White Lies, or Gray?
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
White Lies, or Gray?
As a collective culture, sometimes we know things with a numeric specificity that make them seem unambiguous, but those facts are questionable hand-me-downs with no verifiable source. The numbers attached to them make them look all the more real: Surely someone did the requisite counting and measuring, right?
The YouTube channel Kurzgesagt—in a Nutshell once had a video that repeated the factoid that tallied the approximate length of blood vessels in the human body to around 100,000 kilometers. They recently revisited the issue, which had been a tangential remark previously, trying to track down the number’s origins. Who was it that had come up with the claim there were approximately 100,000 kilometers of veins, arteries, and capillaries? How did they arrive at the number?
Their research effort resulted in the following video:
Since we’re social creatures, it should come as no surprise that we pass information among ourselves that have the validation of social interaction, but are more memorable than they are factually true. As in this instance, they may not have any particular purpose. That is to say, they don’t serve anyone’s particular interests, but they are elegant or impressive enough to stick in people’s minds. They are factoids that are innocent and harmless, and they may not ever be questioned because they’ve been repeated as true by so many for so long.
Sometimes these factoids are mentioned as foundational bits of knowledge, and they are used to amaze. They just stuck in the listeners’ minds. They then get woven into the tapestry of common wisdom.
The average length of all the blood vessels in the human body is irrelevant to anything else. To be honest—and maybe it has more to do with my own lack of imagination—I could have accepted a number of 1,000 km or 10,000 km just as easily. As a kid, I probably would have wondered what it looked like for someone to take a person apart and use a yardstick to find out. Were the blood vessels unwound from a corpse by someone driving a vehicle for measured distance, unraveling it like some gory skein of yarn?
It’s hard to imagine a situation where it could potentially matter. But to claim the factoid to be true, the burden of proof should fall on the person invoking it furnish support, if need be. If it teaches us anything, it’s probably that the limits of human knowledge are worth bearing in mind.
Charlotte City Manager Marcus Jones is getting a pay raise of 5%, Mayor Vi Lyles announced at Monday’s City Council meeting. The raise will bring his base salary to about $474,530. For the second year in a row, the City Council did not vote in open session on the raise, a potential violation of North Carolina open meeting laws.
Council members also didn’t vote in open session last year on raises for the city clerk and city attorney. A pair of attorneys told The Charlotte Observer at the time that was a likely violation of North Carolina open meeting laws.
Read more at: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article296148509.html#storylink=cpy
Darn those MAGA and their scofflaw ways! Oh, wait ...
I once researched the claim that women's fertility peaks at age 27. "How could they know?" I asked. "How could they assemble a study population of women with naturally functioning reproductive systems who are regularly engaging in natural sexual behaviors with men who also have healthy reproductive systems?"
The answer was, they did not. They counted how many children women in a small, "plain-living" German religious sect had, and at what age. (I think it was in the 1960s.) They found that, after age 27, child-bearing slowed among these women.
That's it: the whole #Science. From this, they generalized a biological loss of fertility, across the whole female sex, at age 27.