The Nocebo Effect (Why Charms Work)

Most of us have heard of placebos,nocebos are the exact opposite.

While placebos are generally associated with positive outcomes, like curing an illness or getting drunk on O’Douls and having fun (if you consider that positive), the nocebo effect produces negative results, such as a cancer patient vomiting before chemotherapy starts or someone breaking out in a rash because they thought they touched poison ivy, even though it was merely an ordinary plant.

One of the most talked about examples of the nocebo phenomenon was an incident published in “New Scientist.” According to the account, late one night an Alabama man, referred to as Vance, went to a cemetery and met up with a witch doctor who told Vance that he was going to die soon. Believing the witch doctor’s prediction, Vance soon fell ill and within a matter of weeks was emaciated and close to death. Vance was taken to the hospital but the medical doctors could find nothing wrong with him. Finally, Vance’s wife told the physician, Dr. Doherty, about the encounter with the witch doctor, which gave the creative physician an idea. The next day, Dr. Doherty told the couple he had tracked down the witch doctor and physically threatened him until the medicine man finally admitted he had put a lizard inside Vance that was eating him from the inside. Of course, the Doctor’s story was completely fabricated, yet he made a big show of injecting the patient with a mysterious substance and snuck in a genuine, green lizard that he pretended to extract from Vance. The next day, Vance awoke alert, hungry, and it didn’t take long before he fully recovered.

Apparently, that story was corroborated by four other medical professionals, and is often cited when explaining why Voo Doo sometimes works (i.e. not because of magic, but because of the nocebo effect).

Being Blonde Instantly Changes How Women Are Treated By Men

The idea that we’re morally obligated to help other people when they’re in trouble is deeply ingrained in our society, though in practice, it rarely works out that way. Our inclination to help another person can be influenced by everything from whether we think people are watching to how busy we are.

In 2010, New Zealand Star reporter Celeste Gorrell Antiss performed an experiment to see if people would be more inclined to help a blonde or brunette stranger carry some heavy boxes or assist her with car trouble. Though her sample size was small, limited to only a few encounters over a few days, the results showed that as a blonde, Celeste received help four times as often as she did as a brunette.

In another social experiment, brunette student Elyssa Goodman found that when she donned a blonde wig, it only took about 30 minutes for someone to call her a whore to her face. Goodman was wearing exactly the same clothes she’d worn the previous week—the only change was her hair color.

These aren’t cherry-picked examples, either. The so-called “blonde effect”—that is, the phenomenon of men openly treating women differently based on hair color—has been noted by many female bloggers. It’s even been studied by scientists, who have observed that blonde women, along with being far more likely to receive help from men, are paid more than other women in the same positions.

The Longest Word In The English Language

We’re going to be honest, our spellchecker just gave up when we tried typing “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,” and we can’t really blame it. Clocking in at a mind-boggling 45 letters long, it’s one of the single longest words in the entire English language, dwarfing its better-known cousin, “antidisestablishmentarianism,” by 17 whole letters.

So what does it mean? Well, the word can technically be used to describe a very specific medical condition that can arise as a result of inhaling fine silica ash or dust, but you’d be hard pressed to find a doctor who’s even aware of the word because the condition described above already has a much shorter medical name: pneumoconiosis.

“Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” was actually coined in 1935 by a guy named Everett Smith in a deliberate attempt to create a very long word. Smith came up with the word by combining a number of Latin terms before presenting it to the National Puzzlers’ League (NPL) during a presentation on “the ever-growing length of medical words.” Smith, who was the president of the NPL at the time, neglected to mention to any of the people present that the word wasn’t actually a medical term or that he was the one who’d made it up. Nevertheless, the word was able to “somehow” sneak its way into a dictionary a few years later—officially making it a real word, much to the annoyance of everyone who wasn’t in the NPL. Of course, this led to the sadly unproven rumor that they were the ones responsible for it being added to the dictionary.

Abraham Lincoln was a marvelous wrestler

Abraham Lincoln is one of the most famous Presidents in the history of United States, because of his strong and direct involvement in the abolishment of slavery in the country. However, despite his notoriety and all of the references in popular culture to him, there are some things you haven’t heard about Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln, as a young man, was an incredible wrestler due to his strength and the length of his limbs. Allegedly, Lincoln only lost one out of the 300 matches he had fought during his wrestling career. His immaculate wrestling abilities earned him an “Outstanding American” award, and he was inducted into the Wrestling Hall of Fame.

Nazis invented Fanta soft drinks

No matter how unbelievable this fact might sound to some, Fanta was invented by Nazis in Germany back in 1941. It was very difficult for the Nazis to import Coca-Cola syrup into Germany during World War II due to trade embargos. So, the head of Coca-Cola Deutschland, Max Keith, decided to make a new product for the German market.

He used ingredients available already in Germany at the time, including whey and pomace. During a brainstorm on what to name the beverage, Keith said “use your imagination” or “fantasie” in German. Salesman Joe Knipp yelled out “Fanta!” And this is how Fanta was born. Today you can find over 100 flavors of Fanta worldwide.

The founding fathers of the US loved to drink

While in France, Jefferson spent a great deal of time in the vineyards of Burgundy. John Adams is said to have drunk cider for breakfast every day to the day he died. In 1787, two days before they signed off on the Constitution, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention partied at a tavern. According to thebill preserved from the evening, they drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer and seven bowls of alcoholic punch.

In their defense, we must mention that getting drunk and not losing control was socially acceptable and perfectly normal back in those times. Of course that would slowly change and become less acceptable, until the US had alcohol prohibition in the early 20th century.