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Long held misconceptions
CygnusZ
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Back when I was in elementary school I loved reading fantasy books. It started in second grade when my father bought me The Book of Three. I enjoyed the sense of adventure, and all the strange creatures that the adventurers encountered on their journey. After reading the prydain books I moved on to Xanth, the Deathgate Cycle, until I finally stopped reading fantasy books when I entered high school.
Now, of all the odd creatures in all the fantasy books I ever read, the Unicorn never struck me as being particularly unrealistic. It's just a horse with a horn. To this day it seems possible to me that such a creature could really exist. I mean, pegasus and dragons are plain silly, but I could see unicorns herds running about in eastern Europe. A matter of fact, I thought that unicorns were real until our class took a trip to the bronx zoo in the last year of middle school. The biology teacher asked us what animals we would like to see in their habitats, and I bravely [foolishly] said that I would like to see a unicorn. The whole class burst out into laughter, and I was saved by the fact that everybody thought I was joking. That night when I told my parents, they were kind enough to inform me that unicorns are not real.
It's a bit of embarassing story, but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone here. I'd like to hear some of the misconceptions that many of the people here held onto that were dispelled way too late in life.
Now, of all the odd creatures in all the fantasy books I ever read, the Unicorn never struck me as being particularly unrealistic. It's just a horse with a horn. To this day it seems possible to me that such a creature could really exist. I mean, pegasus and dragons are plain silly, but I could see unicorns herds running about in eastern Europe. A matter of fact, I thought that unicorns were real until our class took a trip to the bronx zoo in the last year of middle school. The biology teacher asked us what animals we would like to see in their habitats, and I bravely [foolishly] said that I would like to see a unicorn. The whole class burst out into laughter, and I was saved by the fact that everybody thought I was joking. That night when I told my parents, they were kind enough to inform me that unicorns are not real.
It's a bit of embarassing story, but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone here. I'd like to hear some of the misconceptions that many of the people here held onto that were dispelled way too late in life.
CygnusZ on
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No, but I do remember "When Cars Attack III" which was amazing!
Edit: at least I thought there was a 3, but google isn't helping me find it.
I think we made fun of you for this in some chat thread a long while back.
Shit was funny.
For the longest time as a kid, I was fucking terrified of the day killer bees would finally reach Oregon, and end life as I knew it. I'd have horrible thoughts about getting stung by a bee, already bad enough, and suddenly being swarmed by thousands of bees.
Because of how they were often present in fantasy and ghost stories that I KNEW were fake, I was convinced as a child that pirates where completely fictional, and when my friend's parents told me that their coffee table was made out of a door off of an old pirate shit, I thought they were pulling my leg.
Curious. Did you also assume knights in armor were not real in that case?
Well, a door made from old pirate shit would be odd.
Your post reminds me of that Venture Bros. episode.
I may have. The difference is that I heard far less stories about ghost-knights.
I had a decent grasp on "what shit isn't real" as a kid, and since pirate lore is so closely associated with ghost ships and skeleton crews, it just got them lumped in.
"Bat-Kid Spotted!"
"Half Crocodile, Half Man!"
"Woman Gives Birth to Alien!"
"Big Foot Found in Sewers of L.A.!"
"Woman With Three Breasts!"
since prague is sort of a hip indie place in europe
sigh
That's how the city's pronounced by the literate.
When I was a kid I heard somewhere that the world's ability to grow chocolate would be exhausted by 2000, and every year I would grow a little sadder by the impending death of my delicious sweets.
Instead you just get to be sad by losing bananas soon.
Also, Fish, but I don't care so much about fish.
This is the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread.
3DS: 2852-6809-9411
What? My bananas! Don't take away my bananas! Explain yourself!
Sid Meier's Pirates! went a long way to helping me understand the era of piracy. I have to admit though, I always wondered how the Spanish managed to make a silver train in the mid-1500s. Or, for that matter, why they kept on taking the train to Spain.
Bananas are all cloned. They do not reproduce. They have no genetic variation. They are/will be decimated by diseases within our life time.
Maybe I'm off by a little
As for things we should have learned a long time ago, I have no idea where peanuts come from. Maybe I'll look that up.
EDIT: Ah, the underground part of a low plant.
And that reminds me of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc
One particular variety of grown-for-consumption bananas (the one that proves that God exists because it's so perfectly designed) will go extinct. However, it should be noted that this happened once before. When Cavendish bananas go the way of the dodo, we'll create a new variety to replace them. Don't worry your little head off.
i assumed that TV sets essentially reported what show was being watched and when on which TVs
this is a pretty common misconception, even amongst adults. for example, recently i was browsing a Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles fan forum and there was people actively encouraging everyone to leave every TV in their house on the show's season finale in order to boost ratings. which is hilarious and dumb, but points out that many adults don't even know how the nielsen rating system operates.
but, when i was a kid, not only did i have this assumption about how it worked, i assumed the TV could tell who was watching it, because i would hear things like "this show is really popular with 20 year old males" or whatever and i would think how could they possibly know that unless the TV can tell?
so as i came into adolescence and found myself interested in seeing people naked and whatnot, i found out that some channels late at night would show programs that contained nudity or sexuality
not porn, necessarily, but R-rated movies that weren't cut for TV because they showed at 11 pm and so on.
so when young and sexually curious me would sneak downstairs after my parents went to bed to watch R-rated movies on TV, i was afraid not only of my parents waking up and giving me shit, i was afraid the TV could tell i wasn't supposed to be watching these shows and the people at the TV stations would call my mom
but i did it anyway! that felt pretty brazen
then i found out from kids at school that what i thought about TV ratings and monitoring was bullshit, and felt safe watching whatever i wanted, even porn
I saw this when I was an adult, and knew it wasn't real, but I desperately wanted a house hippo. Still do.
When I was in grade school, I didn't believe my teachers that midgets were real.
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they are legumes, in the same family as beans and peas.
they do not grow on trees
this shocked me when i learned it
No, they have studied web formation under the effects of various drugs. The effects are interesting - webs will lose symmetry, or the spider will forget to build parts.
This is one of my pet peeves, and really gets under my skin, since anybody should know better if they just take two fucking seconds and think about how shit works.
Kids are excused from this hatred though.
That's how I first read that line, and had quite the amusing mental image.
http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm
It is indeed! And, as it turns out, the crack-cocaine spider really did think building webs was for suckas.
And that AIDS was a virus.
There are still long held misconceptions I have, because I fail to truly grasp the concept behind the universe like what shape it is, where the center is, what the hell the universe is expanding into, and that you could have more than one universe.
I grew up reading the Phantom as a kid, and a lot of Tarzan (Edgar Rice Burroughs). As a white boy growing up in the jungle, (I was about 6 in this story) these heroes both had the appeal and setting I was familiar with. I was convinced I could do similar things, if only I undertook rigorous training. This consisted of me starting on the first few steps of things and jumping off; stairs, slides, barrels, low branches etc.
I knew these weren't spectacular feats, but I was being smart you see, working my way up. Within the hour I was jumping off the tops of things, low roofs, water tanks, hedges (yes hedges, totally doable) and was doing alright. And that was me just in regular kids clothes. Satisfied I was ready for the next level, I made a headband and turned a cardboard box into a set of wings that I strapped to my forearms, and turned my eyes to the small shed behind our house.
It had a sloping corrugated roof, so where on one side, a bright young lad could move barrels and boxes and climb up onto it quite easily, the other side was ten or fifteen feet above the ground. The slope created a horizon effect; there was the roof, the edge, the sky, and my own limitless potential. I sprinted for the end and leaped, arms wide.
One of my cutout wings snapped off, and the other just sort of flailed against my left arm. I remember looking at it, thinking that I should have spent more time on the design. Not to fear, my legs were coming into position nicely. I struck the ground in a sort of heroic ta-da, the laid back Superman cruise landing, except of course, I didn't stop at all, my legs buckled underneath me instantly and my knees were slammed into my chest, popping out both sides as the rest of my body whumped into the ground. My face was pounded into the grass so hard it stained, and little bits yellow and green were embedded into my cheekbones.
Could there be something wrong with The Program? Impossible, i thought, The Program is sound.
Fuck you, training montage, you lied to me!
This led to an unfortunate incident in which I informed my family that I was freezing my balls off, and not understanding why my parents were upset with my choice of words.
Ha ha, that's where I assumed it was too. I think it's because they show map closeups all the time on the news and those look similiar in close-up.
People in general have a lot of completely asinine misconceptions about various realms of scientific knowledge. In particular, evolution by natural selection and the second law of thermodynamics seem to be totally incomprehensible to about seventy percent of the population. I blame it on the repeated misuse of these principles in popular culture.
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
As for me, growing up and learning the truth about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy at a really young age, I then decided to myself that God was also another fairy tale. It all clicked in my head: Santa doesn't give presents to bad kids = God doesn't let bad people into heaven. I was an eight-year-old atheist telling other children that God didn't exist (while also telling them that Santa wasn't real either).
I probably made some awkward conversations for other kids' parents.
Instead of commending me for saving them all from a painful and gruesome death, my teacher burst into laughter and told me that was the most ridiculous thing she'd ever heard. Then the rest of the class had a good laugh. I felt like such an idiot for the rest of the day.
I thought I was wrong for many years, but a couple of months back I checked snopes on a whim and sure enough there have been recorded deaths caused by lightning coming through the phone line! In retrospect my teacher was a fucking idiot and I'm not sure why I ever believed her in the first place..
Until I was like 8.