The Thread of General Ignorance

[LevesqueIsKing]

^I'm just guessing here, but I think arthritus is caused by a breakdown of the cartilage (sp?) between two joints, and cracking your knuckles would presumably not do any more damage to your cartilage than any other movement of your fingers.

Good thread, Napalm.

My biggest annoyance is:
-There's no such thing as exercises that specifically help "tone" your body. The word was created by a comination of the media and personal trainers telling people what they wanted to hear. The only way to tone your body is to lose fat and build muscle, and besides the pace at which you achieve that "tone," there's really no difference whatsoever in exercises. If anything, exercises that claim to "tone" your body are probably less efficient than standard muscle-gaining exercises.
-There are not exercises that make you "big" and "muscular" and there are not exercises that make you "trim" and "toned," there are only exercises that are more efficient and less efficient. Women, I'm looking at you on this one.
-Creatine is not a steroid.
-Steroids do not create muscle, nor do they make muscles grow.
-Increase in muscle mass and increase in strength are not equally proportional among different people.
-It is not possible to target different sections of a muscle (the biggest case for this is the chest, where everyone is told that incline bench targets the top of your pecs and decline bench targets the bottom).
-Abdominal exercises are not particularly efficient in weight loss. If anything, the muscle that you'll gain from doing such exercises will build underneath the fat and make your stomach protrude even further.
-There is no possible way to spot-reduce fat. Fat is removed from your body in the opposite order that it was gained. Always.
-There are no exercises, routines or substances that are good for "shaping" or "forming" muscle, and you can't tell that someone uses steroids by the way that their muscles look. The way the way that your muscle is defined is part of your genetics.
-Although age determines the amount of HGH your body produces, it's completely possible for someone of any age to develop significant new muscle. Many cases have been reported of elderly people that could scarcely walk beginning routines and ending up easily being able to move about.

That's all I can think of.

 

[Fox]

-Kongi charecters do not make cool tatoos. They make you deuchbags.

 

[CrocoLylee]

How does cracking your knuckles NOT cause arthritis?

Cracking your knuckles is just your tendon popping in and out of place and releasing trapped gases which have built up in your joints causing a popping sound.

 

[Napalmbrain]

Since Leve did a post about exercising/steroids, I feel I should do one on my specialist subject:

-You cannot buy the right to name a star. Any company which claims otherwise is ripping you off.
-Polaris (the North Pole Star) is not the brightest star in the sky.
-The Universe does not have a centre. The Universe is actually being 'stretched', sort of like the surface of an expanding balloon (the centre of the balloon would not correspond to any physical thing), although the universe is not necessarily "spherical"/"balloon shaped".
-Also, the Universe is not expanding "into" anything.
-The Andromeda Galaxy is not the closest galaxy to the Milky Way. That distinction goes to the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, which is currently being "swallowed up" by the Milky Way.
-A higher magnitude means a star is dimmer, not brighter.
-Famous Star Wars mistake: the parsec is a unit of distance, not time.
-The reason you cannot escape a black hole is not because they have an escape velocity which is faster than light, but because the space-time in the black hole is warped so that you can only move towards the centre.
-The positions of the stars and planets on the day you were born has no effect on your life.
-Newton did not discover gravity. What he actually did was come up with a (good, but incorrect) theory to explain it. Humanity has known about gravity for as long as it has had intelligent thought.
-Pluto has not been reinstated as a planet.

 

[Fox]

Pluto should remain a dwarf planet with it's small size and strange orbit.
(Imagines a charecture of myself looking down on a sad Pluto with a smug look)

-The smell of "rain" is actually ozone.[needtoclarifythough]
-This nutrigrain bar is actually rather bad for me.

 

[Napalmbrain]

Pluto should remain a dwarf planet with it's small size and strange orbit.
(Imagines a charecture of myself looking down on a sad Pluto with a smug look)

It should indeed stay a dwarf planet. I get the feeling at least some Americans are upset because it was the only "planet" they discovered (over a hundred exoplanets are not good enough for you?).

-The smell of "rain" is actually ozone.[needtoclarifythough]

Not quite: Ozone is what produces that "recently cut grass" smell after a thunderstorm.

 

[LevesqueIsKing]

I'm bumping this thread on account of its awesomeness

One of my favorite lies of American history:
-"No Taxation Without Representation" wasn't a genuine request, it was a rally call. If parlaiment would have given the colonies representation in England (which they probably should have done to shut them up), they would have gotten overruled every time. England never called the colonies' bluff.

 

[GCommander]

You guys are giving me a lot to think of

If God is everywhere, then how many God's are there?

 

[Fox]

The biggest one of all: THERE IS NO GOD!

 

[GCommander]

The biggest one of all: THERE IS NO GOD!

Well that is a belief and I respect what people believe in.

 

[Napalmbrain]

The biggest one of all: THERE IS NO GOD!

Perhaps, but let's stick to facts rather than opinions.

-A penny dropped from a tall building would not kill someone it landed on.
-Brain cells can regenerate.
-Glass is not a very slow moving liquid.
-Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" is not meant to be a patriotic song.
-China's "one-child policy" does not actually ban citizens from having more than one child, but it does mean that parents do not get any benefits for any child after the first.
-Juries in common-law countries (such as the UK and the US) are not obliged to find a defendant guilty if they feel the law is unjust, even if it is quite obvious they are guilty of the accusation.
-The Nazis did not create Germany's autobahns.
-Charles Lindbergh was not the first person to fly across the Atlantic. He was the first to do it solo, though.
-A scientific theory is not just a 'guess'. It is a testable model based on evidence.
-Contrary to what some Biblical-literalists would have you believe, there is no damning evidence against evolution. It is accepted as a sound theory by almost all mainstream scientists.