You can balance an egg on the equinox (or not) but not better than at any other time

The fall equinox, which happened on Friday afternoon, has come and gone, and with it, some believe, the chance to balance an egg on its end for another six months.

The idea that eggs balance better at the equinox — for hazily explained scientific reasons that might have something to do with gravity — has a surprising persistence.

Interestingly, the notion long predates the Internet, the usual culprit for misinformation — the Associated Press was debunking it back in 1987.

Skeptical Inquirer traces it back to an article in Life magazine in 1945 which was widely misunderstood in the United States. Life‘s reporter described a spring festival in Chungking, China which involved most of the population standing eggs on end on the first day of spring in that culture, which in 1945 was February 4.

Egg-balancing became a fad in the U.S., but on the first day of spring in the West, which is the equinox. Attached to this, somehow, was the idea that egg-balancing works better at the equinox, for reasons. At the exact moment of the 1983 spring equinox, a peace activist balanced 360 eggs on end in front of the United Nations in New York. (She also set off 52 highway emergency flares.)

But just to show that you can do it anytime you like, try it now.

h/t Snopes.

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Brian Spotts places one of the 439 eggs he balanced in their end to smash the Guinness World Record, in Melbourne, 14 September 2005. (AFP)

In fake news news:

• Bloomberg looks at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s embattled months after the U.S. election, as critics try to dissect the shadowy role that microtargeted political ads — and the Russians who bought them — may have played in the U.S. election. (It’s hard to avoid the impression that Facebook has created dynamics in which it finds itself profoundly out if its depth.)
• This week, Facebook agreed to give the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee copies of the ads that accounts linked to a Russia-based troll farm bought before the 2016 U.S. election. It’s not clear whether the ads would be released to the public.
• Facebook was also criticized this week for deleting posts by persecuted Rohingya Muslims in Burma. “The problem with social media is that their policing mechanisms can be used for harassment by those willing to mount a concerted campaign of filing complaints against specific Facebook pages or Twitter feeds,” Human Rights Watch told the Guardian.
• Buzzfeed points out that Facebook, which was adopted more or less overnight in Burma, is full of fake news and anti-Muslim propaganda there. (An odd detail: ” … news sites have become so popular that print magazines called Facebook and The Internet regurgitate stories spotted online for stragglers who have not yet joined the internet revolution. Many of them feature sensational and salacious tales, cribbed from Facebook pages with a very loose definition of facts.”)
• The Hollywood Reporter came under fire this week for a glossy, uncritical (under the circumstances) profile of Your News Wire, an L.A.-based site which it describes as consisting of “murky fact and slippery spin”. The story breezily mentions the site’s role in Pizzagate without reminding readers that it was a really sleazy confection of lies that ended in an incident in which people could easily have died. Nice view from the open-concept office, though.
• Wired profiles David Mikkelson, the founder of Snopes, now entangled in lawsuits:  ” …  Just as it’s hard for Snopes to nail down, absolutely, definitively, certain truths … it can be trickier than expected to nail down the truth about Snopes.”
• Unexpectedly, the Russians seem to have lost interest in trying to manipulate the German elections, the New York Times reports: “The trolls who spread distorted and falsified information before earlier elections have failed to make much of a splash here. The websites of the campaigns and major news media outlets are operating like normal.” Part of the reason may be a pact among mainstream parties not to use leaked information.
• Poynter has a different take, pointing to a network of Kremlin-linked Twitter accounts that are trying to boost the extreme-right AfD. Germans vote in national elections on Sunday.
• The Daily Beast looks at Russian involvement in organizing pro-Trump flashmobs in Florida on Facebook. As with Russian-linked efforts to organize anti-immigrant rallies in the U.S., it’s not clear that it’s very successful in practice — a few dozen people showed up, at most — but it’s worth flagging the fact that it’s being tried at all. The Facebook group involved was called ‘Being Patriotic,’ ironically. “It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence.”
• Trump is using dark ads on Facebook to assure core supporters that he still plans to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. Buzzfeed’s Craig Silverman explains.
• Twitter says that people were able to target ad buys to users of some drearily familiar offensive terms because of a bug, and that their system had been set up to prevent this. Last week, it emerged that Facebook and Google would allow buyers to target ads at neo-Nazis and genocide advocates, a sign that their system was working without human supervision.
• Slate has a quiz testing whether you can tell whether headlines came from Breitbart or from Klan newspapers from the 1920s.
• And Vice explores Awake Dating, the dating site that connects conspiracy theorists. “How do you date a conspiracy theorist? ‘I like normal dates where you go see music or you go eat dinner,’ Jenny says. ‘But if I met someone who was, say, more of a ufologist, it would be really fun if we got in the car one night and we drove to a nice open quiet dark space and we tried to make ET contact or something.'”