DIY Mythbusters

New fun for web surfers – DIY Mythbusting. Pick a “fact” that sounds fantastic from any web site and actually check it before you repeat it to anyone else. For instance, this one over at Weird Facts: “Pound for pound, hamburgers cost more than new cars.”

A Big Mac weighs 209 grams – cooked, all in – buns, sauces and pickles. Estimated price, $2.90 (USD). A moderately well appointed Chevy Malibu retails for roughly $22,015 (USD) – they weigh roughly 3,476 pounds, or 1,576,687.08 grams. Some quick math shows then that a Big Mac costs 1.38 cents per gram, while a Malibu comes in slightly more expensive at roughly 1.39 cents per gram. Problem is, you can get much cheaper cars than the Malibu and you can certainly take fewer options in the Malibu – both of which could significantly decrease the cents/gram calculation.

All in, I don’t believe that one can categorically say that burgers cost more than cars (unless one is willing to say that the Big Mac isn’t a fair measure of a hamburger…) And of course, you can try this at home – in fact, I recommend it, I’m not all that great at math

Point is, its not just wiki’s that anyone can contribute to – the entire web is a living canvas. We can each raise the collective wisdom of the ‘net if we each do our part in ensuring that the knowledge possessed by the web (those bits of trivia that we all love to pass around) are rooted in some sort of reasonable fact.

Have you checked a fact today?