Misconception #8, regarding efficacy of the flu shot, is not so cut and dry:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/flu-vaccine-paradox-adds-to-public-health-debate-1.2912790

The flu vaccine may also not be as effective for the elderly:
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=486407

I have nothing against vaccinations for the more serious illnesses like polio, etc - these vaccinations are effective and important. I'm just not so quick to buy into the flu-shot.

Your video, Misconceptions about getting sick - mental_floss, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Just to clarify terminology. Heart attack is not the same as cardiac arrest.
Basically a heart attack is when the arteries to the heart become occluded causing chest pain and (as time goes by) cardiac muscle damage.
A cardiac arrest is where the heart is unable to pump blood to supply the brain causing a loss of consciousness. Cardiac arrest can be caused by arrhythmias, large blood clots in the lung and also heart attacks where either a large part of the heart is infarcted or because an arrhythmia develops secondary to infecting an important conducive pathway in the heart.

The majority of heart attacks cause chest pain and no loss of consciousness but the ones that do cause LOC have a poor survival rate.
When someone collapses like this you have no idea what the cause is but if they are not breathing then you should call for help and start CPR immediately.
Defibrillators are found on tube stations, supermarkets etc and are designed for members of the public to use - they talk you through the steps.
The pads analyse the rhythm of the heart to see if it's a 'shockable' rhythm. If it's not then no shock will be delivered which is why it's essential that CPR has been started and is maintained until help arrives.

A common misconception (in tv/movies) is that a 'flat line' can be shocked back into a normal rhythm when in fact if the defibrillator reads a 'flat line'( technical term asystole) then it will not initiate a shock.

"The high-income tax increase sapped 0.25 percentage points from GDP in 2013, estimates Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania."

"Politicians who support tax increases operate under a misconception that there is little real effect, Maloney said.

“A higher tax rate reduces our ability to recapitalize and reduces our ability to expand,” he said. “You keep your forklifts a little longer, you do whatever you can to stretch the dollars you’re left with.”"

"According to Zandi’s estimates, the payroll tax cut subtracted 0.6 percentage points from U.S. economic growth, more than twice the effect of the high-income tax cuts."

“Clearly, taxes affect behavior; they affect some behaviors more than others. What has not been established is that the level of taxes has a clear and important impact on economic growth. And one reason is that this is not a well-posed question. How government activity affects prosperity depends not only on the level of taxes, but also on what the money is used for.”

"Thus, the proper answer to a question as broad as whether tax increases are “positive” or “negative” for growth is: “It depends.”"

just to clear up a few misconceptions here..First, you cant prove your arguement, by disproving someones elses..This is a tactic of christians. Even if you could disprove evolution, that doesnt prove a 500 year old man built a giant boat.. donkeys can talk,,the sun stopped in the sky..,or there were giants on the earth,,ok?,, AKA false dichotomy fallacy.

Second,,this arguement also applies to evolution and abiogenesis...you cant disprove evolution by saying,well,where did everything come from..

This type of willfull ignorance can actually kill us,,,IE anti vaccine people...ignorance like this, can kill, your children. People will use superstition to kill their children,,,and,,yours.

Hi Engels,

I just wanted to address what is a common misconception about the teachings of Jesus Christ, which is that He taught the oneness of mankind, or that we could all achieve some kind of evolutionary process of consciousness expansion. This is simply false; Jesus Christ taught that He is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that there is no other way to reach God except through Him. He taught that we are all sinners, alienated from God, and that His suffering and death on the cross and resurrection from death was the universal atonement for our sins and the hope of all mankind, which we receive by putting our faith and trust in Him.

The popular culture has distorted our understanding of Jesus, but this distortion is easily remedied by studying the scriptures. A reading of the gospel of John, for instance, will show you that the Jesus you have heard about and the Jesus of the bible couldn't be more different. I would challenge you to do so and learn more about Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who He truly was and was not, and what He taught about Himself. It is a question He posed to His disciples:

Matthew 16:13 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?"
Matthew 16:14 And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets."
Matthew 16:15 He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"

@VoodooV

two dimensional thinking at its finest.

just because i point out that your commentary is tantamount to harassment does not automatically equal my condoning lantern or bobs oftentimes ridiculous commentary.

just because i am pointing out your hypocrisy does not mean i disagree with your actual comments.

if my fly was open or i had a huge booger hanging from my nose i hope you would pull me aside and point that out to me not stand from the bleachers,point and laugh.

your obsession with always being right has clouded your judgement in regards to what i am trying to point out to you.

is your ego so massive that the words of another should be so easily dismissed?each consecutive comment towards me is becoming more and more irrational and paranoid.

you mentioned calling me out on another thread.
yes you did.
which was a response to ME calling YOU out first.
and i smacked you down pretty handily.mainly due to the fact that you base your commentary towards me rife with presumption and conjecture.

which is exactly what you are doing here...again.

instead of hearing my words,you marginalize me in order to dismiss and ignore them.which is what all weak-minded people do in order to hold onto their own misconceptions.

bob does it.
lantern does it.
and so do you.

but never for a second deceive yourself into thinking i do not have the stones to say what needs to be said.your commentary reveals such an ignorance about who i am that i am literally laughing while i type this to you.

stop projecting voodoo.this persona you write about is not i,but rather you.

one last thing for your consideration (since we have totally hi-jacked this thread.sorry OP,please forgive).one of the main reasons i called you out was due to multiple private emails i received in regards to your current..and i quote one.."douchey attitude".

so the silence you hear is NOT due to agreement or consensus but rather many sifters fear confrontation.

i hold no such fear.

I also found it interesting they highlighted the Ryugyong Hotel (the huge pyramid building). It's been under construction for 25 years, largely halted since the Soviet Union collapsed and the slush fund train ended. While the exterior is done according to wikipedia, the interior is not and it's always be unoccupied.

China's metropolises feed a similar misconception. They are similarly impressive that it's easy to forget that the country as a whole is still very poor. China's GDP per capita is half of Brazil, a quarter of South Korea and a tenth that of the US.

While China is obviously not as repressive as NK, the hukou dual citizenship system has a similar effect of segregation rural and urban dwellers. While rural workers may be able to move to work in the cities, they will enjoy none of the social benefits and protections that local citizens do. This has a lot to do with China's disparity of income and accretion of wealth to the large cities.

So, this is a major misconception by the public about where the money actually goes when drugs are developed. Read the link you have there, but with a more realistic eye about where the money is going. Drugs are SUPER expensive, but only because they're super expensive to discover. 'Drug discovery' is a tremendously difficult thing, to the point where it is the wetdream of a professional drug discoverer in the pharma world to discover 1 drug in their 30+ year career. During that time, the team of pharma researchers all have to be paid for their PhD level of expertise, and the human cost in developed countries is quite expensive! If there are 1000 people in one pharma company, and each person makes ~70+ thousand, and benefits cost another 100+ thousand per person each year, then the human cost alone in that rough exercise accounts for 170 million yearly for just 1000 people, and can touch the billion dollar figure per year for very large companies. That is where the money is going in that 1.3 billion dollar figure.

The major problem lies in developing a substance that actually does something, and you know exactly what that something is, including all side effects. To get a statistically valid clinical trial is actually a rather hard thing to do; a poorly designed clinical trial can prove whatever you want it to. Considering your St. John's wort example, the most costly 'drug discovery' component is already finished, it would just need to go through clinical trials as a drug for antidepression. The body of evidence in place may already serve for early phase clinical trials, and it may just need to go through a couple of more trials to prove its efficacy (and determine side effects). It would cost some money, but it would NOT be so prohibitively expensive as starting from complete scratch.

Considering this, the idea that it's 'unfair' to make the supplements world actually prove their product does what it is promised to do (or at the very least, not be harmful) is a bit odd. Quackery is illegal for moral reasons, and hard to argue that what the supplements world is doing is not quackery; particularly with the Dr. Oz zeal, false promises are being sold millions of bottles at a time. It is in the public's interest to get this stuff tested and approved!

Your video, Misconceptions About the Universe - Veritasium, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Veritasium youtube comment:
Some people have been sending wikipedia references saying parts of this video are wrong, but I think it's wikipedia with the misconceptions. For further reference check out this paper: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8838887

Once again you personally insult, and ignore most of the facts in order to further your insanity. I'll see your 'child' and raise you to infant.
FAIL
I only read your post because someone else replied quoting you (and I can't fathom why it showed your comment even then, it should have been hidden since you're ignored...@lucky760, what happened?)
You can't parrot what you haven't heard said, and no one else is pointing out that you can't be a patriot if you don't believe in the Fed, which unites the states....at least no one I've heard.
Your misconception based on intentionally misleading, 1/4 true, right wing media BS is obvious...this guy is a violent felon who publicly threatened to use violent force (against law enforcement that was not yet there in force OR heavily armed) to enforce his "right" to continue to break the law, no question, as are all those that brandish weapons at officers of the law, federal or not. It's the law that you can't do that to people not attacking you or breaking into your property (and NEVER to law officials) ...and no one attacked the cowards hiding behind their wall of women and children OR the Bundys, they simply confiscated illegally grazing cattle on FEDERAL land, belonging to all of us.
EDIT: and you ignore that most of these people don't consider themselves citizens, as they don't believe in the fed...without which there is no U in USA. They are citizens of their own states (in their own minds), considering themselves 'sovereign citizens', even though most don't have the balls to actually renounce their citizenship in the USA.
Non- payment of well known, legal state and federal fees for use of state and federal property, and non-payment of taxes are NOT civil matters, they are criminal, as is failure to appear. Many of his supporters guarding the Bundy's from prosecution (hindering prosecution is a felony too) are the same ones that support the fed seizing property of those caught with a joint, so it's not about state rights or 'freedom', it's about standing with idiots that hate what you hate, namely "the negro" (one in particular).

Respectfully....
You aren't keeping your word...already.
His comment was not directed at you (although I grant you he did use vulgarity of a type).
You claimed/promised you would only respond in kind if vulgarity and vitriol was directed at you...yet your reply about a comment to someone else still included un-needed vulgarity (although not directed at a person, which is an improvement) I think based on a misconception that he was being 'nasty' to that person.
You're doing better, but not quite there yet. Please try to keep your word to not use vulgarity unless it's directed directly at you (or your comment). Others can usually defend themselves if the feel the need, or you could do so without vulgarity. You promised to. (as I see it)
And trust me, if BoneRemake (or anyone else I notice) starts being as nasty and vulgar as you have often been in the past, I'll ask him to change his behavior as well. I hope it never comes to that again, it's not a pleasant position for me.

here's the thing that convinced me that I wasn't an agnostic anymore.

I am not opposed to the idea of a creator.

I *am* opposed to every single depiction of a creator that humanity has come up with so far. petty, fear-based, eternal punishment for finite crimes, constant inconsistencies in their rules, ok with slavery, and absolutely shitty morals.

Sure..individual people have a personal vision of a much more...humane and moral creator that represents a much better view of a creator. But those ideas don't get any real traction in the public scene. It's always the hateful creator, the vengeful creator, The creator that somehow plays favorites and cures cancer and other diseases but only for certain people, but has never once given an amputee their limb back. the creator that picks the winners of football teams, the creator that somehow hates how you think and behave even though he created you that way. The creator that somehow sides with one political party and not the other.

I don't know if there is a creator, and when it comes right down to it, no one does either. But what I do know is that there is absolutely no evidence of ANY religions' creator(s) And even if there were, many, if not all of these creators have created rules systems that are just demonstrably...bad or so full of holes.

So you could say I am agnostic, but that, at least to me, implies that both views have an equal footing...that somehow there is evidence for both, but you just haven't decided which is stronger.

Theists have made claims but have not provided any good evidence to support those claims. Atheism is not declaring that there is no creator, just that the theists haven't made their case. So it's pretty clear that even if you don't know if there is a creator, if you call bullshit on religion, you're an atheist, not an agnostic. Religion and whether or not a creator exists are TWO SEPARATE THINGS.

It just comes down to burden of proof and the common misconception that atheism is the declaration that there is no creator. You can't prove a negative on this scale Believing that there is absolutely no creator is anti-theism, not atheism.

Your video, 50 Science Misconceptions, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.