KurtagagWhat was a fact taught to you in school that has been proven false during your lifetime?
BjörnThat tastes have specific regions on the tongue. We actually had to protest when that shit was taught at our son’s elementary school. Don’t know if it came up for our younger daughter.
Poor kids at school had old atlases where Germany was still separated. But I guess that’s just obsolete and not false knowledge.
Yeah, I remember that one. We even did an experiment to “prove” it. I was like, “I kinda taste it everywhere”. I don’t remember what the punishment for that one was exactly, but it was pretty severe, and I didn’t do anything wrong.
I remember getting detention on first grade for telling my classmate that a whale had beached here in finland. It happened, it was on the news. Same thing again after I told my classmate about some asteroid that is going to kill us all. On 6th grade the whole class was given detention for not having music books with us because the teachers had decided to change the schedule that morning.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to become teachers because they like being in a room full of people who won’t question them.
That particular teacher in the story was also let go at the end of the year, though, related to her treatment of students. It was kind of dramatic.
egretsThere’s a weird thing here. I totally accept that the traditional tongue map is pseudoscience and debunked, but if you’re paying attention to something like wine or good chocolate, letting it spread across your whole tongue really does seem change the flavor and bring new aspects to what you’re tasting.
My subjective impression is that there is some effect to exposing the whole tongue to a stimulus, and I’d really like to understand it more - but when you search the web, you pretty much just get deconstructive articles about the old model, and not much about what might actually be happening.
Trickle down economics (well, it’s not like there was a time when it was true)
flicker“You need to learn this because you won’t always have a calculator on you!”
That wasn’t so much a “fact” told in school as it was a prediction, and it was true for them. Some people carried pocket calculators, but most people didn’t. Some supermarkets has calculators built into their carts, but most didn’t.
Failing to predict society’s norms in 20 years isn’t the same as teaching a false fact.
ThoGotThe same was told to me even as everybody already had mobile phones with calculators in them or even iPhones
LouSlashSome supermarkets has calculators built into their carts
wat
Tiny photocell powered calculators used to be everywhere. There were “thin” ones to fit in your Costanza sized wallet, Mousepads with them built in, and my wristwatch in 6th grade had one with tiny rubber keys.
It was a magical time till be alive. 5138008
Yep, back in the 90s they were in some places. My local supermarket had one like this, except without the annoying ad on the left side.
Basic mathematical literacy is a prerequisite to being able to use a calculator.
Yeah but its such a hassle to find, so…
I feel have super power by being to calculate accurate tips without needing to crack out my phone.
- Pluto is a planet
Evil KittyPLUTO IS A PLANET!
I thought it was Mickey Mouse’s dog 🤔!
IT’S BOTH
What? As in Schrödinger’s cat? Interesting!
Why does a mouse own a dog? And how come the mouse is also friends with another dog? What’s going on there?
Ok Jerry.
This was my first thought as well!
Pluto is a great test for what types of person someone is.
If someone says Pluto is still a planet. They have a personality where they are immovable and can’t accept scientific change.
If they do say pluto is a new kind of dwarf planet they arw more accepting of new information and belive in the scientific method.
It’s a great quick test when meeting news people.
I recently heard that they discovered hundreds of Pluto sizes “planets” beyond Pluto, so they had to decided do we add 100 more planets or just demote Pluto to planetoid and ignore the rest
Eris? Didn’t Sephiroth kill her?
So presumably NASA is anti-science ?
Because they have redetermined that Pluto is a planet.
Or the third option of they recognize that scientifically Pluto is a dwarf planet and no longer a ‘full’ planet, but they also anthropomorphize everything to an unhealthy degree and don’t want to hurt the feelings of Pluto by saying it isn’t a planet anymore
agamemnonymousWell, Pluto being reclassified as a dwarf planet doesn’t really have anything to do with the scientific method. “Planet” is a manmade concept, we just changed the definition for that classification to avoid having to add the dozens of bodies we discovered since Pluto that would have also met the old definition.
I know - can the person accept hundreds of planets and that ours is less special, or do they need to change a definition (including exceptions) to keep their world view.
That humans came out of Africa once and then settled the rest of the world. In reality there was a constant migration of humans in and out of Africa for millennia while the rest of the world was being populated (and of course it hasn’t ever stopped since).
I love how much DNA analysis has completely upended so much “known” archaeology and anthropology from even just a couple decades ago.
Whats about DNA??
Gene sequencing wasn’t really a thing (at least an affordable thing) until the 2010s, but once it was widely available archaeologists started using it on pretty much anything they could extract a sample from. Suddenly it became possible to track the migrations of groups over time by tracing gene similarities, determine how much intermarrying there must have been within groups, etc. Even with individual sites it has been used to determine when leadership was hereditary vs not, or how wealth was distributed (by looking at residual food dna on teeth). It really has revolutionized the field and cast a lot of old-school theories (often taken for truth) into the dustbin.
Wonder how many new ones it’s creating.
Scientist: ‘Look at this science thing that is definitely true because DNA!’ Narrator: ‘It wasn’t true’
chaosCruiserJunk DNA.
Junk DNA is still a thing - some parts of thr genome are verifiably junk, and the rest is just “unkown”. It’s just that some of the “unknown” bits back in the day have now been found to actually be useful. At least this is my understanding as a non expert.
Various parts that don’t directly make proteins will regulate their production or carry out other vital tasks. Those systems take s lot of space, and all of it was considered junk DNA when it wasn’t understood. Biochemistry has taken huge leaps within the last 50 years, so many notions have been either updated or discarded.
I was taught that the moon landing was fake.
LainTrainJesus Christ, how? Why? I’m so sorry
𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬How planes generate lift.
Did they finally find that out? Last time I checked even PhDs in aerospace engineering still added “we think” at the end of their explanations.
NASA has a webpage on aeronautics that says lift is the mechanical force created by a solid object turning a flow of liquid or gas. They also have an equation for calculating lift for any solid object/fluid combo.
The wing experiment with hundreds of pressure sensors shows lower pressure on top and more on bottom.
It is known yeah. Another user commented it. If you take a wing and put it in a wind tunnel you can put sensors in its wake to measure the pressure. By manipulating the fluid flow you can change the pressure. So low pressure on top and high pressure on bottom. Multiply that by the surface area and you get a force. Smaller force on top of the wing, lower force on the bottom of the wing. So the wing goes up. Of course theres some physics going on in the fluid that explains the change in pressure, but this is just a quick and simply-put explanation because I took a fat amount of zquil and am tired.
Source: Im getting a PhD in aerospace engineering
hm, I just read through a few publications pertaining the Navier–Stokes equations and the scientific community still didn’t seem to find out why they’re not 100% accurate even in lab conditions, is that correct?
What doesn’t help is that plane pilots are basically taught a different version of physics to spare them from liquid dynamics and to see the forces on an aerofoil as independent ones which makes it all pretty confusing for a layperson trying to get a basic understanding of both and marry the two
kingthrillgoreTaste buds are arranged by flavor in four sections of the tongue. Complete load of horseshit.
The multiplication table is still fact even if you have a calculator.
6 x 6 mothefuckers. Y’all tell me that didn’t immediately form “36” in your brain.
SonotsugipaaNope, went through “(6 × 5) + 6”. Slightly slower, but much more flexible since you can do that with any (base 10 representation of a) number that has a reasonable number of digits.
What? How is multiplying by 5 more convenient than any other number?
When dealing with base 10 representations, multiplying by 10 is a simple matter of adding zeroes;
dividing numbers that end with a zero is (usually) an afterthought;
doing both operations in that sequence is the same thing is (usually) equally trivial, the only effortful thing I have to do is adding or subtracting a multiplicand, once or twice or thrice.
It’s not easier than having the result imprinted in my memory, but it cuts away ~ three quarters of the table.
Cactus_HeadI was thinking of a bed for some reason
Is it so bad to know your multiplication tables? It’s lowk a quality of life thing yknow. imo it’s just a good thing to know so you aren’t entirely reliant on the calculator for an answer.
I need to use multiplication at work every single day, it’s extremely handy to remember them.
Study and work hard will make you successful.
Depends on your definition of successful
Broadly speaking, failing to put in effort does tend to lead to worse outcomes.
…Unless your parents have the last name “Musk” or “Trump”.
treadfulThat I was a republican. The teacher gave out this political alignment quiz that was incredibly biased asking things like “do you like lower taxes or higher taxes?” and “do you like more freedom or less freedom?” All the questions basically lead you to the same answers. So the entire class basically had the same result.
This was in middle school so I wasn’t even politically engaged yet. I didn’t realize how crazy this was until years later.