If you aren’t a usual peruser of debunks, then you may not know that a lot of the facts you think you know aren’t actually facts you know, and are more like things you “know” that aren’t true, you know? Purveyor of explanatory, interesting YouTube videos CGPGrey is back and ready to turn your world of interesting facts upside down.

At the end of October, it came to light that a paragon among the European psychology community, Diederik Stapel, had admitted to falsifying the data in his publications, and the data he provided as coauthor. According to the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, a probe into Stapel’s work has founded “dozens” of publications which used falsified data and 14 PhD theses supervised by Stapel. Among these was a study we reported on back in April.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stapel said that he, “was not able to withstand the pressure to score points, to publish, to always have to be better.” In the end, it was his own students who questioned his methods, and blew the whistle on his rampant academic dishonesty.

One of the most popular articles on The Huffington Post right now is about a Republican Congressional proposal called “HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act,” which aims to make the value of pi “exactly 3.” Reading the article carefully, it’s pretty clear it’s satire: “‘It’s no panacea, but this legislation will point us in the right direction. Looking at hard data, we know our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including the geometry incorporating pi,’ Roby said. ‘I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier.’” And Ron Workman has traced its origin to an ancient Internet rumor that was debunked by Snopes in 1998. (The real HR 205 under consideration by Congress now is actually about Native American tribal land-leasing.)

But here’s the thing: Thanks to the A.D.D.-enabling power of social media, all it takes is a truncated Facebook headline and excerpt for people to form an opinion about a story, and many of them don’t actually read it. (more…)

Not to be disdainful, but it’s surprising that this is even a thing to be debunked: Since March 19th marks the moon’s perigee, or closest point to earth, and since some astrologer [not astronomer] said that scary things would happen during this so called “supermoon,” some folks — with the egging on of major media outlets [see above] — are asking if the 8.9 magnitude earthquake that hit off the coast of Japan today was caused by said supermoon. Their argument would be that when the moon is unusually close to Earth, its gravity affects Earthly happenings more and causes natural disasters.

My friend called me last night and while we were discussing (what else?) Minecraft, she interjected with excitement, informing me about some crazy thing where everyone’s Zodiac signs are now different. I’m not a Taurus anymore, apparently I’m an Aries. I don’t care about astrology so much, but thought it was kind of weird that I now have to tell people who do care something different. It’s kind of like when you write dates after the New Year and keep messing up the year for a couple of months: Weird, but whatever, you get over it. I did, however, have fun for five minutes thinking, “I AM NOW ARIES, GOD OF WAR.” This new astrological sign reassignment took the Internet by storm and everyone thought this was some crazy new thing. It’s not, if you were wondering. Humans have apparently known about this all along. Allow us to explain.

This past weekend, Sir Ian McKellen attended an event in Hyde Park to protest the policies of Pope Benedict XVI on the Pope’s very first state visit to the UK. Shortly thereafter, the photo to the above left began to make its way around the tubes, wherein McKellen wears a shirt that says “I’m Gandalf and Magneto. Get over it!” The Internet being the Internet, it “went viral,” as the kids say, with the picture getting more than 250,000 views on Twitpic, close to 200,000 more when it was ripped to Imgur, and who knows how many more via blogs and other third-party sources.

Indeed, it is a pretty awesome shirt. However, it is not the shirt that McKellen actually wore to the anti-pope rally: Rather, he wore the shirt to the above right (“Some people are gay. Get over it!”) which actually makes a lot more sense considering 1) that the typeface changes in the Gandalf shirt, but is consistent in the real thing; 2) that the protester behind him is wearing the same shirt in both instances; and 3) that as mind-blowing as is the Gandalf-Magneto singularity presented by McKellen, the Church’s positions with respect to homosexuals are a bit easier to protest. All good Photoshop fun, maybe, but it apparently actually fooled a lot of people; The Advocate ran the shopped McKellen shirt on their website before correcting it, and lots of social media sharing of the picture takes it at face value. As The Daily What wrote when they debunked the ‘shoop earlier today: “Before this goes so far that it gets picked up by the Times … right – real; left – fake.” It’s instructive how this happened: