The De-Textbook Read online

  EDITOR IN CHIEF

  Jack O’Brien

  EXECUTIVE EDITOR

  David Wong

  HEAD WRITER

  Daniel O’Brien

  SENIOR EDITORS

  Michael Swaim, Robert Brockway, Soren Bowie, Kristi Harrison, Adam Tod Brown, Cody Johnston

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Jacopo della Quercia, Robert Evans, C. Coville, Eddie Rodriguez, Alexander L. Hoffman, Karl Smallwood, Cyriaque Lamar, Tom Reimann, Maxwell Yezpitelok, S. Peter Davis, Christian Ames, R. Jason Benson, Kathy Benjamin, Danny Harkins, Eric Yosomono, Juan Arteaga, David Dietle, Elford Alley, Pauli Poisuo, Christina H., Crystal Beran, Dennis Hong, Rohan Ramakrishnan, Cezary Jan Strusiewicz, Clive Jameson, Evan V. Symon, Jake Klink, Levi Ritchi, Lola C., M. Asher Cantrell, Xavier Jackson, Adam Wears, Brendan McGinley, Christian-Madera, Colin Murdock, Craig Thomas, Dan Seitz, David A. Vindiola, Geoffrey Young, J. F. Sargent, Jack Mendoza, Jake Slocum, Jonathan Wojcik, Justin Crockett, Katherine Smith, Kenny Thompson, Kevin Forde, Mark M., Martin Bear, Michael Voll, Mohammed Shariff, Nathan Birch, Philip Moon, Rob Sylvester, S. Peter Davis, Samuel Bloodthirst, Shayn Nicely, Steve Kolenberg, Tom Lagana, XJ Selman

  ART DIRECTORS

  Monique Wolf, Randall Maynard

  COVER ART

  Adam Simpson

  COPY EDITORS

  Sheila Moody, Erica Ferguson, Andrea Reuter

  SPECIAL THANKS

  Becky Cole, Kate Napolitano, Jaya Miceli, Demand Media, Dan Strone at Trident Media Group, John Cheese, Sean Reiley, Chris Bucholz, Wayne Gladstone, Luke McKinney, Ian Fortey, Alex Green, Kristin Plate, spouses, moms, dads

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013

  Copyright © Demand Media, Inc., 2013

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Page 209 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Cracked is a trademark and/or registered trademark of Demand Media, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  The detextbook : the stuff you didn’t know about the stuff you thought you knew / CRACKED.com.

  pages cm

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15804-7

  1. Common fallacies. 2. History—Errors, inventions, etc. 3. Errors, Scientific—Miscellanea. 4. Medical misconceptions—Miscellanea. I. Cracked.com.

  AZ999.D47 2013

  001.96—dc23

  2013022408

  Version_3

  For granting us continual existence through its inconceivable power, we dedicate this book to the sun. Thanks for not eating us yet.

  CONTENTS

  The Authors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  A Brief Recap of Your Squandered Education

  CHAPTER 1

  Health and Anatomy

  Stuck inside an insane machine with a user’s guide made of lies

  CHAPTER 2

  Biology

  The propaganda campaign to make you think all cool animals are dead

  CHAPTER 3

  World History

  If it was written by the winners, they are boring liars

  CHAPTER 4

  Sex Education

  Lies about your junk and how to use it

  CHAPTER 5

  Physics

  The universe is an unpredictable magic show

  CHAPTER 6

  U.S. History

  The (bullshit) superhero movie

  CHAPTER 7

  Health and Nutrition

  Tricked into living fat and dying young

  CHAPTER 8

  Practical Psychology

  How to keep your brain from screwing you

  Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Even before our own mothers, the Cracked editors would like to thank the heaps of talented comedy writers who fearlessly throw their ideas to the wolves every day in our Writer’s Workshop. Without their tireless hunt for all things fascinating and their long-suffering tolerance of our fickle, occasionally drunken demands, this book would never have been possible.

  We would also like to thank the wolves, those Workshop and forum moderators who believe in something greater than themselves, and have inexplicably chosen a comedy website as that something. They never kill an idea or a profile without reverence and necessity, and in doing so, maintain the precarious balance between fascist order and lawless swill hole that Cracked could collapse into without their diligence.

  We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Randall Maynard, Monique Wolf, and the rest of the design team for arranging every inch of this book, as well as Andrea Reuter for her patient and flawless copyediting. The debt of gratitude, we should note, has no monetary value because we already paid them handsomely. If they are shoeless and blackout drunk in a box somewhere today, that’s on them.

  Thanks also to everyone at Demand Media, first and foremost Richard Rosenblatt, Shawn Colo, Stewart Marlborough, our PR, marketing, sales, and especially our legal team for allowing us to continue this extensive, highly scientific experiment into the healing properties of dick jokes. Also, thank you to the Cracked team including Abe Epperson, Adam Ganser, Breandan Carter, Mandy Ng, Simon Ja, Billy Janes, Greg Shabonav, Stephen Lopez, Jason Gu, and Mitchell Thomas, who keep the entire site running.

  We would especially like to thank Kathleen Napolitano and Becky Cole from Penguin, Jaya Miceli and Adam Simpson for designing the polished cover you now hold in your strong and capable hands, and our agent Dan Strone from Trident Media Group for understanding the importance of foul language and tasteful nudity.

  Lastly, thank you to those once great leaders of Cracked who couldn’t be here today, Oren Katzeff and Greg Boudewijn. They are in a better place now, at higher-paying jobs.

  Oh shit, and our moms! Sorry, moms, for saying “shit” just now.

  INTRODUCTION

  A Brief Recap of Your Squandered Education

  Welcome to school, the propaganda wing of your parents’ battle to win your hearts and minds, or at least get you to “quiet down for a single goddamn second before Mommy does something crazy.” An annoying number of pointless questions are going to start popping into your head. You come into the conscious part of your life as a barely contained vortex of pure uncut curiosity, and the people in charge of your education are like Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies—counting down the days until they’re able to retire with some peace and quiet, and most assuredly too old for this shit.

  The Sacred Pact of the Bad Teachers Alliance

  Teachers are fighting a nonstop battle to bring the energy in the room down to their level, which meant there was some stuff they couldn’t tell you about. Because the truth is, and don’t tell them we told you this, the world around you is fucking amazing. It’s just way easier to manage a classroom full of children on the verge of falling asleep than one that is vibrating with sheer,
joyous energy because nobody can freaking believe how goddamn amazing blue whales are!

  And so, they edited the coolest stuff out of the stories they taught you, inundated you with dates and names and other curiosity-dampening instruments to clog the information-craving hole in your brain that churns out questions like, “Yeah, but why is the stuff inside of the leaves green?”

  One thing is for certain: They never came clean about completely biffing your education, which is how you came to construct your view of the world on a foundation of lies and half-truths that totally missed the point.

  For Instance . . .

  In case you’re wondering what they could have gotten so terribly wrong, here’s a quick preview of one of the incredible history lessons nobody taught you. Bear with us, because this is weird. And it has massive implications for everything you’ve ever read on any subject ever.

  Homeric scholar William Gladstone was going through The Iliad for the thousandth time when he noticed something odd. Despite being one of the best poets ever to put pen to paper, Homer sucked at describing colors. He described the ocean, oxen, and sheep as being the color of wine. He described honey and a nightingale as being green, and the sky as being bronze. At one point he described Hector’s hair as being the color of a stone that we know to be blue. Gladstone, who was so smart that he’d eventually become the prime minister of England four times, started going through and counting all the colors referenced in the book. There were thousands of blacks and whites, a handful of reds, yellows, and greens, and, assuming Hector wasn’t a Smurf, no blue at all.

  Following Gladstone’s lead, scholars expanded the search for the color blue in ancient Greek writing. Nothing in Aristotle. Even the color theorist Empedocles didn’t mention it, and writing about colors was sort of his thing. Ancient Greeks not only seemed to not have a word for blue but also didn’t seem to be able to perceive the color at all. Realizing that the cone receptors in our eyes couldn’t have changed that much over the course of three thousand years, the scholars were forced to conclude that it was some rare mental block.

  But as academics and historians from different fields began comparing notes, they realized that it wasn’t just the ancient Greeks. Colors seemed to emerge in stages. In the early days, colors started as black and white. Aristotle described colors as the presence and absence of light, and he was the smartest dude ever to exist anywhere. Next, the concept of colors would blink into existence one at a time. Red would show up first, then green and yellow would eventually arrive on the scene. Without fail, blue would always show up last.

  A loose theory has emerged that it’s need based. Cultures take their lazy old time, not inventing colors until they need them. Red comes first because it’s the color of blood and wine, two of the only fluids with color that are in abundant supply in the early stages of a civilization. Green would usually come next because it’s the color of foliage and can be useful in differentiating one leaf from another. But in most places in the world, the only thing that’s naturally blue is the sky. And if sky blue is the only type of blue you ever see, why have a word for it at all?

  So Homer was writing at a time somewhere around the invention of yellow—he uses it, just not very well—and about five hundred years before blue arrived and freed ancient Greek artists to take reality from black and white to Technicolor (see here). What’s amazing is that not having a word for blue made him see the world the way someone might if they were wearing glasses that filtered out all blue light. Put on a pair of blue blockers and the sea probably does look like wine, and the sky bronze. In a recent experiment, a man actively shielded his daughter from the word “blue” for the first four years of her life and found that on a clear day she would simply describe the sky as white, and blue things as other colors, because her mind hadn’t invented the existence of blue.

  This means that language is not some separate code that we use to describe a set of preexisting things. Language gives us the ability to perceive them. Probably the greatest modern example of this is the Aboriginal Australian tribe that invented the word “kangaroo” but never got around to inventing words for “right” and “left.” Instead, they related everything to its position on the compass. Rather than making them worse at orienting themselves, not having the concept of left and right gave the tribe a superhuman sense of direction: They could be chasing an animal in circles through the forest on a moonless, pitch-dark night in the middle of a downpour and they would know exactly where true north was at all times.

  Think about what that means for history. We’re not just the newest link on a chain of identical iterations of humankind. The world you perceive might be completely different from the one being observed and recorded in historical documents. Think about how much more interesting history class would have been if you’d realized that every new era offered you the ability to see the world in a completely new way and solve the mystery of what words and ideas people possessed at a given time, and what they didn’t. Think about how much more interested you would have been in the world around you if they’d just taught you that there are types of human perception and abilities that you can’t even conceive of because nobody’s given you the tools necessary to describe them in your head. That could have changed your life!

  But it’s easier to test your ability to remember names and dates, so they just made up a bunch of those, taught you how to memorize them, and called it a day. This book is our attempt to erase the layer of black and white gunk they painted over some of the most surprising truths mankind has found out about so far. It is full of information that you will be furious you weren’t taught the first time around, and lies you won’t believe you fell for. And dick jokes. There will be plenty of those, too.

  FIGURE 1.1 Fun fact: The most disgusting part of the body is literally the entire thing.

  1

  Welcome to Your Body!

  Here’s Some Bullshit We Made Up About It

  Naturally, you’re curious about this meat suitcase you find yourself locked inside. From the time that you enter kindergarten—not knowing your ass from elbow macaroni, and unwilling to take “I don’t know” for an answer—on through the stage when puberty flushes everything that isn’t hormones from your bloodstream and well into adulthood, you’re going to have lots of questions about the soft pile of tissue you’re stuck piloting. Unfortunately, your parents and teachers won’t let you learn enough about human anatomy to know what part of their body they’re pulling the answers out of.

  The Five Senses

  THE MYTH: You perceive the world around you with five senses.

  When someone says they have a sixth sense, it means they’re a crazy person. Believing there are more than five senses is for television psychics and M. Night Shyamalan.

  FIGURE 1.2 While none of Johnny’s “five” senses are bringing in new data, his brain still senses that we’ve made him stare at this blank wall for more than three hours. After talking to his classmates, his sense of time will tell him that these were the same three hours when they did an experiment to find out which ice cream makes time go the fastest. (Answer: the best-tasting ice cream!)

  Class Discussion! Should Johnny have doubted his teacher about having a clock in his brain, even though he doesn’t know shit?

  THE TRUTH: The five senses you’re familiar with aren’t even the most important ones.

  For instance, think about your sense of time—the inner clock that tells you how long something is taking. Don’t think you have a clock ticking away inside your brain? Try staring at a white wall in a totally silent room. Your sense of time is what tells you how much of your life has been wasted because you doubted us (see Figure 1.2).

  If you’re walking in the woods and a bear growls in the bushes over your left shoulder, the sound hits your left ear a millionth of a second before your right. Your sense of time picks up on that tiny difference and allows you to perfectly triangulate the bear’s location. If you had only five senses, you’d have to use your eyes
to locate the bear, and by then it would be too late. A blur of brown fur would be the last thing you ever saw!

  The Tongue Map

  THE MYTH: Your tongue has specialized zones responsible for detecting certain tastes.

  FIGURE 1.3 What you learned the tongue looks like in action: a ladybug that knows how to party.

  You saw this colorful diagram in an elementary school textbook and you might have even sat through a classroom experiment where you placed different flavors on different parts of your tongue to show you that your taste buds stick to their own in segregated taste zones, presumably fighting little salty versus sweet gang wars on the borderlands whenever you eat a chocolate-covered pretzel.

  THE TRUTH: Your tongue is like your digestive system’s fingerprint.

  FIGURE 1.4 What the tongue actually looks like: a ladybug that’s freaking out, you guys!

  The idea that strictly defined areas of the tongue respond to particular tastes started much in the same way that we expect the next world war to start . . . with Americans failing to grasp the translation of words written in a foreign language. In 1941, a Harvard academic with the comically ideal name of Dr. Boring (seriously) mistranslated a 1901 German study, erroneously interpreting it to mean that certain areas of the tongue react more strongly to certain tastes. The first red flag should have been the fact that German food only has one taste: sauerkraut.

  Rather than identifying a precise map of the tongue, that 1901 German study just concluded that some people react to different tastes on different parts of the tongue more strongly than others, which is pretty much spot-on. Each of our “tongue maps” will react to different tastes in different ways, sometimes detecting different flavors in the exact same meal. As for taste buds, they aren’t just on the tongue but instead stretch all the way down the esophagus into the stomach. When you eat something that makes you nauseous, it’s the taste buds in your stomach that tell the rest of your digestive tract that the train is coming. We blame pressure from the notoriously strong Colorful Chart Industry lobby for keeping this myth alive in classrooms a full thirty years after it was debunked.