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Need some commonly accepted untruths/misconceptions

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SirStev0 said:
He is just twisting words. Yes slime mold can survive, but we have developed a much more complex and advanced system of survival. And we are more fit for our environment.

Need proof? Aim a stampeding rhino at me and a slime mold and see which gets out of the way faster.
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Put you and a water bear into orbit for a week and see which one dies first.
 
Arkaign said:
I could be wrong, but I think your links clearly conclude that indeed it was not Colossus that was the first 'digital computer'.

From link one above :

"Short for Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the ABC started being developed by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry in 1937 and continued to be developed until 1942 at the Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). On October 19, 1973, US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision that the ENIAC patent by Eckert and Mauchly was invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer."

From link two above :

"Design of Colossus started in March 1943 and the first unit was operational at Bletchley Park in January 1944."
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Sorry, I should have said the first fully functional digital computer (from link one):
"However, because the ABC was never fully functional we consider the first functional digital computer to be the ENIAC."
 
Keynesian economics works..and there really is a God who listens to all of your prayers and performs miracles when he feels like it.
 
FoBoT said:
i recently realized that something my grandfather always told me , no longer is as wise as it was back in his time

he would tell me , "Don't take any wooden nickels"

back in the 1920's or 1930's , the wood needed to carve a wooden nickel would of course cost much less than a nickel . so taking a wooden nickel in place of a real nickel would clearly be a rip off

now, in 2009, if you were to carve a nickel out of a good quality hard wood, a nice cherry or teak or something, it may very well cost more that $0.05 for that piece of wood

so now, a wooden nickel might well be worth more than a real nickel
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You did not take inflation into account. You can buy a shit lot more stuff in 1920-30 with a nickel than now.

But if you actually have a wooden nickel from the 20s or 30s, I would imagine it is worth quite a bit.
 
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Diamonds are hard. REALLY hard.

But it can be shattered easily by striking a hammer on it because it is not tough. Thus, diamond swords are a bad idea...
 
daw123 said:
Sorry, I should have said the first fully functional digital computer (from link one):
"However, because the ABC was never fully functional we consider the first functional digital computer to be the ENIAC."
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However, unlike Colossus, ENIAC was fully programmable and Turing-complete.
 
Acanthus said:
kranky said:
My favorite is if you go out without a coat in the winter, you'll get sick.
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You beat me to it. This one is very very prevalent.
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Or that quickly going from a cold place (like outdoors in winter, or a refrigerated warehouse) to a warm room will cause severe illness.
There are a lot of these that I hear day to day. It's like general medical knowledge is still stuck somewhere in the 1600's, minus the urge to bleed the "bad blood" out of people.



StrangerGuy said:
Diamonds are hard. REALLY hard.

But it can be shattered easily by striking a hammer on it because it is not tough. Thus, diamond swords are a bad idea...
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And this is true of any ceramic material. 🙂
VERY hard, but very brittle.
Metals are more ductile than ceramics, and so they can absorb some energy of impact by flexing.
 
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Jeff7 said:
Or that quickly going from a cold place (like outdoors in winter, or a refrigerated warehouse) to a warm room will cause severe illness.
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It worked for me.
All those years in Minnesota I never got sick.
Soon as I joined the Navy and went down to Florida I got sick as a dog. Of course, it could have had something to do with being surrounded by pussies with no immune system. Weak people are germ factories.
 
shortylickens said:
It worked for me.
All those years in Minnesota I never got sick.
Soon as I joined the Navy and went down to Florida I got sick as a dog. Of course, it could have had something to do with being surrounded by pussies with no immune system. Weak people are germ factories.
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Yeah, you're suddenly going to a new region, with a new crowd of people who were likely also from all over the country. I'm sure there were all kinds of fun new pathogens your immune system had never seen before.

Besides, in Minnesota, I'm sure you'd experience crazy temperature swings daily during the winter, say from walking outside into a heated building.



yh125d said:
Distilled water doesn't conduct, and it widely available and cheap
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I think deionized water is what is needed to stop electrical conductivity.
 
deionized and distilled are two methods to remove impurities from water

the point is that pure water is a poor conductor

Water conductivity

Pure water is not a good conductor of electricity. Ordinary distilled water in equilibrium with carbon dioxide of the air has a conductivity of about 10 x 10-6 W-1*m-1 (20 dS/m). Because the electrical current is transported by the ions in solution, the conductivity increases as the concentration of ions increases.
Thus conductivity increases as water dissolved ionic species.

Typical conductivity of waters:
Ultra pure water 5.5 · 10-6 S/m
Drinking water 0.005 – 0.05 S/m
Sea water 5 S/m



Read more: http://www.lenntech.com/applications/ultrapure/conductivity/water-conductivity.htm#ixzz0XVp0uvTw
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yh125d said:
Even more specifically, the poor aerodynamics and low mass result in a low terminal velocity. It's low terminal velocity matched with its low mass result in a rather small momentum when it would hit a person, and since it doesn't have a shape prone to piercing skin much less bone, it won't kill a person 🙂
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yeah but, what if it fell down their throat and...

well, it would still only knock out one of the lungs.

also, falling from the empire state building wouldn't enhance it much.
 
Modelworks said:
Textbooks in school are filled with so many errors and nobody seems to care. They still show Haeckel drawings in science books under evolution even though he was criticized by scientists after they found out he made them up.

Schools spend millions each year trying to fix them. You would think a history book couldn't change much each year but they get total rewrites regularly.
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That reminds me of first day of physics 101 in college...the professor said "all that stuff you may have learned in high school, they're wrong." At the time, I was thinking I understand how history books can be wrong, but physics???
 
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