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Fun Fact
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| Karth_DeQora | Date: Sunday, 05 Jun 2011, 10:41 PM | Message # 1 |
 Colonel general
Group: Administrators
Messages: 1157
Status: Offline
| The average North American consumes at least 17 spiders a year while asleep.
You're welcome.
Man, Myth, Administrative God. Also plays a mean kazoo.
Jace Varitek: In Northern California we just have gangs of vigilante interior decorators.
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| Jace_Varitek | Date: Sunday, 05 Jun 2011, 11:00 PM | Message # 2 |
 Generalissimo
Group: Administrators
Messages: 2245
Status: Offline
| Is that, like, nigh microscopic spider eggs floating about in the breeze?
Jace Varitek
Manager/Administrator from January 2003 to Present
My recent posts here, pre-2009 archives here
"When my information changes, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
—John Maynard Keynes
Furthermore, a dancing Wookiee:
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| Devistator | Date: Sunday, 05 Jun 2011, 11:03 PM | Message # 3 |
 Private
Group: Users
Messages: 3
Status: Offline
| No, this is an urban legend. Created to show that people will believe anything--and then going on to be believed. The following is from the urban legend debunking site www.snopes.com Claim: The average person swallows eight spiders per year. Status: False. Origins: Fear not. This "statistic" was not only made up out of whole cloth, it was invented as an example of the absurd things people will believe simply because they come across them on the Internet. In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of "facts" that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous "facts," among which was the statistic cited above about the average person's swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst's propagation of this false "fact" has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.
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| Karth_DeQora | Date: Sunday, 05 Jun 2011, 11:06 PM | Message # 4 |
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Colonel general
Group: Administrators
Messages: 1157
Status: Offline
| Welp, there goes my night.
And here I was thinking that I have spider eggs growing in my stomach.
Man, Myth, Administrative God. Also plays a mean kazoo.
Jace Varitek: In Northern California we just have gangs of vigilante interior decorators.
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| Jamie_the_Hutt | Date: Monday, 06 Jun 2011, 10:54 AM | Message # 5 |
 Major general
Group: Users
Messages: 392
Status: Offline
| Actually, you're questioning my religion so this is unfair. The spider gnome puts them down the faces of the unfaithful.
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| Jace_Varitek | Date: Monday, 06 Jun 2011, 12:05 PM | Message # 6 |
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Generalissimo
Group: Administrators
Messages: 2245
Status: Offline
| Actually, it's an urban legend that it's an urban legend. It was created to demonstrate that people on the internet will disbelieve anything, even a (reasonably) well known fact because it is refuted by a supposedly "authoritative source," in this case Lisa Holst (who isn't a real person) of PC Professional (which is in reality an IT services company, and does not publish articles about spiders). The statistic about an average person swallowing 8 spiders does originate in 1954, however. Professor Paul Asquith, an entomologist at Purdue University, made calculations based on the mating habits of arachnoids, which he was studying at that time. While his calculations are based somewhat unreliably in inferential statistics, his average number of 8 spiders swallowed has not been questioned since, and has even appeared in National Geographic, Nature, and other periodicals (which, unlike PC Professional, are real). Like many internet fads, no one is sure where or when the refutation of this fact originated (it has been attributed to an issue of Boardwatch magazine in the early 1990s), but it has endured over the years and, with delicious irony, has not only caused many to doubt Prof. Asquith's statistic but has caused it to be misunderstood, too (for example, "17 spiders" rather than 8, or "the average North American" or "the average European" rather than the average person). Today, it remains a cautionary tale: don't believe everything you hear, except the things that are true!
Jace Varitek
Manager/Administrator from January 2003 to Present
My recent posts here, pre-2009 archives here
"When my information changes, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
—John Maynard Keynes
Furthermore, a dancing Wookiee:
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