Five More Things You (should) Know That Aren’t True.

ISSUE #048 · FUN FACTS · AUGUST 2026

The image is fixed in the culture: a grey tide of little rodents pouring over a cliff edge into the sea, driven by some dark instinct to thin their own numbers. It’s one of nature’s great set-pieces. It’s also completely staged.

The scene comes from White Wilderness, a 1958 Disney “True-Life Adventure” that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. There was very little documenting going on. Lemmings aren’t native to Alberta, where it was filmed, so the crew bought a few dozen and trucked them in. To fake the “migration,” the animals were run on a snow-covered turntable and shot from tight angles to look like a horde. Then, for the finale, they were herded off a cliff — not into the sea, which was actually a river — while the narrator solemnly described their urge for mass suicide.

Real lemmings do boom and crash in number, and when food runs short they disperse, sometimes swimming across water and occasionally drowning. That’s the whole of it. No cliffs, no death drive. The public only learned how the footage was made in 1982, when a CBC investigation exposed it — by which point the Oscar was long won and “like lemmings to the sea” was permanently in the language.

It’s the one thing everybody “knows” about the wall, and it was being repeated long before anyone had gone up to check. The best-known version is a Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoon from 1932, claiming the wall was the only human work visible from the Moon. An English antiquarian made a similar Moon claim back in 1754. The wall is old; the myth is nearly as old as the telescope.

The reality: astronauts from Apollo onward have tried and failed to pick it out. The wall is enormously long but only a few metres wide, and it’s built from local stone that follows the natural colours and contours of the land, so it blends in rather than standing out. From the Moon, Neil Armstrong and others confirmed you can’t make out any human structure at all. From low orbit you can photograph the wall with a powerful telephoto lens — but not spot it by eye.

The neatest proof came from China itself. When Yang Liwei, the country’s first astronaut, returned in 2003, he admitted he hadn’t been able to see it. The claim was quietly taken out of Chinese school textbooks.

They’d suffocate, for a start. The largest bird on Earth is not in the habit of burying its breathing apparatus in the ground and hoping the lion loses interest.

The myth is ancient — it traces to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, around AD 79, who claimed ostriches think that if they hide their head in a bush, the rest of them is hidden too. What people actually see is two perfectly ordinary behaviours. Ostriches dig shallow holes in the ground for nests, and several times a day they push their heads right down to turn the eggs. And when a predator is close and running isn’t an option, an ostrich will drop flat and stretch its neck along the ground to look, from a distance, like a low mound. Both, from far away, resemble a head vanishing into the earth.

For the record, an ostrich has no reason to hide. It sprints at seventy kilometres an hour and delivers a kick that has been known to kill a lion.

This is one of the best-loved motivational “facts” going: even Einstein flunked maths, so chin up. It’s false, and Einstein said so himself. “I never failed in mathematics,” he pointed out, adding that he’d mastered differential and integral calculus before he was fifteen.

Two misunderstandings keep it alive. The first is his 1895 entrance exam for the Zurich Polytechnic, which he genuinely did fail — but on the general sections like botany, zoology and French, not the maths and physics, which he sailed through. He was also two years younger than the usual candidates. The second is a quirk of his old school reports: the Swiss grading scale ran one way and was then flipped, so a run of top marks briefly looks, to a modern eye, like a run of failing ones.

He struggled with rote learning and bristled at strict teachers. He never struggled with the maths.

Every habitual knuckle-cracker has been warned they’re grinding their joints toward ruin. The warning has no evidence behind it — and we know that partly because one man went to heroic, faintly unhinged lengths to check.

Dr Donald Unger, an American physician, had been told off for the habit as a boy. So he ran an experiment on himself. For roughly fifty years he cracked the knuckles of his left hand at least twice a day — some 36,500 cracks — while never cracking his right, keeping it as a control. At the end he X-rayed both hands. No arthritis in either, and no difference between them. He published the result in a rheumatology journal in 1998 and won the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for it. Larger imaging studies have since agreed: no link.

The pop itself isn’t bone or cartilage grinding. It’s gas bubbles collapsing in the fluid that lubricates the joint — closer to opening a fizzy drink than to anything breaking.

Five more confident beliefs, five small corrections. Deploy one at the right moment this week and watch the tiny recalculation happen behind someone’s eyes. That, as ever, is the entire point of this newsletter.

Lemmings: Alaska Department of Fish & Game, “Lemming Suicide Myth: Disney Film Faked Bogus Behavior”; Snopes, “White Wilderness lemming suicide”; the CBC exposé of the staged footage (The Fifth Estate, “Cruel Camera,” 1982).

Great Wall: Scientific American, “No, You Can’t See the Great Wall of China from Space” (2024); astronaut accounts from Apollo to the ISS (incl. Alexander Gerst, 2018); Al Jazeera, “China’s spaceman shatters a myth” on Yang Liwei (2003).

Ostriches: McGill Office for Science and Society, “Ostriches Do Not Really Stick Their Heads in the Sand”; Live Science, “Do ostriches really bury their heads in the sand?” (2024); origin traced to Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, Book X.

Einstein: HowStuffWorks, “Did Einstein really fail math?”; the reversed Swiss grading-scale explanation (per a 1984 New York Times review of his school records); Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe.

Knuckles: Donald Unger, “Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?” (Arthritis & Rheumatism, 1998); Scientific American, “Crack Research” (2009); Ig Nobel Prize archive (Medicine, 2009).

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