Can you think of any now?
Submitted 2 weeks ago by LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone/posts/2l/Vt/2lVtS7OeYhBiPfn.jpg
Comments
ijon_the_human@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
bstix@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_common_misconceptions
The history list was most interesting in my opinion.
Nikls94@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Obligatory “there’s a xkcd for anything, isn’t it?”
neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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:
- “The original 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds lead to a mass panic.” – It did not. However, rumors of a panic spread via newspaper op-eds about how it was a bad idea to get your news on any other medium besides newspapers. Citation: slate.com/…/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-…
- “You can boil a frog in a pot by gradually raising the temperature of the water.” – This doesn’t work; frogs just jump out when they get uncomfortable. Citation: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- “Lemmings march off cliffs to their deaths because they blindly follow one another.” – They don’t. Citation: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions
- “…but I saw it in a Disney documentary!” – Nope. Turns out the filmmakers paid local kids to capture a bunch of lemmings, spin them around to make them dizzy, then manually threw them off cliffs and filmed it. Citation: hyperallergic.com/…/white-wilderness-disney-natur…
PraiseTheSoup@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
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!
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 2 weeks ago
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.
Landless2029@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Agent641@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They are skilled with bricklaying and mining tools too ⛏️
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Let’s go! Door creaks
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
PC game “Lemmings”
Best game of all time IMHO. “I’ll just try one more level” followed by the sunrise.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
I thought everyone knew the lemmings thing was made up. But it’s become a bit of a meme nonetheless.
neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.
Hadriscus@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
I don’t think there’s a time when everyone knows something
JargonWagon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
On the lemmings one, have you never seen hexbear?
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What about the BBc documentary with the spaghetti trees?
ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
It still routes around damage, but if all the roads are closed you can’t get in or out of somewhere.
cobysev@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
[…] 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.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks ago
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.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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”. Maybe that’s just me, but I suspect that small-i “internet” was never really a term that was widely used, if at all.
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Cut cables mostly just slow the internet. Probably very few remaining places without plenty of redundancy.
Soapbox@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
The mitochondria better still be the power house of the cell. Or we are going to flip some tables and burn the place down.
Faydaikin@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
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?
TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
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
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
They were a 1980s superband with Robert Palmer, I think.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
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.
cdf12345@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
When cells devide there’s a top cell and a bottom cell, the bottom cell is where the powerhouse is generated
Speculater@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No one tell them.
DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Oil and gas is the powerhouse of the cell - Exxon Mobile
tetris11@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
T H R I L L H O
dethedrus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell!
shortypants@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
1987 Edison was a genius and invented everything, Turns out he was actually the Elon Musk of his time.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Edison being a giant dick of a patent troll is one of the main reasons Hollywood exists. I’m not sure Musk has anything that impactful on his resume.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’d say PayPal was a pretty big deal but I’m not sure what his level of involvement was
JamesBoeing737MAX@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Intellectual jokes like this are one of the reasons I’m on Lemmy.
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
AND he electrocuted an elephant.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
He was trying to prove that electricity was dangerous. Even at the time though a lot of people pointed out that the voltage used was not the voltage used in mains electrics so it was basically a pointless thing to do and people quite upset about the elephant. He did receive a fair amount of bad press for it.
blargh513@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Oh, it wasn’t just elephants. He did it with dogs, monkeys, etc. This wasn’t a one-time thing, he provided this “demonstration” on a variety of occasions.
All because he wanted the world to adopt his standard for electrical transmission, direct current (DC) instead of Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (AC).
Tesla was a brilliant engineer and inventor. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing (though later he did get a little nutty). Edison just yelled at engineers he hired to do work for him.
I am so sad that Tesla’s name has been ruined. He was wildly intelligent and though he was a prominent figure in his prime, he died broke. It’s not bad enough that he went out like that, now we have a fucking clown pissing on his grave by using his name to sell his bullshit nazimobiles.
sharkaccident@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Don’t get me started. He did not invent the lightbulb. Did he “perfect” it? Maybe? But only after trial and error of 100’s of filaments including human hair.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Can it even be said that it was perfected when later we switched from carbon filament to tungsten, and from there to halogen-surrounded tungsten.
And on the other side, Edison’s lamp wasn’t even the first one to be mass produced and commercially sold.
There’s a certain style of education that really wants to draw a hard line between “before the thing” and “after the thing”, and credit its invention to a single guy. But in really the line is quite wide and fuzzy.
logicbomb@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
“The atomic bombings were necessary” was something we were expected to internalize as an indisputable hard fact, like gravity and oxbow lakes.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
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”
pageflight@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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!”
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Class of 2003.
Food wheel was taught in elementary school. As were the taste bud “zones” and the American Dream.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 2 weeks ago
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.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
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.
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
crapwittyname@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Five senses; taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, acceleration, temperature, body configuration, pain, balance, time, hunger…
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I can think of a few.
- That T-Rex’ vision was based on movement.
- 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.
masterbaexunn@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t care if it’s wrong, Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could blow himself
WanderFree@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The United States is a constitutional Republic/democracy with 3 co-equal branches of government…
ninjabard@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
nuggie_ss@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
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.
primrosepathspeedrun@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks ago
The constitution of the united States.
bebabalula@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
USA is a democracy
it_depends_man@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The “tongues have taste zones” thing is the only thing that comes to mind.
Schlemmy@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
‘‘You won’t have a calculator in your pocket all the time!’’
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Left brain/right brain pseudoscience
etherphon@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Work hard and you will be rewarded and taken care of. LOLLLLLLLLLL.
shplane@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The US south treated their slaves well. Even in high school, I was like “mmmm you suuuure about that?”
derry@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Alpha wolf is a lie.
Stupidmanager@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
qaz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
recently_Coco@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
IQ tests!
They are standardized eugenics and should be rethought entirely
BallShapedMan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen goes a long way to accomplish this. At least it did for me.
wer2@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
When I was in school, we were taught that vaccines work. /s
argh_another_username@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
www.schoolmyths.com
It’s a collaborative site.
danekrae@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
Kushan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
“Planet X (Planet 9) exists and explains gravitational pull”
Weird conspiracy theories were not taught at my school.
Also:
The updated understanding emerged 7 years before the photo appeared?
This is why websites need downvotes.
Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Where did you go to school? I’ve never heard of either of those before.
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
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 60sw
“Sugar causes hyperactivity in children” is mentioned to have been corrected around 1995 but stops making the list from 1980 onward.
I wanna recommend it to others but i cant in this state.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.”
smeg@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
That isn’t a response to the initial statement at all, which is very much an opinion or prediction rather than any claim to be a fact. I’m suddenly feeling pretty sceptical about this website.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
RamenJunkie@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Why would they just lie about Pluto like that?
#Pluto4Lyf
Arioxel@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
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.
trolololol@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
dethedrus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
That’s messed up!
SSUPII@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Both 1960 and 2020 are showing the same 6 facts, and the facts shown were debunked years before 2020
heydo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Oh fuck this site!
Goddamn I’m old
noxypaws@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
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!
blackbeards_bounty@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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