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 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
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.
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.
USA is a democracy
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 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.
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…
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In an atom, the electrons orbit around the nucleus in the same manner as the planets orbit around the sun.
That’s been debunked for many many decades but middle scool still teaches this model. At least I wasn’t told back then how misleading and wrong that is, only in high school right before graduating the physics teacher emphasized this misconception. I remember how mad she was about it lol. I have no clue how its taught elsewhere.
The Bhor’s model is at least a useful simplification of the atomic structure. What needs taught is that everything you learn before college and intensive narrow topical courses is simplified to the point of being incorrect with the hope that you get enough of an intrinsic understanding of the concept that the less simplified explanation you get next will make sense. I say this because it will still be simplified to the point of being wrong, but will be a step closer to the truth. This is the essence of education.
- Elementary/middle school: ice is water that has frozen solid
- HS: ice is water that has lost enough energy that the molecules form a crystalline lattice.
- College: there are actually 19 or 20 kinds of water ice that have been verified, but as many as 74,963 might exist.
- Post-collegiate: There may be 74,963 kinds of ice, but I know one ICE we should definitely eliminate from this world.
Yes I agree to all of this, especially to the last sentence lol. I didn’t want to give the impression that simplifications are a bad thing. But I think at one point you should start to hint that its a simplification and that there’s much more to it, like kurzgesagt does
Oh I’ve got a good one. Learned in the American south. Supposedly the American Civil War was not fought over slavery, but differing railroad track widths. Slavery was a minor detail that was a scape goat for the north to force the south to use its standard railroad width.
It’s not just about slavery. There was also state’s rights (to slavery), and the economic disparity (turns out free men work harder than slaves?!), and a clash of religious ideals (people that interpret the Bible as pro-slavery vs people that believe benevolence requires abolition). There were even one or two spots where water usage rights and federal funding were in controversy.
Obligatory “there’s a xkcd for anything, isn’t it?”
The one that immediately springs to mind doesn’t exactly fit the criteria, because it wasn’t even true at the time that I was taught it in public school in Texas. But my history teacher taught me that no real historian called it the “American Civil War,” and that it was correctly called “The War of Northern Aggression.” And, of course, although the Confederacy did want to keep slavery legal, their actual central reason for seceding was “states rights.”
Like I said, both of those are simply lies. Only propagandists call it “The War of Northern Aggression”, and it was always explicitly about slavery.
The sad thing is that I believed and repeated these lies for years after that. Note that, like most people, I didn’t have access to the internet to easily check things myself. Since at the time I had zero interest in reading about history, it was difficult to correct my knowledge.
It has demonstrated, to me at least, the importance of keeping propaganda away from children. The more you lie to children, the harder it will be for them to become functioning adults.
“The atomic bombings were necessary” was something we were expected to internalize as an indisputable hard fact, like gravity and oxbow lakes.
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.
Hell, Nazi Germany also had a few elections. All extremely rigged, of course.
Fruit and vegetables being separate categories: Fruits are actually a type of vegetable. Additionally cucumbers are melons.
Cyan being a light blue: It is actually 50% green.
Simple machines are fundamental: They completely ignore compliant mechanisms and aren’t atomic. Actually atomic mechanisms would be defined by the type of force, the shape, and the compliance.
The only form of Socialism is Marxism and Communism and Capitalism means markets: Look up Mutualism or Syndicalism.
Basically everything with pop psychology.
I am sure there are more, but these were just top of my head.
