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[–] 332 points 1 year ago (34 children)
  • [–] 186 points 1 year ago (16 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 68 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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").

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 37 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    "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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago*

    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

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year 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 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.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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."

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  • [+] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year 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.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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

    Why would they just lie about Pluto like that?

    #Pluto4Lyf

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year 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!

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