Was there some stupid untrue thing you learned as a kid and believed into your adult life?

[NNadir]

Mine:

1) My father told me that if you ever put milk in a beer glass, you would never get a head on the beer when your filled it afterwards. (I certainly should have known better, but somehow I actually believed that until I finally did the experiment.)

2) Until my early 20s, I believed that hot water freezes faster than cold water, that is, if you put hot water in the freezer, you will get ice faster. (I probably misinterpreted what my high school teacher must have told me, that hot water cools at a faster rate (degrees/minute), but obviously hot water must pass through exactly the same thermodynamic state.)

3) When I was in high school, I used to make ice in the refrigerator in the kitchen which was directly under my bedroom, and transport it up to my room to put in a swamp cooler by my window. Of course this added heat to the house. We didn't have air conditioning, but it used to amaze me that I was always covered by sweat when waking.

I certainly didn't absorb the laws of thermodynamics when I was in high school. I certainly felt like a dumb rube hick when I took PChem.

These are things about which I laugh at my young self.

[Botany]

1. Yes from 5th grade up to my 40s @ one time or anther I liked:

Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, and Joe Paterno.

[NNadir]

2. That's a bad one. I'm one for three on that list. I used to think Woody Allen was funny. n/t.

[Botany]

6. Stuff

Bill Cosby .... he came to Columbus, OH for a fund raiser for an at risk program for male
teens and a friend's dad worked at the program and said that Cosby was a grade A dick
and not a nice person. I had never heard friend's father ever say anything bad about any-
body before or after that.

Woody Allen .... started having sex with an underage girl who was in his and Mia's family
structure his daughter ... I thought he was a brilliant film maker/actor/director but after
the Soon Yi story came out I haven't watched one of his films.

Paterno ..... before his protection of a child rapist on his staff came out he refused to step
down as head coach even though he was no longer up to the job and got broken bones be-
cause he could not get out of the way of the players.

[Shermann]

3. The "indoor swamp cooler" could conceivably work

But you need to vent the humidified air out of the house (or room) and bring in fresh outdoor dry air to run through it.

[NNadir]

7. The refrigerator was under my room. The heat exchanger from the freezer and the heat from the...

...motor rose into my room.

I grew up in a post World War II tract house of the type they built for veterans, small rooms, poor insulation, and tiny windows.

Also summers on Long Island were always very humid.

I didn't understand it then, but I understand now why it never worked.

My high school was pretty good, but my science teachers weren't real scientists with serious lab experience; they were guys with Bachelor's degrees in who-knows-what working from a prepared curriculum.

I don't know if I was goofing off, or intimidated (most of my friends were the children of engineers, lawyers, professors, and the like, my father was a laborer with an 8th grade education), but I certainly didn't know the laws of thermodynamics when I was in high school. I was always dreaming up perpetual motion machines.

I now think everyone should have at least a very basic idea of these laws. It would save us a lot of trouble and waste if people did have a working knowledge of them, at least on a simple level.

[Shermann]

19. Right but there are two cooling mechanisms at work

Assuming 100% of the heat from the refrigerator radiated into your room, that would be a wash.

However, the swamp cooler also provides an evaporative cooling effect on dry air. Some of the sensible heat is converted into latent heat by humidifying the air from the water supply. But once the air is humidified, it stops working. So, fresh air is needed, and even then it only works to a point.

[NNadir]

22. Well, in a dry climate, that would be true. Long Island in summer, however didn't qualify as dry.

The air was frequently near saturation and there wasn't much opportunity for the uptake of heat of vaporization, for the same reason that wet bulb temperatures above 35 centigrade are fatal.

[Shermann]

31. My position is that you weren't a dumb rube hick

Stop debating that position!

[NNadir]

32. It won't work.

I was a dumb rube hick.

Long Island actually has a town called "Hicksville." I had a girlfriend who lived there. I fit right in.

[3catwoman3]

33. My husband grew up in Hicksville.

Billy Joel is from Hicksville.

They didn’t know each other.

[NNadir]

37. Billy Joel is Hicksville writ large.

When we were kids, a big thing for us was to go see his first band, the Hassles. It was a pure Hicksville/Long Island scene.

I heard, and am inclined to believe, that Christie Brinkley divorced him because she found it boring as hell to ride back and forth from Oyster Bay to Orient Point week after week in a big boat.

[FuzzyRabbit]

23. Intro to physics should be mandatory for high schoolers.

Lots of adults who never took physics believe you can break the laws of physics, like breaking traffic laws.

[hunter]

35. It should be mandatory in elementary school.

So should sex education.

Kids should know the facts of life before adolescence addles them.

[rsdsharp]

4. I was taught, by my parents and my third grade teacher

that the word “oriole” was pronounced “oreo.” I learned the truth after reading the baseball scores on the radio, and my wife asked me why I pronounced the Baltimore team name wrong.

I should have known. My third grade teacher pronounced tortilla tor-til-a. I forgive you Mrs. Tjaden.

[NNadir]

8. I was in my early twenties when I learned that the word "oil" was not pronounced "earl."

Somehow I also believed the word "comparable" was pronounced "conquerable."

[Bev54]

11. That reminds me of when I dated a Kiwi and he and his friends were big rugby fans so

they would all talk about their team. It wasn't until I went with him to the Pub to watch a game that I learned their name was All Blacks, I had been calling them Oil Blacks for months and none of them corrected me because that is exactly how they pronounced it.

[3catwoman3]

12. My husband's dad grew up on Long Island pre-WW 2.

He had an “earl boiner” in the basement of the house my husband grew up in.

[NNadir]

28. Ah, the days of Long Island ducks and Long Island potatoes.

I am just old enough to remember potato bugs covering everything. They're probably extinct on Long Island now. (I only go there once or twice a year, to see a cousin and my stepmother.)

[markie]

5. if one works really hard

they will certainly get ahead and succeed

[Boomerproud]

14. That was the 1st item in my belief system that got squashed.

The phrase it's who you know not what you know was 100% true. When my department at a large bank was dissolved they pounded the word "networking" at us and I found out why.

[Bev54]

9. My Dad told me I got Stys in my eye from peeing on the side of the road.

We lived out in a logging community and it was a 2 1/2 hour drive to the nearest town on a gravel road and I often had to have him stop for me to pee. I figured it out before adulthood but as a young child I believed him.

[rsdsharp]

16. LOL. A number of years ago we drove to Kansas City with another couple

to see a football game. It’s about a 3 hour drive — normally. We stopped at every rest stop on I35, and a couple of gas stations, so she could pee. Talk about teeny weeny bladder! I didn’t notice any stys.

[Bev54]

17. Yep I still have that tiny bladder and so does my kid.

[AZSkiffyGeek]

10. I immediately knew it was bull

But I had a third grade teacher who said succotash was a form of squash, and that the pilgrims landed in Virginia.

[Ocelot II]

13. Not quite into adulthood but at least until high school,

I believed that the liquid inside of a golf ball was so deadly poisonous that you could die if you touched it.

[iwillalwayswonderwhy]

15. Most of my misperceptions were corrected through reading in my teens

But the weirdest one I heard while living in California, from many people was that the word “lozenge” was actually “lozenger” and they were adamant that they were right and I was wrong.

[NNadir]

25. Californians talk funny.

I just love saying that. I took such shit for my New York accent for the first several years I lived there.

[Archae]

30. I'm born and raised Wisconsin...

Two years ago I went to Georgia and I got some ribbing for the way I talked.

[Croney]

18. You mustn't eat watermelon down past the red part,

because the white layer is poison.

We'd be out in the country in central Mississippi and each kid would be handed half a watermelon and no utensils. You just "beasted it" (a phrase I picked up from Beasts of the Southern Wild) but you only ate the red.

The white was poison.

[surrealAmerican]

20. #2 is actually true in an open ice cube tray because ...

... more of the hot water evaporates in the freezer. You could just freeze a smaller quantity of cold water, which would be faster still.

[NNadir]

24. No it isn't. There is a point at which the temperature of hot water will be the same as the...

temperature of the cold water that one might have placed in the freezer originally.

[surrealAmerican]

26. Of course there will ...

... but, at that point you will be freezing one tray with less water (that was previously hot), and one with more.

[NNadir]

27. Yes, but time was spent getting to that state. The belief I had was that if you placed a ice...

...tray with hot water next to a tray with cold water, the cold one would take longer time to freeze.

This isn't true.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

21. That there is such a thing as magic/supernatural stuff .. gods, devils, heaven, hell, afterlives ...

ghosts, spirits, souls, psychics, faith healers, witches, warlocks, etc.

It didn't last long into 'adulthood' but by the time I was 22 (with a decent scientific education) I believed in absolutely NONE of that magical bullshit.

[Mr.Bill]

29. This thread reminds me...

some of my great grandchildren are just at the right age to teach them that trees moving is what makes the wind blow.

[PuffPuff]

34. Drinking soda and eating pop rocks will kill you.

Held onto that for way too long.

[RussBLib]

36. Santa Claus, tooth fairy, Easter bunny, god

The usual.

Oh, and if you swallow a watermelon seed, a watermelon vine will grow out of your navel.