On wanting to extend Snopes.com to my brain
warning: snarky post ahead
I’ve run across two urban legends just this week that made me really want a new product to emerge: BS Detection Implants with a Snopes.com Really Simple Brain Syndication feed.
Here’s how it works. First, you need an alert system for your brain. One that can tell you that something doesn’t feel quite right when you hear something like “green M&Ms are an aphrodesiac”. Next it would parse that alert and compare it with your snopes.com RSBS (really simple brain syndication) feed. After verifying that “no, Microsoft and AOL are not giving away $245 for every email you forward” then you now know that not only was it a bunch of crap, but you also do not need to call & email your 194 closest friends to warn them.
Here are the two events that triggered this:
1. Autism Talk
Nora went to some Seminar-of-Fear that discussed the upcoming doomsday scenario around Autism. It sounds terrifying. We should all probably stay in this next weekend and just worry about it. They offer no vaccine, no treatment, and no real solutions… Just a scare message to get you to contribute to the cause and raise awareness…which will contribute to the cause.[To be fair, I get that it's a serious issue, and it does need to be addressed, but that's not the point for me right now.]
As an example/comparison of silent killers she brought up a video of a “scientific” experiment showing cell phones popping popcorn. I called BS and Snopes backed me up. Turns out they were viral videos made by a bluetooth headset corp.
Awesome. And it’s being used to sell funding for Autism. Ausome. I sure hope the people researching their presentation are not indicative of the caliber of research being done of autism.
Anyway, I guess some of the moms at that Seminar-of-Fear got scared and swore off their cell phones after that. They sure could’ve used my BS detection Implants with built-in Snopes Really Simple Brain Syndication TM.
2. Twitter breaks the death of Jared from Subway
That thing spread all over twitter and on blogs today. That “news” probably reached well into the hundreds of thousands of people. Not good though, it wasn’t real.
This one is a bit harder to detect since..well, why is it big news that a pseudoceleb died of natural causes? But after looking around a bit more, one of the apparent sources cites an article and it mentions gastric bypass. ding ding ding…that’s the BS Alert giving you a warning. Gastric bypass & Jared from Subway losing weight…in it together but how? Sure enough, pass that through the Snopes feed & it’s confirmed it’s an urban legend. My guess is that it was an annoyed obese person who initially put out the story because they couldn’t follow Jared’s turkey sub diet and kept slipping to the meatball sub with extra cheese and mayo. Either that or it’s just people being mean.
So there, could’ve saved some time this week talking about cell phones popping popcorn, pondering why Jared is a celeb in the first place, and then going to snopes for the truth. Bring on my BS detection Implants with built-in Snopes Really Simple Brain Syndication TM. And oh yea, I love that Snopes.com exists, it’s such a good & necessary site.
Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed