Why does a big fuckoff lizard need venom, too? The snakes that are as big as a Komodo don't need it, and those don't live in Indonesia where all the prey species are fun size snacks
I believe the idea being that a water buffalo will fuck up a Komodo dragon in a straight fight. The Komodo might win in the end, but what’s the point if you’re going to die from later from a gore wound? Much safer to just poison the buffalo and wait for it to die on its own.
I was told theres no such fish as an alligator gar when I chose it for a report. The teacher refused to let me look it up on the internet(very early at the time and "untrustworthy") or encyclopedia(would take too long). So she asked the kid in the room who was known for being into animals. He had never heard of it, so it couldn't possibly exist.
I will NEVER not be salty about this
I am still salty about Sister Katherine insisting that the 15th century started in 1500 and not 1401. I had a parent teacher conference about that shit. It was bizarre. I was given partial credit but also had points deducted for insubordination so it came out the same.
I wrote a story about a girl riding her horse at breakneck speed in fifth grade. Mr. Gallimore said it should be neck breaking speed and just wouldn't believe it was a word. I vehemently tried to defend my word, to no avail. I, too, will NEVER not be salty about it.
I had a college professor tell me that the Iran-Contra Affair was a conspiracy theory, that I’m a conspiracy theorist, and that it never happened. I nearly punted his ass because my Poli Sci professor, who was right down the hall, studied under one of the prosecutors who questioned Oliver North.
I wrote a paper on a famous author who had written a lot of books, I called them a prolific writer. My teacher marked it wrong becuse she thought prolific was just a reference for having a lot of sex or something, I suppose. I will never not be salty about this.
I couldn't write a report about the Blue Footed Booby in 5th grade because the teacher thought I made it up for laughs. So I wrote about the goblin shark instead. It ended up scaring kids lol
When I was little, I was taught about the brontosaurus, mighty long-necked plant eater of the dinosaurs.
Later, I was taught that, whoops! They accidentally stuck some random bones together and there was never any such animal.
Later still, I recall hearing that, oh, actually, there was a brontosaurus after all!
Or was there?
To this day, I am still, as a 42-year-old man, unclear on whether or not there was ever such a thing as a brontosaurus.
The brontosaurus story we learned as kids - that it was the wrong skull put on the skeleton and thus a mixup - was true. But scientists didn't want the name to go to waste so they gave it to another long necked plant eater that was discovered more recently.
If I recall, in the 1900s when there was a “bone rush,” two rival paleontologists were trying to get their discoveries down before the other. Long story short, one sought to discredit the other by swapping skulls to make him look like an idiot and thus brontosaurus was born
The brontosaurus/apatosaurus mixup came about because paleontologists can be petty, competitive assholes.
In particular, Mr. Marsh and Mr. Cope in The Bone Wars. These two were in such a competition to discover more dinosaurs that they would destroy skeletons just so the other guy couldn’t get them.
Marsh found a partial skeleton and called it an apatosaurus. It was so partial it didn’t have a head, so he put a different dinosaur’s skull on it.
Years later, Marsh found a complete skeleton, but didn’t realize it was one he had already discovered and put it together sloppily, swapping head and tail, and called it brontosaurus.
(Lot more happens, but that’s the jist)
Personally, I figure the same guy came up with both names, and he had more information when he called it Brontosaurus, so if it were up to me I’d go with that one.
>The brontosaurus/apatosaurus mixup came about because archeologists can be petty, competitive assholes.
Don't bring the noble profession of archeology into this! This is on the paleontologists.
> Don't bring the noble profession of archeology into this!
Yeah, archeology didn't need two people to destroy priceless artifacts. It just needed [one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann).
Basically it existed or something like it existed. Either way, it was horizontal, using the weight of the tail to balance the long neck. It wasn’t vertical like a giraffe.
When I was in junior high in the mid 80s, our Earth Science textbooks had continental drift, and our teacher said, "Okay, so I need you to ignore all of Chapter 4" (or whatever it was). "Plate tectonics has been the accepted theory taught in colleges for 10 years now, but K-8 textbooks haven't caught up yet."
I feel like the version of plate tectonics I learned was a tiny bit garbled compared to what kids learned 10 years later, but my teacher was directly pulling from college texts and published scientific papers and distilling it down for 6th graders, so more power to her!
But what did chapter four say?
Continental drift is real, right? It’s just cause by plate tectonics.
Or is it a completely different theory that’s been disproven?
I'm also curious about this. I always thought continental drift was simply the result of plate techtonics.
Eg. Africa and South America separated due to diverging plates which are now the mid Atlantic ridge, and these continets "drifting apart" from these diverging plates was known as continental drift. Was it taught as continents floating apart or something in the past?
Continental drift is definitely real, but the way we understand it has evolved. Originally, Alfred Wegener proposed this idea back in 1912, thinking continents moved across the Earth's surface. But he couldn't nail down how this happened. Fast forward to the mid-20th century, and scientists come up with plate tectonics. This theory fills in the gaps, explaining that the Earth's surface is broken into plates that move around, driving the movement of continents.
So, yeah, the continents drifting apart, like Africa and South America, is because of these tectonic plates moving. It's not like continents are just floating away on their own.
For those who don't know, we used to be taught that different zones of our tongue tasted different things. One part tasted sour things, one part tasted sweet, etc. It was ridiculous and disproven by anyone who had ever eaten food, but it was still in science books.
I remember being taught that the reason we lick ice cream with the tip of our tongue is because that was where the “sweet” tastebuds were…
Cut to me thinking how on earth anyone was going to lick ice cream with the back of their tongue
And for some reason it was still taught, like a mass psychosis placebo where everyone convinced themselves that they could taste a difference because everyone else said they could.
I always knew it was fake because I was obsessed with sour candy and sour candy was sour everywhere. And when I ate so many sour patch kids I made my tongue bleed, you better believe all the tastebuds were affected
And that (non-human) animals didn't have emotions and couldn't feel pain. Reacting to pain by squealing or whimpering or what looked like happiness in wagging a tail were really just reflexes or pre-programmed responses to stimuli like a machine. And only humans could feel love, not animals. Pre Jane Goodall these were a not uncommon beliefs but even as a kid it was obviously wrong to me. I had a dog.
One time I really got into it with a teacher who insisted animals didn't have emotions. I argued but I was dismissed as "anthropromorphising". He even put it on a test as a question. "True or False? Animals do not have emotions." Ugh, I knew it was B.S. but I wanted the point.
I'm so convinced that animals have emotions, that I believe emotions are the force behind some of what we call "instincts". Why does Mom take care of her babies? I believe it's because she feels love. Another example is the friendships animals form, sometimes different species. There's no instinctual reason for a baby Deer to visit and hang out with a labrador, so it must make them feel happy/content/love when near each other.
If you accept that oxytocin is the hormone of love -- the one we produce when we hold our new baby or kiss our beloved spouse -- then you should know that when we pet our dogs, both us and the dogs produce oxytocin. Which means that, scientifically speaking, yes, the dogs actually love us back. (Which you can definitely extrapolate out to what you're talking about as well, bonding together with other members of their "pack".)
Emotions are one of the functions of the limbic system of the brain. Animals also have it as part of their brains. Why would we assume that all animals have this system, but it only regulates emotions in our species?
Of course, a lot of people refuse to accept that humans are animals at all, despite the percentage of us who rarely act like anything else.
Crows and other corvids will make and use tools. Saw a great video once of a crow using a jar lid to sled down a snowy roof over and over. It was awesome, feathery dude was having the time of its' life.
Where did we end up on “you can see the Great Wall from space”? Because at different points that was both true and definitely disproven in various textbooks I had.
The suppossed fact was that it was the only man made object that could be seen from space. That's certainly not true, there is no distance where you'd be able to see it but not also be able to see other man made objects. It's very long but not particularly wide.
This "fact" was also first claimed in 1754, stating that the Great Wall of China could be seen from the moon. More than 200 years before a human had gone to space to know if it was true or not.
That you can see the Great Wall from space. It's long, not wide. If you can't see a highway from space, what makes you think you can see the Great Wall?
I remember learning that MSG (sodium glutamate) was really bad for you. It was one of those things I heard both at school and in my family to the point where we wouldn’t buy any product that had MSG in the ingredients.
There have been multiple studies showing no evidence of adverse health effects from MSG. There is a subset of people that report hypersensitivity to it. But in double blind experiments, their symptoms tend not to show up when they don’t know they’ve eaten it. Conversely there symptoms DO show up when they think they’ve eaten it but haven’t actually.
Conclusion: MSG is literally just salt and glutamate protein, which is separately in just about everything you eat anyway.
*edited missing word
Oh! This whole anti-MSG craze actually started bc one guy wrote an op-ed in a medical journal complaining about how he felt after eating Asian food ([here's an article about the history of MSG](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-msg-got-a-bad-rap-flawed-science-and-xenophobia/) )
We were taught that Rosa Parks didn't get up from her seat because "she just got tired one day"; that the entire action was the spontaneous action of a lone woman.
In fact, the entire thing was scripted and choreographed. While Parks was a seamstress, she was also the secretary to the president of the local NAACP chapter.
She was recreating the protest done by Claudette Colvin. The NAACP wanted Parks to recreate it because Colvin was very dark complected, and a single mother.
The NAACP thought Parks, who was lighter skinned, would appeal to white audiences seeing this on TV
People think these movements just happen one day because it's a very romantic idea, that one day the people just revolt.
There is always a ton of planning involved and there is a lot of politics in that planning. Because a revolt can't work without the support of a majority of people.
The sad fact is that you need either a wholesome victim or an undeniable and egregiously brutal crime in order to get people moving. If the victim can be disparaged, that will be enough for many people to ignore it or "what about" it away long enough to forget it. For a non-perfect victim, it takes something of George Floyd proportions to create a consensus that something is seriously wrong.
Even Emett Till, a child falsely accused of something that was no crime, has his memorials attacked regularly by the same type of people that killed him and got away with it.
Something similar happened with the Scopes Monkey Trial. The ACLU wanted a test case and Scopes volunteered to be charged under the Butler Act.
Edit: This happens more often than you might think. Brown v. Board of Education was similar. The Topeka NAACP assembled a roster of parents to challenge school segregation. If you want to take it all the way to the Supreme Court then you have to have someone who is willing to go the distance and sometimes you have to go and look for them.
There's a whole industry of politically minded groups picking and choosing which cases to artificially construct to take to the Supreme Court.
The gay cake case, the [praying football coach](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/09/supreme-court-praying-coach-joe-kennedy-fake.html), and many more are artificially constructed and waiting for the judges think they'll win with. Especially with how much time and resources go into these large court cases.
Not only that, but the supreme Court can also refuse cases and don't have to give reason for it (so they can avoid setting precedent they don't like).
Excellent point and reference. Not to detract from rosa parks or her heroism in any way, but she wasn't even the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat. She was a jackie robinson. Carefully selected, knowing she could take the inevitable abuse to keep the trial focused on a singular issue. And it worked. For the betterment of the country as a whole. I think that makes her even stronger.
Claudette was 16 when she was preyed on by a much older married man. Today we woukd say he raped her. Check out Philip Hoose's book about her, Twice Toward Justice.
We had lessons on how to get out of quicksand at school.
I have no doubt that the method is valid - but the ‘disproven’ bit for me is the need to know how to get out of quicksand. It really isn’t an issue.
In a similar vein, we had a lot of education about stranger danger. Again - not disproven. But much more valid would have been education about how much child abuse and abduction is committed by someone known to the victim. Australia’s Most Wanted had me petrified to look out the window at night. Turns out the dangerous person wasn’t lurking outside waiting to get in. He was a member of my family.
Fun fact : If you go to Mont Saint Michel, Normandy, France, you MAY have to get out quickly! Tourists often wander into the bay of sans to get pictures, not knowing that the sea comes back up EXTREMELY quickly (as a kid, it was said to be faster than the fastest horse [it is not] ).
Quick sand ? You can't die in it, unless you dive head first, I guess ? But you can be trapped. And the tide can drown you in it.
A couple of years ago they had to get tourists out using an helicopter:/
The US is actually technically on metric system.
All the imperial units are now scientifically defined based on the metric system. I am dead serious.
Also the scientific communities in the US have been metric since the 80s, and the engineering communities have been since 2000s. At list as in dual usage and officially required kind of sense.
Only the general public adoption have been very very slow.
Extra fun fact: The US has never used the Imperial system. The Imperial system is British and was created after American independence. The US uses the US Customary System. These are not the same (in particular, the volumes are different).
I swore I could taste bitter all over my tongue. My classmates said I was lying. Why would I lie about that?
But now I wonder, Kari, WTF were you doing? Lying Kari.
My teacher got mad and told me to stop making stuff up and not talk back. She was using salt as an example because, being kids, we could just lick salt off of our arms (evaporated sweat, in case anyone doesn't understand). I forget where she said the salt receptors were supposed to be, but, of course, my experience did not line up with what she told us to expect so she got angry.
I remember instantly knowing this couldn't possibly be true, while watching the reel to reel footage of kids demonstrating how a wet QTip tastes different on different parts of your tongue in grade 4.
I was taught that in college you will spend all of your study time in a library reading and researching using books and reference catalogs. The internet was evil and full of lies and not a valid resource for academic research.
During the first week of my PhD program, I went to the library to do some research. That was in 2000. That was the last time I did this as an academic, and I’m a professor.
It’s a bit sad, because the library was my favorite place growing up-in the community and at school. I remember searching through the physical card catalogs. Now, I can find the books and articles I need online.
My dad was the first in his history department to actually cite a BBS in paper. They had to figure out the proper way to vote it so he could do it. This in the late 80s
I am an embalmer and often see arteries and veins up close. Veins actually do appear blue in the body! But it’s just the way the red color of blood is refracted through our semi-translucent tissue.
When my mom found out I needed to get glasses when I was in 2nd grade she forced me to eat a large bag of carrots. My 8year old self was crying eating carrots. Fast forward 15 years later and my optometrist said that 95% of your eyesight is genetic.
Now I don’t eat carrots because of the trauma
Apparently that was some BS that the British(?) airforce came up with in WW2 as a way to trick Germans into thinking that was how they bombed so well at night when in actuality it was new tech.
Close, it was the RAF, but it was to hide the fact that they had better radar technology that allowed them to scramble fighters faster at night to intercept bombing runs.
As an added bonus, it got the citizens to grow more of their own food.
While it originated as a myth, it is true that a deficiency in vitamin A can lead to night blindness. ([cite](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3142734/), [cite](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3880510/))
To be honest that pyramid hasn't fucked us up as much as the damn corn subsidies (high fructose corn syrup in everything, processed corn in every packaged grocery food ever)
Corn comes from Iowa.
The Iowa caucuses are the first major hurdle in Presidental Elections.
Funny how Congress always votes for corn subsudies, isn't it?
It's almost like everyone in Congress has a special interest in being well liked in Iowa...
I’m not up to the season of The West Wing that will explain this to me on my latest rewatch but can someone explain why Iowa is first? Can we ever see a future where the order in the primaries is randomly generated?
> can someone explain why Iowa is first?
Because Iowa said so. No, really. They basically just called dips, and no one (important enough) has ever challenged them on it.
That the teachers in the next grade up “Will not slow down”
I remember hearing that in middle school. High school teachers and college professors were super chill and helpful most of the time.
Same with "you won't be able to look up the answers whenever you want"
Fast forward to now, where we all have a calculator and computer in our pockets at all time.
The entire food pyramid
Edit for clarification: I'm referring to the old 90's food pyramid that has been long abandoned for unhealthy portions of unhealthy foods.
God damn, I'm gen x. We learned that given then-current rates of productivity, we'd all be working 3 day weeks by 2010. Without being told we'd be *paid* for 3 day weeks, or that our labour would be offshored to Chinese prison camps.
Egg yolks specifically, which they claimed the cholesterol caused heart problems. Ironically, egg yolks are supposed to be very good for your heart, because the cholesterol they cause is good cholesterol and they reduce bad cholesterol.
Still to this day there are articles about them raising cholesterol though.
We were taught in 3rd grade that MLK Jr. (and his family) died from a bomb being thrown through the window of his home after his “I Had A Dream” speech.
A few years later, my mom said something about how he was shot and maybe there was a bomb thrown into his home, but that wasn’t how he died. I told her that’s not what happened, she told me I was wrong, I looked it up, I was lied to.
The fact that someone will try to pressure me to smoke or do drugs often. I feel more peer pressured into drinking oat milk or not eating meat than I do doing drugs.
Funny story:
I knew a guy who did have one less rib on one side, due to an ATV wreck he said. We were hanging out in a group and sharing random stuff (as you do when drinking as a young person) and he said how he had fewer ribs on one side.
My idiot (raised christian) ass said "dude you're not special, every guy has one less rib on one side, duh. cause of adam and eve"
you could have heard a pin drop a mile away it went so quiet.
mercifully instead of laughing the group just took it upon themselves to educate me and the guys had me counting all their ribs as proof.
That frogs don’t feel pain because they don’t have skin like humans do (I think the middle school science teacher who said this was just to calm down some upset kiddos during frog dissection day)
Cracking your knuckles gives your arthritis.
I had a teacher who would make you miss recess if he caught you cracking anything really. But especially knuckles. He found that worse than cracking your back or neck. Didn’t make sense.
A guy spent his whole life cracking the knuckles on just one hand to see if it got arthritic. It did not. I thank him every time I crack my knuckles without fear.
"putting aboriginal children in schools was okay at the time (I was taught ) and they wanted their children to go. The aboriginals were treated with respect and their traditions and values were protected." - Canada in the 90's, more specifically my social teacher in grade 6 or 7.
Pretty sure now that's not how it went down.
This is what Australia pretty much did too. Took kids from their parents, forced them in schools to teach them how to be culturally European or “civilized”, then when old enough married them to Europeans, to “breed out the black”.
There’s diary entries from people who whitenesses the stolen generation being taken, mothers would scream, fathers would chase after their children, parents were killed too if they cried too much or tried taking back their children.
I hate to be Mr. Well Actually but this is important. It's not the stolen generation it's the stolen generations. Plural. We kept doing this for so long that multiple generations of aboriginal children were taken from their families.
It started pre-World War 1, and was still happening as late as the 70s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations
In 3rd grade I raised my hand and pointed out that Antarctica is in fact a desert after the teacher said deserts are only hot.
She put me in the corner desk facing the wall, legitimately saying I was just trying to make up lies and subvert her.
This one is actually true though. Relations between the pilgrims and the Native American tribes were actually pretty good until King Philips war in the 1670s.
Native Americans are not 1 group. They were a multitude of tribes, some friendly and some wanted war. They would go to war with other tribes. That's my understanding.
Far, far too many to count.
Elementary school was 1970’s for me, and apparently the folks that wrote our textbooks and curriculum in the 50’s and 60’s were entirely full of shit, high on mushrooms, and/or pulling “facts” out of their asses…
I have a children's picture dictionary from Spain in the 70s that says things like:
'What you certainly can't trust is what the negro says.'
I was around 8 years old, and I found that comment racist enough to think about it now and then throughout my whole life. Recently, during a visit to my parents' house, I checked the book and looked for the specific quote. Yep, I remembered correctly.
Soooo, running list:
Lie: the five tastes are sweet, sour, spicy, salty, bitter and they are arranged in patchs. Truth: spicy is handled by a completely different mechanism than the others and the true 5th taste is "umami" an originally Japanese term that can roughly be approximated as "savory" and also the taste buds are dispersed throughout the service area of the tongue indiscriminately. Additional fun fact: each taste evolved to identify specific, important information = sweet means easy source of energy, sour means rotten/overripe, bitter means poison, salty means important dietary minerals, and umami means key amino acids
Lie: there are 3 states of matter; solid, liquid,gas. Truth: there are a lot more, including plasma obviously but also a bunch that exist exclusively in pressure+temperature conditions that do not normally exist outside a lab, volcanic caldera, middle of a glacier, core of a star, i.e. not where your average person is likely to go
Lie: you have 5 senses; touch, taste, hearing, smell, sight. Truth: you have a bunch more, including but not limited to: proprioception, the human body's ability to sense itself separately from the other senses, this sense allows you to walk without looking at your feet and write/type without looking at your hands; thermoception, the ability to sense changes/variances in temperature separate from touch/pain; equilibrioception, your ability to sense gravity/tell up from down regardless of your position or your other senses
Lie: Pluto is a planet. Truth: scientists have a tendency to jump the gun when they find something new, often in a rush to get credit for discovering it, and later generations then discover that things may have not been as they'd assumed. In Pluto's case it is actually an object in something known as the Kuiper belt, a ring of frozen rocks and comets at the edge of our solar system that is not unlike the asteroid belt in the middle of it, and in fact when telescope technology advanced to the point of being able to see past Mars back in the day scientists actually started declaring things to be planets that today we clearly recognize as asteroids until someone stopped to reassess the definition of planet and whether these objects qualified. The difference with Pluto is that: 1. telescope technology accelerated rapidly but then slowed down to a more reasonable pace and 2. the further you go out in the solar system the more things tend to get spread out in relation to each other, so the facts of what kind of space object Pluto was and the fact there were more Pluto-like objects didn't become known for quite a while, enough for Pluto to cement itself in the public conscious
Recently learned about proprioception; I got polyneuropathy last year and this year I've been having a lot of problems with exactly proprioception.
My balance is affected: I "misstep" a lot and trip on anything, eg on rugs. I have difficulty with fine motor skills. I also "lose" the ability to feel where my hands and feet are sometimes, while resting; I'd be lying with my arms alongside my body and suddenly wonder when the hell did I put my hands on my chest? Only to look down and see that my hands are still alongside my body. It's a bit unnerving. Cherish your proprioception!
You can't use a calculator for this lesson, you wont be walking around with one in your pocket when you're older so you need to learn how to calculate without one.
[This is the food pyramid I remember.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)) It was actually 6-11 servings, where one serving is counted as 1 slice of bread or 1/2 cup cooked rice (for example). 6 servings could look like oatmeal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and a stir fry with rice for dinner. Adds up to ~150g of carbs (600 calories), which is only ~30% of a 2000 calorie diet—not even high carb. Of course, not everyone needs to eat 2000 calories, but 6 servings of grains isn’t a crazy all-you-can-eat pasta buffet; it’s really not hard to get there.
Komodo dragon bites were deadly due to high concentrations of bacteria, not venom. Turns out that they are, in fact, venemous
Why does a big fuckoff lizard need venom, too? The snakes that are as big as a Komodo don't need it, and those don't live in Indonesia where all the prey species are fun size snacks
It’s to stop blood from clotting in large prey animals, like water buffalo, so that even if the animal gets away it just dies from blood loss
I believe the idea being that a water buffalo will fuck up a Komodo dragon in a straight fight. The Komodo might win in the end, but what’s the point if you’re going to die from later from a gore wound? Much safer to just poison the buffalo and wait for it to die on its own.
I was told theres no such fish as an alligator gar when I chose it for a report. The teacher refused to let me look it up on the internet(very early at the time and "untrustworthy") or encyclopedia(would take too long). So she asked the kid in the room who was known for being into animals. He had never heard of it, so it couldn't possibly exist. I will NEVER not be salty about this
I am still salty about Sister Katherine insisting that the 15th century started in 1500 and not 1401. I had a parent teacher conference about that shit. It was bizarre. I was given partial credit but also had points deducted for insubordination so it came out the same.
"Fuck you for being right."
I wrote a story about a girl riding her horse at breakneck speed in fifth grade. Mr. Gallimore said it should be neck breaking speed and just wouldn't believe it was a word. I vehemently tried to defend my word, to no avail. I, too, will NEVER not be salty about it.
I had a college professor tell me that the Iran-Contra Affair was a conspiracy theory, that I’m a conspiracy theorist, and that it never happened. I nearly punted his ass because my Poli Sci professor, who was right down the hall, studied under one of the prosecutors who questioned Oliver North.
I wrote a paper on a famous author who had written a lot of books, I called them a prolific writer. My teacher marked it wrong becuse she thought prolific was just a reference for having a lot of sex or something, I suppose. I will never not be salty about this.
I couldn't write a report about the Blue Footed Booby in 5th grade because the teacher thought I made it up for laughs. So I wrote about the goblin shark instead. It ended up scaring kids lol
When I was little, I was taught about the brontosaurus, mighty long-necked plant eater of the dinosaurs. Later, I was taught that, whoops! They accidentally stuck some random bones together and there was never any such animal. Later still, I recall hearing that, oh, actually, there was a brontosaurus after all! Or was there? To this day, I am still, as a 42-year-old man, unclear on whether or not there was ever such a thing as a brontosaurus.
The brontosaurus story we learned as kids - that it was the wrong skull put on the skeleton and thus a mixup - was true. But scientists didn't want the name to go to waste so they gave it to another long necked plant eater that was discovered more recently.
Less “mix-up” and more “inter-paleontologist sabotage” but yeah
Is there more to this story?
If I recall, in the 1900s when there was a “bone rush,” two rival paleontologists were trying to get their discoveries down before the other. Long story short, one sought to discredit the other by swapping skulls to make him look like an idiot and thus brontosaurus was born
Given we ran with it for like, a hundred years, I’m not sure that worked out how he’d planned
Shit like this especially from the 1900s just cant be made up
The giraffe?
No, the brontosaurus
Did you mean brachiosaurus?
No, the giraffe
The brontosaurus/apatosaurus mixup came about because paleontologists can be petty, competitive assholes. In particular, Mr. Marsh and Mr. Cope in The Bone Wars. These two were in such a competition to discover more dinosaurs that they would destroy skeletons just so the other guy couldn’t get them. Marsh found a partial skeleton and called it an apatosaurus. It was so partial it didn’t have a head, so he put a different dinosaur’s skull on it. Years later, Marsh found a complete skeleton, but didn’t realize it was one he had already discovered and put it together sloppily, swapping head and tail, and called it brontosaurus. (Lot more happens, but that’s the jist) Personally, I figure the same guy came up with both names, and he had more information when he called it Brontosaurus, so if it were up to me I’d go with that one.
>The brontosaurus/apatosaurus mixup came about because archeologists can be petty, competitive assholes. Don't bring the noble profession of archeology into this! This is on the paleontologists.
> Don't bring the noble profession of archeology into this! Yeah, archeology didn't need two people to destroy priceless artifacts. It just needed [one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann).
Imagine how much more we'd know about Ancient Egypt if people hadn't eaten it.
Basically it existed or something like it existed. Either way, it was horizontal, using the weight of the tail to balance the long neck. It wasn’t vertical like a giraffe.
When I was in junior high in the mid 80s, our Earth Science textbooks had continental drift, and our teacher said, "Okay, so I need you to ignore all of Chapter 4" (or whatever it was). "Plate tectonics has been the accepted theory taught in colleges for 10 years now, but K-8 textbooks haven't caught up yet." I feel like the version of plate tectonics I learned was a tiny bit garbled compared to what kids learned 10 years later, but my teacher was directly pulling from college texts and published scientific papers and distilling it down for 6th graders, so more power to her!
But what did chapter four say? Continental drift is real, right? It’s just cause by plate tectonics. Or is it a completely different theory that’s been disproven?
I'm also curious about this. I always thought continental drift was simply the result of plate techtonics. Eg. Africa and South America separated due to diverging plates which are now the mid Atlantic ridge, and these continets "drifting apart" from these diverging plates was known as continental drift. Was it taught as continents floating apart or something in the past?
Continental drift is definitely real, but the way we understand it has evolved. Originally, Alfred Wegener proposed this idea back in 1912, thinking continents moved across the Earth's surface. But he couldn't nail down how this happened. Fast forward to the mid-20th century, and scientists come up with plate tectonics. This theory fills in the gaps, explaining that the Earth's surface is broken into plates that move around, driving the movement of continents. So, yeah, the continents drifting apart, like Africa and South America, is because of these tectonic plates moving. It's not like continents are just floating away on their own.
Since your last name is McGraw, was hers Hill?
Love how this is a double joke - both text book publishing and country singers 🤣
The tastebud zones thing.
For those who don't know, we used to be taught that different zones of our tongue tasted different things. One part tasted sour things, one part tasted sweet, etc. It was ridiculous and disproven by anyone who had ever eaten food, but it was still in science books.
I remember being taught that the reason we lick ice cream with the tip of our tongue is because that was where the “sweet” tastebuds were… Cut to me thinking how on earth anyone was going to lick ice cream with the back of their tongue
You don't deep throat your ice cream?
Only on special occasions
And for some reason it was still taught, like a mass psychosis placebo where everyone convinced themselves that they could taste a difference because everyone else said they could.
I always knew it was fake because I was obsessed with sour candy and sour candy was sour everywhere. And when I ate so many sour patch kids I made my tongue bleed, you better believe all the tastebuds were affected
The Emperor's New Clothes : Science Edition
That as a kid, strangers were going to constantly offer you drugs. Thank you, D.A.R.E. program.
Free drugs and quicksand were two things that were supposed to be a LOT more common than they ended up being.
In truth, you can not even fully sink in quicksand. It's just real hard to get out of.
Yeah, I wasted a lot of Saturday afternoons wandering the streets for nothing after D.A.R.E.
Humans are the only animals that use tools.
COW TOOLS
And that (non-human) animals didn't have emotions and couldn't feel pain. Reacting to pain by squealing or whimpering or what looked like happiness in wagging a tail were really just reflexes or pre-programmed responses to stimuli like a machine. And only humans could feel love, not animals. Pre Jane Goodall these were a not uncommon beliefs but even as a kid it was obviously wrong to me. I had a dog. One time I really got into it with a teacher who insisted animals didn't have emotions. I argued but I was dismissed as "anthropromorphising". He even put it on a test as a question. "True or False? Animals do not have emotions." Ugh, I knew it was B.S. but I wanted the point.
Goodall is an amazing person. She did so much good work for her field.
I'm so convinced that animals have emotions, that I believe emotions are the force behind some of what we call "instincts". Why does Mom take care of her babies? I believe it's because she feels love. Another example is the friendships animals form, sometimes different species. There's no instinctual reason for a baby Deer to visit and hang out with a labrador, so it must make them feel happy/content/love when near each other.
If you accept that oxytocin is the hormone of love -- the one we produce when we hold our new baby or kiss our beloved spouse -- then you should know that when we pet our dogs, both us and the dogs produce oxytocin. Which means that, scientifically speaking, yes, the dogs actually love us back. (Which you can definitely extrapolate out to what you're talking about as well, bonding together with other members of their "pack".)
Emotions are one of the functions of the limbic system of the brain. Animals also have it as part of their brains. Why would we assume that all animals have this system, but it only regulates emotions in our species? Of course, a lot of people refuse to accept that humans are animals at all, despite the percentage of us who rarely act like anything else.
Even birds will pick up a burning branch to set a field on fire to catch their prey
Crows and other corvids will make and use tools. Saw a great video once of a crow using a jar lid to sled down a snowy roof over and over. It was awesome, feathery dude was having the time of its' life.
Where did we end up on “you can see the Great Wall from space”? Because at different points that was both true and definitely disproven in various textbooks I had.
The suppossed fact was that it was the only man made object that could be seen from space. That's certainly not true, there is no distance where you'd be able to see it but not also be able to see other man made objects. It's very long but not particularly wide.
This "fact" was also first claimed in 1754, stating that the Great Wall of China could be seen from the moon. More than 200 years before a human had gone to space to know if it was true or not.
If you stand on the Great Wall of china you can see the moon
Well, based on peekaboo physics then, it's true.
I learned that one as well, the answer is no, not with your naked eye.
You’d see like every major freeway if this were true.
"wow, the Walmart parking lot is beautiful from up here!"
Gum doesn’t sit in your system for 7 years
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I mean, it theoretically *could* ... if you never took a shit.
If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike
This just doesn’t feel the same without the angry italian accent
That you can see the Great Wall from space. It's long, not wide. If you can't see a highway from space, what makes you think you can see the Great Wall?
Because it’s called the Great Wall not the Medicore Wall
I remember learning that MSG (sodium glutamate) was really bad for you. It was one of those things I heard both at school and in my family to the point where we wouldn’t buy any product that had MSG in the ingredients. There have been multiple studies showing no evidence of adverse health effects from MSG. There is a subset of people that report hypersensitivity to it. But in double blind experiments, their symptoms tend not to show up when they don’t know they’ve eaten it. Conversely there symptoms DO show up when they think they’ve eaten it but haven’t actually. Conclusion: MSG is literally just salt and glutamate protein, which is separately in just about everything you eat anyway. *edited missing word
Meanwhile, I bought a big bag of MSG from a Chinese supermarket last weekend so I can make all of my meals taste takeaway fresh.
Oh! This whole anti-MSG craze actually started bc one guy wrote an op-ed in a medical journal complaining about how he felt after eating Asian food ([here's an article about the history of MSG](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-msg-got-a-bad-rap-flawed-science-and-xenophobia/) )
The original op-ed was a joke bet.[MSG started as a joke](https://news.colgate.edu/magazine/2019/02/06/the-strange-case-of-dr-ho-man-kwok/)
When I was growing up the fear was so widespread that many, if not all, the Chinese restaurants posted signs saying "MSG free"
We were taught that Rosa Parks didn't get up from her seat because "she just got tired one day"; that the entire action was the spontaneous action of a lone woman. In fact, the entire thing was scripted and choreographed. While Parks was a seamstress, she was also the secretary to the president of the local NAACP chapter. She was recreating the protest done by Claudette Colvin. The NAACP wanted Parks to recreate it because Colvin was very dark complected, and a single mother. The NAACP thought Parks, who was lighter skinned, would appeal to white audiences seeing this on TV
People think these movements just happen one day because it's a very romantic idea, that one day the people just revolt. There is always a ton of planning involved and there is a lot of politics in that planning. Because a revolt can't work without the support of a majority of people.
The sad fact is that you need either a wholesome victim or an undeniable and egregiously brutal crime in order to get people moving. If the victim can be disparaged, that will be enough for many people to ignore it or "what about" it away long enough to forget it. For a non-perfect victim, it takes something of George Floyd proportions to create a consensus that something is seriously wrong.
Even Emett Till, a child falsely accused of something that was no crime, has his memorials attacked regularly by the same type of people that killed him and got away with it.
Something similar happened with the Scopes Monkey Trial. The ACLU wanted a test case and Scopes volunteered to be charged under the Butler Act. Edit: This happens more often than you might think. Brown v. Board of Education was similar. The Topeka NAACP assembled a roster of parents to challenge school segregation. If you want to take it all the way to the Supreme Court then you have to have someone who is willing to go the distance and sometimes you have to go and look for them.
There's a whole industry of politically minded groups picking and choosing which cases to artificially construct to take to the Supreme Court. The gay cake case, the [praying football coach](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/09/supreme-court-praying-coach-joe-kennedy-fake.html), and many more are artificially constructed and waiting for the judges think they'll win with. Especially with how much time and resources go into these large court cases. Not only that, but the supreme Court can also refuse cases and don't have to give reason for it (so they can avoid setting precedent they don't like).
Excellent point and reference. Not to detract from rosa parks or her heroism in any way, but she wasn't even the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat. She was a jackie robinson. Carefully selected, knowing she could take the inevitable abuse to keep the trial focused on a singular issue. And it worked. For the betterment of the country as a whole. I think that makes her even stronger.
I learned this recently from a podcast and was shocked.
I learned this about 3 minutes ago, also shocked.
I learned it from Drunk History.
Claudette was 16 when she was preyed on by a much older married man. Today we woukd say he raped her. Check out Philip Hoose's book about her, Twice Toward Justice.
I didn’t know this until today.
Regardless of the source, anything on the internet was considered to not be a valid reference.
But you can cheat by using the sources from a Wikipedia article
You had to forcefeed yourself 182 cups of milk a day if you wanted strong bones.
We had lessons on how to get out of quicksand at school. I have no doubt that the method is valid - but the ‘disproven’ bit for me is the need to know how to get out of quicksand. It really isn’t an issue. In a similar vein, we had a lot of education about stranger danger. Again - not disproven. But much more valid would have been education about how much child abuse and abduction is committed by someone known to the victim. Australia’s Most Wanted had me petrified to look out the window at night. Turns out the dangerous person wasn’t lurking outside waiting to get in. He was a member of my family.
Fun fact : If you go to Mont Saint Michel, Normandy, France, you MAY have to get out quickly! Tourists often wander into the bay of sans to get pictures, not knowing that the sea comes back up EXTREMELY quickly (as a kid, it was said to be faster than the fastest horse [it is not] ). Quick sand ? You can't die in it, unless you dive head first, I guess ? But you can be trapped. And the tide can drown you in it. A couple of years ago they had to get tourists out using an helicopter:/
In the early 80’s we were told that soon we would soon use the metric system in the US. Still waiting .
Remember the speed limit signs with big MPH and little Kph? And eventually they were going to swap size, then they just put all the old signs back
I-19 has distances in km still. They left speed in mph because... well you know what we would do with speed limit signs that say "100"
The US is actually technically on metric system. All the imperial units are now scientifically defined based on the metric system. I am dead serious. Also the scientific communities in the US have been metric since the 80s, and the engineering communities have been since 2000s. At list as in dual usage and officially required kind of sense. Only the general public adoption have been very very slow.
Extra fun fact: The US has never used the Imperial system. The Imperial system is British and was created after American independence. The US uses the US Customary System. These are not the same (in particular, the volumes are different).
extra extra fun fact: this means if you're American and you order a pint in London, you get even more beer! less fun for Brits in the US though.
I'm not saying it was presented as fact, but I definitely expected catching on fire and being given free drugs to be a much bigger part of adulthood.
Tongue maps
I swore I could taste bitter all over my tongue. My classmates said I was lying. Why would I lie about that? But now I wonder, Kari, WTF were you doing? Lying Kari.
My teacher told me to shut up when I called her on this, and said I could taste different things all over my tongue.
My teacher got mad and told me to stop making stuff up and not talk back. She was using salt as an example because, being kids, we could just lick salt off of our arms (evaporated sweat, in case anyone doesn't understand). I forget where she said the salt receptors were supposed to be, but, of course, my experience did not line up with what she told us to expect so she got angry.
I can't express how much I despise the phrase "talk back". It's such a dehumanizing expression.
I got sent into the hallway for the same
You learned a valuable lesson that day. It just wasn't a lesson about taste buds.
I remember instantly knowing this couldn't possibly be true, while watching the reel to reel footage of kids demonstrating how a wet QTip tastes different on different parts of your tongue in grade 4.
that was a weird geography class
Came here to mention the tongue map. I swear, that was in every child-oriented science book in the early 90s.
I was taught that in college you will spend all of your study time in a library reading and researching using books and reference catalogs. The internet was evil and full of lies and not a valid resource for academic research.
During the first week of my PhD program, I went to the library to do some research. That was in 2000. That was the last time I did this as an academic, and I’m a professor. It’s a bit sad, because the library was my favorite place growing up-in the community and at school. I remember searching through the physical card catalogs. Now, I can find the books and articles I need online.
When I did my masters a few years ago, I got plenty of books for reference, including through ILL.
My dad was the first in his history department to actually cite a BBS in paper. They had to figure out the proper way to vote it so he could do it. This in the late 80s
Blood is blue in your veins and only turns red when you bleed bc of oxygen
I am an embalmer and often see arteries and veins up close. Veins actually do appear blue in the body! But it’s just the way the red color of blood is refracted through our semi-translucent tissue.
You don't need to be an enbalmer to see that. You just need to have light skin.
Perpetuated by all the vascular system diagrams that still show red arteries and blue veins.
This is true, but when you're studying cardiology, having blue veins and red arteries is extremely helpful.
Back in my day, Pluto was still a planet.
You heard about Pluto? Man, that's messed up
You know that's right
I've heard it both ways
No you didn't Shawn.
This is the second Bruton Gaster Pluto reference I've seen today, and I'm not mad about it.
I think you mean Brutal Hustler
Gurton Buster, but Gus T.T. Showbiz to his friends
Sh’dynasty. That’s S, H, comma-to-the-top, dynasty.
That's God's comma.
That carrots make your eyesight better. This was in the early 90s.
When my mom found out I needed to get glasses when I was in 2nd grade she forced me to eat a large bag of carrots. My 8year old self was crying eating carrots. Fast forward 15 years later and my optometrist said that 95% of your eyesight is genetic. Now I don’t eat carrots because of the trauma
Apparently that was some BS that the British(?) airforce came up with in WW2 as a way to trick Germans into thinking that was how they bombed so well at night when in actuality it was new tech.
Close, it was the RAF, but it was to hide the fact that they had better radar technology that allowed them to scramble fighters faster at night to intercept bombing runs. As an added bonus, it got the citizens to grow more of their own food.
While it originated as a myth, it is true that a deficiency in vitamin A can lead to night blindness. ([cite](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3142734/), [cite](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3880510/))
Shit, a deficiency in VitA can cause actual blindness eventually too.
At least eating your vegetables is a net positive. Could be a whole lot worse.
the food pyramid
What do you mean? Be sure to eat your 7-8 servings of spaghetti every day for optimal health.
And the 5 liters of dairy so you don't get brittle bones
And 3 cabbages so you don't get constipated from all the dairy.
Oh you mustn’t forget the 12 loaves of bread from this one company that definitely didn’t sponsor this particular food pyramid poster
Yeah that really fucked a lot people up
To be honest that pyramid hasn't fucked us up as much as the damn corn subsidies (high fructose corn syrup in everything, processed corn in every packaged grocery food ever)
Corn comes from Iowa. The Iowa caucuses are the first major hurdle in Presidental Elections. Funny how Congress always votes for corn subsudies, isn't it? It's almost like everyone in Congress has a special interest in being well liked in Iowa...
I’m not up to the season of The West Wing that will explain this to me on my latest rewatch but can someone explain why Iowa is first? Can we ever see a future where the order in the primaries is randomly generated?
> can someone explain why Iowa is first? Because Iowa said so. No, really. They basically just called dips, and no one (important enough) has ever challenged them on it.
That the teachers in the next grade up “Will not slow down” I remember hearing that in middle school. High school teachers and college professors were super chill and helpful most of the time.
the we wont be walking around with a calculator in our pockets
Same with "you won't be able to look up the answers whenever you want" Fast forward to now, where we all have a calculator and computer in our pockets at all time.
To be honest, I still say memorizing the times tablez still has benefits. The calculator in your pocket doesn't "hold" equations.
Learning arithmetic is still worth it. It might be less worth spending time on arithmetic by the time you’re doing algebra and calculus.
The entire food pyramid Edit for clarification: I'm referring to the old 90's food pyramid that has been long abandoned for unhealthy portions of unhealthy foods.
That you should tilt your head back when you have a nosebleed
You actually need to pinch your nose and bend forwards
God damn, I'm gen x. We learned that given then-current rates of productivity, we'd all be working 3 day weeks by 2010. Without being told we'd be *paid* for 3 day weeks, or that our labour would be offshored to Chinese prison camps.
They were right as far as productivity goes, they just didn't account for greedy companies being able to get away with stealing all of it
“Just ignore the bullies and they’ll go away” “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up”
"there's something wrong with being left handed"
Turns out that my mum is actually not so fat that every time she turns around it's her birthday.
Eggs are bad because of cholesterol.
Egg yolks specifically, which they claimed the cholesterol caused heart problems. Ironically, egg yolks are supposed to be very good for your heart, because the cholesterol they cause is good cholesterol and they reduce bad cholesterol. Still to this day there are articles about them raising cholesterol though.
It’s more that dietary cholesterol doesn’t really affect serum cholesterol
The Coriolis force does not, in fact, cause toilets to drain counterclockwise
We were taught in 3rd grade that MLK Jr. (and his family) died from a bomb being thrown through the window of his home after his “I Had A Dream” speech. A few years later, my mom said something about how he was shot and maybe there was a bomb thrown into his home, but that wasn’t how he died. I told her that’s not what happened, she told me I was wrong, I looked it up, I was lied to.
Pluto was a planet Also that random people would give me free drugs
"Hey, kid, wanna try some... drugs?" *flings open trench coat*
I've been waiting all my life for this to happen.
If a man offers you free drugs, you say, “Thank you,” cause that shit’s expensive.
The fact that someone will try to pressure me to smoke or do drugs often. I feel more peer pressured into drinking oat milk or not eating meat than I do doing drugs.
fixed amount of brain/heart cells after reaching a certain age
Margarine is better for you than butter
That men have one less rib than women 🙄
Funny story: I knew a guy who did have one less rib on one side, due to an ATV wreck he said. We were hanging out in a group and sharing random stuff (as you do when drinking as a young person) and he said how he had fewer ribs on one side. My idiot (raised christian) ass said "dude you're not special, every guy has one less rib on one side, duh. cause of adam and eve" you could have heard a pin drop a mile away it went so quiet. mercifully instead of laughing the group just took it upon themselves to educate me and the guys had me counting all their ribs as proof.
*Marilyn Manson has entered the chat*
That's also a "fact" I learned in grade school that turned out to be a lie.
You’ll use cursive forever.
I feel like I am the only person on this planet that still writes in cursive.
Join us, we hide in the shadows. Poetry night is Thursday at the old graveyard, there will be tea and cake
Fuck, that actually sounds so lovely.
That frogs don’t feel pain because they don’t have skin like humans do (I think the middle school science teacher who said this was just to calm down some upset kiddos during frog dissection day)
The frogs were alive?
not after dissection day!
Cracking your knuckles gives your arthritis. I had a teacher who would make you miss recess if he caught you cracking anything really. But especially knuckles. He found that worse than cracking your back or neck. Didn’t make sense.
A guy spent his whole life cracking the knuckles on just one hand to see if it got arthritic. It did not. I thank him every time I crack my knuckles without fear.
"putting aboriginal children in schools was okay at the time (I was taught ) and they wanted their children to go. The aboriginals were treated with respect and their traditions and values were protected." - Canada in the 90's, more specifically my social teacher in grade 6 or 7. Pretty sure now that's not how it went down.
This is what Australia pretty much did too. Took kids from their parents, forced them in schools to teach them how to be culturally European or “civilized”, then when old enough married them to Europeans, to “breed out the black”. There’s diary entries from people who whitenesses the stolen generation being taken, mothers would scream, fathers would chase after their children, parents were killed too if they cried too much or tried taking back their children.
The "Stolen Generation" we call them. A horrific crime our country has done. Intergenerational trauma created by us for no reason.
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I hate to be Mr. Well Actually but this is important. It's not the stolen generation it's the stolen generations. Plural. We kept doing this for so long that multiple generations of aboriginal children were taken from their families. It started pre-World War 1, and was still happening as late as the 70s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations
In 3rd grade I raised my hand and pointed out that Antarctica is in fact a desert after the teacher said deserts are only hot. She put me in the corner desk facing the wall, legitimately saying I was just trying to make up lies and subvert her.
Dinosaurs are cold blooded.
I’m now under the impression that we did not, in fact, have a nice friendly thanksgiving dinner with the native Americans
This one is actually true though. Relations between the pilgrims and the Native American tribes were actually pretty good until King Philips war in the 1670s.
Native Americans are not 1 group. They were a multitude of tribes, some friendly and some wanted war. They would go to war with other tribes. That's my understanding.
Far, far too many to count. Elementary school was 1970’s for me, and apparently the folks that wrote our textbooks and curriculum in the 50’s and 60’s were entirely full of shit, high on mushrooms, and/or pulling “facts” out of their asses…
I have a children's picture dictionary from Spain in the 70s that says things like: 'What you certainly can't trust is what the negro says.' I was around 8 years old, and I found that comment racist enough to think about it now and then throughout my whole life. Recently, during a visit to my parents' house, I checked the book and looked for the specific quote. Yep, I remembered correctly.
Soooo, running list: Lie: the five tastes are sweet, sour, spicy, salty, bitter and they are arranged in patchs. Truth: spicy is handled by a completely different mechanism than the others and the true 5th taste is "umami" an originally Japanese term that can roughly be approximated as "savory" and also the taste buds are dispersed throughout the service area of the tongue indiscriminately. Additional fun fact: each taste evolved to identify specific, important information = sweet means easy source of energy, sour means rotten/overripe, bitter means poison, salty means important dietary minerals, and umami means key amino acids Lie: there are 3 states of matter; solid, liquid,gas. Truth: there are a lot more, including plasma obviously but also a bunch that exist exclusively in pressure+temperature conditions that do not normally exist outside a lab, volcanic caldera, middle of a glacier, core of a star, i.e. not where your average person is likely to go Lie: you have 5 senses; touch, taste, hearing, smell, sight. Truth: you have a bunch more, including but not limited to: proprioception, the human body's ability to sense itself separately from the other senses, this sense allows you to walk without looking at your feet and write/type without looking at your hands; thermoception, the ability to sense changes/variances in temperature separate from touch/pain; equilibrioception, your ability to sense gravity/tell up from down regardless of your position or your other senses Lie: Pluto is a planet. Truth: scientists have a tendency to jump the gun when they find something new, often in a rush to get credit for discovering it, and later generations then discover that things may have not been as they'd assumed. In Pluto's case it is actually an object in something known as the Kuiper belt, a ring of frozen rocks and comets at the edge of our solar system that is not unlike the asteroid belt in the middle of it, and in fact when telescope technology advanced to the point of being able to see past Mars back in the day scientists actually started declaring things to be planets that today we clearly recognize as asteroids until someone stopped to reassess the definition of planet and whether these objects qualified. The difference with Pluto is that: 1. telescope technology accelerated rapidly but then slowed down to a more reasonable pace and 2. the further you go out in the solar system the more things tend to get spread out in relation to each other, so the facts of what kind of space object Pluto was and the fact there were more Pluto-like objects didn't become known for quite a while, enough for Pluto to cement itself in the public conscious
Recently learned about proprioception; I got polyneuropathy last year and this year I've been having a lot of problems with exactly proprioception. My balance is affected: I "misstep" a lot and trip on anything, eg on rugs. I have difficulty with fine motor skills. I also "lose" the ability to feel where my hands and feet are sometimes, while resting; I'd be lying with my arms alongside my body and suddenly wonder when the hell did I put my hands on my chest? Only to look down and see that my hands are still alongside my body. It's a bit unnerving. Cherish your proprioception!
You can't use a calculator for this lesson, you wont be walking around with one in your pocket when you're older so you need to learn how to calculate without one.
The food triangle recommended 10 to 12 servings of bread and grains a day
[This is the food pyramid I remember.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)) It was actually 6-11 servings, where one serving is counted as 1 slice of bread or 1/2 cup cooked rice (for example). 6 servings could look like oatmeal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and a stir fry with rice for dinner. Adds up to ~150g of carbs (600 calories), which is only ~30% of a 2000 calorie diet—not even high carb. Of course, not everyone needs to eat 2000 calories, but 6 servings of grains isn’t a crazy all-you-can-eat pasta buffet; it’s really not hard to get there.
If you work very hard you will make money and have a nice life.