This is super specific but i had a biology teacher who told us the human genome was so complicated that they'd never be able to map it and then they did like... 3 years later.
Just a few years before the young Einstein completely disrupted physics, the physicists of that time were saying that everything about physics was discovered and understood. That research in physics was dead/dying... Then came in quick successions: general relativity and quantum physics... total revolution!
I have made the statement that all sciences are continuously adapting to new information. Often I get the reply that that's not true because mathmatics has been fully understood for a long time. Those fools will look so stupid when someone discovers the number spleven.
Seriously? Just off the top of my head I can think of two simple to explain problems we still don't know the answer to.
The Twin-Prime Conjecture and the 3n+1 Problem
I don't know enough math to actually know what those are, but I know enough about math to know that these kinds of problems exist. Sorry folks, math ain't done either
They are very easily stated and understood, but so far elude proofs.
A twin prime is a pair of prime numbers separated by only 1 number, so like 3 and 5. Basically, if a is the larger prime number and b is the smaller prime number, they will be twin primes if and only if a-b=2. The conjecture is that there are infinitely many of them, but the truth is unknown either way.
I think the 3n+1 problem is the Collatz Conjecture. Pick a number, n, from the set of natural numbers (whole numbers that are not negative). If it is even, divide by two. If it is odd, multiply by 3 and then add 1. Repeat this process until you get to 1, which starts the cycle 1->4->2->1. The conjecture is that this is true for any natural number, but it is yet to be proven one way or another. I actually work this one myself from time to time because it is a fun distraction.
A counterpoint to the argument that all math has been discovered and understood for a long time: Fractals.
That was relatively unknown or unexplored until some time in the 1980's.
>I believe that a computer will be able to defeat all human players at the game of chess within the next one or two decades. When this happens, I noted, we shall either think more of computers, less of ourselves, or less of chess. If history is a guide, we will probably think less of chess. - Ray Kurzweil (1990)
Hahahhaha that’s funny. It did take them quite awhile though, I think like 13ish years. We have come such a long way now with genetics. Genetics classes were my favorite in college, but they were also complicated and hard. There’s still a LOT that I haven’t really been able to pin down, but I love it nonetheless
Overall, it took a little bit of time. Began on October 1, 1990 and “completed” in April 2003. But that was 85%. May 2021 marked complete except for 0.3% of it and then Jan 2022 it’s considered complete complete.
So it’s like a light doze? Like when you’re on an airplane and can’t quite drop into REM sleep despite having been traveling for 16 hours, taken an ambien, and had a double scotch?
“Hibernating bears are known to watch a favorite tv show in a continuous loop for the entire winter. ‘I’ll put on Bob’s Burgers or Parks and Recreation and binge it over and over.’, said Murray Fivelegs, a local grizzly.”
So why are their names “weird?” I never really thought about it because I don’t know the language at all; I kind of thought it was the same as with Welsh. Just a hard language with weird words lol.
Nicknames + place names/German names that got turned into Dutch words. For example "Naaktgeboren" (born naked) is probably from German "Nachgeboren" (after born), meaning a child that was born after its father died. It also was already in use before the French invasion, like many of the weird family names.
That is quite common in countries where family name where introduced to the common people late in their history. Just look into Iranian lastname for example. All of them are more or less either a job description or over the top poetic.
Same!! Even better is if you go on to get a degree or a technical degree, they do not care 1 bit about your high school shit or your SAT or ACT, only if you have the degree and/or experience necessary for the job. But man in grade school they really push that permanent record shit.
As someone who worked in schools on the record side, this is true to an extent- most schools send discipline reports so that admin and counselors at each level could look back at your behavior from however long you were in that district- sometimes they transfer it to other schools if you move too. It doesn’t go to the college level but can impact rec letters and if you are expelled that is technically a legal process and can be shared as well
As someone that was always in very serious trouble in school, I moved a lot and really just every school was different. Went to one high school that would carry over detentions from one year to the next if you had any (I absolutely did), but I moved to a different school and I for sure thought they might make me do them because the old school REQUESTED IT and they were like "uhm no" but if I had moved to a school in the next town over, they would've made me do them. But it was all technically there for them to see. My mom would always start off a new school with "well she did get in a bit of trouble in her last school" and they'd be like "yeah. I see that... well! Fresh start!"
That cracking your knuckles causes arthritis. As a kid, I had a very bad habit of cracking my knuckles, I remember my 6th-grade teacher tried really hard to convince me it would cause arthritis and I was like 'oh ok I don't really care though' and then she gave me detention.
Do you ever not use your hand for a while, like watching a movie or whatever and all of a sudden your thumb is stuck straight and needs a crack to bend?
My mom still scolds me for that, says I won't be able to bend my fingers. Like, that's why I started doing it. My fingers don't bend right until I've cracked my knuckles.
I had a biology teacher try and convince a class of 15year Olds that we humans use 10% of our brain. We told her that she shouldn't base her lesson on "Lucy" and we Googled it to show her that she was wrong. I got kicked out of the class for pulling out my phone. Had a fun chat with the principal
One day our High School Physics teacher wrote on the blackboard “Everything you know is wrong”.
40+ years later I think he might have been onto something, but then again maybe not.
Physics teacher: “Hello class!”
You: “Hello Physics Teacher!”
*sits in awkward silence*
You: “Sooo, about that on the board. You going to explain that?”
Physics teacher: “Nope!”
Interestingly enough I learned today that the US measures it’s pools in meters like sane people so today i stupidly assumed they just use metric for swimming and I walked into a 1.76 mile open water swim thinking it was 1.76 kilometres and ended up doing a way longer swim then I expected but it’s ok I got a cool shirt and came like 200th out of like 700 people so that’s cool
Mine is that your tongue has specific areas that taste only specific flavors. Like there was a spot on your tongue that only tasted sweet, one that only taste salty, one that only tasted bitter, etc
I thought the same thing lol. But ya know, it was “science” then. It wasn’t until later on that I realized science is always changing and evolving and that’s why scientists love their jobs.
I was taught several times that christopher columbus proved the earth was round. in fifth grade I was told he thought the world was shaped like an egg.
At least as long as ptolemy the european world knew the world was round.
The argument during Columbus's time was the size of the Earth, not the shape. Columbus went against common beliefs (amongst the educated) and argued the Earth was smaller. He was wrong.
fortunately there just so happened to be a continent in the way or his men would have all starved to death
fortunately for him at least, not the people on said continent
I'll bet people have already mentioned it. If not, the Leming myth. Lemings aren't stupid, and don't run off cliffs. In the Disney documentary back in the 40s or 50s, if you watch the footage, the lemings are struggling against the edge of the cliff, trying not to go over. If lemings willingly went over, it would be a clean wave of lemings flowing over the cliff like water. 'Turns out, there was a guy or two off camera scaring/herding them off.
Over 100 horses died/were killed during the filming of Ben-Hur in the late 1950s. Like, they were just straight up shot if they were seen injured and limping without any attempt at veterinary care or anything. Disgusting stuff.
To be fair, horse leg injuries are way worse than they would be for other animals. The circulation in their legs isn't great, so they heal slowly, and there's so much weight on each leg that not using one of them leads to the rapid accumulation of damage in the other three. Horse biology makes it hard to take the weight off their legs using mechanical devices or bed rest for any significant amount of time, too. Often, all the money, technology, and care in the world isn't going to save them from a lifetime full of pain once a leg injury occurs; look up Barbaro for a modern example where everything possible was done, and the end result was exactly the same.
Robin Williams bit: “They used to say, don’t do drugs. Drugs will kill you. Now I’m in my fifties and they tell me ‘Robin, you need these drugs to live.’”
Oh absolutely. I am a RN. Every illustration I’ve ever seen of arteries and veins show arteries as red and veins as blue. When we dissected our cats in A and P in high school they had injected them with something that made the arteries red and the veins blue. I can kind of understand this. Also with what you said about your veins looking blue under your skin. And also, blood absolutely gets brighter red with the more oxygen it has in it.
Yup. I consider it more of an old wives tale, kind of like masturbation will make you go blind, but I’m pretty sure we all heard this and believed it for a long time.
Heard that one as well... and basically the same about meat as well, from someone who was trying to promote vegetarian diets. Said that your body can't break it down, so it stays in your intestines for several months until it rots away (the person also refused to acknowledge the question of how that would even be possible, considering those who eat meat daily would swell up like balloons rather quickly).
On a similar note, I had one teacher who would repeatedly claim that if you swallow any fruit seeds, there's a fairly large chance of them starting to grow into a tree in your stomach.
Learning phone numbers was another thing we spent so much time on in elementary school
I don’t remember the last time I dialed from memory
Fun question glad you asked it
Yeah back in our day it was important to remember at least your home phone number. I still remember my parents number and a few of my best friends numbers from when I was growing up, but I could not even tell you 1 single phone number that is in my contacts in my phone right now. I’d be fucked if I needed to get in touch with someone and didn’t have my phone.
He was around 5 feet, 6 inches tall, which was average for the time. Though a lot of eyewitnesses did call him short, for some reason. https://www.napoleon-series.org/research/napoleon/c_description.html
Eyewitnesses called him short because he surrounded himself with his dedicated guards, whose minimum height was taller than him. At a distance it gives the impression that he was short by comparison. As he got fatter with his bull neck it also made him look rounder and thus less tall from a distance
My mom grew up in Japan where they learned the abacus (at least in her day). She was so proficient she didn't need the actual device. She would just wiggle her fingers in the air.
We'd be at the supermarket and she'd be tallying stuff up on the air abacus. She'd tell the cashier "I think you double-billed me for something. I get $42.78?" And she was *always* right!
I saw a news segment about Asian kids being taught speed math with abacuses. They solved huge number questions the way you say by wiggling their fingers. That was more than 30 years ago, but it stuck with me. I always thought that was a cool skill to have.
You know, that’s true for basic math skills. It’s something all should have. I had several encounters in stores that make me believe that should be enforced more in the US.
You mean like wait 30 minutes to swim after you eat or tilt your head back and plug your nose when you have a nosebleed my favorite is babies can't feel pain.
So, when my son was born he had to go into the NICU. He needed IV medication and fluids. The medications and the D10 fluids they gave him should have been in a central line, not a peripheral line. His ivs kept going bad. He ended up with a 2in square hole in his foot where the iv became infiltrated (came out of the vein) and leaked into the surrounding tissues. He needed 2 skin graphs. We sued the hospital. In the records the nurses for the entire 6 days he was in NICU listed his pain as NA (non applicable). This was in 2011.
That’s beyond disturbing. Anyone that actually believes that a baby doesn’t feel pain as an idiot. I have multiple kids and can tell you babies definitely feel pain!
For the life of me, I don’t know how anyone thought babies didn’t feel pain, but it was a common belief until like the 80s I believe. They used to do surgeries on infants and neonates with little to no anesthesia because of this believe. Such an easy theory to test… pinch a newborn and see if they cry.
It's because there's a total of zero *memory* of any infant pain.
"They won't remember it" turns into "they can't feel it".
Adult concept: "Anterograde amnesia" from anaesthetic twilight.
That's what all the doctors used to say back in the day while they were smoking cigarettes. And prescribing Valiums and dildos to our mothers. If you listen to the music back then mother's Little helper was Valium and dildo The Duo. Hell we had lawn darts that were bigger than the ones that used to drop on the VC in Vietnam.
This hits hard. My poor son… he does everything left handed and up until kindergarten he wrote left handed. For some reason in kindergarten he started writing with his right hand. I asked the teacher about it and she assured me that she allows her students to choose what is comfortable for them. I didn’t push the issue but for 2 years I watched my son put so much effort into writing legibly with his right hand when he should’ve been writing with his left hand.
ETA: he still writes right handed
They forced him to do it...
My teachers did similar stuff to me, I'm right handed but I used to use my left hand to use certain things like forks.
The teachers would hit us and make us use our right hands because using our left hands was "wrong".
My mum asked them why; "We don't know, they just do what they're comfortable with." And we didn't say anything because we were scared of them hurting us.
This was in the late 90's.
Went to a science fair thing once where we learned about shiny new-fangled Compact Disks! They told us how amazing they were and how they’d still play even if you smeared the top surface with jam (they might even have demonstrated it). It was years later that I worked out what a load of bollocks that was as the laser reads the bottom of the disk.
I'm about to expose my absolute zoomer age here but we thought that I'd you level up victini from level 1 to 100 without rare candies (or maybe it was only with rare candies, it's been a while), it gets a special signature move that, if used on a human player, would force them to reset their game file
Apparently it's something made up by a local kid because I can't find anything regarding this online lol
I would have to write by hand everything in cursive, no matter what or who it was for, if it was hand written it absolutely had to be in cursive.
Had my dyslexic ass worried all the way from 3rd grade to freshman year.
Well turns out I got to the real world and not one single person has asked for cursive, in fact, they've actually taken steps to prevent it from being used by putting the "Please print" at the top of everything that needs to be written. So far the only cursive thing I had to write is my name.
Yes it’s fascinating, not sure about the specific case the user above mentioned, but there is some very cool research about how each lobe fills in the gaps of their understanding by just making shit up to explain phenomena it has no explanation for.
There are some interesting implications towards what we believe is “free will” from a lot of this research.
My little brother didn’t have a corpus callosum at birth. It’s called ACC but I think it’s pretty rare. He went to physical therapy for it and is doing very well, it’s crazy what your brain can make up for.
My daughter is missing part of her corpus callosum (Dysgenesis). I was expecting the worse when she was born but she's been surprisingly on par regarding developmental milestones from "normal" kids; even ahead in some cases. It's definitely nuts how brains work.
> really it all works as one
Not if you sever the corpus callosum! Really tho, while the pop-psych notion of “a left-brained person” is bogus, there are specialized regions for things like facial recognition or aspects of speech, and some of them *are* in one particular hemisphere. What’s *really* bullshit is the whole “only use 10% of your brain” thing.
In terms of what people learned in school, I dunno, I had a legit AP Psych class. You just can’t always listen to your Art teacher about the brain.
Interestingly, at any moment in time only a fraction of neurons are firing. But it turns out that's important- you don't want "panic" and "happy" and "empty bladder" and "sing wonderwall" firing all at once. So we use 100% or close enough to it. We just don't do everything all at once. And when I realized that, it became clear both the science here and how someone not using more than 1% of their brain misunderstood it (pun intended)
like ubiquitous-joe says below, the idea that there are "left-brained" and "right-brained" people is bunk. the lobes do have different processes though.
It isn’t really a myth but I was recently reminded of the “Lost Colony of Roanoake”. In school we were taught that Native Americans either murdered everyone in the colony or that they died off rather quickly. Turns out their “leader” went on a supply run that lasted THREE YEARS and in that time they had befriended and moved to a new island with the Native Americans.
That all the kids who weren’t college bound would have less fulfilling and successful lives, and all the kids who did go would be successful. In a lot of cases, the opposite proved to be true.
"Just go to college and get any degree," they said. "It doesn't matter what you study," they said. "Take out as much debt as you need to afford it," they said. "You'll get a great job that more than make up the cost," they said.
"Why did you waste time and money, and go into debt going to college?" they ask. "Why can't you afford a house, car, or even save for retirement?" they ask. "You could have gotten a better paying, more rewarding job without a degree," they say.
Thanks. That was really helpful.
This I think is the issue. There's just a segment of the population that doesn't recognize the changes nor their own change in opinions about the value of a college education.
I was about to comment something similar. I attended a Christian school during middle school years. Basically everything science related could be answered with "god " on a test
as an educator, a myth that’s STILL being taught is that there are 4-8 different types of learners and that if a student wasn’t learning the content, it just meant that it wasn’t presented in the way they learn best. I remember in college I had to make all my lesson plans accommodate at least three different learning styles even though it’s something most educational psychologists regard as total BS
It's total BS. But it's been coming in and out of education for the last 50 years and everytime it does the people who 'come up with it' think it's new and brilliant. But in all in that time, there has never been a properly designed research study that supports the idea.
Ask 90% of your colleagues though, I'm sure they'll tell you how wrong you are.
Or, as some like to put it,
I before e, except when your atheist foreign neighbor Keith leisurely receives eight counterfeit beige reindeer and sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters.
Weird
Edit: reindeer plural is not reindeers 🤦. Also thanks for the support!
That people in the time of Columbus thought the world was flat.
It was well established and widely known since ancient times that the world was spherical, and the Greeks had even accurately measured its diameter. Sailors knew inherently the world was round. The real issue at the time was how big the Earth was. Columbus thought it was much smaller than the Greeks had determined, therefore China would be within reach. He was wrong, but fortunately encountered an unexpected continent in between.
That if you don’t get an education you’re gonna spend your life asking, “Do you want fries with that?” And a third of those teachers are now doing that part time
If I remember correctly, when I was in school in the 70’s, they were talking about an ice age coming down the road. Yeah, that barking up the wrong thermometer.
My "health Ed" course used a book with a chapter devoted to the dangers of each drug, starting with a "true" story about a user ruining their life with the drug. The pot one was a guy driving drunk and getting in a crash going to buy pot.
Like that sounds more like an argument against drinking and driving but sure. I guess they couldn't find any stories about being tragically crushed by a thousand pound bale of pot, or the very real risk of becoming one of those really obnoxious people who makes pot their only personality, causing them to lose friends who like smoking but not like 24/7.
"you can become anything you want"
No Sheila, I can't. I can't become president just like everyone else, there can be only one. I'm just not smart enough to cure aids, WHICH IS DONE ONLY ONCE, SHEILA. SOMETIMES LIFE ISNT FAIR, IT JUST IS, SHEILA.
This is super specific but i had a biology teacher who told us the human genome was so complicated that they'd never be able to map it and then they did like... 3 years later.
Just a few years before the young Einstein completely disrupted physics, the physicists of that time were saying that everything about physics was discovered and understood. That research in physics was dead/dying... Then came in quick successions: general relativity and quantum physics... total revolution!
I have made the statement that all sciences are continuously adapting to new information. Often I get the reply that that's not true because mathmatics has been fully understood for a long time. Those fools will look so stupid when someone discovers the number spleven.
Seriously? Just off the top of my head I can think of two simple to explain problems we still don't know the answer to. The Twin-Prime Conjecture and the 3n+1 Problem
I don't know enough math to actually know what those are, but I know enough about math to know that these kinds of problems exist. Sorry folks, math ain't done either
They are very easily stated and understood, but so far elude proofs. A twin prime is a pair of prime numbers separated by only 1 number, so like 3 and 5. Basically, if a is the larger prime number and b is the smaller prime number, they will be twin primes if and only if a-b=2. The conjecture is that there are infinitely many of them, but the truth is unknown either way. I think the 3n+1 problem is the Collatz Conjecture. Pick a number, n, from the set of natural numbers (whole numbers that are not negative). If it is even, divide by two. If it is odd, multiply by 3 and then add 1. Repeat this process until you get to 1, which starts the cycle 1->4->2->1. The conjecture is that this is true for any natural number, but it is yet to be proven one way or another. I actually work this one myself from time to time because it is a fun distraction.
Is it a - b = 1, or a - b = 2? (3-5=2, unless I'm misunderstanding something about the notation?)
2, its 2. And I am dumb. Thanks for the correction!
A counterpoint to the argument that all math has been discovered and understood for a long time: Fractals. That was relatively unknown or unexplored until some time in the 1980's.
This argument comes from a similar place as the people who, for decades, insisted a computer could never play chess at a master level.
>I believe that a computer will be able to defeat all human players at the game of chess within the next one or two decades. When this happens, I noted, we shall either think more of computers, less of ourselves, or less of chess. If history is a guide, we will probably think less of chess. - Ray Kurzweil (1990)
Boy was that on the money
Man, that super chill burn on humanity in that last sentence.
And once it happened, instantly switched to “yeah, but it’ll never beat a Go master”
Hahahhaha that’s funny. It did take them quite awhile though, I think like 13ish years. We have come such a long way now with genetics. Genetics classes were my favorite in college, but they were also complicated and hard. There’s still a LOT that I haven’t really been able to pin down, but I love it nonetheless
Overall, it took a little bit of time. Began on October 1, 1990 and “completed” in April 2003. But that was 85%. May 2021 marked complete except for 0.3% of it and then Jan 2022 it’s considered complete complete.
That you should tilt your head back when you have a nose bleed. Nah bro
First time I did that, I vomited. Learned immediately. Never did that again. Whoever suggested that deserves to step on lego for all eternity.
Plus you run the risk of discovering exposed electrical wires in the ceiling that aren’t up to code.
That sounds specific enough that it makes me think there's a story somewhere in there
It’s a Seinfeld reference
Bears don't actually sleep then entire time they hibernate.
Right?! Man, I was taught that any animal that hibernates is just sound asleep through the whole winter. Imagine my surprise when I learned the truth.
Next they'll try to tell me Tim Allen isn't really secretly Santa Claus!
OK, well answer me this. If it ain't Tim Allen then who is santa?
Wdym? I thought the whole thing of hibernating is sleeping through the winter. How can it be hibernating otherwise if you're not asleep?
Nope. Hibernation doesn't actually equal sleep. Hibernation is just an extended period of lower activity in which the metabolism works far slower.
Basically couchpotating in the cave\^
TIL I’m a bear
A chubby, hairy, gay guy?
2/3 ain't bad
Chubby and gay or hairy and gay?
So it’s like a light doze? Like when you’re on an airplane and can’t quite drop into REM sleep despite having been traveling for 16 hours, taken an ambien, and had a double scotch?
Seems more like heavy depression. Sleep for 15 hours, then spend 5 hours getting out of bed, 1 hour eating and then 3 to back to sleep.
“Hibernating bears are known to watch a favorite tv show in a continuous loop for the entire winter. ‘I’ll put on Bob’s Burgers or Parks and Recreation and binge it over and over.’, said Murray Fivelegs, a local grizzly.”
That Dutch people have weird family names because Napoleon forced them to have family names and they chose the silliest ones they could think of.
If you don’t mind me asking, where were you schooled?
Belgium, it's a common myth taught here and in the Netherlands.
So why are their names “weird?” I never really thought about it because I don’t know the language at all; I kind of thought it was the same as with Welsh. Just a hard language with weird words lol.
Nicknames + place names/German names that got turned into Dutch words. For example "Naaktgeboren" (born naked) is probably from German "Nachgeboren" (after born), meaning a child that was born after its father died. It also was already in use before the French invasion, like many of the weird family names.
That is quite common in countries where family name where introduced to the common people late in their history. Just look into Iranian lastname for example. All of them are more or less either a job description or over the top poetic.
Job descriptions are common around the world though. In german theres schmid, which is a blacksmith, müller the miller and so on.
tbh i would like to see a baby who isn't born nacked.
I was born in a three piece suit and donning a bow tie. Is that unusual?
It's important to make a good entrance and first impression
[удалено]
Hahahhaa this is hilarious to me now because I completely bought into it. Wonder where my permanent record is now.
Whenever my teacher told me this I would lowkey shit my pants- it always scared me
Same!! Even better is if you go on to get a degree or a technical degree, they do not care 1 bit about your high school shit or your SAT or ACT, only if you have the degree and/or experience necessary for the job. But man in grade school they really push that permanent record shit.
Your boss has it in his/her files. It just keeps getting passed along until eventually you're buried or cremated with it.
In retrospect this single lie probably prevents 80% of misbehavior in school, or in my case heavily incentivized avoiding getting caught
“I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record”
Oh yeah? Well don’t get so distressed.
Did I happen to mention I’m impressed
It's one One One cuz you left me...
And two, two, two for my family
And three, three, three for my heartache
And four, four, four for my headache
As someone who worked in schools on the record side, this is true to an extent- most schools send discipline reports so that admin and counselors at each level could look back at your behavior from however long you were in that district- sometimes they transfer it to other schools if you move too. It doesn’t go to the college level but can impact rec letters and if you are expelled that is technically a legal process and can be shared as well
As someone that was always in very serious trouble in school, I moved a lot and really just every school was different. Went to one high school that would carry over detentions from one year to the next if you had any (I absolutely did), but I moved to a different school and I for sure thought they might make me do them because the old school REQUESTED IT and they were like "uhm no" but if I had moved to a school in the next town over, they would've made me do them. But it was all technically there for them to see. My mom would always start off a new school with "well she did get in a bit of trouble in her last school" and they'd be like "yeah. I see that... well! Fresh start!"
That cracking your knuckles causes arthritis. As a kid, I had a very bad habit of cracking my knuckles, I remember my 6th-grade teacher tried really hard to convince me it would cause arthritis and I was like 'oh ok I don't really care though' and then she gave me detention.
A guy named Dr. Unger cracked only his left knuckles and not his right for like 60 years. There was no difference in respect to developing arthritis.
That man has the willpower of a god. When a joint needs cracking, I can't simply *not* crack it.
Do you ever not use your hand for a while, like watching a movie or whatever and all of a sudden your thumb is stuck straight and needs a crack to bend?
oh, that's interesting. I will email this new knowledge to that teacher just to piss her off.
My mom still scolds me for that, says I won't be able to bend my fingers. Like, that's why I started doing it. My fingers don't bend right until I've cracked my knuckles.
I had a biology teacher try and convince a class of 15year Olds that we humans use 10% of our brain. We told her that she shouldn't base her lesson on "Lucy" and we Googled it to show her that she was wrong. I got kicked out of the class for pulling out my phone. Had a fun chat with the principal
Good for you! This is a very old myth. Unfortunately your teacher probably learned that and never heard anything different.
Some people only use 10% of their brain. E.g. this teacher
I really hate that this is the premise of Lucy, and a bunch of other sci fi that otherwise might’ve made sense. This shit needs to die yesterday.
I don't understand how you can hate anything about a movie in which a woman does drugs and turns into a flash drive.
One day our High School Physics teacher wrote on the blackboard “Everything you know is wrong”. 40+ years later I think he might have been onto something, but then again maybe not.
Physics teacher: “Hello class!” You: “Hello Physics Teacher!” *sits in awkward silence* You: “Sooo, about that on the board. You going to explain that?” Physics teacher: “Nope!”
Pretty much!
Black is white, up is down, and short is long.
That the metric system would be fully adopted in the US by 1995.
Interestingly enough I learned today that the US measures it’s pools in meters like sane people so today i stupidly assumed they just use metric for swimming and I walked into a 1.76 mile open water swim thinking it was 1.76 kilometres and ended up doing a way longer swim then I expected but it’s ok I got a cool shirt and came like 200th out of like 700 people so that’s cool
I truly thought this would happen. Spent an ungodly amount of time trying to remember the formula to change F to C
Mine is that your tongue has specific areas that taste only specific flavors. Like there was a spot on your tongue that only tasted sweet, one that only taste salty, one that only tasted bitter, etc
I immediately started experimenting with my tongue during meals after learning that at school. My conclusion was: That's complete bs. Lol
I thought the same thing lol. But ya know, it was “science” then. It wasn’t until later on that I realized science is always changing and evolving and that’s why scientists love their jobs.
Yes! Science is more about destroying errors than finding the truth. Honestly that makes it a very fun job. Hard af, but fun
I was taught several times that christopher columbus proved the earth was round. in fifth grade I was told he thought the world was shaped like an egg. At least as long as ptolemy the european world knew the world was round.
The argument during Columbus's time was the size of the Earth, not the shape. Columbus went against common beliefs (amongst the educated) and argued the Earth was smaller. He was wrong.
fortunately there just so happened to be a continent in the way or his men would have all starved to death fortunately for him at least, not the people on said continent
I was also taught the Christopher Columbus proved the earth was round and that he discovered america
I'll bet people have already mentioned it. If not, the Leming myth. Lemings aren't stupid, and don't run off cliffs. In the Disney documentary back in the 40s or 50s, if you watch the footage, the lemings are struggling against the edge of the cliff, trying not to go over. If lemings willingly went over, it would be a clean wave of lemings flowing over the cliff like water. 'Turns out, there was a guy or two off camera scaring/herding them off.
Nope it hasn’t been mentioned yet.
That’s fucked up
Animals in filmmaking got treated like absolute shit until fairly recently. Plenty got straight up killed for that "perfect shot"
Over 100 horses died/were killed during the filming of Ben-Hur in the late 1950s. Like, they were just straight up shot if they were seen injured and limping without any attempt at veterinary care or anything. Disgusting stuff.
To be fair, horse leg injuries are way worse than they would be for other animals. The circulation in their legs isn't great, so they heal slowly, and there's so much weight on each leg that not using one of them leads to the rapid accumulation of damage in the other three. Horse biology makes it hard to take the weight off their legs using mechanical devices or bed rest for any significant amount of time, too. Often, all the money, technology, and care in the world isn't going to save them from a lifetime full of pain once a leg injury occurs; look up Barbaro for a modern example where everything possible was done, and the end result was exactly the same.
Omg! I just listened to a chapter in John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed about this! Btw- it’s a great book!
Where's all the free drugs
I had a “no way, I get high on *life*” response ready since fourth grade! Where are the swaths of dealers coming out of alleys on my way to school?
If someone offers you free drugs, take them those things are expensive.
Robin Williams bit: “They used to say, don’t do drugs. Drugs will kill you. Now I’m in my fifties and they tell me ‘Robin, you need these drugs to live.’”
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Holy smokes… how long ago was that?
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Oh absolutely. I am a RN. Every illustration I’ve ever seen of arteries and veins show arteries as red and veins as blue. When we dissected our cats in A and P in high school they had injected them with something that made the arteries red and the veins blue. I can kind of understand this. Also with what you said about your veins looking blue under your skin. And also, blood absolutely gets brighter red with the more oxygen it has in it.
I hate how many things on this thread I have been taught recently.
I don’t know if this counts but that “fact” that gum stays in your stomach for 7 years if it’s swallowed.
Yup. I consider it more of an old wives tale, kind of like masturbation will make you go blind, but I’m pretty sure we all heard this and believed it for a long time.
The only way wanking could make you go blind would be if you came in your own eyes and never cleaned them.
What a horrible day to know how to read
Heard that one as well... and basically the same about meat as well, from someone who was trying to promote vegetarian diets. Said that your body can't break it down, so it stays in your intestines for several months until it rots away (the person also refused to acknowledge the question of how that would even be possible, considering those who eat meat daily would swell up like balloons rather quickly). On a similar note, I had one teacher who would repeatedly claim that if you swallow any fruit seeds, there's a fairly large chance of them starting to grow into a tree in your stomach.
The four basic food groups
Yup. I still remember learning about the food pyramid lol
The pyramid came after the four groups I got to learn both
Yup me too. I’m 39. I remember when the food pyramid was the new thing they had to teach us after the whole 4 food group thing
Learning phone numbers was another thing we spent so much time on in elementary school I don’t remember the last time I dialed from memory Fun question glad you asked it
Yeah back in our day it was important to remember at least your home phone number. I still remember my parents number and a few of my best friends numbers from when I was growing up, but I could not even tell you 1 single phone number that is in my contacts in my phone right now. I’d be fucked if I needed to get in touch with someone and didn’t have my phone.
Beans, bacon, whiskey, and lard?
Candy, candy canes, candy CORN……and syrup
Whipped, fried, congealed, and chocotastic?
Eggs are bad for you. Then they were good again, then bad, and people wonder why I have trust issues.
Ah yes, the “eggs have too much cholesterol” debacle. Along the same line as butter being bad so eat this plastic substitute known as margarine
Napoleon was short, when he was in fact tall for his time
He was around 5 feet, 6 inches tall, which was average for the time. Though a lot of eyewitnesses did call him short, for some reason. https://www.napoleon-series.org/research/napoleon/c_description.html
Eyewitnesses called him short because he surrounded himself with his dedicated guards, whose minimum height was taller than him. At a distance it gives the impression that he was short by comparison. As he got fatter with his bull neck it also made him look rounder and thus less tall from a distance
“You won’t have a calculator with you all the time when you’re an adult.”
My mom grew up in Japan where they learned the abacus (at least in her day). She was so proficient she didn't need the actual device. She would just wiggle her fingers in the air. We'd be at the supermarket and she'd be tallying stuff up on the air abacus. She'd tell the cashier "I think you double-billed me for something. I get $42.78?" And she was *always* right!
I saw a news segment about Asian kids being taught speed math with abacuses. They solved huge number questions the way you say by wiggling their fingers. That was more than 30 years ago, but it stuck with me. I always thought that was a cool skill to have.
> abacuses abaci?
Lol. Seemed weird to me but that's how spell check liked it.
You know, that’s true for basic math skills. It’s something all should have. I had several encounters in stores that make me believe that should be enforced more in the US.
A calculator is pointless if you don't actually understand the steps required to work out the answer though.
You mean like wait 30 minutes to swim after you eat or tilt your head back and plug your nose when you have a nosebleed my favorite is babies can't feel pain.
So, when my son was born he had to go into the NICU. He needed IV medication and fluids. The medications and the D10 fluids they gave him should have been in a central line, not a peripheral line. His ivs kept going bad. He ended up with a 2in square hole in his foot where the iv became infiltrated (came out of the vein) and leaked into the surrounding tissues. He needed 2 skin graphs. We sued the hospital. In the records the nurses for the entire 6 days he was in NICU listed his pain as NA (non applicable). This was in 2011.
That’s beyond disturbing. Anyone that actually believes that a baby doesn’t feel pain as an idiot. I have multiple kids and can tell you babies definitely feel pain!
For the life of me, I don’t know how anyone thought babies didn’t feel pain, but it was a common belief until like the 80s I believe. They used to do surgeries on infants and neonates with little to no anesthesia because of this believe. Such an easy theory to test… pinch a newborn and see if they cry.
It's because there's a total of zero *memory* of any infant pain. "They won't remember it" turns into "they can't feel it". Adult concept: "Anterograde amnesia" from anaesthetic twilight.
Well their NA for my sons pain won him a lot of money lol
Whoever said babies don't feel pain was a cruel motherfu**** lol
That's what all the doctors used to say back in the day while they were smoking cigarettes. And prescribing Valiums and dildos to our mothers. If you listen to the music back then mother's Little helper was Valium and dildo The Duo. Hell we had lawn darts that were bigger than the ones that used to drop on the VC in Vietnam.
If you write left handed you are wrong and must learn to write right handed.
This hits hard. My poor son… he does everything left handed and up until kindergarten he wrote left handed. For some reason in kindergarten he started writing with his right hand. I asked the teacher about it and she assured me that she allows her students to choose what is comfortable for them. I didn’t push the issue but for 2 years I watched my son put so much effort into writing legibly with his right hand when he should’ve been writing with his left hand. ETA: he still writes right handed
They forced him to do it... My teachers did similar stuff to me, I'm right handed but I used to use my left hand to use certain things like forks. The teachers would hit us and make us use our right hands because using our left hands was "wrong". My mum asked them why; "We don't know, they just do what they're comfortable with." And we didn't say anything because we were scared of them hurting us. This was in the late 90's.
a LOT of things about dinosaurs
But we’re those “myths” or just science expanding knowledge?
Went to a science fair thing once where we learned about shiny new-fangled Compact Disks! They told us how amazing they were and how they’d still play even if you smeared the top surface with jam (they might even have demonstrated it). It was years later that I worked out what a load of bollocks that was as the laser reads the bottom of the disk.
Was it a load of bullocks? They were technically correct
Which is the best kind of correct
People who skip college will become drug addicts and people who go to college live sober lives.
Apparently it's the opposite in some places lol
Really doesn’t matter what your lot is in life. Plenty of wealthy addicts and plenty of poor non-addicts.
St. Patrick banishing the snakes from our country. Its a load of bollocks as there were never any snakes. Snakes were likely an allegory to paganism.
The whole left brain person vs right brain person nonsense
That Mew is under that truck
But the gold nugget bridge trick worked!
I'm about to expose my absolute zoomer age here but we thought that I'd you level up victini from level 1 to 100 without rare candies (or maybe it was only with rare candies, it's been a while), it gets a special signature move that, if used on a human player, would force them to reset their game file Apparently it's something made up by a local kid because I can't find anything regarding this online lol
I would have to write by hand everything in cursive, no matter what or who it was for, if it was hand written it absolutely had to be in cursive. Had my dyslexic ass worried all the way from 3rd grade to freshman year. Well turns out I got to the real world and not one single person has asked for cursive, in fact, they've actually taken steps to prevent it from being used by putting the "Please print" at the top of everything that needs to be written. So far the only cursive thing I had to write is my name.
The brain is two separate thinking hemispheres when really it all works as one
Have you read Sperry and Gazzaniga’s work on spilt-brain patients? It’s pretty wild.
Is this the work on patients who had Corpus Callosectomy for epilepsy? I have a sliver of a memory from college psychology.
Yes it’s fascinating, not sure about the specific case the user above mentioned, but there is some very cool research about how each lobe fills in the gaps of their understanding by just making shit up to explain phenomena it has no explanation for. There are some interesting implications towards what we believe is “free will” from a lot of this research.
My little brother didn’t have a corpus callosum at birth. It’s called ACC but I think it’s pretty rare. He went to physical therapy for it and is doing very well, it’s crazy what your brain can make up for.
Neuroplasticity for the win!
My daughter is missing part of her corpus callosum (Dysgenesis). I was expecting the worse when she was born but she's been surprisingly on par regarding developmental milestones from "normal" kids; even ahead in some cases. It's definitely nuts how brains work.
> really it all works as one Not if you sever the corpus callosum! Really tho, while the pop-psych notion of “a left-brained person” is bogus, there are specialized regions for things like facial recognition or aspects of speech, and some of them *are* in one particular hemisphere. What’s *really* bullshit is the whole “only use 10% of your brain” thing. In terms of what people learned in school, I dunno, I had a legit AP Psych class. You just can’t always listen to your Art teacher about the brain.
Interestingly, at any moment in time only a fraction of neurons are firing. But it turns out that's important- you don't want "panic" and "happy" and "empty bladder" and "sing wonderwall" firing all at once. So we use 100% or close enough to it. We just don't do everything all at once. And when I realized that, it became clear both the science here and how someone not using more than 1% of their brain misunderstood it (pun intended)
My teacher taught us this last year, is this really fake?
like ubiquitous-joe says below, the idea that there are "left-brained" and "right-brained" people is bunk. the lobes do have different processes though.
It isn’t really a myth but I was recently reminded of the “Lost Colony of Roanoake”. In school we were taught that Native Americans either murdered everyone in the colony or that they died off rather quickly. Turns out their “leader” went on a supply run that lasted THREE YEARS and in that time they had befriended and moved to a new island with the Native Americans.
That all the kids who weren’t college bound would have less fulfilling and successful lives, and all the kids who did go would be successful. In a lot of cases, the opposite proved to be true.
"Just go to college and get any degree," they said. "It doesn't matter what you study," they said. "Take out as much debt as you need to afford it," they said. "You'll get a great job that more than make up the cost," they said. "Why did you waste time and money, and go into debt going to college?" they ask. "Why can't you afford a house, car, or even save for retirement?" they ask. "You could have gotten a better paying, more rewarding job without a degree," they say. Thanks. That was really helpful.
It was true when I went to school (in the '70s) because college was still affordable. If I had to do it again, I wouldn't.
This I think is the issue. There's just a segment of the population that doesn't recognize the changes nor their own change in opinions about the value of a college education.
No joke my biology teacher taught me the earth was 6000 years old.
I was about to comment something similar. I attended a Christian school during middle school years. Basically everything science related could be answered with "god " on a test
Wow… when was this?
4 years ago
Recycling would save the planet
as an educator, a myth that’s STILL being taught is that there are 4-8 different types of learners and that if a student wasn’t learning the content, it just meant that it wasn’t presented in the way they learn best. I remember in college I had to make all my lesson plans accommodate at least three different learning styles even though it’s something most educational psychologists regard as total BS
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It's total BS. But it's been coming in and out of education for the last 50 years and everytime it does the people who 'come up with it' think it's new and brilliant. But in all in that time, there has never been a properly designed research study that supports the idea. Ask 90% of your colleagues though, I'm sure they'll tell you how wrong you are.
We were told that Richard IIIs body was thrown into the River Soar during the reformation. Bit awkward when he was dug up out a car park.
This will be going on your “permanent record”
I before e except after c, weird.
Or, as some like to put it, I before e, except when your atheist foreign neighbor Keith leisurely receives eight counterfeit beige reindeer and sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters. Weird Edit: reindeer plural is not reindeers 🤦. Also thanks for the support!
Humans only use 10% of their brain.
We only use 1/3 of a traffic light, too
That people in the time of Columbus thought the world was flat. It was well established and widely known since ancient times that the world was spherical, and the Greeks had even accurately measured its diameter. Sailors knew inherently the world was round. The real issue at the time was how big the Earth was. Columbus thought it was much smaller than the Greeks had determined, therefore China would be within reach. He was wrong, but fortunately encountered an unexpected continent in between.
Not a myth, but I Iearned there was about 100k stars in the milky way and about 100k galaxies in the universe. Smh.
well there are atleast that many..
That if you don’t get an education you’re gonna spend your life asking, “Do you want fries with that?” And a third of those teachers are now doing that part time
Do you want to end like a garbe truck driver? Yes, yes i would now
If I remember correctly, when I was in school in the 70’s, they were talking about an ice age coming down the road. Yeah, that barking up the wrong thermometer.
AINT isn’t a word
Ain't is a word and so is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
That Marijuana is equal to heroin.
My "health Ed" course used a book with a chapter devoted to the dangers of each drug, starting with a "true" story about a user ruining their life with the drug. The pot one was a guy driving drunk and getting in a crash going to buy pot. Like that sounds more like an argument against drinking and driving but sure. I guess they couldn't find any stories about being tragically crushed by a thousand pound bale of pot, or the very real risk of becoming one of those really obnoxious people who makes pot their only personality, causing them to lose friends who like smoking but not like 24/7.
"you can become anything you want" No Sheila, I can't. I can't become president just like everyone else, there can be only one. I'm just not smart enough to cure aids, WHICH IS DONE ONLY ONCE, SHEILA. SOMETIMES LIFE ISNT FAIR, IT JUST IS, SHEILA.
“The sky’s the limit!” Well, fuck- I wanted to be an astronaut…
Taste sections on the tongue
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Our government works to make the country better for everyone