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Every Tuesday on the Woot blog, writer and professional ex- Jeopardy! contestant Ken Jennings puts on his Debunker hat and takes at aim much-believed morsels of information that feel so true... but are really all wrong. This month, to celebrate Halloween and the inevitable candy-gorging orgy (gorgy?) that ensues, Ken will debunk four myths about sweets and desserts of all kinds. These treats, it turns out, are full of tricks.

Sweet Myth #1: Marie Antoinette Said of the Peasants, “Let Them Eat Cake.”

If you learned one thing about Marie Antoinette in school it was probably this: she was an extravagant flake who partied while her people starved, and she lost her head for it in 1793 when the Revolution came. The “Let them eat cake” story is often used to prop up this image of the Queen as frivolous and out of touch: when told that her people were starving for want of bread, Marie is said to have nonchalantly replied, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”—in other words, that the poor should just chill out and try some cake (well, brioche, anyway, which is rich, eggy bread) instead. The story was trotted out yet again last week to describe the financiers sipping champagne and sneering at the “Occupy Wall Street” protestors in New York City.

The first problem with the “Let them eat cake” story is that it’s chronologically impossible. It dates back to the Confessions of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who attributes it to a “a great princess.” But Rousseau wrote those words in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was only nine years old. Unless Rousseau had a time machine, Marie Antoinette couldn’t have been the princess he was thinking of.

The second problem with the story is that it’s unfair to Marie—who, many historians now argue, wasn’t really a bad sort. Sure, she liked to dance and gamble and dress up, especially when she was young, but soon grew out of her “Girls Gone Wild” phase. For most of her life, she was a modest teetotaler who tried to reform the licentious excesses of the French court, and gave liberally to the poor. In 1770, she and the king decided to give up a year of their income; it was donated to a fund for the victims of a tragic stampede that had killed 800 Parisians at a fireworks celebration earlier that year. She later adopted three poor children that she raised herself, and cared for many other peasant families. And in the famine of 1787, she sold the royal silver to buy grain for her people, while serving her own family the same coarse barley bread that the poor ate. No cake for her - not that it did her any long-term good in the court of public opinion.

Quick Quiz: Speaking of French cake, what kind of fruit is traditionally found in the dessert known as tarte tatin?

Ken Jennings is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and the new Maphead. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.

Illustrations: Still life with brioche, Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, 1763 (from here) and Marie Antoinette at the clavichord by Franz Xaver Wagenschön, 1768 (from here). Public domain.

Every Tuesday, we ask Jeopardy! know-it-all Ken Jennings to blow our minds by debunking a cherished myth that “everybody knows” — even though it’s dead wrong. Since Ken’s new book Maphead, about geography nerds, is in stores now, we pulled him away from the gazetteer long enough for him to demolish four incredibly wrong “facts” about geography.

Map Myth #4: The Sahara Is the World’s Largest Desert.

I know you want to appeal to a map here, Sahara-defenders. Look at its huge beigeness! It’s like, half of Africa, the second-biggest continent! “Saharan” is actually a dictionary word meaning “vast, desert-like.” How could it not be the biggest?

But here’s the rub: a geographer’s definition of “desert” has nothing to do with temperature, or sandstorms, or cacti, or dudes on camels, or any of that stuff. If you want to be a desert, all you have to do is not rain. The general rule of thumb: if less than ten inches of precipitation falls somewhere in a year, then it’s a desert. And the Earth’s driest continent gets much less than that — only eight inches annually at its wettest spots, along the coast. Yes, the world’s biggest desert is actually chilly Antarctica. Much of the Antarctic interior gets only a couple inches of snow a year, and cold air carries so little moisture that the relative humidity can be as low as 1% . If you’re going to the South Pole, bring Chapstick.

So what’s the Sahara then — the world’s largest sandy desert? Nope, that’s another misconception. Most of the Sahara is a rocky plateau, not a sea of dunes. (The Arabian Desert is the world’s largest sandy desert.) The Sahara is usually called the world’s largest hot desert. I know it must hurt the locals to have to agree to this asterisk, but what can they do? Antarctica is two million square miles bigger than their puny runner-up desert. It beats the Sahara cold.

Quick Quiz: What fictional alien planet is named for the southernmost province of the Saharan nation of Tunisia?

Ken Jennings is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and the new Maphead. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.

Photo by Flickr member http2007, used under a Creative Commons License.

Every Tuesday, we ask Jeopardy! know-it-all Ken Jennings to blow our minds by debunking a cherished myth that “everybody knows” — even though it’s dead wrong. Since Ken’s new book Maphead, about geography nerds, hits shelves today, September 20, we pulled him away from the gazetteer long enough for him to demolish four incredibly wrong “facts” about geography.

Map Myth #3: The Panama Canal Runs from the Atlantic in the East to the Pacific in the West.

That’s just common sense. The Atlantic Ocean is east of the Americas; the Pacific is west. If you’re using the Panama Canal as an oceanic shortcut to the Pacific, you must be heading west, right?

But look at any map of Central America: the Panama Canal actually runs more or less from north to south, not east-to-west. And the Atlantic end of the canal is actually a teensy bit to the west of the Pacific end, so ships traveling from the Caribbean into the Pacific sail southeast through the length of the canal! Did I just blow your mind?

If this kind of geographic bar bet always trips you up, don’t feel bad: it’s your brain’s fault. Over the millennia, humans have evolved specific neurons to judge horizontal and vertical relationships, but we still struggle with diagonals. So that’s why it surprises us to read that Reno is actually further west than Los Angeles, or that the first foreign country you hit while traveling due south from Detroit is…Canada. (Both true! Look at a map!) Our brains want these places to be tidily aligned either north-south, or east-west. The fact that their real relationships aren’t so rectilinear befuddles us.

This is also why that girl in the old TV commercial can defeat her brother so easily at Connect Four by winning…diagonally! Pretty sneaky, sis.

Quick Quiz: What leading U.S. politician was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936, leading to constitutional questions about his eligibility for the presidency?

Ken Jennings is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and the forthcoming Maphead. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.

Photo by Flickr member Comrogues, used under a Creative Commons License.

Every Tuesday, we ask Jeopardy! know-it-all Ken Jennings to blow our minds by debunking a cherished myth that “everybody knows” — even though it’s dead wrong. Since Ken’s new book Maphead, about geography nerds, hits shelves September 20, we pulled him away from the gazetteer long enough for him to demolish four incredibly wrong “facts” about geography.

Map Myth #2: Greenland Is Big. Like, Continent Big.

This is the world, as depicted in the venerable Mercator projection seen behind generations of third-grade teachers, news anchors, and movie NORAD generals.

Greenland, you have probably noticed, is ginormous. Bigger than South America, bigger than three Australias. Mercator Greenland could swallow us whole and then use Chile as a toothpick. As a result of this map, generations of schoolchildren have grown up thinking that Greenland — Earth’s largest island, at 830,000 square miles — is a snowy wasteland the size of Africa. It’s not. It’s not even close.

Greenland looks fourteen times bigger than it should on Mercator maps because Mercator’s was a “conformal” projection—it maintains at all costs the accuracy of angles while saying “Go to hell!” to little details like area and distance. As a result, the Earth’s polar regions are as overinflated as Kanye West’s ego. Things get so crazy up north on a Mercator map that you can’t even draw the North Pole. Mathematically, it would be an infinite distance from the Equator.

Here’s how Greenland looks on an equal-area map projection (this is one called Gall-Peters).

Wow. The great and powerful Oz has been revealed as a tiny old man behind a curtain. In its proper proportion, the world’s biggest island isn’t the size of Africa. In fact, it’s considerably smaller than, say, Algeria, a single country in Africa. Sorry, Greenland. You had us going there for a while.

Quick Quiz: The United States relinquished any claim to Greenland in a 1916 treaty. What current piece of American territory did the U.S. get from Denmark in return?

Ken Jennings is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and the forthcoming Maphead. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.

Every Tuesday, we ask Jeopardy! know-it-all Ken Jennings to blow our minds by debunking a cherished myth that “everybody knows” — even though it’s dead wrong. Since Ken’s new book Maphead, about geography nerds, hits shelves September 20, we pulled him away from the gazetteer long enough for him to demolish four incredibly wrong “facts” about geography.

Map Myth #1: Mount Everest Is the Highest Point on Earth.

It’s not? you whisper, heartbroken, wondering what little technicality you’ve missed. So what is the highest place on Earth? Another mountain? Some futuristic Asian skyscraper from a Mission: Impossible movie? Three rows back at a Phish concert?

Well, here’s the catch about the Earth: it’s not a sphere. (Bonus Debunker!) Because of its rotation, the Earth is more or less like an adult human: it bulges more in the middle as time goes by. Geodesists—people who study the shape of the Earth—call it an “oblate spheroid.” Long story short: the Earth is about 25 miles “wider” at the Equator than it is “tall” at the poles, which means that equatorial mountains extend way further into space than more northerly ones like Everest. In fact, the peak of Mount Chimborazo, an Andean stratovolcano that happens to be the highest point of Ecuador, is over a mile further from the center of the Earth than Everest is.

Ah, you say, nodding wisely. So Mount Everest may not be the technical “highest point,” but it is still the planet’s tallest mountain. Not so fast! Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano is 33,000 feet tall, almost a mile taller than Everest. So why don’t we hear about rugged adventurers and their Sherpas scaling snowy Mauna Kea? Because the base of Mauna Kea sits not on a lofty plateau, but on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Well over half its height is wasted underwater, where only exotic Hawaiian fish with hard-to-pronounce names can appreciate it.

So what is Everest? Just the Earth’s tallest mountain above sea level, which is nothing to sneeze at. And the summit is still rising at the rate of 3-5 millimeters a year as due to plate tectonics. This means, in essence, that each new climber who summits Everest is setting a new altitude record. (If you ignore that killjoy Chimborazo, of course.)

Quick Quiz: Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to summit Mount Everest, appears on what nation’s five-dollar bill (as shown above)?

Ken Jennings is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and the forthcoming Maphead. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.

Everything you know is wrong! Each week, we ask writer and Jeopardy! ace Ken Jennings to tear down one of the lies that they teach us in school, man. All month long, Ken's been exposing common misconceptions about sleep. Now that he's taken on the fourth one below, look for him again in two weeks with part one of September's debunkmentations.

Sleepy Myth #4: Turkey Makes Me So Drowsy

No, it doesn’t! Well, I guess it does if you eat enough of it, but it doesn’t make you especially drowsy the way that recycled local-morning-show pieces claim every Thanksgiving.

It’s easy to see how this myth started: who doesn’t feel a little sleepy after a big holiday dinner? And turkey is a source of tryptophan, an amino acid that was once prescribed as a sleep aid because the body metabolizes it into serotonin. But here’s the problem: turkey contains roughly the same amount of tryptophan per ounce that other meats do, and less than cheese and some fish. It contains much less than the dosage once given to insomniacs—which, in any case, was shown to have effect only when taken on an empty stomach. Thanksgiving dinner is pretty much the opposite of “an empty stomach.”

Here’s a partial list of other things that are more likely to cause a holiday nap than a few hundred milligrams of tryptophan:

• Ingesting a carbohydrate-rich stuffing/potato/gravy mass the size of a volleyball alongside your turkey.
• Watching another Lions or Cowboys snoozer on a comfy couch.
• Pretending to agree with the appalling political opinions of the relative you are seated next to.
• Drinking enough glasses of wine to make it through said conversation without throwing a punch at said relative.
• Did I mention that you just ate enough carbohydrates to feed a small Caribbean nation for a week? Also, there’s pie later.

With all that in mind, the turkey could be laced with Seconal and it wouldn’t make a difference. You’d be out cold anyway.

Quick quiz: A female turkey is called a hen, of course. What’s a male called?

Ken Jennings is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and the forthcoming Maphead. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.

Photo by Flickr user TurkZilla, used under a Creative Commons license.

Everything you know is wrong! Each week, we ask writer and Jeopardy! ace Ken Jennings (seen at left and far left) to tear down one of the lies that they teach us in school, man. During these sleepy dog days of August, Ken will expose four common misconceptions about sleep. If your elaborate edifice of preconceptions can stand that much Debunking, read them all.

Sleep Myth #3: Never Wake a Sleepwalker

Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, is more common than you might think: 30% of children and 3% of adults experience episodes. For centuries, we’ve been warned that waking a sleepwalker could lead to a heart attack, brain damage, or worse. In 1841, surgeon Walter Cooper Dendy related the case of “a young lady who was walking in a garden in her sleep; she was awoke, and almost instantly died.”

In reality, sleepwalkers, when awoken, are likely to be disoriented and even distressed by their unfamiliar surroundings, but that’s as serious as it gets. To avoid a possible sock in the jaw, doctors recommend gently leading the sleepwalker back to bed rather than waking him or her.

In fact, the only serious injuries reported to sleepwalkers are in those cases where nobody woke them up. In 2007, a sleepwalking teen in Demmin, Germany wandered out of a fourth-floor apartment window. He fell thirty feet to the ground, breaking an arm and a leg — and went on peacefully sleeping.

Quick Quiz: What Shakespeare character says "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" during her famous sleepwalking scene?

Ken Jennings is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and the forthcoming Maphead. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.

Photo by Photocapy, used under a Creative Commons License.

Everything you know is wrong! Each week, we ask writer and Jeopardy! ace Ken Jennings (seen at left and far left) to tear down one of the lies that they teach us in school, man. During these sleepy dog days of August, Ken will expose four common misconceptions about sleep. If this one rocks your world, further world-rocking can be found in last week's column.

Sleep Myth #2: Bears Hibernate In Winter

Quick: think of an animal hibernating. You pictured a bear, didn’t you? And not a bat, a squirrel, a rattlesnake, a spiny anteater, or a fat-tailed dwarf lemur? Well, you were wrong. All those other animals are true hibernators. Bears are not.

When a real hibernator—a rodent like a marmot, for example—gets down to its winter business, it doesn’t fool around. Its heartbeat lowers by a factor of seven, and it might only breathe once every six minutes. Its body temperature can drop near freezing. A bear, on the other hand, typically loses only five Celsius degrees or so of body temperature, mostly due to its larger size. If a grizzly bear got as cold as a squirrel does during its long winter nap, it would require over 11 million calories of heat to wake it up!

A bear’s winter state, more accurately called torpor or lethargy, is still a dramatic lifestyle change. Black bears can go over a hundred winter days at a time without any exercise—which, granted, is also true of many Americans. Unlike lazy people, however, bears also get around the need for bathroom breaks by eating enough roughage to form a foot-long rectal plug called a “tappen” in their bowels, which is probably more than you wanted to know. Suffice it to say that in the winter, Winnie-the-Pooh, uh, doesn’t.

Quick Quiz: Every November, what university hides its mascot statue behind a big sign reading, "The Bruin Bear is hibernating!" to keep it from being stolen by a crosstown rival?

Ken Jennings is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and the forthcoming Maphead. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.

Photo by ForestWander.com, used under a Creative Commons License.

Everything you know is wrong! Each week, we ask writer and Jeopardy! ace Ken Jennings (seen at left and far left) to tear down one of the lies that they teach us in school, man. But you knew that already if you heard Ken's appearance on the Drunken Smartass Trivia podcast. During these sleepy dog days of August, Ken will expose four common misconceptions about sleep. We feel like there should be a "debunkbed" joke here, but we can't make it work as of press time.

This week... Sleep Myth #1: We Dream In Black & White.

In MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale lives in a sepia-toned Kansas, but dreams her way into a Technicolor Oz. For many years, the conventional wisdom held that the real-world relationship went the other way: our dreams were monochromatic. But in more recent studies, dreamers have reported seeing colored objects in up to 83 percent of their dreams. Those who don’t are typically older folks who grew up on black-and-white movies and TV.

In a recent study from Scotland, dreamers who were better at recalling dream details were also more likely to report color, so it’s possible that everyone dreams in color, but some of us—those of us raised on lots of Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy, presumably—reconstruct them in black and white when we think back later. Other dream researchers take the somewhat Zen view that dreams are usually neither color nor black-and-white—that most dream objects come with unspecified color, like the objects in a novel. Colorblind people, by the way, only report full-color dreams if they became colorblind late in life. Otherwise their dreams will match their visual deficiency.

If Hollywood really does have this tight a hold on the format of our dreams, don’t be surprised if dream researchers soon start to see sleepers reporting THX sound and, for those willing to pay five bucks more, 3-D and IMAX.

Next week: Sleep Myth #2!

Quick Quiz:. Speaking of The Wizard of Oz, what kind of birds does Dorothy sing that she'd like to follow "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"?

Ken Jennings is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and the forthcoming Maphead. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.