The goal of this blog is to create a long list of facts that are important, not trivia, and that are known to be true yet are either disputed by large segments of the public or highly surprising or misunderstood by many.
Superfact 21: Neutering or spaying a dog at 6 months old can be dangerous to their health depending on breed. It is often recommended that you should neuter or spay your dog by the age of 6 months even as early as 8 weeks. This may be OK for some smaller breeds but is dangerous to the health and longevity of many larger breeds.
Many dog welfare organizations, SPCA, ASCA, etc., recommend that dogs are neutered or spayed by the age of 6 months, or even as early as 8 weeks. It is also a common advice in dog books.
In addition, some veterinarians still hold onto this belief. It is easy to understand why. Dogs running loose and causing unwanted pregnancies resulting in puppies having to be euthanized is a sad problem we don’t want.
Unfortunately, research has shown that neutering or spaying a dog at 6 months old can be dangerous to their health depending on the breed. You may need to wait 18 months or two years, and some breeds should not be neutered at all. In addition to the scientists in the relevant fields, professional and certified breeders, AKC and dog breed clubs and veterinarians who kept themselves informed on this issue are all aware of this.
In other words, we know this to be true, it is an important fact since so many of us own a dog, roughly half of all US households do, and yet this information is highly surprising to many. This is why I consider it a super fact.
This is our Labrador Baylor and German Shepherd Baby. Too early neutering and spaying can severely harm their health.
This less than a year-old article from the AKC states that “an age of six to nine months of age may be appropriate for neutering or spaying a toy breed puppy or small breed puppy but a larger or giant breed may need to wait until they are near or over 12-18 months of age.” The article also provides the following interesting information.
Research conducted by the University of California – Davis reveals that for some dog breeds, neutering and spaying may be associated with the increased risks of certain health conditions such as joint disorders including hip or elbow dysplasia, cranial cruciate rupture or tear, and some cancers, such as lymphoma, mast cell tumor, hemangiosarcoma, and osteosarcoma.
The research conclusions are not surprising. Sex hormones are important in the development of any animal. We know they affect psychological development as well as the musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and the immune system.
I believe this is the University of California – Davis article in question. It is from 2020. Notice that the suggested guidelines for age of neutering is beyond 23 months for several of the giant breeds in the table featuring 35 breeds.
Our three months old Leonberger Bronco. The Leonberger is a giant breed you can neuter when they are older than two years old.
Recommended Ages for Neutering and Spaying
Below is a list of recommended ages for neutering and spaying for selected dog breeds.
Australian Shepherd, for neutering and spaying it is your choice.
Bernese Mountain Dog, you should neuter beyond the age of 23 months, but for spaying you have a free choice.
Boxer, neuter and spay beyond the age of 23 months.
Boston Terrier, neuter beyond 11 months, but for spaying you have a free choice.
Doberman Pincher, never neuter, and you need to spay beyond the age of 23 months.
German Shepherd, neuter and spay beyond the age of 23 months.
Corgi, neuter beyond 6 months, but for spaying you have a free choice.
Great Dane, despite being a very large dog you have a free choice for both neutering and spaying.
Rottweiler, neuter beyond 11 months, but for spaying beyond 6 months.
Our mini-Australian Shepherd puppy Rollo. You can neuter this breed at an earlier age.
We used to own a male Leonberger dog, which is a giant breed. Our breeder told us to wait beyond two years before neutering him, for health reasons. This article from Hillhaven Leonbergers states the following “We recommend not neutering until at least 2 years of age…Some Vets would recommend from 6 months but this is NOT a good idea.” To read more about the neutering and spaying of Leonberger dogs click here.
Our Leonberger dog Bronco is giving me a hug. He was about one year old in the picture. That is still too early to neuter him.
This article from the Saint Bernard Club of America states that “above all, no giant breed puppy should be altered before the growth plates in the bones have matured and closed, usually between 15 and 24 months of age.” This Newfoundland dog magazine states : Currently, the recommended age that a Newfoundland dog should be neutered is 18 to 24 months due to the possible health problems that can arise from altering before that age.
According to the article above you should wait to neuter Saint Bernard Dogs until they are close to two years old. Saint Bernard Stock Photo ID: 1713912484 by fred12.According to the article above you should wait to neuter Newfoundland Dogs until they are between 18 to 24 months old. Newfoundland dog Stock Photo ID: 1925281937 by Marsan.
Even though the expert advice regarding the best age for neutering and spaying varies, it is clear that doing it at six months old is too early for many breeds and can harm their health.
At ABB Robotics in Auburn Hills, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, where I used to work as an engineer, there was a steel door without a window that opened out into a hallway. Whomever designed this must have been clueless. When someone opened the door into the hallway, he would not know anything about what was on the other side of the door.
One day I saw a couple of guys standing and talking in the hallway in front of the door. Suddenly a fellow engineer opened the door, and it slammed into one of the guys, who screamed “hey watch it!”.
The thought that occurred to me was “no you watch it! Standing in front of that door is pretty clueless. How is the guy opening the door going to know that you are there?”. I did not say anything.
The fact of the matter was that the designer, the door opener, the guys hanging out in front of the door, all of them were oblivious. In my opinion the guy standing in front of the door and then when something happened instantly blaming the other guy was the most clueless.
Obliviousness is a state of being unaware or unmindful of something or being ignorant of its existence. Some synonyms are clueless, ignorant, and unmindful. The goal of this blog is to create a list of what I call super facts. Important facts that we know to be true and yet they are often surprising, shocking or disputed among non-experts.
However, I will write about other related things as well, and today I am musing about obliviousness and cluelessness, something that afflicts us all more or less. Without obliviousness and cluelessness this super-fact blog could not exist.
I got the idea for this post by reading a comment on another blog post where the author mentioned that “…a woman on her phone in the supermarket walked into my trolley this morning…”. The woman with the phone was oblivious to her surroundings because of her fixation on her phone, a very common situation. I think most of us are guilty of this on occasion, but it is very annoying when the person who was staring at the phone is blaming the other party.
The same is true for people who walk backwards in crowded places and then blame the people they bump into. There are different levels of obliviousness.
Stock Photo ID: 2340473623 by MDV Edwards
Obliviousness And Social Media
There are a lot of ways to be excessively oblivious. One of the most common and annoying examples on social media is in my opinion when people comment on articles they have not read.
I remember an experiment on Facebook where an organization posted an article with an intentionally misleading headline. The article was about something completely different, and the article even stated that the headline was misleading, and the article explained the experiment. If you read just a small part of the article you would know. The result was that most people commented on the headline, not the article. They did not read any of the article and fell into the trap.
This is a commonly used meme from Pinterest.
Obliviousness pops up in all kinds of circumstances. On Facebook I am the administrator or moderator in half a dozen beer groups. In these groups people discuss and review beers.
One of the want-to-be influencers are posting in lots of groups without ever engaging with or reading other posts, with the result that he has completely missed that one of the beer groups is very international and was started by Italians. He unsuccessfully keeps trying to engage other members several times a day by posting questions such as “Don’t you love this unusually warm evening?”, “What beer are you drinking while watching the game tonight?”.
Basically, he thinks this international beer group is his hometown, not Belgium, China, Brazil, Germany, Italy or Australia. As a result, no one knows what he is talking about. After one year with hardly any likes or comments he still has not figured this out because he never looks at anyone else’s posts.
Paulaner Octoberfest and my beer gnome, one of the photos I posted in various beer groups.
Oblivious Bilinguals
Another common example of extreme obliviousness happens when monolingual people judge bilingual people on their language abilities. I’ve written about that here.
People may speak and understand a second language perfectly and still have a strong accent in that language assuming they did not learn the second language in childhood. Unless you take speech therapy an accent is very difficult to lose in adulthood, something bilingual people know but many monolingual people do not know. You certainly cannot know everything, but when someone negatively judges people for having an accent their level of obliviousness is more extreme.
Past childhood it is much harder to accurately perceive and produce new sounds from another language Stock Photo ID: 1818291203 by pathdoc
Oblivious To Facts
Perhaps the most comical example of an extreme level of obliviousness is when people who know very little about a subject lecture the experts in the field and even mock the experts.
I recently read about such an example. A man was writing to a theoretical physicist, an expert on the second law of thermodynamics, telling him that the second law of thermodynamics contradicted evolution and that the physicist was an idiot for not knowing this. The man had fallen in the trap of believing a common but basic misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics.
Not understanding the second law of thermodynamics is one thing, assuming that your brief encounter with it makes you a superior expert on the topic compared to an expert with a PhD in physics is a much higher degree of obliviousness. I should say I see this type of situation quite often on social media.
Second law of thermodynamics Shutter Stock Vector ID: 2342031619 by Sasha701
We can’t know or understand everything, and we are all more or less unaware of other cultures, places, the feelings and thoughts of others, we all get distracted sometimes, and we know a very tiny infinitesimal portion of existing knowledge, we are all oblivious. However, we can make it much worse by not trying.
What are your favorite examples of obliviousness ?
Superfact 20: Domesticated Turkeys and Wild Turkeys are the same species, but Wild Turkeys can fly.So yes, there are flying turkeys.
I think this is a super-fact, because the Turkey is a very important bird to Americans and at the same time a lot of people, including Americans, do not know that Turkeys are not flightless birds.
Domesticated turkeys are flightless but wild turkeys are not flightless. Wild turkeys can fly distances of more than a mile, sometimes at speeds of 55 miles per hour. I’ve seen it with my own eyes on turkey hunts. I’ve seen turkeys fly and glide across the sky at the height of 30-50 feet. I’ve seen them flap their wings and then take off.
The turkey my oldest son shot when he was 11 years old.My son holding the turkey he shot.
The photo above is a Tom, a male turkey, that my oldest son shot when he was 11 years old. Male turkeys are called Toms and females hens. We took it to a taxidermist for preservation and mounting. I should add that we typically ate the meat of everything we shot. Taking a wild turkey to the taxidermist makes eating the animal more complicated but you can typically ask for the breast meat of the turkey.
Personally, I think that legal hunting is a lot more humane than eating meat from animals from factory farms.
Eastern Wild Turkey Meleagris gallopavo flying over the snow in Ottawa, Canada Stock Photo ID: 1358163995 by Jim Cumming.
I should add that legal hunting is often encouraged for conservation and population management. For example, moose are hunted in Sweden (my native country) to manage their large population (400,000 moose), which can cause damage to forests and agriculture, as well as starvation among moose, if not managed. Illegal hunting, on the other hand, is something nefarious. Below is a video showing wild turkeys flying (video is about one minute long).
Superfact 19: An account impersonating you on Facebook does not mean you have been hacked. When someone using your name and photo starts sending friend requests to your friends on Facebook, they are most likely just copying your information. You have not been hacked.
I am considering this a super-fact because almost every time I see this the person being impersonated states “….I have been hacked”. Most likely they have not been hacked. They don’t need to change their password or take special precautions related to their account or password. It is not the problem.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network with over 3 billion users and few people understand this common Facebook problem, which is why I am calling it super-fact. All that happened is that someone downloaded their photo, copied some information, and started sending out friend requests to their friends. It is so easy to do that. Any 10-year-old can do it and there’s no hacking required. If you think about it for a minute, I am sure you all could do it.
However, it is not appropriate behavior and Facebook can delete your account and ban you if you resort to this behavior.
WP AI generated image
So, what can you do to reduce the chance of being impersonated? You can go to Settings & Privacy > Privacy Settings and set your profile to private by setting “Who can see your posts?” to friends only, but if you want visibility and don’t want to go that far you can set the “Who can see your friends list?” to “only me”. You can also set “Who can see posts you’re tagged in?” to “Friends” or “Only me”. You can “Limit Who can see your profile picture and cover photo?” to “Friends.”
Additional things you can do are regularly search your name on Facebook to check for fake profiles and avoid oversharing.
The actions above will greatly reduce the chance that someone will impersonate you but if it happens anyway, you can report the offender by going to the fake profile and click on the three dots (…) on their cover photo, select “Find support” or “report profile” and choose “Pretending to Be Someone” and follow the instructions to report the account. Encourage your friends to do the same.
The goal of this blog is to create a list of what I call super facts, but this is not a super-fact post. I sometimes create posts that are not super fact posts but related to this goal as well as other factual posts, and this is one of those. This post is about the Dunning–Kruger effect. The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. Those who are incompetent in a given area tend to be ignorant of their incompetence. What is so interesting about this effect is how widespread it is and how extreme it can get.
Some extreme examples include people without much knowledge in a given field lecturing the experts in the field, people without experience or much knowledge in an area telling the professionals in the field how to do their job. It includes people insisting on absurd claims despite not understanding the topic. It includes people dismissing scientific consensus on a topic without having much knowledge about that topic. It includes managers lacking engineering experience refusing to listen to the engineers, etc.
We are all occasional victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect. The problem comes when the one with the lower ability is stubborn and unreasonable and does not attempt to understand what the better-informed person is saying. Sometimes the situation becomes absurd. Below I am listing a few interesting cases, starting with a time when I was the ignorant one.
Creationism Bamboozled Me
When I was a teenager, I read creationist books that claimed that evolution was a hoax, and that earth was likely 6,000 years old. This is still a very common belief here in the US. These books appeared to me to be very convincing, and I took it upon myself to spread the word and correct the misconceptions. I was good at science and math, but this was before I had studied biology and physics in depth. I was accepted into the “Natur / Natural Science” Highschool program (similar to taking all AP Science classes) and I later studied physics in college.
As a result of what I learned I came to realize that the creationism I had come to embrace was bunk. The young earth claims and the anti-evolution rhetoric was not tenable. I realized this not by reading counter creationist books; I was just learning about the science. Understanding some science made all the difference. I just never knew how much I was missing. It was a lot. To read more about this click here and here. One more thing I learned is that you should avoid science related books written by lawyers and theologians with agendas. It is not their field and they don’t know what they are misunderstanding.
The fossil record is a lot more solid and much less problematic than the creationist books I had read claimed. Shutter Stock Photo ID: 1323000239 by Alizada Studios
Entropy and Evolution
Related to this is the myth that entropy contradicts evolution. Entropy is the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. It is also the measure of the number of possible microscopic arrangements or states of individual atoms and molecules of a system that comply with the macroscopic condition of the system. These two definitions are identical.
The formula is S = K * ln (W), where S is entropy, K is Boltzmann’s constant, and W is the number of microstates whose energy equals to the one of the system. Entropy is said to be the amount of disorder in a system, but in this context “disorder” may not correspond exactly to what people mean by disorder. Anyway, the issue is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time.
The creationists like to say that evolution decreases disorder in the biosphere and therefore contradicts the second law of thermodynamics.
Second law of thermodynamics Shutter Stock Vector ID: 2342031619 by Sasha701
If you take a college level class in thermodynamics you will realize within half an hour that this creationist / anti-evolution claim is false. The most important point being that evolution does not occur within an isolated system.
First of all, the earth, the biosphere, plants and animals receive energy from the outside, the sun for starters. Whether evolution decreases disorder in the biosphere or not, the claim fails instantly on the point that the system is not closed.
Despite decades and even centuries of conclusive debunking many people continue to make the false claim that the second law of thermodynamics and evolution are incompatible. There are people writing to prominent physicists and lecturing them and mocking them for “not knowing” that the second law of thermodynamics and evolution are incompatible. Typically, people who know almost nothing about the subject. They know too little to realize that their arguments are absurd.
The awkward algorithm
One day the engineering manager at my job at Siemens asked me and another guy to do research on how a certain process might improve our system. It was the CEO of the company (he was not an engineer) who was requesting this.
However, it was instantly obvious to me that this process was not compatible with what we were doing. Before, I had opened my mouth, the engineering manager told me “Thomas I know what you are going to say. This process is not applicable to what we are doing, but the CEO just learned about this process, and he is very excited about it. Just pretend to work on it for a few weeks and then write a report about why it did not work out. This is easier than explaining to the CEO why it wouldn’t work.”
Isotopes are real
On one occasion I was arguing on Facebook with an acquaintance regarding whether the current rapid Global Warming trend was natural or not. He said it was natural, and he insisted that he knew a lot about the science. I knew that he did not have a college level science degree, and it was obvious from what he said that he did not understand the science behind climate change.
One of the pieces of evidence I mentioned to him was that isotope studies showed that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere originated from our burning of fossil fuels. That was when he said that the atoms of a certain element were all identical. There was no such thing as isotopes. He accused me of fabricating the existence of isotopes.
Three natural isotopes of carbon Stock Vector ID: 2063998442 by zizou7
I posted a research article of one isotope study (carbon-12/carbon-13/carbon-14) and an article from Wikipedia on isotopes. Wikipedia isn’t an academically acceptable source, but it featured a good introduction.
He focused on the fact that Wikipedia articles are not always entirely accurate and used it as a reason to dismiss everything I said about isotopes. I was surprised he had never heard of Carbon-14. Isotopes is well known high school science and there are thousands of articles about it on the internet. He just didn’t know anything about this basic fact. He started insulting and mocking me perhaps because he felt I was lecturing him, but how would I have handled this? He knew too little about the subject to realize how much he was missing.
The Current Global Warming is not natural
Nearly all climate scientists say the same thing, Global Warming / Climate Change is real, and it is us. Just because the climate has changed for natural reasons in the past does not mean that is the case now. The same people who told us about the natural variability of climate in the past are the ones telling us it is not natural now. We should listen.
It is not orbital cycles, not the sun, not volcanoes, not bacteria or other lifeforms, and not cosmic radiation, it is us, primarily because of emissions from fossil fuels. The paleoclimatologists and the climate scientists and atmospheric physicists are telling us that it is not natural because of the quite substantial and solid evidence. Yet a very substantial proportion of us insist that it is natural causes without knowing much about the evidence. Why? Because they know too little about the evidence to consider it. The Dunning-Kruger effect again. BTW I will make a more detailed post about this in the future.
Wind Power Myths
Wind power has been on the receiving end of false claims, nonsense, and strange rumors for a while. It is not the only energy source that is a victim of widespread falsehoods, but it is a considerable problem. One false claim is that wind power requires an additional power source to operate (such as a companion diesel engine).
Another false claim is that wind power generates less power than it consumes, and yet another false claim is that wind power causes cancer. These claims are absurd and no one with basic insights in engineering and science would know they are false, yet many people fall for them. The people who fall for these claims think they know more than others, not less. Dunning-Kruger again. I am discussing nonsense and rumors about wind power here.
Super Facts 
