As if now people are knowledgeable…
Yep. The world’s knowledge at your fingertips and we’re all “skibidiing”
I like the way Mary Jo and Bridget explained on a rifftrax video for ‘Duties of a Secretary’ - “Secretaries were the internet in heels.”
My grandfather told me that grits were ground-up pig’s knuckles. I was in my late 20s before I learned otherwise. Pop just didn’t want to share his fucking grits, which is at least understandable.
Now you ask uncle Grok and carry his misinformation for 20 minutes, because your long-term memory doesn’t exist anymore.
Or, if you were lucky, you could look things up in your out of date encyclopedias.
When I was a kid in the 1980/90s, we had two encyclopedias at home: a 20 tome encyclopedia from 1905, and a three volume current one. At some point we got Microsoft Encarta, a CD-ROM encyclopedia.
It was far more common for people to say they don’t know something and refer to other’s expertise.
We were taught blood was blue in school, not just once, in at least two grades. Not in the book mind you, but from the teachers’ mouths.
The 7th grade science book did teach us gamma rays move faster than the speed of light, which is bullshit.
Gamma rays do travel faster than light through some media, but obviously not faster than c, the speed of light in a vacuum.
Well yeah, the media was that one kid’s 7th grade science book
by my grade 7, i had already learned all about dalkon shield and iuds, silicone breast implants and their risks, rely tampons and toxic shock syndrome, roe v wade, aids and homosexuality…
that was just the sex ed units from the regular nightly news.
OK
Gamma rays are photons like light no? Is the speed in a medium related to its energy/frequency? Or am I misunderstanding something
That’s correct, sort of. Individual photons travel always at c (they don’t have mass, so they literally can’t go slower), but when traveling through a transparent (for their frequency) medium they don’t go through the atoms or around them—they would hit an atom (its electrons, really), get absorbed, and then re-emitted. The average speed of all the photons will be lower than c, and depends on the frequency, that’s how we got rainbows. For most frequencies, including visible light, it goes slower the higher the frequency is, but gamma rays/x rays photons are so high energy that they don’t interact with the electrons, but with the nuclei—that’s why you want materials like lead or tungsten to block them—which are much smaller, resulting in fewer absorbing-emitting interactions and a higher average speed.
Its because “speed” can refer to two different things in this context. Group velocity is the speed that your light waves can send a message it. This cannot move faster than light. Phase velocity on the other hand is the speed of the peaks of the wave. This can move faster but its not possible to send a signal through this.
True, but this doesn’t explain if gamma rays move faster than light in certain materials, right?
If you had a material with no light passing through it, then you shined a light through it, it would only move at the group velocity. The whole “faster than light” thing refers to the phase velocity, but you can’t have a phase velocity if the light hasn’t gotten there yet.
Saying that gamma rays (or any light in general) moves faster than light is technically true but very misleading and relies heavily on when you define “speed” as.
3Blue1Brown has a good video on why the phase velocity is different from the group velocity if you’re interested in why. The faster than light phase velocity happens when the “phase kicks” are so delayed that the phase appears to move forward.
I must misunderstand, I wasn’t thinking of the “group velocity” (or that “frequency” making light “faster than light”), but plain old slow speed of light!
Like in water, light moves (as for data transfer) slower than in vacuum, right? There are materials that slow down light to a crawl (I read some theory some time ago about slowing down light to almost zero).
So I thought that in some material, x-rays were faster than light, both being slower than c of course.
c is the speed of light in a vacuum. It is impossible to send information faster than c. x-rays are also just light so everything I said before also applies to x-rays.
I’m not very familiar with how light interacts with materials since it wasn’t covered in the electromagnetism class that I took, so the next part might be wrong. The speed of light is calculated by looking at Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism and recognizing that it is the equation for a wave. The speed is then calculated as c = 1/sqrt(epsilon_0 * mu_0) where epsilon_0 and mu_0 are the vacuum permittivity and the vacuum permeability. Inside a material, I think the permittivity and permeability are different and thus the speed of light as determined by Maxwell’s equations would be different. I know its not possible for the speed (group velocity) of light in a material to be faster than the speed of light in a vacuum because otherwise, you could send information faster than c, which is impossible.
I dunno about xrays, but it is true that light slows down in media and that particles can move faster than light in that medium, that’s where Cherenkov radiation comes from! (Though I’m not sure if that also just slows down the particles or what)
The worst misinformation we got was that after erections (which functionally are made via blood flow) boys pee out the blood. Like Jesus fuck lady, what is wrong with your husband.
Wat
That’s an odd one, since you’d think peeing or not peeing blood would be very easy to verify.
That’s definitely not about her husband, it’s about scare tactics. The reason behind using scare tactics can be many, like religion, suppressed sexuality, what she was taught or even just not wanting to deal with her students doing stuff. It’s absolutely not ok to say that no matter the reason though.
We got a lot of such lies, for instance on Marijuana, and everyone found out it was bullshit if they didn’t already know, and it destroys the credibility of the authorities. Which in truth might be the most important message school could teach our kids heading into the 21st century, the government is dishonest. Everything is based on lies, and if it isn’t they are trying to end that part of government.
But they told us about cancer, it making you impotent and sterile, stupid and brain damage, all sorts of bullshit. Much based on studies where they spray pesticides on the plant then blame the plant for the pesticide effects. Thank the University of Missouri I think it is for a lot of that bullshit.
Ah, that’s just omitting the details. She forgot about the circumstances of the situation, like, e.g., a super strong vacuum cleaner. /s
PSA: Go to the doctor if you’re pissing blood.
Came here to say the same thing, for years I was believing my blood was blue before it hit oxygen…
I was going to add the “hitting oxygen” is an important part of the blue blood myth back then.
Which is really funny since your blood is already oxeygenated
Ah, but I think the “blue” blood you see is in your veins, which carry “spent” blood with low oxygen content. Those kinds of little truths are what make myths believable, too.
Holy shit.
As someone who does not possess the knowledge, is blood white?
Deoxygenated, venous blood is dark red. Oxygenated, arterial blood is bright red.
I was taught the “blood is blue” myth also. My mom was livid, since her job involved drawing lots of blood, starting IVs etc.
I called bullshit from the start on that. If it was true, that blood turned red when it touched oxygen, then pulling blood from the vein in a needle would be blue. Teachers told me to shut up.
It’s such a stupid theory, knowing what we knew.
Plasma separated from red blood cells is sorta yellowish beige. At least in IV bags.
It’s actually green
🖖
That one guy in Carbon Creek is an outlier and should not be counted.
Blood separates into white, yeah. That’s basically my understanding of (a type of) pus formation.
That’s right thanks to the internet misinformation is no more!
Very true, friend. As repeatedly proven by reliable studies, the Internet has completely fixed the issue of misinformation. Turns out it was about access to information, and nothing else!
Time to crack those dusty old encyclopedias out again!
Right about more things. Also confidently wrong about just as many things.
“Urine is sterile”
“You can only fold paper 7 times”
Etc.
The paper thing is is testable! It’s not wrong. «You» can’t do it
Did it yesterday
DIN A4? Maybe DIN A1? I can do more than 7 times
there’s a mythbuster episode on it https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l9w8GjMeWGo
So you say butter paper is the trick.
Also I would count the half folded ones too
Oh, no you can’t
assume your hypothetical sheet of paper has thickness 1u; on fold iteration 1: thickness of the paper is doubled, 21u = 2u on fold iteration 2: thickness gets doubled again l, 22u = 4u
this pattern continues for all subsequent iteration and by the seventh iteration the thickness of the paper is 27 * 1u = 128u
hence by the seventh iteration, assuming you have managed to reach this far, you will be trying to fold something that is 128 times thicker than your first fold.
also whether it be DIN A4 or DIN A1 it doesnt matter, the ability to fold is dependent on the thickness of the paper, which is the same.
Yes’nt.
You are correct on the thickness. However the folding makes it smaller. And the smaller it gets the less leverage you have.
Now you can go online and double down on your misinformation.
My ex thought that night time just meant that the moon went in front of the sun. I have no idea how she managed to live to 30 years old before she learned about night time.
My dad told me thunder is when clouds collide
My uncle told me it was God clappin’ cheeks.
I always heard “angels bowling.”
“that’s just god twerking…”
Is that misinformation or a dad joke?
As far as I know it’s misinformation
Hoho man, I’m gonna use that one
We’re still there, aunt Marge is just called Grok now.
I don’t want to think that badly about aunt Marge. How about Gemini? Marge wasn’t gropey
she also goes by other names too, such as “AI Overview” and “Claude”
I had an argument with a teacher in middle school who shared the crap of, “If you swallow gum, it stays in your stomach for 7 years.” The kids told me I must be wrong, because the teacher said it so he must be right.
I was so pissed that I came in the next day with three different sources saying that it was a myth. He quietly admitted the truth to me, but refused to tell the class.
I get being frustrated with kids chewing gum in class, but if you have to lie to get them to follow rules, that’s a failure as a teacher. He was a science teacher, no less. If anybody should be open to a student pulling up sources for a claim, or to admitting they learned something new and they were wrong before, it should be a science teacher.
Thanks, Mr H. Way to prove to me that even “cool” teachers care more about controlling kids than being truthful.
To make kids look stupid in front of their peers by taking an authority figure at their word you just have to be willing to burn credibility.
He quietly admitted the truth to me, but refused to tell the class.
98% of humanity, right there. Fuck I hate them.
Yep, it was a lesson that cut deep. Which is why I won’t let such stuff pass with my own students. One of my coworkers wanted to discourage a kid from using permanent markers and told him he’d give himself ink poisoning. The kid took it to heart and started saying he was allergic to tattoo ink. It was kind of funny at first, but he kept repeating it until it got concerning. I think he was starting to be scared of markers.
I just told him the truth - he’s probably not going to get sick, but permanent markers are hard to clean off of things, including skin, and that some of his peers might use them on things they aren’t supposed to. He’s a smart kid who just wants to understand things and will think through stuff he doesn’t understand until they make sense to him, even if it means imagining an allergy to something he sees other people use just fine. It breaks my heart to think that’s not the last time some adult will tell him a myth, but hopefully his natural desire to make sense of things will continue to develop into a first-rate bullshit alarm someday.
Now an LLM has parsed Aunt Marge’s Facebook posts into it’s knowledge bank and regurgitates it to everyone searching online for an answer.
I’d prefer it if they actually worked that way
It kinda does, but it’s everyone’s Facebook posts, and it’s stored in a lossy way as a weighted graph rather than in a database, and it will sometimes traverse the graph down a different path depending on if venus is crowning a supercrescent moon.
You could go to your local library. I still do.
You could, but that info was still there. Schools and educational material taught us that blood was blue, Columbus discovered America, and animals were hot or cold blooded.
