“There are several reasons given as to how a fan can kill (other than using it to bludgeon someone to death).”

Just out of curiosity, what’s your source on “almost all” South Koreans believing in fan death?

Aah, the less well known if they told you to run in front of a bus, you wouldn’t be stupid if you did argument.

I think, Paul, you missed the part where you have to know very little about the matter at hand before. If you genuinely didn’t know what would happen if you ran in front of a bus, and someone you had good reason to believe was an expert told you it would cure your terrible chronic disease, then no, you wouldn’t be stupid to do it.

My source is http://fandeath.net/menu/whobelieves.htm as I think it’s probably marginally more reliable than Wikipedia. I see no reason why it would by lying.

It’s not really a matter of life or death if you’re just not sleeping in a room with a fan on (which is what you’d do if you believed in fan death, unless you were an idiot). It’s a matter of being a bit warmer when you’re already too asleep to really notice anyway. Probably easier to just turn the fan off than to spend your precious time investigating.

I don’t know what the hell that Poissonian Distribution thing was supposed to demonstrate. Or do you expect people who believe in fan death to sleep in a room with a fan on just to make sure? Keeping in mind that they think that doing this might kill them?

I assume that it’s the doctors you’re expecting to have discussed this with other people, as I think expecting the general public to seek out international confirmation of this sort of thing is a bit bloody ridiculous.

I bet you’ve believed stuff you’ve been told that would seem ridiculous to someone in the know.

But yes. I expect doctors to discuss something like this, particularly since a fan is one of the most harmless objects I can think of. Short of someone climbing into a bath with one or being hit by one falling from a great height, I can’t imagine how they could possibly injure someone. They hardly even affect the temperature, most of the time, especially considering they’re generally only used when it’s way too hot to get hypothermia, and the theory that the fan “creates a vortex and sucks out all the oxygen” doesn’t even make sense, unless you’re in a bad science-fiction movie.

The Poissonian Distribution thing was intended to demonstrate a non-idiot (i.e. me) questioning something stupid he was told by someone supposedly in the know instead of believing it wholesale simply because he’d been told to. To prove it could (and should) be done and that I wasn’t preaching things I didn’t myself do.

I wonder if it’s legal to carry those little pocket fans in Korea.

See, now, I suspect either that you had knowledge about statistics that showed you that what he was saying was bollocks, or that just by explaining it he provided enough information for it to be demonstrated that he was wrong. Neither of which is necessarily the case with fan death.

(Just out of curiosity, was he serious about the bus thing or was he joking? Because if he was serious, I’m worried. Especially as the point could be disproven pretty easily by the simple observation that buses don’t come in threes very often at all.)

That said, if he’s going to be a lecturer his delivery needs a lot of work.

On-topic (quite ridiculous for a comments box): Euan keeps telling me about this show. If the contestants are, in fact, fools, I wonder what would happen if they did something unexpected.

For instance, Euan told me that on a hoax press conference, they were asked “Would you have sex in space?”. WOULD they? Though they might have signed a contract that forbids them to do such things, who knows.