It’s actually an April Fools joke from the French magazine “Le Magazine des Voyages de Pêche” (English: Fishing Travel Magazine), from the issue of April 2006.
Continue reading Man Who Befriended a Great White Shark – Not a True Story
No! The Earth Would NOT Look Like This Without Water
No, no no, and again: no! The Earth would NOT look like this without water. Please stop sharing this nonsense.
Here some numbers: the Earth has a diameter of about 12,735 kilometers (on average). The highest point on Earth is the top of Mt. Everest, at 8.85 km. The deepest point on Earth is the Mariana Trench, at about 11 km deep. Make the calculations and you can see, the Earth definitely would NOT look like below without water:
The World Is Going To End, Again, In September 2015? Of Course Not
There’s a super crappy 1982 science-fiction movie named “The man who saves the world”. The story is absurd – in the opening, a narrator speaks a lot. He tells about somebody attacking on Earth, but a layer made by human brains (?) is protecting our planet. Then the battle begins: two space cadets of the world get shot in the space, crash-land on a desert planet, where an evil wizard seeks the ultimate power to take over the world. Although the movie borrows some background footage from Star Wars, the plot is mostly unrelated.
If a movie is bad then you should not watch it at all. But if a movie is really, really bad then it makes more fun than a good movie. This is one of those movies, called B-movies. Perhaps this is a C-movie.
World’s Largest Crocodile? (7+ meters/23+ feet)
A widely circulated photo over the internet which shows a giant crocodile with a bunch of villagers sitting behind. A story next to the photo saying “the people in a village on the Niger River in Africa were losing fellow villagers at a rapid rate, and called in the army, which shot
Crocodiles often suffer from a prevalence of “big fish” stories and over-exaggeration. The photo below was first got shared on Reddit, and it started circulating rapidly since then. When I first saw the photo, I tried to guess the length of the crocodile, because it didn’t seem to me 7+ meters. I thought it was not more than 5 meters.
