Spyke
danekraereply
lemmy.world

I like it, though there wasn't a single one of the false facts that I was taught in schools.

"Dinosaurs shed their skin all at once like snakes"

"Girls are naturally not as good at math as boys"

I don't mean to be rude, but If this was taught in your school, everyone around you is probably a moron.

197
kkjreply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Yeah, the concept is nice, but it tells me that the Big Bang doesn't explain what happened before it (the leading hypothesis is that the Big Bang started time, so there is no "before") and sources a Wikipedia article on spiders. Then, it cites the common myth about Daddy Longlegs being highly venomous, says that that wasn't dispelled until 2020, and then cites a fucking BuzzFeed listicle.

69
Treczoksreply
lemmy.world

Yeah, the concept is nice, but it tells me that the Big Bang doesn’t explain what happened before it (the leading hypothesis is that the Big Bang started time, so there is no “before”)

Which is entirely correct. Time as we know it is an "inside" parameter of our universe, and therefor any causality only exists inside our universe, too. Because causality always contains a temporal element as in "Event A happened, which caused Event B later". We cannot make any assumption of "before the big bang" and therefor no assumption of "what caused the big bang" either.

At least not in any way we could relate to.

the common myth about Daddy Longlegs being highly venomous

Quite a childrens tale, even back then. Two reasons for it: First, the "Daddy Longlegs" has no ability to bite us. Even extreme thin parts of the skin, e.g. the lips, are still way to thick for it to penetrate with its teeth. Second, even if it could inject its venom (which really exists!) it would need to inject about half a cup of it into a grown adult (IIRC about the amount, it could be a quarter cup or a whole cup or something, but still in the range of "thousands of total spider weights").

3

I remember an episode of Mythbusters where they tested this, and I found a neat website that claims to have the result of that test. ( https://mythbusters.fandom.com/wiki/Daddy_Long_Legs_Myth ). The result was that they could bite humans and pierce the skin, but the bite was not especially problematic.

Searching for Mythbusters Daddy Long legs also brought up some YouTube suggestions from the episode, which was called Buried in Concrete. I haven't watched any yet but maybe the scene is somewhere.

2
sh.itjust.works

Yeah I think that the "you have to discharge your batteries entirely before charging them" would be a better fit, even though it wasn't false at the time, but the technology changed

35
aussie.zone

That was the original reason. Ni-cad batteries develop a “memory” if they aren’t fully discharged loose capacity.

11

With modern Lithium ion batteries its because as their capacity decreases over time the BMS can't always keep up and recover the 100% point unless you're occasionally draining it all the way. This can result in someone charging their battery to say 97% and leaving it for hours to reach a 100% it will never reach. This is potentially unsafe as it heats up the battery.

Edit: Autocorrupt beansed up my comment

13

You're probably already familiar with this resource, but Battery University has some interesting and useful information about batteries and it's accessible enough for the layperson.

9
lobutreply
lemmy.ca

I was always told to always leave it charged from 20% to 80% and draining it to 0% was a bad thing.

1

This is correct with unmanaged batteries. Batteries with a BMS however will never get below whatever voltage is set as their 0% unless allowed to sit at 0% for long enough that e n t r o p y occurs and the charge slowly dissipates over time. This will happen even with a fully charged battery left to its own devices (ba dum tss) for too long.

The point of the BMS is to manage the health of the potentially dangerous lithium batteries, and as long as they are used within spec it should keep voltages from getting so low the batteries enter a state of deep discharge, as well as prevent overcharging due to imbalanced charging rates or other similar issues.

Used is the important word here. A battery must be used to maintain it's health. A battery must also not be abused to maintain its health.

Now none of that touches on what you said, but was important background for this to make sense: The BMS will report to you whatever values it deems safe charging and Discharging limits based on factors like internal resistance and temperature. As a result 20-80% of an unmanaged battery is close to 0-100% of a managed one in new condition because the BMS will cut power before unsafe discharge limits are reached, and will stop charging to prevent overcharge once those limits are reached.

1
Kushanreply
lemmy.world

Yeah I didn't get taught any of the stuff mentioned for me either.

One thing I did notice that wasn't mentioned was the tongue map, that I was taught about in the 90's - you know the one that said that your tongue has different areas for detecting different kinds of tastes - sweet at the front tip, sour at the back, that kind of thing. All bullshit.

33
0opsreply
piefed.zip

I remember even testing that one out as a kid, observing that it obviously wasn't true, and bringing up my experience to my teacher. "No" was basically the only response I got. How did a myth like that catch on when it was so easily testable by literally anybody?

30

the landing page mentions "your tongue has taste zones". though on the other hand brontosauruses are real again

1
lemmy.ca

"Planet X (Planet 9) exists and explains gravitational pull"

Weird conspiracy theories were not taught at my school.

Also:

In 2017, a photograph appeared to prove that Amelia Earhart survived her plane crash and was taken prisoner by the Japanese. However, it was later proven that the photo was taken two years before her disappearance, leaving the mystery unsolved.

Updated understanding emerged around 2010

The updated understanding emerged 7 years before the photo appeared?

This is why websites need downvotes.

13

Planet 9 a conspiracy theory? Who's conspiring against whom there :|

Afaik it was a legit theory since we discovered planet 8 that way and then people tried to use the same method for further planets. Also beyond Mercury there was supposed to be Vulcanus and people reported sightings but nothing added up

Discovery of planet 8 (Wikipedia):

unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led Alexis Bouvard to hypothesise that its orbit was subject to gravitational perturbation by an unknown planet. After Bouvard's death, the position of Neptune was mathematically predicted from his observations, independently, by John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier. Neptune was subsequently directly observed with a telescope

And then Mr Einstein had a thing or two to say about those gravitational disturbances being actually relativity and most things clicked into place (but you'll still have a discrepancy between the known spacetime curving and observed orbits because it's hard to know what mass is exactly where in the Kuiper belt etc.). Or something. I'm probably wrong on the details but that's the broad strokes as I remember them

We didn't get planet 9 in school either fwiw but I think it was in magazines or encyclopedia at my grandparents' place that I heard of it

6
Jayreply
lemmy.ca

Where did you go to school? I've never heard of either of those before.

9
danekraereply
lemmy.world

Those false facts were on the site. I was never taught that.

Besides every girl in my school were better than any boy at mathematics.

8

Ah sorry, I totally misread that lol!

I think a lot of those are highly dependent on where a person went to school and who their teacher was, because some of them are pretty far out there.

3

Cool but flawed website.

Earlier times dont include myths that are on later years.

There is no overlap in myths between 1990 and 1970-80 but there is with the myths of the 60s, so we stopped teaching it for 20 years and then went back to it?

"Sugar causes hyperactivity in children" is mentioned to have been corrected around 1995 but stops making the list from 1980 onward. I have heard it after 95 but not from school.

I wanna recommend it to others but i cant in this state.

38
JackbyDevreply
programming.dev

Just put in 2010 and most of everything it said is incredibly obvious. Plus some of the dates of updated sources seem really incorrect. For example, one of them is it is a myth that most oxygen comes from trees, but I very distinctly remember my math teacher of all people saying in 2006 or 2007 that when he was in school he corrected people that it's mostly from plankton. And even if I'm misremembering this, he definitely said something about it being from plankton in those years, but it says the updated sources are from 2020.

It says that it is a myth that the big bang theory explains where the universe came from but in 2020 we found out it doesn't explain what came before. Like... No? That's always been what it is. Sure, it's always been a Christian talking point to sort of say that, but then why say 2020?

But I guess it's hard to really gauge what should and shouldn't be included. I remember my 5th grade teacher telling me that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. I don't really remember exactly what all she said and if she got deeper into Lost Cause rhetoric than that, but she definitely said Lee was a "good man."

27

I think it's a neat idea but probably needs more contributors and for people to be a bit more critical with things. For example, an obvious one, I don't see it mention that Pluto is no longer classified as a planet. That would be a great thing to mention, especially if you talk about things we used to consider planets but don't any longer. Ceres is another example of this. In 1801 it was discovered and considered a planet until sometime in the 1950s (it seems like it wasn't an all-at-once shift) when it was considered an asteroid despite its planet like appearance. Now it is considered a dwarf planet like Pluto.

4

IMO, that site needs more cold war propaganda myths.

For example:

Myth: The US won WWII

Truth: The biggest battles of the last few years of WWII were between Germany and the USSR, and the USSR won, pushing the German army back to Berlin.

--

Myth: Unions are communism, and therefore bad.

Truth: It is thanks to Unions that we work 8 hour days instead of 12 hour days, and that we have a 2 day weekend. They're an essential part of balancing the power of the rich against the power of the workers.

--

Myth: Unions hold back the most skilled, so if you're skilled or smart you shouldn't be in a union.

Truth: The best actors in the world are members of SAG-AFTRA. They negotiate deals where they make tens of millions per movie. The union doesn't hold them back. It just means that when the film studios try to screw over the less powerful actors and the union votes to strike, the rich and powerful actors need to do their part to help the less powerful actors out.

20
midwest.social

Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet due to not clearing its orbital path.

Why would they just lie about Pluto like that?

#Pluto4Lyf

14
Arioxelreply
jlai.lu

Part of the reason Pluto's classification hit so hard in the US is that it's the only 'planet' ever discovered by an USian astronomer. That national pride made the 2006 decision sting more than elsewhere. Some of the top figures from the AAS even challenged the legitimacy of the decision afterwards.

US pride, again.

6

Huh. I don't think national pride that was a factor in my disappointment. I was more sad because 9 is a better number than 8, and Pluto is just a cute little guy.

9
piefed.world

I care that it is draconian nonsense. It wasn't created by planetary scientists, or by consulting any. It was primarily created by a highschool teacher in Temecula California. It is temporally incongruent. Saying it is not a planet then calling it a planet in the following name is an oxymoron, or rather just moronic. And it impedes real science and science communication depreciating the era and discoveries that have happened.

The real definition of worlds is by gravitational differentiation and the point at which a body is dominated by geology.

No object is ever defined by external factors. It is a fundamental elementary logic failure to attempt to do so. If you drive your car in a bicycle lane and clear out all the cyclists, what the &%$# object is defined. Absolutely nothing! You may define a condition here, not an object, not a noun! The fact that this definition even exists is an epic embarrassment that makes the entire field look like a bunch of dogmatic clowns.

0
alsimoneaureply
lemmy.ca

That definition exists because if you want to include Pluto and be consistent you have to include dozens of other bodies.

6

So it was basically laziness on the part of the international astronomical community.

-1

Because those other bodies are worlds. In centuries to come, every one of these will be important and uniquely valued.

What kind of argument is "reality too hard to science." – Dogmatic clown level arguments. Anyone stating this should be purged from academia. This is the culture of the crisis academics talk about. This is the collapse. Fundamental contextual logic has failed. Planet is a verb, by the IAU definition, used incorrectly as a noun, in an oxymoron, with recursion. That is epic 16th century level nonsense. Nouns and verbs are what, 3rd grade level skills?

-3

It's in fact a teenager planet and it doesn't clean his room. Once it does it will be bumped back to planet.

We're doing this for his own good.

🤣🤣🤣🤣

3

Both 1960 and 2020 are showing the same 6 facts, and the facts shown were debunked years before 2020

8

Years since graduation:

Oh fuck this site!

Goddamn I'm old

7

Cool site but sadly the link for "Learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) determine how you best learn" being debunked is both dead and missing from archive.org

I'd really like to know more since I've very recently been learning about very similar processing modalities for ADHD brains

Still, cool site and resource!

2

Was gonna say, I've seen this reposted for so many years I figured some one would have made it by now, o/w I was gonna. Thank you not-yet-dead Internet

1
lemmy.blahaj.zone

A short list of things you didn't realize were false, stolen from the most recent episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast (on Intellectual Humility, Sept 14 2025):

89
midwest.social

I actually learned the lemmings thing from the windows 95 era PC game "Lemmings". This is also how I learned that lemmings have green hair!

31
FiskFisk33reply
startrek.website

fun fact, lemmings was developed by a little studio called DMA designs, which later changed name to Rockstar North, and is nowadays most known for the GTA games.

29

My favourite DMA game was Blood Money.
Good old times!
Thanks for bringing that memory up!

3
Agent641reply
lemmy.world

They are skilled with bricklaying and mining tools too ⛏️

5

TIL Lemmings are an actual creature and not just from the PC game Lemmings! I'm guessing that's why it's named "Lemmy" and then has a logo of a rodent. I just thought it was a random name and a drawing of a mouse this whole time.

10
Echo Dotreply
feddit.uk

I thought everyone knew the lemmings thing was made up. But it's become a bit of a meme nonetheless.

10
neuracnureply
lemmy.blahaj.zone

More extracts from that same podcast:

In each case, right up until the moment I received evidence to the contrary, all this misinformation, these supposed facts, felt true to me. I had believed them for decades and I had accepted them in part because they seemed to confirm all sorts of other ideas and opinions floating around in my mind. Plus they would have been great ways to illustrate complicated concepts, if not for the pesky fact that they were, in fact, not facts.

That's one of the reasons why common misconceptions and false beliefs like these spread from conversation to conversation and survive from generation to generation and become anecdotal currency in our marketplace of ideas. They confirm our assumptions and validate our opinions and, thus, they raise few skeptical alarms. They make sense and they help us make sense of other things.

7

The lemmings thing never made sense to me until I found out what the film crew did to them. There's just no way a species that susceptible to mass suicide could survive long term. They would have gone extinct long before the invention of bored documentarians.

4

I don't think there's a time when everyone knows something

5

The War of the Worlds broadcast didn't cause mass hysteria, but it did cause some people to go outside and shoot at the nearest water tower.

6
piefed.social

The very architecture of the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then) made it impossible to take over, and traffic would naturally route around any damaged links or nodes.

Google and CloudFlare have since proven that sonsabitches with enough money can subvert it completely, and it only takes a few dudes dragging an anchor from a boat to disconnect entire countries for weeks and months.

82

It took them a long time to get there. As corporate ISPs took over from the government and universities, the Internet got built around a few large pipes rather than several smaller ones. It's cheaper to build and maintain, but more prone to failure.

Some of the redundancy from the old ARPANET is still around in the US. Everywhere else, it mostly got built as above. One ship laying an anchor somewhere they shouldn't has brought entire countries offline.

36

It still routes around damage, but if all the roads are closed you can't get in or out of somewhere.

14
cobysevreply
lemmy.world

[...] the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then)

Back then, an internet (lower case "i") was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.

The World Wide Web, being a massive collection of computers across the globe that are interconnected, quickly earned the title of "THE Internet" (upper-case "i"), to differentiate it from smaller isolated networks.

"World Wide Web" turned out to be a mouthful to say, so we replaced it with "the Internet" instead. Although most websites still start with "www" to represent their global reach.

Nowadays, we've stopped using the word "internet" to describe smaller networks, so the word mostly just refers to the global network. And as such, if doesn't really matter if you capitalize it or not.

However, I was there when the web became accessible to the public and the nomenclature has stuck, so I always capitalize the Internet when referring to it.

9
anarchist.nexus

Back then, an internet (lower case "i") was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.

That is an intranet, not internet, and is still applicable as a term. You just hear people say LAN more these days.

"World Wide Web" turned out to be a mouthful to say, so we replaced it with "the Internet" instead. Although most websites still start with "www" to represent their global reach.

The world wide web was always just one part of the internet, specifically the portion supported by http. Ftp, email, etc existed then as well, but was not part of the www.

23
lemmy.blahaj.zone

An internet in theory is a network of other computer networks (not single computers). The Internet is the world wide web.

1
anarchist.nexus

An intranet is a local and private computer network.

The internet is a network of intranets, or more accurately, a network by which computers of disparate networks can connect.

Intra, meaning inside or within. Inter, meaning between or among.

Interdepartmental communication would be communication between departments, while intradepartmental communication would be within a single department.

The inter vs intra is the difference here.

4

I thought I was clarifying without going into detail on the definition of an extranet, I don't even know how I'd assume gender?

2
14th_cylonreply
lemmy.zip

no, the internet is not the world wide web. www is just one of many services provided on the internet and it can be used on the intranet that is completely cut off from the rest of the world.

there is a terminology question then if it is still really the world wide web or rather small web, but the fact stays that services provided on http protocol and internet are not the synonyms. same as mcdonald is not asynonym for "a restaurant" even if specific person may not have visited any other restaurant in their life.

1

Well, this is something that felt off indeed. But please explain. So http(s) is the world of http requests, but you can also have other services like ftp, ssh, bittorrent and what not. Is that what you mean? So the WWW is just the global interconnection of web pages strictly, over the Internet? Would this apply to any internet? /genuine

1

basically, yeah. internet is network of computers spanning all earth. intranet is smaller network of computers. intranet is often more private network under more centralized control of someone, with limited access from outside, that can be operated for example by some corporation or university, accessible only for employers or students (possibly using vpn to remotely connect to the network).

www. is the name of the service - http is a protocol it uses.

e-mail is the name of service - to access it, lot of people use http protocol if you use webmail, or imap or pop3 protocol if you use some dedicated client (like thunderbird, outlook, or others). smtp protocol is used to send the message to another mail server (you may have also been asked to configure it when manually configuring some dedicated e-mail client).

ftp, ssh, bittorrent,VOIP telephony using SIP protocol, IRC are other useful services. all these services can be run on network of any size, internet or intranet.

for example majority of modern doorbell systems are running on sip protocol and they are basically small VOIP phones running primarilly on a limited intranet in one specific building. but if that local network has access to the internet, they can have, due to nature of what they are, an option to forward that "call" to any other telephone number in the world in case no one picks it up at home.

small web-developers routinely run their own web-server of their own desktop, which may only be accessible locally, from that one computer or their small home network, to test the web pages they are developing. whether it is still world WIDE web is funny academical question then, because that web is not very wide in such case.

2

Back then, an internet (lower case "i") was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.

That's what I was told too, but I never once encountered anybody who used the small-i "internet" term. I heard "network", or "intranet" or often topology-related things like "the token-ring network". For a network of networks, I'd hear "WAN" or "external network" but never "internet". Maybe that's just me, but I suspect that small-i "internet" was never really a term that was widely used, if at all.

2

Cut cables mostly just slow the internet. Probably very few remaining places without plenty of redundancy.

1
lemmy.zip

The mitochondria better still be the power house of the cell. Or we are going to flip some tables and burn the place down.

75
Feydaikinreply
beehaw.org

See, I was told that too, but no one bothered to explain what that means. I still have no idea what that actually means. What is a powerhouse?

14
mander.xyz

A mitochondrion (pl. mitochondria) is an organelle found in the cells of most eukaryotes, such as animals, plants and fungi. Mitochondria have a double membrane structure and use aerobic respiration to generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is used throughout the cell as a source of chemical energy.[2] wickerpedia

Cells can't use the energy from sugar directly. The mitochondrion turns the sugar into another molecule that other organelles can use for energy.

Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is a nucleotide triphosphate[2] that provides energy to drive and support many processes in living cells, such as muscle contraction, nerve impulse propagation, and chemical synthesis. Found in all known forms of life, it is often referred to as the "molecular unit of currency" for intracellular energy transfer.[3] John "Wick" Peta

16
lemmy.blahaj.zone

Friendly neighborhood microbiologist here. You're right except for one thing: most cells can use sugar directly through anaerobic respiration. Mitochondria facilitate aerobic respiration, which utilizes oxygen and is far more efficient, albeit a bit slower, and produces carbon dioxide as its end product.

Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.

I can get as nerdy as you want if anyone has any questions.

Edit: another cool one! Part of the process that regenerates ATP from ADP is ATP synthase. Look it up! It's literally a little biological waterwheel that utilizes a chemical gradient, established by the mitochondria, to smoosh ADP (adenosine DIphosphate) and a phosphate back together into ATP (adenosine TRIphosphate).

28
HugeNerdreply
lemmy.ca

Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.

Maybe the way you do it. I lost 5 pounds this morning, you wouldn't want to breathe.

14
SkaveRatreply
discuss.tchncs.de

On that (brown) note: most of the solid part of shit is actually (dead) gut bacteria, not food waste

9

This is why partially why fiber helps with bulking and pooping. Fiber is "fiber" because it's made of things we can't digest, but our gut microbes can. One of the byproducts of their utilizing it is SCFAs, short chain fatty acids. These confer various benefits like reduced inflammation and enhanced mucous production, which helps you drop a deuce.

Feeding your microbes also means you grow more of them, which makes your turds bigger and easier for your intestines to push along.

Yet another fun fact: ruminants like cows ferment otherwise indigestible plant matter in their guts, breaking it down and growing absolutely huge quantities of microbes in the process. Then they digest those microbes. That's how they get enough protein. A cow is a mooing, shitting house of horrors if you're a microbe.

9

Well tough guy, this morning was an oatmeal surprise swirl, with carrots, two inches above the waterline. In a Crane Galaxy #3251D701100, you do the math.

1
MagicShelreply
lemmy.zip

Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.

BRB. Hyperventillating to test a theory....

(Going to assume this just results in a smaller quantity of calories processed per breath before anyone get's all sciencey on me.)

4

It's too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you're breathing heavily. Then you'll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!

3
trololololreply
lemmy.world

What would happen if I got ATP injected directly in the blood stream? And what about the stomach? Skin?

2

Depending on the concentration, it would hurt as it's a bit of an acid, plus ATP outside of the cell is one of the mechanisms that drives inflammation, but it won't give you extra energy or anything.

ATP is used to transfer energy more than store it, more like a wire than a battery. The average adult has about 250g of ATP in their body (for my fellow Americans: about one rather chunky hamster) but it's recycled about 200 times a day, so would require 50kg (6 watermelons or two average labradoodles) if it was used and discarded.

ATP has been around since the beginning of life or near enough, and evolution is a deranged, cat-piss-soaked hoarder that makes use of whatever is already lying around, so ATP also does several things beyond energy transfer. This also means where ATP is allowed and in what quantity is fairly controlled. To that end, there's a class of enzyme called ectonucleotidases that's found on the outside of cells. One of the things it does is keep the level of circulating ATP and things like it low, so whatever was injected would get chopped up pretty quick.

7
calmblue75reply
lemmy.ml

Cells can't use the energy from sugar directly.

Well, they can, but it's not very efficient. They produce 4 atp at the cost of 2 atp. The mitochondrion generates 34 atp from pyruvic acid at the cost of 2 atp.

6
HugeNerdreply
lemmy.ca

They were a 1980s superband with Robert Palmer, I think.

3
Echo Dotreply
feddit.uk

It just means it's the system that turns food molecules and oxygen into energy for the cell. The cell itself doesn't know how to do this which is quite spectacular when you think about it. So if the mitochondria died the cell would die.

0

There are human cells without mitochondria, and plenty of energy chains outside of mitochondrial action.

There are, in fact lots of them: your red blood cells, for example.

Mitochondria are more efficient at energy production, not the only source. Red cells use glycolysis.

You as a human organism would die pretty fast because you need that more efficient energy production but a lot of your cells would be fine until the effects of the system collapsing around them go into effect.

Don't think about that metaphor too deeply.

4
cdf12345reply
lemmy.zip

When cells devide there’s a top cell and a bottom cell, the bottom cell is where the powerhouse is generated

-1

1987 Edison was a genius and invented everything, Turns out he was actually the Elon Musk of his time.

63
lemmy.world

The one that immediately springs to mind doesn't exactly fit the criteria, because it wasn't even true at the time that I was taught it in public school in Texas. But my history teacher taught me that no real historian called it the "American Civil War," and that it was correctly called "The War of Northern Aggression." And, of course, although the Confederacy did want to keep slavery legal, their actual central reason for seceding was "states rights."

Like I said, both of those are simply lies. Only propagandists call it "The War of Northern Aggression", and it was always explicitly about slavery.

The sad thing is that I believed and repeated these lies for years after that. Note that, like most people, I didn't have access to the internet to easily check things myself. Since at the time I had zero interest in reading about history, it was difficult to correct my knowledge.

It has demonstrated, to me at least, the importance of keeping propaganda away from children. The more you lie to children, the harder it will be for them to become functioning adults.

58
skisnowreply
lemmy.ca

“The atomic bombings were necessary” was something we were expected to internalize as an indisputable hard fact, like gravity and oxbow lakes.

24

Whereas the actual phrase should be "the atomic bombings were necessary to force an immediate total surrender and scare them damn commies before they could take any credit for the Pacific theatre"

5
lemmy.world

Is it not just the misinterpretation of the fact that the US wanted to end the war quicker to prevent sending more soldiers into a meatgrinder?

You can certainly call that "necessary" to prevent further deaths of US soldiers.

4
skisnowreply
lemmy.ca

The narrative of the Pacific theater still being an intractable or unbeatable long-term conflict in 1945 was hugely overstated, and also leant heavily on racist notions of the Japanese being “brainwashed”.

Also, most wars could be ended more quickly by committing war crimes, we don’t allow it as a justification when it’s done by the losing side. There was also the option of using them on purely military targets, instead of the middle of a major city, murdering a six-figure number of civilians.

11

The "brainwashed" thing is somewhat true, at least from the perspective of an outsider, not due to a racial thing, but there is a cultural aspect in addition to the tendency for all sides to be brainwashed by their own propaganda.

But the Japanese propaganda told their soldiers to fight to the death, because if the Americans captured you, it would be worse than death. So, from the outside, they did appear to be brainwashed in that regard. Of course, Americans had similar propaganda making Japanese seem as evil as possible, often in the most racist way, so you'd have to say that Americans were brainwashed, too.

Also, culturally, I think American culture emphasizes each person more, while Japanese emphasizes community more, which means things like kamikaze are easier to sell. And that sort of thing also appears like brainwashing to the outside.

5

I mean, kamikaze pilots did exist, so there had to be a certain level of what you're calling "brainwashing".

And unless it's also a myth (completely possible), but weren't there Japanese soldiers found on an island years after the war had ended who were convinced that it was still going on?

3

I'm pretty sure the largest consideration was keeping the Soviets from claiming land in Asia the same way they did in Europe.

Also, we had this shiny new toy and a war was on; we weren't going to not use it.

3
prolereply
lemmy.blahaj.zone

I think there might be an argument for the first bomb, but the second was completely unnecessary.

1
mander.xyz

They had literally agreed to surrender before the first bomb dropped, their only condition being that the emperor remain, which the US agreed to anyway.

0

In our timeline, after two nuclear bombs were dropped, a coup almost happened that would have blocked the surrender of Japan. Would it have been different without the bombs?

-1

AFAIK, historical documents show the Japanese government were ready to surrender, if they had been sure the monarchy would be preserved.

The bomb could have been replaced with properly worded surrender terms.

2
smhreply
slrpnk.net

I was taught it was about states rights, too. In Kentucky, they were less forceful about calling it the "war of northern aggression.

Did you get taught that some slaves liked being slaves because it meant all their needs were met and they didn't have to worry about anything?

8
LOGIC💣reply
lemmy.world

I don't recall specifically being taught that, but I do recall believing that was a fact at the time, so it is very likely that I was taught that in class.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were a couple of slaves like that, but even so, it's a misleading statement. I actually think that using the truth to lie is a worse sin than just outright lying, because it's easier to mislead more people like that.

5

I had a college professor, Honors US History, teach us that the Civil War was about trade, an agrarian society against an industrial society. Which makes sense and is true in part, but I wish I had known to bring up the various state letters of secession naming slavery as the #1 concern. LOL, Mississippi's is a doozy.

8

Similarly, in the US Northeast, I learned about the civil rights movement as a solved problem, and that slavery was basically the only (and long gone) system of oppression we'd had. "Black and brown people have their equal rights now, carry on!"

7
nuggie_ssreply
lemmings.world

The texas schooling system is horrendous.

Most texans are genuinely dumb as shit because of how they've been hamstrung by their "education."

0

When I went to grade school, I think it really depended on the local school district. I was lucky enough to grow up in a nice area with well-funded schools, and I have relatively few complaints about the education I received. However, in doing school activities, I had the opportunity to see schools in poorer districts, and there was a distinct difference.

At the time, I didn't think too much about the difference, except that I didn't feel as safe in some schools.

But looking back... Now I know why parents always shop around for better school districts, because there are some places where it would have been far more difficult to get a decent education.

That's my knowledge from many decades ago. Maybe it's gotten worse since then.

5
lemmy.zip

Class of 2003.

Food wheel was taught in elementary school. As were the taste bud "zones" and the American Dream.

55
lemmy.ca

We had the Food Pyramid here in Canada, which is very similarly a lie pushed by the dairy and grain industries and not linked to any real health benefits.

27
swg-empire.de

We had to write angry letters to our children's school about 5 years ago to get them to stop teaching taste regions. It's really baffling.

55
lemmy.world

I remember being like 7 and trying that out for myself by touching a lemon slice to different parts of my tongue. I think when I realised that it tasted sour regardless of where on my tongue I touched it to was when I first started questioning authority.

11
Björnreply
swg-empire.de

I remember many kids in my schooldays saying the same and being gaslit by the teacher into thinking they tested incorrectly.

7

Yes! The tongue taste zones experiment was my introduction to gaslighting. I guess I'm thankful for that.

2

at similar age, a teacher told me there can't be polygon bigger than 360-gon, because that would be a circle. i wasn't of course in a place to fight with her, i just thought "wtf, how dumb is this bitch?"

3
feddit.uk

Five senses; taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, acceleration, temperature, body configuration, pain, balance, time, hunger....

51
neuracnureply
lemmy.blahaj.zone

Acceleration, temperature, body configuration (positioning), pain, balance and hunger are all related to touch in one way or another.

Time, however, is legit. Along with emotion. Maybe you could call the 6th sense cognition?

15

In theory we can break down the sense of sight into subcomponents, too. It's only the visual cortex that processes those raw inputs into a coherent single perception. We have two eyes but generally only perceive one image, even if the stereoscopic vision gives us a good estimate of distance, and one eye being closed or obscured or blinded fails pretty gracefully into still perceiving a single image.

We have better low light sensitivity in our color-blind rods but only have color perception from our cones, and only in the center of our visual field, but we don't actually perceive the loss of color in those situations.

So yeah, someone putting a warm hand on my back might technically set off different nerve sensors for both temperature and touch, but we generally perceive it as a unified "touch" perception.

Similarly, manipulating vision and sound might very well throw off one's proprioception, because it's all integrated in how it's perceived.

8

Proprioception (body config) is actually feedback from the muscles.

Also they forget or were unaware of the most interesting sense: CO² chemoception. It is how our lungs tell if we need air.

7

Getting the washing off the line...time to play "is it still wet, or just cold"

18

Walking/riding in a thin rain coat, the sensation of rain telling your body you're completely soaked, while dry as a bone underneath.

8

You are missing CO² chemoception. Our lungs tell us if there is a lot stale air, but not if we are in a pure nitrogen environment.

12
lemmy.world

Isn't acceleration just a sense of balance? Like you feel acceleration because the whatever fluid moves in your ears due to acceleration which is the same as balance.

9

I was going to say you have a static sense of what orientation you are in, e.g. you can tell standing up Vs lying on your front/back/side without relying on other senses and that feels different to the sensation of moving...

But thinking about it I guess the orientation sense is just detecting acceleration due to gravity?

12
feddit.uk

I guess so, but similar to how a lot of taste is actually perceived via smell? I suppose linear and angular acceleration could be two separate senses which encompass the sense of balance.

3

Eh, it's not really similar though. Yes, a lot of what we think of as "taste" is actually perceived via smell. But separately from that, there is actually a phsyiological sensation of taste that is unrelated to smell, i.e. the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury.

Whereas there isn't really any meaningful distinction between the sense of acceleration and balance. They're exactly the same sensation, and the mind only knows which one you're actually experiencing by cross-referencing what your other senses tell you. If you're in a situation where these other senses are unavailable, people generally can't distinguish whether they're accelerating or off balance.

This has led to a number of plane crashes in history, in situations where pilots are in dense cloud cover and can't see the horizon. During stressful situations, if they forget to look at the artificial horizon display, they think the plane is pitching up, and therefore try to pitch down to correct, when in fact the plane is accelerating (due to already being pitched down), resulting in a crash.

4

well, theres the sense of taste, referring to sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami. then separately theres the sense of smell, sensing what we call aromas. These are two separate senses.

Our perception of taste could be argued includes the two senses

3
feddit.uk

For me it's the regions of the tongue thing. It never made any sense, and a 6 year old with a sugar cube could have disproved it. Yet they taught it in schools for years.

51
SkaveRatreply
discuss.tchncs.de

We did test it in school with different substances

I was like "I can mostly still taste it everywhere" and the teacher basically told me I was wrong

18

Yes. We did this experiment in school, too!

I can confirm that a six year old with a sugar cube can at least throw some skepticism at this one.

I was told I must be doing the experiment wrong.

I did get a quick preview about education, gullibility and gaslighting on that day.

9

The idea, to me at least, wasn't that the regions were completely distinct, merely dominant.

2
Echo Dotreply
feddit.uk

What chicken? Sorry I have no idea what your saying.

0
lemmy.world

I can think of a few.

  • That T-Rex' vision wasn't actually based on movement. (Probably)
  • Feathered dinosaurs are a thing.
  • What we were taught as the 'reservation' system more closely resembled concentration camps, and indigenous people were given a 'choice' between death marches and war.
  • That the US military was actually on the wrong side of nearly every civilian movement for greater rights, from suffrage, to labor, and now freedom of speech and immigration.
49

“In some paleoartistic reconstructions, you will see furry T. rex,” says Tseng. “We think it’s likely that at least at one point in their lives, they probably had bodies that were partially or completely covered in feathers. … Maybe they were more like modern birds, which are among the most extravagant animals.”

~ Jack Tseng, a UC Berkeley vertebrate paleontologist and functional morphologist

4
lemmy.dbzer0.com

If I'm remembering correctly vision is movement based, but animals have lots of ways to deal with it. Humans and other species that can move their eyeballs just like vibrate their eyes. But birds like chickens rely more on head bob I think. Couldn't tell you what kind of muscles a tyranasaur has in its eyes.

Also being wrong on the Internet is the best way to find the right answer. So tell me how I'm wrong.

3

I could be wrong, and if I am, it's just an opportunity to learn a new thing. I put what I've read elsewhere in the thread.

Have a great day.

1
lemmy.world

A bit curious here. How they did prove at first that T-Rex' vision was based in movement and then how they did prove that doesn't?

3

Not sure it's provable, really, but the idea for T-Rex having movement-based vision is (if I'm remembering correctly, forgive me as it's been a while) something that came from the Jurassic Park story, and more specifically how frog vision works, since they used frog DNA to birth their dinosaurs.

4
trololololreply
lemmy.world

It's also on the wrong side of mostly if not all left leaning democracies. It prefers dictators over center democracies, and will send CIA dogs after any country that starts drifting left.

3

Or just train their fascists opponents at the School of the Americas. Then kablammo, we help overthrow a democracy AND create an enemy justifying more military action in the region.

1

I think the biggest one that was drilled into us constantly, especially about WW2 and Nazis was

“ Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned To Repeat It”

This was a load of shit as evidenced by what is going on in the USA right now and other parts of the world. The real lesson should have been to push back the second a nazi takes an inch as they will take more if you play the nice and tolerate. Not everyone is well intentioned.

46

I guess the big one for me is the whole Mozart for babies thing. It wasn't Mozart's music making babies and young children smarter, it was a combination of more affluent parents or at least parents with college plus educations having time and income to spend on enrichment activities.

43

The United States is a constitutional Republic/democracy with 3 co-equal branches of government...

41

That whole "got milk" campaign was a load of bullshit.

It turns out only about 30% of the global human population is able to even digest milk.

37
lemmy.ca

Also "the 5 senses". It depends on how you define "sense" there's at least a dozen to over 20.

3
lemmy.world

The US south treated their slaves well. Even in high school, I was like “mmmm you suuuure about that?”

30
TeddEreply
lemmy.world

In the era, "spare the rod, spoil the child" was considered good advice. If that's how even loved ones were treated … slaves treated well? Press X to doubt.

15

Yeah, think about how many men already get drunk and beat the shit out of their wives. The person they supposedly love the most.

Now imagine if they had a slave to take it out on instead.

5
midwest.social

There's actually a lot of scholarship about how Southern plantation owners developed their child rearing philosophy on a misunderstanding of the Roman patriarchy combined with their newfangled "scientific racism," conflating the discipline expected for both children and slaves.

2

Compared to how other slaves were treated around the world, this is relatively true.

-5

''You won't have a calculator in your pocket all the time!''

30

That's on me, I forgot to test this on mobile after making some changes

4
lemmy.blahaj.zone

The story of how North and South America were settled by the first humans. What I was taught was that the Bering Sea was frozen at the end of the last ice age, and then glaciers opened up and people migrated southward.

The problem is that the timing is too tight and the migration would have to have happened too quickly. Many native groups have long seen this story as flawed, as well.

This was covered in the book "1491", and at the time of publication, researchers weren't quite sure what model to replace it with. Probably some of the migration was using boats along the west coast rather than going over land. That book is getting pretty old now, though, and I'm not sure if or where things have settled out.

20
lemmy.ca

Racial supremacist preferred narratives favour suppressing evidence that Polynesians could navigate larger Pacific before Europeans could navigate Atlantic. But simply artifacts predate the "land bridge theory timing"

8

Genetic evidence clearly shows native americans origins are from Siberian people. While there are evidence Polynesians made contact with them before europeans, native americans were already well established for tens of thousands of years before then.

3

The book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen goes a long way to accomplish this. At least it did for me.

19
lemmy.blahaj.zone

IQ tests!

They are standardized eugenics and should be rethought entirely

19
midwest.social

Always a planet, fuck scienctists! (Seriously, nerdy chicks are hot, fuck them.")

4

Average cluttered orbital neighborhood fan

Vs

Binary dwarf planet Pluto - Charon system enjoyer

3
Arioxelreply
jlai.lu

Part of the reason Pluto's classification hit so hard in the US is that it's the only 'planet' ever discovered by an USian astronomer. That national pride made the 2006 decision sting more than elsewhere. Some of the top figures from the AAS even challenged the legitimacy of the decision afterwards.

(I copy-pasted this comment for the third time even though I don't like to do that, but it's important to know where does such reaction come from : partly from pure national pride)

1

That's interesting because it's completely bullshit.

Americans don't know SHIT about that lol and have so many other firsts to pick from.

4

Interesting, because I saw a looot of Europeans being very emotionally involved in the topic!

1

When I was in school, we were taught that vaccines work. /s

17

I went through the two websites posted here for graduation year 2008. The only incorrect thing I was taught that I still believed was:

"Learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) determine how you best learn"

False. Huh.

16
piefed.social

Alphas.

White Jesus.

IQ.

9 out of 10 dentists.

Apple a day.

16

I recently told my mother that I'm probably the most intelligent person she will ever meet while explaining why her conservative beliefs are dumb as shit and she defensively asked what my IQ is...

I was no contact for the past eight years or so and it was at a family reunion that we saw one another.

I don't know my IQ, I'm actually a pretty slow learner, and I have horrible test anxiety. But as a polyglot physicist with a dash of perpetual autodidactic inclinations, I'm pretty well informed and I don't know if intelligence can be measured, but I know it when I see it.

It's funny that conservatives think quick wit and fast words equate to intelligence without ever stopping to think about the substance.

2

Objectively speaking, intelligence is considered to be the ability to reason. Following that line, high intelligence would be the ability to reason well.

However, we humans do well because we specialize. It was discovered early on that we can't do everything. One could say it's our individuality which drives us towards having different proficiencies and the entire chain of schooling would better serve to explore and encourage pursuing such specializations.

Where the means to cultivate proficiency are lacking, the end result will often be incomplete. That shouldn't mean there is a lack of intelligence, but that it hasn't been developed to its potential. I would say.. the base intelligence remains the same while expectations rise in concert with each own's path of development.

Life is neither easy nor fair. And opportunities aren't equal. So i often try to remind myself that perspective changes with experience and as such any standard we set ourselves and others to tend to be laced with personal bias.

3
discuss.tchncs.de

I recently told my mother that I'm probably the most intelligent person she will ever meet

and so humble, too! seriously though, this is a major red flag. I rarely find smart people to brag about how smart they are.

also, telling someone that their beliefs are wrong because they're dumb, and that your beliefs are right because you're smarter than them, has literally never worked. it will just make them resent you, your beliefs, and anyone they meet in the future who believes what you do. this kind of smugness has been the Achilles heel of Dems for years.

1

I don't go around saying this to random people and I wouldn't have to in polite society. It was with respect to her belief that hospitals were paid extra for people who died from COVID.

You have to understand, my entire family, siblings, parents, nephews, cousins, are all functionally illiterate. I'm literally the most intelligent person they know.

Place me in an APS conference and I'm probably the dumbest person in the room.

1

The fact that we thought Pluto was a planet seemed absolutely insane at the time but none of the kids could question the adult in the room when the stupid rock is literally not even staying in its own lane

15

Rome didn't have special rooms for people to vomit in, then resume feasting.

Soviet blocking brigades weren't machine gun nests set up to mow down retreating soviet soldiers.

Vietnam had a regular army, it wasn't entirely a guerrilla force.

14
Arioxelreply
jlai.lu

Fun fact :

Part of the reason Pluto's classification hit so hard in the US is that it's the only 'planet' ever discovered by an USian astronomer. That national pride made the 2006 decision sting more than elsewhere. Some of the top figures from the AAS even challenged the legitimacy of the decision afterwards.

7

I dunno. I'm American and knew that, didn't care. My ire was simply having 4 decades under my belt of knowing Pluto as the 9th planet.

2

Yes. The Pluto thing is a huge violation of the "rule of cool".

If there are bigger rocks than Pluto in orbit, we should promote some cool new big space rocks to be new secret bonus planets!

3
beehaw.org

Feel like a lot of the "myths" are also just because you're not going to teach a 16-year-old about quantum mechanics to explain why table salt exists

14
piefed.social

Well there are deepening levels of understanding depending on the learner's pre-existing understanding of the world (e.g. matter > atoms > protons/neutrons/electrons > fermions), and there are things that are just plain incorrect, that were assumed to be correct, because science advances (e.g. Pluto is a grey ball of boring nothingness very similar to Mercury).

12
crank0271reply
lemmy.world

Pluto is a grey ball of boring nothingness very similar to Mercury

It isn't?!

1

That's really cool! (Because the average temperature on Pluto is apparently -387°F, or -232°C.)

1
shalafireply
lemmy.world

Been through Discworld three times but hadn't read The Science of Discworld. Know if it's any good?

2

I recall liking it well enough at the time but Lies to Children is honestly the only concept in it that was new to me. It's a decent enough Unseen University side story but that's just the framing for talking about real world physics.

Where else are you going to find another Discworld fix though?

2

Never been a big fan of children, but they fucking love me, even if I'm clearly annoyed at the time. I was asking my ex-wife about this mystery. "You don't talk to them like kids, you talk to them like little adults and they respect that."

She was right! I talk to them like adults that simply don't know as much as I do.

2

Wash your chicken before cooking. Don't do this, it just spreads salmonella all over your sink.

14

I thought this wasn't about actually using a sink and water, but rather, using lemon juice to cover the chicken as the enzymes break up the protein and tenderize the meat?

2

"What you were taught
"Flu shots give you the flu"

What we know now
A common misconception...

Updated understanding emerged around 2020"

Updated for whom? Anti-vaccine idiots?

13

Most of what I learned about genetics is incorrect as when I graduated we thought DNA ran the show.

We were also wrong about why the USSR fell (not a huge surprise)

13

They sure weren't teaching that an overdose is instakill on our liver.

4

Oh I've got a good one. Learned in the American south. Supposedly the American Civil War was not fought over slavery, but differing railroad track widths. Slavery was a minor detail that was a scape goat for the north to force the south to use its standard railroad width.

11

School experiences are too varied for such a site to exist. Examples:

Climate change was universally agreed upon to exist and be caused by people 30 years ago. For some reason it no longer appears to be.

Leif Erikson was taught to us back then but you’ll find people today that celebrate Columbus.

11

Fruit and vegetables being separate categories: Fruits are actually a type of vegetable. Additionally cucumbers are melons.

Cyan being a light blue: It is actually 50% green.

Simple machines are fundamental: They completely ignore compliant mechanisms and aren't atomic. Actually atomic mechanisms would be defined by the type of force, the shape, and the compliance.

The only form of Socialism is Marxism and Communism and Capitalism means markets: Look up Mutualism or Syndicalism.

Basically everything with pop psychology.

I am sure there are more, but these were just top of my head.

10

Well, mainly, yeah? The vast majority of us fall on one end of the scale or the other. But it is a scale, same as sexuality.

1

When I graduated highschool, the idea that some dinosaurs had feathers and evolved into birds was still "fringe science".

9
lemmy.world

The economy works and real estate is always a good investment. Also, the best thing that can happen to a nation is to be defeated by the US, because the US will then rebuild their infrastructure. The only example that teacher would cite was Japan.

Fm radio travels in waves while am radio travels in beams. This wasn't a science teacher though. This was a media teacher's wisdom.

9
JcbAzPxreply
lemmy.world

The rebuilding thing was a plan specific to WWII. They wanted to avoid the issues that the end of WWI brought to keep another war from happening a couple decades down the line.

5

The US also wanted an ally in the area who was into capitalism. Similar to how SK got a lot of support in building their infrastructure, but they went even farther into capitalism. Both countries are really depressed now.

He was trying to rationalize why Bush II's wars weren't going to be bad for them. In both cases, completely ignoring the huge loss of life that incurred.

3

Fairly, land is always a good investment. Taking out predatory loans to buy land isnt.

1

In my moc-GCSE year(s), my science teacher was so confident that blood was blue in the veins, I called her out on it but she was so adamant about it.

8

This one is ongoing. It gets modified a bit whenever some industry or another pays enough, but it's still misleading kids and educators to this day.

5
Eq0reply
literature.cafe

I went into a deep dive on the matter. Many countries have food pyramids, but they look potentially very different. For a laugh, look up the Italian one, with pizza and pasta at the base! I nowadays refer to the Harvard food pyramid, seems fairly legit to me.

2
shalafireply
lemmy.world

Isn't torpor just the scientific term for hibernation, or are they distinct?

2

They are similar, but Torpor is involuntary, hibernation is voluntary. Torpor is for short periods of time, hibernation is for long periods. Torpor drops the body temperature just a little, hibernation drops body temperature significantly. Torpor allows an animal to wake up and move around minimally (like to get food/eat) while hibernation does not.

3
lemmy.ca

I was taught that Canada has 10 provinces and two territories. That was proven false before I even graduated high school!

6

"Yeah, but they ain't disproved my beleif in the flat earth" (sarcasm because crappy day in work)

6
Jax
sh.itjust.works

Who would be the arbiter of truth in this instance?

Like it's a cool idea, just practically impossible.

4

Who would be the arbiter of truth in this instance?

I generally settle for panels of scientists. Scientists aren't prone to agreeing on things, but much of what they do agree on is a pretty safe bet.

(Even the stuff in that category that turns out wrong often is subtly wrong, rather than glaringly wrong.)

2

I was taught that serious academics favored Support Vector Machines over Neural Networks, which industry only loved because they didn't have proper education. oops...

also, Computer Vision was considered "AI-complete" and likely decades away. ImageNet dropped a couple years I graduated. though I guess it ended up being "AI-complete" in a way...

3

Your work improves the lives of others more than it will improve your own. Which others is determined by politics. Best to spread the improvement around so you can get more of it back from more people.

3

That is what the post is a about. Not just facts that were always wrong, but ones that no longer are true

2

People believe enough random bullshit to tickle their memories with their classics list.

2

In an atom, the electrons orbit around the nucleus in the same manner as the planets orbit around the sun.

That's been debunked for many many decades but middle scool still teaches this model. At least I wasn't told back then how misleading and wrong that is, only in high school right before graduating the physics teacher emphasized this misconception. I remember how mad she was about it lol. I have no clue how its taught elsewhere.

2

Nero linguistics programming

On second thought I learned this from some guy WHILE in highscool

1

The reallity ist that you create a website with Google and it generate automaticly your complete Curriculum Vitae from Birth to now.

1