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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

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JumpCrisscross·

> How is this not common knowledge?

There is a lot of stupid common knowledge, from fan death to cold weather causing colds.

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There’s also common knowledge that’s not wrong, like the fact that gravity exists and that cats learn their own names

> the fact that gravity exists

Gravity was famously misunderstood through various common knowledges for millennia. Birds, clouds and stars each confounded theories.

That's separate and somewhat irrelevant to the practical understanding that things do fall down to earth when dropped.

>cold weather causing colds

That's true, though.

Please explain how

Cold weather creates the social and somatic conditions that increase the effective infectiousness of viruses.

Increased mucous production leading to higher transmissibility? more time spent indoors? drier air (that one was new to me) we don't actually know the mechanisms exactly, but there's some causal vector between cold weather and colds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold#weather

Colds are more frequent in cold weather due to increased proximity and transmissibility. Bundling up better when outdoors won’t protect you against a cold.

oh I forgot the old wives tale was literally direct exposure rather than the season

Yup! I really think my cat understands words. But he might be picking up on body language, or randomly iterating through a short list of behaviours until he gets a response. Human nature, closely studied, is unintuitive. I have to assume feline nature might be too.

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