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To paraphrase Hellen Keller, unless you stay awake to watch whether a spider is in your vicinity while you sleep, how would you know? Of course staying awake will alter the parameters, and may not provide the same result. You even recognize that in your 47 years that it's possible that a spider could have been on your pillow while you slept.
Yep, I think that at most 3 times in a lifetime is possible. I'm not claiming that the claim is entirely accurate, but that given the laws of probability, its possible.
Why did someone fund a study into the friction effects of banana skins? Or whether cows are more likely to lie down the longer they stand (which kind of boggles my mind, I'll have to read that one to figure out what it's really trying to say because prima facie, yes, the longer they stand the more likely they are to lie down)?
You're misusing the term myth, a myth is
Quote:
a widely held but false belief or idea.
Sounds like a myth to me. And I know what a myth is without having to look it up in a dictionary. Thanks.
Is swallowing a spider while sleeping impossible? If not it cannot be a false idea, it may be implausible, but not impossible. 70 years is a long time, that's a lot of hours sleeping (23 1/3 years), like I said in a previous post, one of the prime laws of probability is that over a long enough timeline all possible outcomes must occur (Komolgorov's second probability axiom the sum of the probabilities of all possible outcomes must equal 1). Therefore given 7 billion people on the planet and in the developed world there being an average 30 spiders per living space, then even the most implausible becomes realized, there are roughly 192,000 man years of sleep generated per day on the planet (taking an 8 hour per day sleep cycle), that's a lot of time for spiders to get swallowed per day.
That's not what were arguing about though is it. I never said it's impossible.
You said this though:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gungnir
Now just to really freak you out...
Did you know that statistically speaking if a person lives an average of 70 years, that over the course of their lives they will swallow three spiders in their sleep?
Interesting trivia fact, #279.
I also understand how averages work.
What you are saying is that statistically speaking an average person will swallow 3 spiders if they live 70 years. For this to be statistically accurate, lets say I swallow 0 spiders, someone else swallows 3, to make your statement accurate someone else will have had to have swallowed 6... other people might have swallowed 2 someone else 5 and so on. In other words 3 is the number arrived at by adding all the quantities together and then dividing the total by the number of people. In other words unless there are people consuming hundreds of spiders to account for most people having consumed 0, this statement of yours makes no sense.
No swallowing a spider is not impossible but your statistics are massively improbable.
Anyway, we are arguing about swallowing spiders here. It's really not worth the argument. If you want to believe it, fine, I leave you to it.
Most bites by the redback don't require medical attention at all. When I read the article, and it said that black widow spiders are even more venemous, then it made redbacks sound not all that bad - I know a bunch of people who have been bitten by black widows and just went on about their day. Usually sore, yea - but rarely life threatening.
I used to live in an apartment complex where two people were bit (within a year of one another) by a brown recluse - they both had to have skin around the bites surgically removed. So I learned to always shake my sheets at night, and shake my clothes/shoes out every morning.
Brown recluses sound scarier than any spider. Glad that we don't have to deal with them here as I'd be alert all the time. Give me a relatively harmless tarantula over them.
Mrs J has me busy at the moment removing big hairy ones from the bath and sinks.
I read this great comment somewhere this week that said it needs only for someone to walk into a spider's web in the garden to turn them into a karate expert.
I believe there is a spider program on the BBC tonight which is worth a watch. Did you know that spiders are actually good to have around the house, and they are all relatively harmless in the UK... What do we all wry about then! Give it a watch: BBC iWonder - Why should I love spiders?
Apparently our arachnid friends suffer from "conkerphobia" Just putting some conkers by the doors & windows should be enough to cause the little blighters to flee to your neighbours abode.
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