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On April Fool's Day in 2013, a pair of Florida disc jockeys got themselves into a bit of hot water with station management for prankishly warning their listeners that dihydrogen monoxide — another name for that life-giving substance we identify as H2O, or more commonly, water — was coming out of local residents' taps: Lee County residents were far from the first people to fall for this venerable jape. Back in September 2007, for example, news media reported that a New Zealand MP was tricked by a letter from a constituent asking her to raise the issue of dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO): In 1997, Nathan Zohner, a 14-year-old student at Eagle Rock Junior High School in Idaho Falls, made the news when he based his science fair project on a warning similar to the one reproduced in the Example box above. Zohner's project, titled How Gullible Are We?, involved presenting that warning about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide to fifty ninth-grade students and asking them what (if anything) should be done about the chemical: Forty-three students favored banning DHMO, six were undecided, and only one correctly recognized that 'dihydrogen monoxide' was actually plain old water. Zohner's analysis of the results he obtained won him first prize in the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair; garnered him scads of attention from newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations, universities, and congresspeople; and prompted the usual round of outcries about how our ignorant citizenry doesn't read critically and can be easily misled. Even back then Nathan Zohner's project wasn't original, as spoof petitions about dihydrogen monoxide and other innocuous dangers had been circulating for years, and Nathan based his project on a bogus report that was already making the rounds of the Internet. Moreover, his target audience was ninth-graders, a group highly susceptible to allowing peer pressure to overwhelm critical thinking. Thrust any piece of paper at the average high school student with a suggestion about what the correct response to it should be, and peer pressure pretty much assures you'll get the answer you're looking for. Someone that age isn't very likely to read a friend's petition calling for the banning of whale hunting and critically evaluate the socio-economic and environmental impact of such a regulation; instead, he's probably going to say to himself, This issue is obviously important to my friend, and he must have some good reasons for circulating the petition, so I'll sign it. That said, this example does aptly demonstrate the kind of fallacious reasoning that's thrust at us every day under the guise of important information: how with a little effort, even the most innocuous of substances can be made to sound like a dangerous threat to human life. In March 2004 the California municipality of Aliso Viejo (a suburb in Orange County) came within a cat's whisker of falling for this hoax after a paralegal there convinced city officials of the danger posed by this chemical. The leg-pull got so far as a vote's having been scheduled for the City Council on a proposed law that would have banned the use of foam containers at city-sponsored events because (among other things) they were made with DHMO, a substance that could threaten human health and safety.
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