The De-Textbook

by Cracked. com

  You are comparing yourself to men who have giant penises for a living. And by the way, scientific surveys indicate that women are far more likely to avoid a second go-around with someone who has too big a penis than one that’s too small.

  The Bad News for Guys

  D: Your First Time Will Probably Be a Humiliating Disaster

  The guys who insist it wasn’t? Ask them if they were drunk at the time. Drunk people will remember the sex as being great for the same reason they remember their jokes as being hilarious.

  The Good News for Guys

  D: You Get Better with Practice

  For some reason, guys instinctively know that practice will make them better at baseball, but think if they’re “bad with girls” then that’s a permanent stain they will carry to their grave. But as with anything, dating and talking and having sex with girls gets easier with practice. And that’s good, because the practice is awesome.

  Male Versus Female Sexuality: Not as Different as You Think

  THE MYTH: Women reach their sexual peak later than men.

  It’s a well-known fact. If we were reproducing as nature intended it, every eighteen-year-old boy flooded with testosterone on a cellular level would be dating a late-thirties minx who’s finally revved up her estrogen engines and is off to the cougar races.

  THE TRUTH: They’re just not that into you.

  While it is true that males have the most testosterone at around eighteen, and that females hit their peak of estrogen production at a much later date, it turns out that people aren’t as chemically simple as Mentos and Pepsi, and the combination of testosterone and estrogen into testostrogen doesn’t always result in a stories-high jet of ecstasy. According to Dr. Marc Goldstein of Cornell University, hormones don’t decide when you hit your sexual apex.

  If you think you’re unable to get laid because you refuse to go after lusty cougars or sex-crazed frat guys, think again. The more likely culprits are a myriad of social contexts, behavioral conditioning, and your complete lack of personality or hygiene. Your “sexual peak” has more to do with your attitude toward sex and level of experience.

  This is closely tied to another myth guys have concocted to explain the baffling mystery of why young women aren’t lining up to jump on their boners.

  THE MYTH: Men like casual sex; women like committed sex.

  A half century of feminism hasn’t changed the fact that women consider sex to be a step toward a long-term relationship and deep emotional commitment, while men consider sex to be nothing more than scratching an itch.

  THE TRUTH: Women like casual sex with men who aren’t bad at it.

  Turns out, women are no less likely to be down for some consequence-free coupling, as long as it’s in a safe situation with a sexually competent partner. In other words, a woman likes casual sex if she’s with a guy who knows what he’s doing. Otherwise, it’s just not worth the trouble.

  A 1989 study showed that men were far more likely to accept solicitations for casual sex than women. Male and female students were approached by “moderately” attractive students of the opposite sex and awkwardly propositioned. The men, being eighteen and in immediate proximity to a vagina, said, “Fuck yes.” Most of the women said no. Obviously. But that wasn’t the end of the story.

  In 2011, a University of Michigan psychologist named Terri Conley decided to dig a little deeper. Her study found that women weren’t making those decisions based on expected commitment levels but because it’s so much harder for a woman to reach orgasm. Men know they’re going to have an orgasm even if the girl is terrible in bed, and in fact know that it will happen even if she leaves halfway through. But women only have orgasms 35 percent as often in first-time sexual encounters. Why commit yourself to a night of getting some guy off if you aren’t getting anything but filthy sheets out of it? Studies of bisexual women showed that their hesitance to bone disappeared as soon as the partner wasn’t a man. That infamous female prudishness all came down to the fact that most men have awful cocksmanship when it’s a consequence-free one-night stand.

  FIGURE 5.1 Possible, as far as Science knows.

  5.A

  Science Is Bluffing

  Miscellaneous Questions from Elementary School Science Tests That Real Scientists Can’t Answer

  No matter how slow of a softball problem you lob at it, Science always seems to duck out of answering and raises more questions instead.

  How Many Planets Are in Our Solar System? 9! Duh.

  It sounds like a bizarre question to even ask, considering that we all dully gazed at those sad, old, yellowed papier-mâché models of our solar system hanging from the elementary school ceiling, but we don’t really know for sure how many planets are in our solar system. The vast majority of it is actually entirely uncharted and unknown. The area between Mercury and the sun is too bright to see, and the area beyond Uranus is too dark. Sure, the second half of that sentence probably would have started a riot in most elementary school classrooms, but it’s an important point that restores mystery to a part of science that most of us assume is boring.

  Scientists are still finding new objects in the asteroid belt by the hundreds of thousands, and the fact that there’s a huge gap in asteroids after a certain distance behind Pluto tells scientists that there’s probably a planet between the size of Earth and Mars gobbling up all the space rock back there. So even though Science took Pluto out behind the cosmic woodshed, our solar system is probably back up to nine planets again . . . at least.

  Wait, “at least”? How many could there be? Well, astronomers have discovered an object named Sedna orbiting the sun, and although no one’s 100 percent certain of its size, they’re pretty sure it’s carrying at least Pluto’s heft. Another little anomaly that astronomers have noticed is that comets’ orbits aren’t exactly going along as predicted. The explanation? There must be another planet out there affecting the icy rocks, and this mother of a planet is huge—as in “four times the size of Jupiter” huge. Named Tyche, this giant gas ball is too far away for sunlight to reach it, but scientists are pretty confident that evidence gathered from a NASA telescope will prove its existence very soon . . . and Professor Lovecraft is pretty confident that the horrors that live in its perpetual darkness will rise up and overtake Earth almost immediately after.

  How Does a Bicycle Work? With . . . balance.

  At the very least, you’d think that Victor von Bicycle, inventor of the bicycle, knew what he was doing at the time. But after more than a century of research, Science has been forced to conclude that he was probably some kind of sorcerer. Or maybe we just made that name up and the first bicycles were invented not through any kind of scientific procedure but by dumb old trial and error.

  In fact, modern bike experts even admit that, although there are a few equations on the matter, they’re pretty much all fancy icing on top of a cake of cluelessness. One Cornell researcher, Andy Ruina, even goes so far as to say that nobody has ever come to an understanding of what causes a bi to cycle (see Figure 5.2). We thought it was the gyroscopic effect (the force that keeps a spinning top from falling over). But nope! That theory was dashed back in the 1970s. So then it was something called the caster effect (something to do with the front wheel’s angle away from the frame). But just this year, top bikeologists (?) from several universities formed an angry science mob and pitchforked that theory as well.

  How Bicycles Work

  FIGURE 5.2 As in, “Hey, man, how bicycles work?”—a question Science continues to ask to this day.

  5.B

  The Laws of Physics

  Are More Suggestions, Really . . .

  The Law of Gravity: No law is more important, and none more unequivocally our bitch. The law of gravity is like the polio vaccine of the physics world: We threw our best and brightest nerds at it, and we won. We fly. Into space, even. The battle is over. Humanity 1, Gravity 0 (with our balls in its face).

  It turns out that there are four basic forces that hold the univ
erse together—electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravity—and out of these four, gravity is the only one that doesn’t make any sense. How can it be so incredibly weak and incredibly strong at the same time? All the other major forces have their own particles. That’s how they interact with each other. But gravity’s particle—the graviton—is strictly hypothetical. Despite the fact that gravity is everywhere, it’s the one particle we haven’t found. It’s not actually a particle, really. It’s more of an imaginary friend that Science invented.

  FIGURE 5.3 Graviton: The imaginary superhero Science had to invent to explain why you’re not flying off into outer space right now.

  Gravity is predictable when we take a step back and watch it yank things out of midair, or act as the unbreakable chain the Earth has been using to swing the moon around its head like a planet-size Viking (see Figure 5.3). But get up close, and the best Science can come up with is “Well, there must be something there. Let’s give him a name that sounds like a powerful supergenius and call it a day.”

  The Law of Conservation of Energy: You know the one. It says that energy can’t be created or destroyed, just transferred. So you’ll never get more energy out of something than what you started with.

  Unfortunately, one of the simplest laws of physics has to have an asterisk next to it. Go down to the bottom of the page and you’ll find something along the lines of “*This is usually the case, but occasionally the universe gets a hankering to let an object passing Earth just up and gain speed for no real reason. We assume this is because someone somewhere is fucking with us.”

  It’s called the flyby anomaly, because there are multiple instances where NASA’s Galileo, NEAR, Pioneer 10, and Pioneer 11 spacecraft have experienced an unexplainable increase in speed over massive distances. It’s always when they’re passing Earth at enough of a distance to not be affected by its gravitational pull, yet they somehow pick up speed, like a universal force is inside stepping on the accelerator.

  The anomaly was only first noticed in 1980, and Science has spent the ensuing decades trying to figure out what the hell is going on. They’ve accounted for every type of energy that’s ever been discovered. So far, they don’t even have a real theory. So we could suggest that the spacecraft are just showing off for the home crowd, and that would be as good as anything Science has come up with so far (see Figure 5.4).

  FIGURE 5.4 As a satellite nears Earth, Jesus farts on it, causing it to speed up—one of many ridiculous theories Science hasn’t officially ruled out yet.

  5.C

  Miscast Stars of Physics

  They Got the Biggest Superstars in the History of Science Totally Wrong

  Albert Einstein Was a Total Pimp

  Albert Einstein, Time magazine’s man of the century, is simply the most famous scientist in the history of the planet. He was the first to postulate the theory of relativity, convinced FDR to build the atomic bomb, and is considered the father of modern physics. You wouldn’t automatically think of a physics geek as getting more ass than a toilet seat, but you’d be wrong.

  When he wasn’t sciencing the hell out of everything, Einstein spent his time postulating his wiener into as many women as possible. Even though he was married twice (once to his cousin), he cheated on both of his wives with about ten different women. In his defense, he presented his first wife with a list of rules, one of which was “expect neither intimacy nor fidelity.” If you didn’t think he was a genius before, now you have proof.

  Before Einstein finally settled on his cousin Elsa, he apparently almost married her twenty-two-year-old daughter instead. (Elsa was his first cousin through his mother’s side and his second cousin through his father’s side—Einstein was probably the only human capable of conceptualizing the branches of his own family tree that he had sex with.) Plus he supposedly got some side action from Elsa’s sister when they were younger, which he defended in a letter to Elsa by pointing out, “You can’t blame me; we were young and she was willing.”

  BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: Einstein would regularly get lost and was known for stopping strangers and saying, “I’m Albert Einstein and I’m lost; can you help me get home?” even as an adult. The man was good at science, sex, and absolutely nothing else.

  We imagine he used the same defense when he was caught boning his best friend’s niece years later. Einstein would also write to his stepdaughter and wife to tell them which women he was currently tutoring in asstrophysics, and sometimes he had his stepdaughter act as a messenger to deliver letters to his mistresses. Man of the century, indeed.

  FIGURE 5.5 Professor Albert Einstein, seen here calculating the optimal pelvic thrusting speed of an elderly Jewish theoretical physicist.

  Thomas Edison Was a Thieving Dunce

  THE MYTH: Edison was the greatest inventor of the twentieth century.

  Thomas Alva Edison is that rare historical figure whose middle name we remember even though he didn’t assassinate anyone. You probably associate Edison with the lightbulb and, if your brain had room for two things in elementary school, electricity (or maybe English muffins if you went to a crappy school). If it weren’t for him, we’d all be living like the Amish today.

  THE TRUTH: Thomas Edison set electricity back decades . . .

  There are two kinds of electricity—direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC). AC works much better than DC because it can retain a strong electrical flow over a long distance. Running your city on a DC grid requires a power plant to be constructed on nearly every block. Silly, right?

  Well, Edison invented the crappy one. A Serbian American physicist and engineer named Nikola Tesla invented alternating current and brought the technology to market right around the time Edison’s company was pushing DC (see Figure 5.6). Big mistake, guy who’s just trying to add to the common store of human knowledge!

  . . . by Being a Supervillain . . .

  In the 1880s, Edison launched a vicious smear campaign so successful that his inferior DC wasn’t totally supplanted by AC until the 1960s. If you’re wondering what sort of smear campaign it takes people eighty years to forget, in one instance, Edison personally electrocuted an elephant to death and filmed it. Seriously. Go to YouTube and type in “Topsy the elephant” and you will see footage of the man who invented incandescent lighting murdering a chained elephant.

  Guess Which One Your Teachers Decided Not to Tell You About

  Nikola Tesla

  Detaches one of his awesome, glowing balls to give you a better look.

  Thomas Edison

  Seen here pondering his collapsed scrotum.

  FIGURE 5.6 Tesla was a crazy Serbian who blew shit up with lightning. Thomas Edison looks like he’s failing to hold in a fart in literally every photograph of him.

  . . . Who Stole His Biggest Inventions . . .

  Of his 1,093 patents, it’s estimated that Edison ripped off 1,165, then realized that some of them were duplicates and threw those out. But the stolen crown jewel of the Edison empire has got to be the lightbulb.

  First he stole it from its actual inventor, Heinrich Göbel, who initially tried to sell him the idea. Edison refused, saying that he saw no merit in the invention, then promptly bought the idea at a bargain rate from Göbel’s widow the second he died. Hooray, inventing!

  The second time Edison stole the lightbulb, it was from his business partner, Joseph Wilson Swan. Swan had done what Edison couldn’t—actually fabricate a reliable, working bulb—so Edison partnered with him to form the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company. For an understanding of how well that “partnership” worked out for Swan, consult Figure 5.7 and try to figure out which one he is.

  . . . and Is Just as Stupid as You Are

  That header might be misleading, so allow us to clarify: Famous inventor Thomas Edison is just as stupid as you are, assuming you’re very, very stupid.

  We’d be lying if we said that the lightbulb wasn’t a real game changer, but despite that and all of the great inventi
ons that Edison was associated with, not all of his “inventions” were winners. Some of them were ghost-busting devices.

  In the early twentieth century, Edison burned his finger, and when his fingerprint grew back, he concluded, with no hint of self-doubt, that it was because humans were made of “immortal units” that cannot be destroyed, and that, to Edison, formed conclusive evidence of the existence of ghosts. Everything holds up so far.

  Now that Edison had discovered (invented?) ghosts, it was time to figure out how to bust them and, eventually, profit off said busting. He set out to create an invention that would trap ghosts so that he could study them, but his invention never made it to the light of day. Perhaps because it was too spooooooky to be seen by man! (Or perhaps because, while working on it, one of Edison’s assistants died as a result of the experiment. It was probably that.)

  FIGURE 5.7 Two uncredited inventors of the lightbulb. From left to right: Oh, who are we kidding? You’ve never heard of either of them.

  5.D

  Practical Physics

  Action Movie Tropes That Can Mislead You . . . to Death

  If You’re Three Floors Up, You’re About to Be Six Feet Deep

  Pop quiz, hotshot! You’re about to jump from the roof of a three-story building to avoid capture by crazed roof pirates. Would you rather jump into . . .

  a. A hay pile

  b. The awning of a sidewalk café

  c. A shallow body of water

  d. An open grave your family and friends are gathered around

  If you answered d, you are correct, in that it’s considerate to at least save your loved ones the trouble of scraping your remains together and transporting them to a gravesite. Despite what seems to be an irrefutable law of falling according to every TV show and movie ever made, it’s a simple medical fact that a fall from thirty feet or higher is rarely survivable.