Asymmetrical Information

How about:

"...the French don't have a word for 'entrepreneur'!..."

There's a kernel of truth in the Shakespeare/North Carolina myth. Shakespeare and modern-day English as spoken in England stand on two different sides of something called The Great Vowel Shift, a major change in the way that long vowels are pronounced in English. The link provides audible demonstrations, the history, etc. Appalachian pronounciation preserves the pre-GVS pronunciations.

So, no, people living in Appalachia do not speak exactly as Shakespeare did. But in some ways it's closer than the way modern Englishmen speak. And closer than conventional stage Shakespearean.

I've got to say, I lived in North Carolina for 14 years, I just listened to a lengthy excerpt of T&C in OP, and I *did* find it completely conprehensible.

The "we only use 10% of our brains myth" always irritated me. Here is the truth.

Clinton was not responsible for the economic growth in the 90's. Here is the truth.

THANK YOU for the Chinese "danger" and "opportunity" myth. ARRGH.

My contribution: the QWERTY keyboard was not, in fact, designed to slow the user down.

Inuit is not a synonym for Eskimo. According to Wikipedia:

"There are two main groups of Eskimos: the Inuit of northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland and the Yupik of western Alaska and the Russian Far East (the latter group is known as Siberian Yupik or Yuit)."

No word on which group has more words for snow...

James, to hear Jack Kemp tell it, Clinton wasn't responsible. I think you meant to say the myth was that Clinton was responsible.

I keep asking those who suggest he was exactly what he did and to a man the only answer they can give is "raising taxes", if that. It's just accepted among some folks. The guy's like a wizard or something.

Back to the Bard. I went to the Language Log item you linked to and listened to a clip of Philip Bird reciting an abridged version of Hector's speech from Act IV, Scene 5, first in a modern pronunciation and then in the reconstructed Tudor pronunciation. I've never lived in North Carolina, and I found the Tudor pronunciation perfectly comprehensible. It sounds more like a modern Irish accent than anything else I'm familiar with. But it certainly bears almost no resemblance to any Southern accent I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of them, from West Virginia (yes, it's a Southern State) Virginia (which sports several accents, as do other Southern States), the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.

Oh, I left out Kentucky and Tennessee.

Charlie, I understood the text too, but I don't think it has much to do with where I'm from or have lived.

Dave Schuler: are you certain Appalachian preserves the pre-GVS vowels? They say "beef" so it rhymes with our "strafe", "Greece" so it rhymes with "race", and "mine" so it rhymes with "keen"?

I'd love to see documentation of this; I don't think it's true (and I was born in the Appalachians and grew up in North Georgia) but I'd be willing to be proved wrong. As you and I both said, there's a kernel of truth in this--Appalachian does preserve some features lost elsewhere in America and England. But a tiny, tiny kernel at most.

James, to hear Jack Kemp tell it, Clinton wasn't responsible. I think you meant to say the myth was that Clinton was responsible.

This is because Jack Kemp is a partisan zealot with very little understanding about how economies really work. He drank the supply side Kool Aid years ago and has been blinded ever since. This little gem ought to have been a tipoff that Jackie is clueless on economic matters:

"During Mr. Clinton's first year in office, the year of the tax increase, economic growth slid to 2.6 percent."

Here he is being either ignorent or dishonest. While its true that 93 was the "year of the tax increase", it couldn't have had much of an impact on growth. Most of Clinton's first year in office was spend under the influene of Bush 41's last budget, with fiscal year 93 beginning in Ocotber of 92. Clinton's tax increase was passed much later and couldn't have caused the supposedly slow growth rate in "Clinton's first year in office" that Kemp is talking about.

The entire field of economics is littered with ridiculous (in the sense that they haven't been even close to empirically proven) assertions of causality, and these insipid assertions are often made by "highly qualified" people, from across the political spectrum. If every econ professor who made an assertion of causality with only the mereset shred of empirical proof, or without any proof at all, were hung from a lamp post, undergrads across the land would suffer from lower back problems, due to them being forced to walk to class while bent 90 degrees at the waist.

Personally, the canards that drive me nuts are "Hitler was elected", and, quite prominently these days, the notion that the treatment of captured enemy combatants by American forces in previous wars was less brutal and abusive, or more closely adhered to due process, than what has been the case in the current war. I swear, I sometimes wonder if Andrew Sullivan has ever opened a history book. Really, though, the degree to which the nature of previous wars, especially WWII, has been whitewashed is ridiculous.

On the QWERTY typewriter, this is all that the cited reference says:

"Among the problems that Sholes and his associates addressed was the jamming of the type bars when certain combinations of keys were struck in very close succession. As a partial solution to this problem, Sholes arranged his keyboard so that the keys most likely to be struck in close succession were approaching the type point from opposite sides of the machine. Since Qwerty was designed to accomplish this now obsolete mechanical requirement, maximizing speed was not an explicit objective."

Nowhere does it establish that an objective was not to slow the user down, but my guess is that the arrangement had that effect anyways. An interesting article, though, even though it is devoted to dissing the Dvorak keyboard. The last I heard, the typing record was 240 wpm established with an Apple computer using a Dvorak keyboard. And anecdotally (the best kind of evidence for discussing!) a friend of mine trained himself to use the Dvorak keyboard and said it was much faster than the QWERTY keyboard.

"Einstein proved that everything is relative." Relativity is no more relative than classical mechanics. When Einstein learned that his theory was being described that way by people who knew nothing about it except its name, he tried to change the name to "Theory of Invariants," but it was too late.

Newton's Theory of Gravitation was not the theory that gravity exists, but a theory of how it works. Similarly, Einstein's Theory of Relativity was not a theory that relativity exists, but a theory about how to handle it.

I wonder if Jack's first comment is meant to point out that the "don't have a word for entrepreneur" tale is an urban legend, believed by many people but false. It's a good example of several anti-Bush urban legends that people believe.

Nowhere does it establish that an objective was not to slow the user down, but my guess is that the arrangement had that effect anyways.

I can type like a legal secretary on a QWERTY keyboard, to the point that nearly everyone I have ever worked with or near has commented on it. I daresay typespeed is set primarily by the size and length of the user's fingers, the degree of dexterity and hand/eye coordination the user possesses, and -- surprise -- simple practice. Moreover, all non-genetic elements of the above will probably be most developed in users who were taught proper keyboarding technique at a young age.

Actual keyboard layout would strike me as having only a second-order effect in comparison to the above.

Not only is Inuit not a synonym for Eskimo, but the Yupik people of Alaska, who are part of the Eskimo group, really hate being called Inuit. They prefer Yupik, are quite happy with Yupik Eskimo, and are even quite fine with Eskimo. They really despise being called Inuit, though.

It's loosely akin to someone saying "Don't call them Orientals, they're Chinese!" and using the term "Chinese" for Koreans, Japanese, and everyone else in East Asia and Southeast Asia. (Indeed, the word "oriental" is more acceptable in Asia than in North America.)

A particularly annoying consulting aphorism has been: "If you're not the lead dog, the view doesn't change."

Fast Company debunked it awhile back. But I think it was more of an eye roller than simply wrong. It simply means: businesses are hierarchies

In fact, many of the most vile sayings get used, abused, overused, and discarded through business fads. Most are rah-rah cheerleader 'leadership' sayings that are simply hot air. It is empty rhetoric that deserves to be ridiculed, not debunked. Despair.com has made mocking this fatuousness a business itself.

The mythological story of the Snopes trial is too-good-to-be-true, though in a different sort of overly simplified morality play sort of way. Among other things: towns all over Tennessee, including the one in which the trial took place, were auditioning for the right to challenge the law; the biology textbook used was massively racist, conforming to the standards of biology and the nastier uses of Darwinism at the time; the history textbook, like many of the time, extensively praised some of the worst aspects of eugenics; and so on. Reading the entire testimony is quite enlightening as well-- William Jennings Bryan was quite clear that certain things in the Bible were literary allusions, which Clarence Darrow seemed not to understand all that well.

My favorite too-good-to-be-true myth (I'm not sure if "good" is really the right word) from my field: Say you are convicted of murdering someone, but then it turns out they're not dead. You can go ahead and kill them, and the Double Jeopardy clause prevents the state from trying you for murder for the actual killing.

My cousin's kid's social studies teacher was actually teaching this in class. Gees.

Hmm, Hitler WAS elected.

The Nazis got 43.9% of the vote in March 1933 and formed a regular coalition government with Hitler as Chancellor. The Enabling Act came through the Reichstag soon after. I'd say that's more an incomplete statement than a myth to say, "Hitler was elected."

My annoying myth is that Napoleon was short. There's another one that's been bugging me too, but I can't remember.

That one picture of the guy being shot in the side of the head in Vietnam is an example of a bit of a myth. It seems to be an example of a cold-blooded murder, but actually has more of a back story.

Readers are invited to debunk their favorite too-good-to-be-true myths.

That, once you'd arrived at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot (aka Boot Camp), you could just leave by saying you were ready to go.

That myth had a grain of truth; you could leave if you were motivated enough to go through the required process. But the myth had it nearly as easy as raising your hand to leave the room.

Here is a more complete description of Hitler's rise to power. The March '33 vote only took place after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, which made him elected in the same sense that Gerald Ford was elected President, which is to say he wasn't elected at all. The March '33 vote took place after Hitler began a wave of murder, torture, and terror following his appointment to the Chancellorship.

The Nazi party first rose to prominence in Sept. 1930, when they received 18% of the vote. Hindenberg was alarmed by the rise of the Nazis, and scheduled Presidential elections, with he and Hitler being the most prominent candidates. The March '32 election had Hitler receiving 30%, and Hindenberg receiving just under 50%, prompting a runoff in April '32. Hindenberg received 53% in that election, and Hitler 37%.

Parliamentry elections in July '32 did have the Nazis receiving the most seats, about 38%, but this fell to 32% in the November '32 elections. The Nazi party at this time had almost exhausted it's resources, and was threatened with internal dissent. Hindenberg, exhausted and failing, however, was told that the then-Chancellor was planning a coup followed by a military dictatorship. He fell for this, in the climate that surrounded the burning of the Reichstag building, and then appointed Hitler Chancellor, who was in league with other non-Nazis who thought he could be controlled. Upon being appointed Chancellor, Hitler began his wave of terror, which helped produce the March vote in which the Nazis received 44 percentof the vote. Once Hitler got the cooperation of a few more useful idiots, he had enough votes to pass the Enabling Act. The road to the slaughterhouse had been completed.

Readers can decide for themselves whether the assertion "Hitler was elected" is accurate.

the biology textbook used was massively racist, conforming to the standards of biology and the nastier uses of Darwinism at the time; the history textbook, like many of the time, extensively praised some of the worst aspects of eugenics; and so on.

I've heard those observations before, but they've always struck me as disingenuous. It gives the impression that the nice Christians were standing up to the racist Darwinists, which is silly of course.

Bryan didn't oppose the teaching of evolution because evolution was racist -- Bryan himself was openly racist, and the Klan were his biggest supporters. Bryan opposed the teaching of evolution because it conflicted with his understanding of the Bible.

Myth: John Roberts is a good, safe Conservative choice.
THE TRUTH

While he can't prove there isn't one, oriental language blogger Amritas is unaware of a Chinese character for trouble consisting of "two women under one roof".

Myth: If you're an illegal immigrant about to be deported, you can marry a US citizen and automatically have the right to stay. The actual process takes months (some of the couples on the immigration board had been waiting over a year), and the immigrant must return to their home country for a police check and an interview at their country's US embassy. And no, a marriage of convenience is unlikely to fool anyone.

I go on this rant every time it shows up on tv as a plot device.

Favorite ecnomic myth: Deficits cause inflation.

Allied myth: The federal government simply fills the gap between tax revenues and expenditures by printing money.

If the latter were true, the former might be true, but both are either outright false or so wildly oversimplified as to amount to the same thing. Still, both parties take up the cry like it's Holy writ, depending on whether they happen to be the "in party" (deficits are irrelevant) or the "out party" (deficits are an unmixed evil taking us to economic hell).

Favorite health myth: Plutonium is the deadliest substance known to man.

Reality: Not even close. Of 26 men heavily exposed to plutonium in the early days of plutonium manufacture, 19 were still around 50 years later. One had died of a type of cancer that may have been caused by plutonium, or maybe not, thirty-odd years after exposure. If that's the world's deadliest, pass me a smoke.

Favorite gasoline myth: Premium gas is more volatile than reuglar gas, so you can pep up performance in your regular-using car by adding a tank of premium.

Reality: Premium gas is less volatile. It's used in higher-performing engines because they have higher compression ratios. Regular gas would pre-ignite (knock) in those engines, hence the requirement for a less volatile fuel.

Favorite politico-economic myth: Trade sanctions force governments to change their policies and are an efffective way to force dictators out of their jobs.

The $600 (or $700) toilet seat that the US DOD bought is a myth.

The item was a complete cover for a human waste container for a plane (either a P-3 or C-130, I can't find my hard copy reference for this), that was in effect, everything that would make up a portapotty except the waste tank. It was listed as (IIRC) a "toilet seat assembly" in the procurement. Now, making a custom shaped assembly of this kind, out of fiberglass, in a small production run, with DOD documentation is going to have high up front costs for design and paperwork. Also, most government procurements have requirements that you keep the plans and tooling so that they can get more units for some period of time. $600 is cheap.

Reading through the crisis / danger / opportunity piece, there seem to be three points made:

1) You shouldn't call hanzi and kanji "ideograms".

2) "Weiji" isn't "a character", but a compound character.

3) "Ji" doesn't have a postive sense consistent with "opportunity". Except that it does.

Points 1 and 2 are pure snobbery. Point 3 is valid in the sense that the Chinese don't (supposedly) perceive the overtone of "opportunity" in "weiji". I'd hardly call this a debunking -- at best, it's a clarification.

This is an interesting and fun thread.

(That's just a comment, not a myth I'm trying to expose.)

Not sure I agree about "ji", JSinger - the article linked says of it:

The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)."... Aside from the notion of "incipient moment" or "crucial point" discussed above, the graph for jī by itself indicates "quick-witted(ness); resourceful(ness)" and "machine; device." In combination with other graphs, however, jī can acquire hundreds of secondary meanings. It is absolutely crucial to observe that jī possesses these secondary meanings only in the multisyllabic terms into which it enters. To be specific in the matter under investigation, jī added to huì ("occasion") creates the Mandarin word for "opportunity" (jīhuì), but by itself jī does not mean "opportunity."

In other words, only combined with "wei" does "ji" mean "crisis", only combined with "hui" does "ji" mean "opportunity". Otherwise, "ji" can mean zillions of things. So the idea that "opportunity" lies buried in the Chinese word for "crisis" still seems quite debunked to me.

Myth: Betamax was technically superior to VHS.

Reality: From the beginning, VHS had much more tape. This could be traded off between recording time and quality. For any given recording time, VHS would give better quality than Beta (or Superbeta).

(For a professional video studio, Beta did offer certain advanced editing capabilities that VHS didn't. But that had nothing to do with video quality.)

Myth: "The laws of aerodynamics are inconsistent with the {fruit fly, honeybee, hornet}'s ability to fly."

Correction: change fly to glide.

Contributor A:

"Ji" doesn't mean opportunity, and the usual cliche about "crisis = danger + opportunity" is inaccurate. But it seems pretty clear that the sense of "crucial moment" is present in the use of "ji" in the words for both crisis and opportunity. The "hundreds of secondary meanings" is pompous academic handwaving and hairsplitting, as with the issues about "ideogram" and "character".

BTW, the Betamax myth Gary points out is a classic...

On the claim that natives of Appalachia, or North Carolina, or anywhere else speak Shakespearean English: First of all, in 1600 every English county had a distinct dialect, and London had at least one dialect of its own. If Appalachian dialects hark back to the 1600's, they must be a mix of several of the original dialects, so it would be quite a coincidence if this just happened to match the London dialect in which the plays were first performed. This is not to say that certain broad characteristics that held across many 17th Century dialects may not have been retained to some extent in isolated locations after they were lost in more populated areas.

Second, books were precious and expensive in most of the isolated parts of America, at least to the end of the 19th Century. The first book a respectable family would buy would be the King James translation of the Bible (not far removed from Shakespeare's language, but without the "jakes" jokes). If they could afford a second one, they'd select something that was well known to be among the best in English literature - usually Shakespeare. These books were handed down for generations, and generations of kids would learn to read from them. It's no surprise that Shakespearean elements are in their language now, whether or not they were there originally. But pronunciation would be the least likely thing to be transmitted accurately through books.

A Freudian slip to refer, when talking about busting myths, to the Scopes trial as the "Snopes" trial.

How about the myth that automation is bad for the economy because it puts people out of work who then won't be able to buy goods and services. This thesis was most brilliantly propounded recently in the Boston Globe.

Prices for your groceries and home improvement materials will also continue to grow. In fact, the only change to come is the line at the store will get shorter, and not because it is self-checkout. The line will shorten because someone, a lot of someones, perhaps you or me or her or him, can now not afford to put dinner on the table or to patch the leak in the roof because a lot of jobs were getting axed while we rushed by to save a little time.

To counteract the loss of brain cells occasioned by this piece, I offer the following Fisking.

Robert, I followed your link to the Boston Globe, and while I have never been particularly impressed with Ivy league credentials, I must say that I am nearly stunned that somebody who was accepted to Harvard could write something so towering in utter stupidity. It defies belief.

How timely. I just returned from a weekend at Ashland (with the second-best Shakepearian company in the world, the Royal Shakespeare Company holding the top slot) and got to see one of the best First Folio copies in the world.

The security guy standing next to it was fairly knowledgeable about it, perhaps through osmosis.

At any rate, there was a nicely done pamphlet that went with the exhibit, and which I can now refer to for particulars.

Quartos were printed on one sheet and folded into quarters (hence the name.) They were the equivalent of paperback books— this doesn't say if they were even bound— and cost their audience about the same. Most of the plays published this way were considerably mangled.

Folios were folded once and were larger; the First Folio was put together by Shakespeare's friends and includes a large amount of the "canon" that today would otherwise be lost, plays such as Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and the Tempest. We would still have Troilus and Cressida, though.

These would cost the equivalent of $170 - $190 dollars. Not precisely cheap.

Typos were preserved, along with proofreader marks, because they didn't just throw that valuable paper away. Therefore, the Folios are not interchangeable; the one in Ashland is in wonderful condition and looks to be about a century (except for the spelling, which is internally inconsistent as they used multiple compositors.)

Incidentally, the "s", while it resembles the "f", is visibly different. (Wish I had it for the following passage.)

…we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office of their care, and paine, to haue collected & publish'd them; and so to haue publish'd them, as where (before) you were abus'd with diurse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious imposters, that expos'd them: euen those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes…

As I was an English major, the primer on Shakespeare's folios and quartos is much appreciated.

Referring back to the piece in today's Boston Globe on automation and the myth on which it is founded, I cannot resist offering a movie quote (Billy Madison):

"At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul"

People saying they know more about Chinese etymology than Victor Mair? There's such a thing as going to far.

Plutonium goes fine under your pillow, but if you smoke it, then it IS deadly. Alpha emitter and all that.

Oh yeah:

JFK did not say he's a jelly donut.

Yamamoto did not say he feared Japan had "awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve."

What about "Scotch Tape"? It is about the same as calling it "Jew Tape" - it is about being stingey, even though there are several stories circulating about how it got the name, it is a common theme.

3M sez you're right:

http://www.3m.com/about3m/student/scotchbrand4/

"The tax code takes up 8 (or 10 or 12) feet of shelf space." It fits in a 2-volume paperback set. A standard tax law reference takes up that much space, but not the code.

Bonus annoyance points for calling it the "IRS Code." It's the "Internal Revenue Code," and it's written by Congress, not the IRS.

"Men reach their sexual peak at 18, but women don't reach it till they're 30."

I can't actually debunk this, since I've never seen any evidence of an actual scientific study on the subject. You most often hear it from some woman in the audience on Oprah, who recites it like it was Holy Writ, to wild cheers from all the other women. Sometimes the ages given are 19 and 35, or 16 and 29. And everyone thinks they know exactly what a "sexual peak" is, but when you ask whether it's physical development, or fertility, or ability to achieve orgasm, or amount of sexual activity, most people say "Huh?"
I'm declaring this saying bogus until I hear solid proof to the contrary.

I can't resist this bit of pedanticism, so I'll take issue with AT's debunking of the JFK / jellied donut 'myth'.

Here is what JFK said:

"Two thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was 'civis Romanus sum.' Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'"

Here's the link to his text: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkichbineinberliner.html

Now I'm no linguistics expert, but there certainly is a jellied donut in Germany called a 'Berliner'. JFK's sentence could, therefore, be literally translated from the German to mean 'I am a jellied donut,' so in technical fact he did say it.

Of course the literal translation would be incorrect - everyone understood what he was stirringly saying.

Amusingly, you can also find in German bakeries a large iced cookie called an 'Amerikaner'. I can't confirm that the two names are linked by the JFK speech, but I have my suspicions.

As far as myths go, one short year ago there seemed to be universal agreement (among Yankee fans, anyway) that the Red Sox would never win a World Series - 'not in my lifetime'.

Myth ? Dunno, but oddly a whole lot of Red Sox fans feared exactly the same thing.

If it was a myth, it's exploded now.

Cheers,

RE: JFK

If I said I was a Coney Islander few people, well no one, would assume I was saying that I'm a hot dog with chili and onions.

AT: Re: Plutonium. They myth is that ingesting even the tiniest particle of plute will kill you outright or give you cancer for sure. The mechanism for the carcinogenesis is that some isotopes of plutonium are strong alpha emitters. The essence of the myth, as opposed to the reality, is that ingesting any quantity of alpha emitters at all will give you cancer for sure. That's the part that turns out not to be so.
Evidently, the body can tolerate some level of internal low level exposure to alpha particles (helium nuclei) indefinitely.

The 26 guys I mentioned who were exposed to plutonium had ingested fair bits of it--much more than a few atoms. (They were young chem grads who were cleaning up the plutonium extraction lab in Hanford, WA, and cleanliness standards in those days were lax by today's standards. One fellow had a plutonium-uranium-bearing flask blow up in his face. He inhaled so much radioactive matter that he could set off a geiger counter from across the room just by burping--50 years after the fact. The fact that he was still around to burp about it after half a century should tell you something.

Evidently the human body is far more tolerant of radiation, at least in small doses, than the scare-mongers would have us believe. Some people may be extra-sensitive, though, which is why the ALARA standard (As Low As Reasonably Attainable) is a sensible one for controlling radiation exposures to humans.

Still, the mythic "dirty bomb" that stands as a hypothetical terrorist threat is probably more risky for its explosive force than for its radiological toxicity. Evacuate the block by all means. The "hot" particles obligingly tell you where they are--with a gieger counter--so they can be cleaned up. But the real "terorists" are the scare mongers who would have you believe that you'd have to evacuate the whole city to be safe, or that the city would be "uninhabitable for centuries." Even Nagasaki was re-inhabited in weeks, not centuries.

Re: JFK and donuts

Hmmm, then I guess no one would chuckle if I said I'm a Frankfurter.

Like I said, folks understood what he meant even if his German may have been a shade too literal. Maybe the whole thing should be filed under 'translation follies', which could be a whole nother thread by itself.

Kind of like marketing a car called 'Nova' in the Spanish-speaking world.

Cheers,

I thought the Nova-in-Mexico story was a myth.

Publius -- glad to hear that someone else realizes the silliness of the 'dirty bomb'. As a chemist, I only wish that I had some kind of a handheld device that told me where all the badness was...

The tax code takes up 8 (or 10 or 12) feet of shelf space." It fits in a 2-volume paperback set. A standard tax law reference takes up that much space, but not the code.

This is true, but its that's only the code itself. Add the regs and rulings, which accompany it, and it does take up about that amount of space.

Myth: Mars has a red sky.

Fact: Mars has a blue sky, just like Earth. The color of the sky on both planets is caused by the same thing (Raleigh scattering) so during the daytime both have blue skies. The only time the skies are red is at sunrise/sunset.

This holds true for any planet, unless its atmosphere is composed of an intrinsically-colored gas such as bromine (orange) or chlorine (green).

Oddly, NASA has been the prime purveyor of this myth.

The content filter needs to be fixed. I see nothing questionable about four letter vvords beginning vvith the 23rd letter of the alphabet such as "vvhat", "vvord", "vvith" or "vvill". It vvouldn't let me post this vvithout using double-v.

VVeird.

VVhat the?? I'm having the same VV problem.

But Ed, doesn't it surprise you that the Martian sky is orange or pink in all the pictures?

Ed, I found the proper explanation. If the only phenomenon in effect happened to by Rayleigh scattering, then yes, the Martian sky should be blue, though less so than Earth's sky, because the atmosphere there is only about 6 millibars.

In reality, Mars' atmosphere has lots of iron oxide dust, and this dust preferentially absorbs sunlight at blue frequencies and reflects it at other frequencies, thus making the atmosphere a muddy golden color during the day, and yes, pink at sunrise and sunset.

Ich bin ein Manhattan!

In Robin MacNeill's PBS shovv The Story Of English, he finds the Shakespearean speakers not in the mountains, but in the tiny islands of the Chesapeake Bay - Tangier Island in particular. One of the fishermen intervievved says "noight" instead of night, "gao" instead of go, and other archaic vovvel pronunciations vvhich may be similar to Elizabethan usage. Tidevvater English it's called.

Their accent didn't sound much like that T&C recording though.

(Arrgh. Please excuse the double-v's below)

AT: the pictures from the Hubble telescope tell a different story.

http://lunaranomalies.com/colors.htm

"Tvvo hours after the first color image appeared on the monitors, a technician abruptly changed the image from the light-blue sky and Arizona-like landscape to a uniform orange-red sky and landscape. Ron Levin looked in disbelief as the technician vvent from monitor to monitor making the change."

And yes, I am surprised that the sky is orange or pink in all the pictures from the rovers; not only that, those skies shovv no JPEG artifacts but are solid colors (this could not happen using CCD cameras; evidence that these images have been edited).

http://xenotechresearch.com/NASASKIES.htm

http://xenotechresearch.com/NASASKIES2.htm

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