Many assertions about the occurrence of the golden ratio phi in art, architecture, and nature have been shown to be false, unsupported, or misleading. For instance, we show that the spirals found in sea shells, in particular the "Nautilus pompilius," are not in the shape of the golden ratio, as is often claimed. Some of the most interesting properties of phi turn out to be shared by entire families of numbers. On the other hand, phi is not without interest: it is often the simplest number that has a given property, and we look at examples of this.