The Mega Misconception Book Quotes

“        Velociraptors looked the same as they do in Jurassic Park. Velociraptors were only a foot tall. Steven Spielberg liked their design and made them human-sized. In reality, they looked like an aggressive chicken.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“        Godzilla’s famous roar is from a wild animal. Most movie monsters sounds are from animals. King Kong’s roar is an edited lion roar and Jurassic Park’s T-Rex roar is from the ferocious….walrus… huh… Godzilla has the most iconic roar. Strangely, it isn’t from an animal. Akira Ifukube came up with the idea for the sound by stroking a violin chord with a leather glove. I don’t know if Akira has waaaaay too much time on his hands or if he is a genius.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“you burn calories, why wouldn’t you lose weight? When you burn calories, you get hungry. Overweight people don’t eat more because they are greedy or have no willpower. They eat because their hunger pangs are stronger and more frequent.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“Bamboo is grass.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“Goodbye” means “farewell.” Goodbye is an abbreviation of “God be with ye.” It has been used since the fourteenth century.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“The universe is round. Whatever shape you’re thinking of now makes way more sense than the answer. So what shape do you think universe is? Square? Cone? Trapezoid? Dodecahedron? No. The universe is shaped like a horse-saddle. Or to use the scientific term – the universe is hyperboloid shaped. Scientists say this shape is only possible if the universe’s expansion is increasing. So how is that possible? It’s a common fact that the universe’s rate of expansion is decreasing, right?”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“Things can explode in space. Explosions in space are possible but it is not as visually impressive as you would imagine. What do explosions need? Oxygen. Does space have any? Nope. What do explosions do? Make a deafening sound. The tagline for the movie Alien is, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” You can’t hear in space because sound cannot exist in a vacuum. Space ships in Star Trek and Star Wars wouldn’t make any noise in space. Movies like Interstellar and Gravity and tv shows like Firefly portray silence in space during an explosion accurately.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“There is no gravity in space. There is gravity almost everywhere in space. It is reduced but we can’t escape gravity because it is a fundamental force of the universe. Astronauts seem weightless because they are orbiting Earth. They are falling towards Earth but they are moving sufficiently sideways to miss it. So they are constantly falling but never landing.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“The moon is spherical. The moon is shaped like an egg. It looks round to us because we always see the same side of it.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“You can see the Great Wall of China from the Moon. You can barely see anything from the moon. You can barely see the Great Wall from Earth’s orbit and the conditions have to be exact. There’s never a time where the Great Wall is the only landmark you can see from space.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“The first animal in space was a dog. No, and it wasn’t a chimp either. It was a fruit fly. Fruit flies were sent into space in 1946 to test radioactive exposure to gauge if humans could survive space. Eleven years later, Laika the dog was sent into space.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“Clones look identical. If you cloned an animal ten times, you may have ten different looking creatures. A cat called Rainbow had a clone called Copycat (what else?) They looked nothing alike in color or pattern.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“If you turn lights on and off often in an attempt to save electricity, it uses more electricity than leaving it on. The idea behind this misconception is that most of the electricity is used in turning on the light. But this is untrue. It’s like believing turning a car on and off over and over again will use up more fuel than travelling hundreds of miles.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“Raindrops looks like tear drops. Some people believe that raindrops are spherical but this is also untrue. Raindrops are shaped like a hamburger bun.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“Toilets flush the opposite way in the Southern Hemisphere because of the Coriolis force. The Coriolis force only applies to huge forces of water or wind like a hurricane or whirlpool. A toilet is too small to be affected.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“        The toilet is the dirtiest place in your house. The following places have more germs, dirt, and bacteria than your toilet – a) Your cutting board has twice as much. b) Your keyboard has five times as much. c) Your phone has 500 times as much. d) Your carpet has 4,000 times as much. e) Your kitchen sponge has 200,000 times more germs than your toilet. Sponge…you win.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“        Television damages your eyes. Early televisions use to emit a low level of radiation so people were advised not to sit too near it. This hasn’t been a concern for fifty years. Too much tv is bad for you because it creates a lazy and addictive lifestyle but it doesn’t damage your eyesight.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“        Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis. That crack sound is an air bubble escaping from your joints. Donald Unger cracked the knuckles on his left hand every single day for fifty years! He never did it to his right hand. And guess what? His hands were exactly the same. No arthritis. When this was confirmed, he looked up to the heavens and shouted, “YOU WERE WRONG MOTHER!!!” What a guy.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“People believed the world was flat before Columbus discovered America. An Ancient Greek mathematician, Eratosthenes deduced that the Earth was round in 500 B.C. He perfectly calculated the circumference of the Earth over a millennium before it was confirmed because why the hell not. He had some spare time one weekend and invented geography. Columbus didn’t even think the Earth was round. He thought it was pear-shaped. And he didn’t discover it. Bjarni Herjolfsson of Iceland was the first to find America 500 years before Columbus. In fact, Columbus didn’t even land in America (DID COLUMBUS DO ANYTHING???) He landed in the Bahamas and ventured from Dominica all the way southward. He never went to the area that became the United States in his entire life.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“        The Triceratops existed. This is the dinosaur with two horns on top of its head and a rhino-like horn on its nose. It’s probably the most identifiable dinosaur apart from the T-Rex and the Stegosaurus. At least, it would be if it were real. All Triceratops skeletons found are a teenage Torosaurus. You might be thinking, “Stop ruining my childhood! What’s next? Are you going to say the Tyrannosaurus Rex wasn’t the most ferocious dinosaur ever?”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“        Pinocchio becomes a real boy and lives happily ever after. Pinocchio beats Jiminy Cricket to death with a hammer and Pinocchio has his feet burned off before he is hanged by villagers. You know…for kids.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“        Goldilocks was a young girl with blond hair. Originally, Goldilocks was an old woman with silver hair. The story ends with her breaking her neck trying to run away from the bears.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“The BMI (Body Mass Index) is accurate in telling if you’re overweight. The BMI’s only applicable if the person is incredibly underweight or overweight. You don’t need the BMI for that because your eyes can easily tell if a person is malnourished or not. A mathematician called Adolph Quetelet in a social physics class created the BMI. He was not a doctor or a dietician. Furthermore, are you going to trust a guy called Adolph?”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“Lobsters are red. Lobsters are red after you cook them. Most lobsters are blue so it’s hard for predators to see them underwater.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“        Bees die when they sting you. A bee’s stinger can get stuck in a person’s skin and the bee has to rip itself apart to escape.               If the bee is careful, or doesn’t sting you at a funny angle, it will be fine.               So when people say, “You got stung, but at least the bee is dead,” just remember that those people are liars.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“        The animal that has saved the most lives is the Saint Bernard. People believe that Saint Bernard’s used to carry small barrels of brandy in their collar to awaken and warm up people who got lost in snowy mountains. The barrel would weigh down the St. Bernard, slowing it down (last thing you need when someone is dying in the cold.) This isn’t even hypothetically possible. Brandy freezes quickly. Even if it didn’t, alcohol makes you feel warmer, but your body gets colder so it would be counter-productive. The horseshoe crab has saved the most human lives. These crabs (even though it’s more like a spider) have blood that clots around invading bacteria and viruses. This is used to test every single pharmaceutical drug. So every pill, injection, transfusion, and anesthetic you have ever had is all thanks to the horseshoe crab.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“If you come across a crocodile, you are as good as dead. The crocodile has the most powerful bite in the animal kingdom. I have seen a video of a crocodile chewing through a car like butter. But because its muscles are so strong at clamping down, the muscles that open its mouth are extremely weak. If a two-year old toddler put his or her fingers around a crocodile’s mouth, a crocodile wouldn’t be able to open it. A crocodile can be defeated with an elastic band wrapped around its snout.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“        Don’t kill a spider! Put it outside. The reason the spider is inside is because it has adapted to the heat indoors. Once you chuck it outside, it dies within minutes. So if you thought you were a good person because you were putting spiders outside instead of squashing them, you were killing them anyway, only more slowly. Well done.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book

“Human beings are the most adaptable animals on Earth. Human beings are the most intelligent animal, but there are a number of events that could wipe us out. Our vast intellect may not be enough to counter meteors, plagues,  weather changes, radiation, etc. One animal has survived all of these – the tardigrade. The tardigrade is a half-millimeter sized microorganism. So what makes the tardigrade so special? It’s the only animal to survive ALL five mass extinctions. It existed the same time as trilobites hundreds of millions of years ago and it’s still alive today. So how does it survive? To understand why it’s so strong, you need to understand what makes it weak. A tardigrade needs water. Lots of water.  If it stops drinking water for even a few minutes, it goes into a coma. When it’s in a coma, it’s practically indestructible. It’s so hard, you could smash it with a sledgehammer (and scientists have) and it didn’t leave a dent. It can withstand boiling heat, one degree above absolute zero, pressure six times stronger than the bottom of the ocean, meteor strikes, and radioactive fallout. It can even survive the depths of space. No one knows how long it can survive in this coma for but it’s been documented to last at least seventy years. If you give it a drop of water, it will come out of its coma within seconds and revert back to normal.”
― James Egan, The Mega Misconception Book