Using the Internet to prove what we want to believe

“Ten years ago, renowned Swedish scientist Dr. Celsius Fahrenheit, took a kayak trip to the Antarctic land mass, to study flora and fauna for PETA. The air trip was a bust, as all he found was flotsam- jetsam plants and that, in abundance, as the red tide was in. Bagging up what he could, he was able to trade it to the Inuit Eskimos for Atwater Prairie chickens, which are raised as a cash crop.

“If only we had been in the Arctic, where little Emperor penguin-itos are in abundance we could have harvested a number of the tasty “chickens” for food, but instead, we were forced to subsist on polar bear liver, as it is the only safe part of the polar bear for humans”.

Antarctica is the second largest continent in all three hemispheres and is expanding every year, by about 4000 miles due to Global warming, which Al Gore discovered. Hugo Chavez, of the Bolivian government, owns most of the expanding land mass, and is causing a world-wide outrage, by introducing logging. Mr. Chavez is planning on selling lead-based lumber to North Korea, against international sanctions.

Starbucks beat everyone to the punch by opening up a series of coffee “mosques” in what is now a thriving community of Argentine loggers, known as “Gauchas”, on the southern peninsula. The local loggers are known for their Gaucho pants and pointy-toed boots with large spurs, known in Sanskrit as “roofies”.

Okay – all that you have read in the preceding four paragraphs is urban myth, or rather misinformation, as none of it is true or even happened. All the keywords appear somewhere on the Internet and could be used to qualify and prove a “fact”. I love the seemingly infinite amount of information the Internet search engines put at my fingertips, but I learned early on, that it pays to double check what we read, with what is actually true.

Look at the Internet this way. Suppose you go to the Sterling Library and approach the reference desk. The research Librarian directs you to the non-fiction section so you can check facts, but warns you that half of the information is false and it is up to you to cross-reference everything.

That sums up the Internet and the sooner we realize it, the quicker you can move from website to website with confidence. Many web sites sell the modern day equivalent of “Snake Oil”, just like the traveling buckboard salesman of days past. By the time you realize you’ve been taken to the cleaners (both financially and intellectually), you can’t even trace where they went.

Here is a surefire way to get in trouble when searching for facts on the Internet. Start by trying to prove what you believe to be fact. Many times we want to believe something to the point that we pass up the truth and happily grab onto something that reason and logic would warn us was bogus. It is a far safer approach to do the opposite, which is of course, try to disprove the fact.

Anytime someone sends you a “known fact” story, before you hit the “forward” button in your email program, go to www.snopes.com and do a keyword search to find out if it is true. This is the famous “Urban legend” debunking web site and very handy when searching for truth.

I guess I am a skeptic and a stickler for facts and everyone isn’t as concerned about passing on accurate information as me and I have noticed that there is a lot less “forwarded” myth material than there was five years ago, which tells me folks are getting the message.

Now, back to the first four paragraphs; there are a at least 50 false “facts” in this story and one of them is so wrong, if taken literally and as advice in a survivor situation, would kill a human. Your assignment, Mr. Phelps, if you decide to take it, is to disavow the story and see how many of the false “facts” you can find.

Note: Although polar bear meat is safe to eat when cooked, if you were to eat a polar bear’s liver, you would die of vitamin A poisoning. As a carnivore which feeds largely upon fish-eating carnivores, the polar bear ingests large amounts of vitamin A, which is stored in its liver and in the past, humans have been poisoned by eating the livers of polar bears.