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

[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.