1987 Edison was a genius and invented everything, Turns out he was actually the Elon Musk of his time.
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.
I’d say PayPal was a pretty big deal but I’m not sure what his level of involvement was
Intellectual jokes like this are one of the reasons I’m on Lemmy.
AND he electrocuted an elephant.
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.
He wanted to show that AC lines with their heigh voltages are dangerous, as he sold low voltage DC power.
Edison’s electricity was the same 110volts. But it it was 110v from generators to peoples homes and thus suffered greatly from resistance losses.
Telsa’s AC however used high voltages for distribution and step down to 110v at the final destination, so the resistance losses were much lower. Edison’s propaganda conveniently glosses over that fact.
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.
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.
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 really the line is quite wide and fuzzy.
It’s a collaborative site.
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.
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.
The fucking MythBusters did an episode on that like 20 years ago.
Buzzfeed out here doing the real work
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”).
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.
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.
I remember even testing that one out as a kid, observing that it obviously wasn’t true, and bringing up my experience to my teacher. “No” was basically the only response I got. How did a myth like that catch on when it was so easily testable by literally anybody?
Ageism, it is always implied that adults are the ones right - because what adult would accept a child to disprove their logic?
It’s also one of those myths which people forget after a year; and even if its encountered again, it is treated as insignificant.
the landing page mentions “your tongue has taste zones”. though on the other hand brontosauruses are real again
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
You still occasionally should, let it go all the way to dead, but for calibration reasons instead of safety reasons
That was the original reason. Ni-cad batteries develop a “memory” if they aren’t fully discharged loose capacity.
With modern Lithium ion batteries its because as their capacity decreases over time the BMS can’t always keep up and recover the 100% point unless you’re occasionally draining it all the way. This can result in someone charging their battery to say 97% and leaving it for hours to reach a 100% it will never reach. This is potentially unsafe as it heats up the battery.
Edit: Autocorrupt beansed up my comment
You’re probably already familiar with this resource, but Battery University has some interesting and useful information about batteries and it’s accessible enough for the layperson.
I was always told to always leave it charged from 20% to 80% and draining it to 0% was a bad thing.
This is correct with unmanaged batteries. Batteries with a BMS however will never get below whatever voltage is set as their 0% unless allowed to sit at 0% for long enough that e n t r o p y occurs and the charge slowly dissipates over time. This will happen even with a fully charged battery left to its own devices (ba dum tss) for too long.
The point of the BMS is to manage the health of the potentially dangerous lithium batteries, and as long as they are used within spec it should keep voltages from getting so low the batteries enter a state of deep discharge, as well as prevent overcharging due to imbalanced charging rates or other similar issues.
Used is the important word here. A battery must be used to maintain it’s health. A battery must also not be abused to maintain its health.
Now none of that touches on what you said, but was important background for this to make sense: The BMS will report to you whatever values it deems safe charging and Discharging limits based on factors like internal resistance and temperature. As a result 20-80% of an unmanaged battery is close to 0-100% of a managed one in new condition because the BMS will cut power before unsafe discharge limits are reached, and will stop charging to prevent overcharge once those limits are reached.
“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.
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
Where did you go to school? I’ve never heard of either of those before.
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.
Ah sorry, I totally misread that lol!
I think a lot of those are highly dependent on where a person went to school and who their teacher was, because some of them are pretty far out there.
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.
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.
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.”
What you were taught
“Mobile phones will never replace desktop computers”
What we know now
Mobile devices became the primary computing platform for billions of people worldwide.
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.
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.
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!
Both 1960 and 2020 are showing the same 6 facts, and the facts shown were debunked years before 2020
Years since graduation:
Oh fuck this site!
Goddamn I’m old
Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet due to not clearing its orbital path.
Why would they just lie about Pluto like that?
#Pluto4Lyf
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.
Huh. I don’t think national pride that was a factor in my disappointment. I was more sad because 9 is a better number than 8, and Pluto is just a cute little guy.
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.
That definition exists because if you want to include Pluto and be consistent you have to include dozens of other bodies.
So it was basically laziness on the part of the international astronomical community.
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?
That’s messed up!
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.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
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
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.
I had this really awesome kind of angry and nihilistic history teacher in H.S. who offered an elective course that studied the repeated patterns through history leading up to genocide. It covered Armenia, Rwanda, and the Holocaust.
I don’t know if it was just the fact that we looked at the repeated overlaps between human behavior vs just memorizing historical events, but if more people took a course like Crimes against Humanity maybe they would learn to spot those clear patterns of human behavior that somehow happen over and over again without anyone noticing.
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.
Yep, the Holocaust didn’t happen overnight. It always starts as a slow slide into genocide, but once it picks up steam it turns into an avalanche. It drives me nuts that people keep pretending we should be entertaining any of this as just normal politics. The reaching across the aisle bullshit was insane a year ago (and really 10 years ago), but at this point it is literally enabling this shit to happen. You’re a collaborator.
That quote is being proven true right now though?
People don’t really remember what happened with the nazis. Most of the people who actually lived that past are dead now.
And the vast mojority of people lack enough empathy/understanding to be able to ‘walk a mile in their shoes’ as it were and extrapolate the horrors from the most readily available histories.
The quote isn’t
those who remember the past won’t repeat it
That’s the ol’ Oracle of Delphi phenomenon of misreading the claim: the claim still holds if everyone is doomed. Also, are you claiming MAGA remembers shit?
Not sure it is about remembering as much as how one’s brain works as some are more emotional than intellectual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
The history list was most interesting in my opinion.
Obligatory “there’s a xkcd for anything, isn’t it?”
‘‘You won’t have a calculator in your pocket all the time!’’
USA is a democracy
The United States is a constitutional Republic/democracy with 3 co-equal branches of government…
I mean it technically still is. de jure at least
It’s like this:
We need the “under an fascist hybrid regime with a judicial junta (aka: “supreme court”) and a mostly rubber-stamp legislature filled with cultists” to the label in the USA page.
Edit: Worth reading the discussion page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:United_States
I’m not sure that Russia really counts as anything other than an actual dictatorship. It’s not like there’s a free and open choice and people just keep voting against their own interests like in the US, the elections are of course rigged and there are no opponents anyway. Anyone that might stand against him gets assassinated.
Of course Trump probably will try and go that route as well, but he hasn’t done it yet, and he hasn’t consolidated his power there are still people in positions of some authority pushing back against him.
Hence why “hybrid regime” seems like the best descriptor of the US right now.
it’s all just fascism with chrome plating and a spoiler
Nah, not tacky enough. Trump would go with gold.
Work hard and you will be rewarded and taken care of. LOLLLLLLLLLL.
A short list of things you didn’t realize were false, stolen from the most recent episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast (on Intellectual Humility, Sept 14 2025):
- “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 through any other medium besides newspapers. Citation: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html
- “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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- “Lemmings march off cliffs to their deaths because they blindly follow one another.” – They don’t. Citation: https://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: https://hyperallergic.com/545742/white-wilderness-disney-nature-documentary/
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!
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.
Huh. TIL.
My favourite DMA game was Blood Money.
Good old times!
Thanks for bringing that memory up!
Yeah I saw lemmings die all the time growing up!!
PC game “Lemmings”
Best game of all time IMHO. “I’ll just try one more level” followed by the sunrise.
They are skilled with bricklaying and mining tools too ⛏️
I’m not sure if “skilled” is the word, but they get by
Let’s go! Door creaks
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.
I thought everyone knew the lemmings thing was made up. But it’s become a bit of a meme nonetheless.
I don’t think there’s a time when everyone knows something
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.
The book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen goes a long way to accomplish this. At least it did for me.
When I was in school, we were taught that vaccines work. /s
School experiences are too varied for such a site to exist. Examples:
Climate change was universally agreed upon to exist and be caused by people 30 years ago. For some reason it no longer appears to be.
Leif Erikson was taught to us back then but you’ll find people today that celebrate Columbus.
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.
Yeah, but that doesn’t stop baby toy markers from including that shit in every product
Oh, thanks! That makes so much more sense!
On a tangential note, I find hilarious which songs my toddler picks up and which ones are immediately forgotten. Somehow APT and Hey Jude are the shit, most of everything else doesn’t stick. Wonder why…
I think it’s just songs with the right kind of beat that they like. My sister’s kid is very partial to Uptown Girl, of course she doesn’t know the lyrics but she can sort of sing the tune. It took me a while to work out what it was.
…
"What you were taught
“Flu shots give you the flu”What we know now
A common misconception…Updated understanding emerged around 2020"
Updated for whom? Anti-vaccine idiots?
Well some shots do work like that. But you usually don’t get symptoms unless you are immunocompromised and it’s a live (but weakened) version of the virus.
They were just a little wrong, “Flu shots give you a flu”.
There are 2 types of these shots essentially:
- the pathogen is put into some other thing that creates stuff that fights against said pathogen. That stuff is then extracted and given in the shot.
- the pathogen itself is processed and given to you. This causes your body to make stuff that fights against the pathogens. Your body then vaguely remembers how the pathogen felt and hence, increases the reaction your body does to any attack from a similar pathogen that comes the next time. This is the one corresponding to the above quote.
Of course, if your immune system is weak, the processed pathogen can be enough to give you quite a bit of a problem.
I know there are different types of vaccines, but really, experience should be enough to prove this assumption wrong many times over. I guess people just don’t get their flu shots…
I went through the two websites posted here for graduation year 2008. The only incorrect thing I was taught that I still believed was:
“Learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) determine how you best learn”
False. Huh.
I just picked up a book on this! There is, of course, an incredibly racist history to the use of these concepts.
Those were disproven long before then. They are interesting to think about as different sensory inputs to engage, but are complete nonsense as far as learning styles.
…So what learning styles are there?
Teacher here. Now we get taught that the main mechanism for learning is attention, usually triggered by a combo of motivation and diversity (as opposed to monotonicity). So you should hit a variety of teaching styles not because different students react better to some of them but because it triggers their attention and motivation mechanisms. We also get taught that switching too much tires the students out, so we should pick some 3 types of activities and rotate between them, tending to reduce the traditional lecture style.
Oh man, I could go on an in infinite rant about all this… but well, this is the recent theory. (Dated 2024)
In my world I’d adopt the West Wing teacher philosophy: competition to be a teacher should be fierce and pay should start at six figures. You all are literally shaping the world’s future and yet many teachers I know have to purchase their own supplies and deal with thick headed administrators that place politics over pedagogy.
Thanks for what you do. I appreciate your work.
I teach at university level. Fixed positions are few and far between, pay is okay (if you somehow forget all the seniority you need to get to this positions), number of teaching hours is very high, there is no incentive to teach well. One of the results is that you are not selected for being a good teacher, but for the other components of your cv.
My brother had to do that for the military at one point. I don’t know what the point was because apparently nothing ever came of it they just did the tests got their results and then apparently everyone forgot about it, because everyone carried on getting trained in exactly the same manner anyway.
Oh yeah it never was applied. I just remember one of my high school English (Language Arts) teachers talking about it.
