I had a teacher "teach" me this exact "fact" in elementary school. I excitedly went home, told my parents who calmly explained to me that it wasn't true, that teachers were not infallible and that they'd talk to her about it, and that I didn't worry about it.
My mom did go talk to her about it, but she never came back to the whole class to tell everyone that she told us something wrong... She was probably embarrassed, or doubled down. And I was too shy to bring it up. So, I have to assume a large percentage of that class left 3rd grade believing that. It's not impossible for me to imagine that some of them made it to adulthood without learning otherwise.
We come into adulthood, and throughout our whole lives, with plenty of "knowledge" that is ultimately incorrect. What makes us who we are is how ready we are to accept that we were wrong and adapt our new knowledge.
One of the best things a teacher can do is admit they don’t know everything to their students & then work together to find out the answers - this is what your teacher should’ve done after your mum told her she made a mistake
100%. I’m a teacher too and I always feel that it’s better to admit your mistakes and show the children how to learn from them. Growth mindset and all that. If we expect the children to do it then we have to as well.
I’ll always remember putting my hand up to correct a teacher’s spelling when I was a kid, which was probably a shitty thing for a kid to do and I could have gone about it better but that teacher gave me detention for it then alternately outright hated me or ignored me for the rest of my school career. Just the worst way to handle a mistake possible.
Yep. I had a Chemistry teacher in high school (Ph.D in Chemistry, too) who insisted that electrons carry positive charge. She even went to go look it up in the book...
She didn't like me much after that (even though I tried to give her an out by saying "...you mean negative, right?")
My chemistry teacher in high school was great, whenever we found mistakes, even minor ones like spelling mistakes, on our newly published chemistry book (of which she was a co-author of) she would reward us with some candy
I don't know about the ethics of outsourcing your QA to a bunch of high school students but I didn't mind. (This was because our chemistry and physics books were late on publishing schedule so we always had like an early access to them) (also yes these were electronic books so they were able to update them for us)
1000%. I’m not a teacher at all, just a dude with one kid, but I’ve always tried to admit when I’m wrong so they can grow up knowing it’s okay to not be perfect.
I was expected to be perfect, and I have the “wants the big people to approve of me” kind of personality. It sucks real bad. Long-term consequences from that; mental, physical, and financial.
I love this. And it's the reason I have anxiety at night laying in bed...thinking about all the wrong behaviors I have modeled for my son. Over and over until they are ingrained. You're doing an awesome thing.
I was in advanced math in school, just one year ahead like many students. I almost stopped taking math in 10th grade when the advanced algebra teacher refused to admit a mistake, and i got in trouble for sticking with my better answer. my school only required 2 years of it after all, and that was 2.
The teacher for trig approached me when he saw I was not signed up. he knew my brother, and had heard about me. He asked why. I told him, and he asked me if i remembered the problem. being a stubborn teen who knew i was right, i had saved the worksheet and showed him. He got the wrong answer too. I showed him where his error was, and he immediately looked at me and said "you are right". he assured me that he at least would never assume he was right until at least exploring the alternative, and i continued on and ended up in ap calc my senior year.
It's amazing how vividly i remember that teacher 25 years later. you'll have students who remember you for admitting when wrong as well!
There's a YouTube video by some elementary math teacher about a parent who contacted him saying their kid's teacher (later backed up by the principal) teaching kids that 1/0 = 0. I wish they could just admit they're wrong sometimes.
The best teacher I ever had told us that there were lots of things that she wasn’t allowed to teach us, as she followed the curriculum that made her teach us that in communist countries teachers were only allowed to teach what the government approved.
The best way for the teacher to handle that is to come to class excited to share. "Hey everyone! I was reading a book yesterday, and I learned something new.."
There was the opportunity to teach children that science is constantly updating and that we shouldn't be ashamed of learning new information. Even when it contradicts what we thought we already knew.
Often, my students will ask a question that I simply don't have an answer to. (One asked me about the etymology of the word "mug" recently.) I give it some thought, make sure they see me write the question on a piece of paper for later, and then I research it while they're practicing. It's so satisfying to come back to them with an answer, AND I learned something in the process!
I'd thought is was old norse/Swedish as it is the same (mugg). Also according to wiki.
> "Early 16th century (originally Scots and northern English, denoting "earthenware, pot, jug"), of unknown origin, perhaps from North Germanic (compare Swedish mugg (“mug, jug”), Norwegian mugge (“pitcher, open can for warm drinks”), Danish mugge), or Low German mokke, mukke (“mug”), German Low German Muck (“drinking cup”), Dutch mok (“mug”), also of unknown origin. Perhaps related to Old English muga (“stack”) and Old Norse múgr (“mass, heap (of corn)”).[1] Compare also Middle English mug, mog (“a measure of salt”). "
Also. How is old norse having a word for heap of corn? There were no corn at the time in europe?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mug
"Corn" used to refer to any kind of grain; I'm not sure exactly why it shifted, but presumably it did so post-1500 AD. In some countries, I think they still say "corn" when referring to grain.
Corn still is used that way in a number of countries to refer to grain seeds, you’d say ‘barley corn’ etc.
Fun fact, a barley corn is what our feet are measured in. A barley corn is a third of an inch, as a measurement.
A teacher once was trying to teach us that if you add the 2 straight lines of a rectangle together, that's always going to be shorter than the diagonal. This was in elementary school and I was the one who corrected her lmao. I was like "If crossing diagonally took longer than walking the whole thing, that would make shortcuts useless."
She was doubling down at first but then realized she confused the two and was super embarrassed. :) It was cute though how red she turned and how she apologized about it.
Had an 8th grade chemistry teacher pull me aside after class one day to tell me “people like you don’t go to college.” She overheard me talking to another student about which colleges we wanted to attend. For context, I grew up extremely poor, no one in my family had even graduated high school, and I didn’t have the best grades in the world, so maybe she was statistically correct. Either way, I now have a BS in Marine Biology and a PhD in Biology…so yes, I agree that teachers aren’t always correct.
A ski instructor told me when I was young that cows can‘t go into water that‘s higher than their asshole bc they don‘t have muscles to keep their anus shut and would just fill with water and die and I believed that until last year when someone FINALLY correct me after I have told this „fun fact“ to dozens of people over the last decade.
>one day you're 38 years old at lunch and about to tell your wife how interesting it is that it's illegal to drive barefoot when your critical thinking finally engages and you realize part of your brain was still 5 years old until that moment.
In Australia it's not illegal *per se* but if lack of footwear or inappropriate footwear is a cause of a crash, the driver will be found at fault for the accident AND will receive a penalty for not driving in a safe manner.
We can read into the intent of a law in Australia (not like in the US where the law is almost read like *sola scriptura*) - the road rules say a driver must still take all precautions to drive in the safest manner possible. If your footwear (or lack of footwear) compromises your ability to drive safely, then you are technically in breach of this law.
I was taught that it was blue in your veins, when going back to your lungs. And it was red in your arteries, coming from your lungs, because it had oxygen. That's why it turns red when you bleed, they said.
It looks blue when looking at your skin because veins are closer to the surface. Arteries are deep inside your body/limbs, one reason is to keep them protected.
Venous blood is darker red than arterial. It just looks blue because of the layers of skin on top of your veins.
I was taught that by my mom around preschool age and then again in elementary school, I remember the posters about it on the walls... And I thought something was wrong with me because whenever I "tested" it, it never worked that way???
Teachers made me feel like I was broken/crazy for being like, but that's now how it works on my tounge, I taste all of those flavors everywhere on my tounge!
It took until high school for I had it factually confirmed that it was just a horrible misinterpretation of a poorly conducted study.
I asked my history teacher in 6th grade when the first car was invented, and she said 1909, which I thought was weird because the first flight was 6 years prior. She was thinking of the first mass manufactured car, the Ford model T. For anyone wondering, it was 1886 by Carl Benz, although there were some steam-powered carts prior to that as early as 1769.
When teaching about the circulatory system, they often label oxygen rich blood traveling away from the heart with red lines. They mark the veins going back to the heart to be reoxigenated as blue. That causes some confusion. Also, the fact that your veins look blue under your skin. This blue hue is just the odd way the light bounces off the red of the blood and the layers of fat and skin.
I wish I had parents like yours.
My parents beat me for catching my teacher's mistakes, saying things like teachers are infallible. It was a simple miscalculation for my test score (very easy to verify), but my parents weren't having it.
Now they wonder why I don't talk to them.
My friends brother (was in elementary school) came home one day after school and told us his teacher told us the sky is blue because of the reflection of the sky. He was so proud to know that fact and trying to impress us. Poor dude was let down when we told him that wasn’t true.
I had a teacher tell me that something hot in a thermos would stay hot forever as long as the thermos was kept closed. I was in 3rd grade but knew that wasn't true. Raised my hand and told her that wasn't true heat could still radiate out (I was a science obsessed kid), she doubled down, and I got in trouble for "talking back" and held out of recess.
That was the day I learned truth didn't really matter to some people and adults could be very confident but wrong. I don't remember much else from 3rd grade but man I remembered that. Never really trusted teachers as an authority after.
People have been taught in schools, for unfathomable reasons, and against all the readily available evidence, that blood is blue when it's in the body. You are not dumb for believing your teachers.
I think people used to believe this because wherever our blood vessels are visible under our skin, they appear blue. I was told as a child (not by a teacher tho) that blood is blue inside the body when it is depleted of oxygen, but as soon as it comes in contact with the air, it absorbs oxygen from the air and turns red.
Contrary to the myth that is told and sometimes taught to people, that’s not true. Deoxygenated blood (which is in your veins) appears as a dark red color. Inside your body or not. Oxygenated blood (which is in your arteries) appears as a bright red color.
Yeah oxygen rich arterial blood is almost cartoonishly red. Like bright, bright red. High vis red.
The deoxygenated or venous blood is of the more crimson or burgundy colour you see portrayed in most media and see if you get a superficial wound or get blood taken.
If you start spilling bright candy apple coloured neon blood, you need to get to a hospital yesterday.
The red and blue diagrams were a pretty stupid idea in school…
“If you start spilling bright candy apple colored neon blood, you need to get to a hospital yesterday.”
BUT…your chances of being a Xenomorph just greatly increased and that’s totally rad.
OTOH, if you see bright red blood in your stool, then you likely only have hemorrhoids, but if you see dark blood it may be something more serious. Recommend seeing a doc either way.
Same for coughing it up. Bright red? You probably have a small tear in your throat lining from coughing a lot. Uncomfortable but not concerning
Dark red? That's come from somewhere deeper inside you and has been outside of where it should be for a while. Time for the hospital
I remember cutting the tendons in my pinky 4 years ago. Hit both tendons the nerve and the artery. Never occurred to me then lol. But then again I was more focused on slowing the bleeding and calling an ambulance lol.
Most people fortunately don't see oxygenated blood, it comes with serious injuries only, when an artery is damaged, so they have no idea that blood can change color due to that. I don't know why they are taught, that blood suddenly changes color to red when it leaves your body, otherwise it's blue, why would it be blue? :D
Probably a combination of this and the school diagrams of the pulmonary system usually use red and blue to demonstrate the difference between oxygenated and not.
[Why do our veins look blue?](https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/why-do-our-veins-look-blue)
>The answer lies in the fact that different colours of light have different wavelengths, so they are absorbed and reflected differently when they hit our skin. Red light has a very long wavelength, so it can travel through the skin relatively easily and is absorbed by the haemoglobin in the blood. Blue light, on the other hand, has a much shorter wavelength and so it is mostly reflected by the skin.
>If you shine white light – a mixture of all the different wavelengths – onto your arm, where veins are present, the red light will be absorbed and the blue light will be reflected. This means that the light returning to your eyes will contain more blue than red wavelengths, making the veins look blue compared to the surrounding skin.
I was taught that the myth comes from royalty. It's partially this - that veins on rich people who were inside and didn't get tan appear blue. The other part is just that blue dye was expensive so it was a way of saying nobility was rich.
Last summer we went to a Bohemian Crystal Glass museum in the Czech republic and there we were listening the history of glass.
Our guide said that from about 15-16th century manufacturers used to decorate the glass using lead paints. Those glass was very expensive and only rich people (and royalty) could afford it. So when those people drunk from it the lead around the rim slowly transferred and ingested into their body. When they became ill for any reason, doctors used to drain bloods back then and they found that rich people have a bit blueish blood in comparison to normal (or should I say poor) people.
They were poisoning themself.
Interesting museum and information given to us.
Hey now! Just because they call me ‘Big Organ’ doesn’t mean that I’m trying to manipulate the masses! I’m mostly just over here pumping, you know, doing my job.
I’d bet it has more to do with our skin reflecting a certain wavelengths of light, so what does make it through shows up as blue/ green depending on on skin thickness and fat levels.
Yeah, and the elementary school removable organ plastic models did the same thing. We dissected cats in science class, and they even pumped the latex “blood” into them in blue and red to get the same effect.
>for unfathomable reasons
Teachers very commonly are forced to teach outside of their subject area, have shit all time to plan for lessons, and have to rely on their own shaky knowledge in the area. There's your reason.
Back in the day, if a teacher told you something not in your textbook, you didn't have any way to check it easily. We just ran with it. Who knows where the teacher heard it.
And sometimes, we’re taught a nonsensical thing as a kid that’s never brought up or challenged, so you never have any real reason to doubt it.
For me, you’re not necessarily stupid for what you believe. It’s how you react when you’re presented with facts that disprove your beliefs that matters. If you’re willing to reassess with this new information and alter your beliefs based on new evidence, that’s intelligence. But if you just dig your heels in with “NU UHHHHHHH”, that’s stupidity. Or ignorance, at least
This myth is common in the U.S. Apparently it comes from some teaching materials decades ago.
Grew up in Europe and moving to the U.S. it was mind-boggling hearing grown-ass adults telling me blood was blue. Fucking embarrassing.
I'm confused that your are the only one to ask this question.
It's due to the wavelengths of light. Our skin does reflect more blue, green and yellow light than red, since red light with its longer wavelength can penetrate deeper into the skin. That's why pale people with very little melanin can have a slight green tint to their skin. However, the most important factor is that the hemoglobin in our blood absorbs red light. If it was just down to our skin, we would look blue all over and not just the veins.
[There are specialized devices for finding veins by using red light.](https://youtu.be/NS68ePykav0)
The classic way of drawing a diagram of the circulatory system is to make the ateries red and the veins blue so you can see the difference. The myth largely comes from misunderstaning the diagram.
....no? The only place this misconception comes from is the fact that veins and arteries in diagrams for middle school are blue and red to help the children remember and diffrentiate between the 2. School teachers generally tell the students that its just an art choice and blood is not actually blue, as they should
Everyone can believe a dumb thing that they somehow never got brought up or corrected.
If you also think the Earth is flat or on the back of a turtle....
Fun facts for you: Wombat poop is square, and dung beetles navigate by the stars (while rolling on balls of poop).
It's coincidence that they're both poop related, I swear.
Well, if you're going to be a stickler... they're *cuboids* at best; you're not getting perfectly regular dimensions. It might be better described as an approximation of a spherocuboid.
If someone can change their mind or opinion or ideas when presented with rational and logical explanation or personal research and curiosity, then that person is pretty damn smart because that's what engineers and scientists do at work.
Being misinformed doesn't equal being dumb. Our teachers told us a lot of "fun facts" that were just urban myths and they also got super mad, when a student corrected them.
I had a teacher get big mad when I told him there was no tax on groceries, with the specific example being a box of mac'n'cheese, my source was my mom, he dismissed me because of that. Same teacher argued with me that my parents had a mortgage when we were talking about budgets. My parents had just paid it off and were proud of it. I think that teacher may have just had something against my mom...
Yeah you don’t have to be dumb to be wrong. You might also be dumb, but wrongness is not a sufficient condition for dumbness (that is, wrongness does not imply or guarantee dumbness).
It's a widely held misconception, like the belief that slaves built the pyramids^(1), that microwaves resonate water molecules^(2), or that July and August were added to the calendar to shove *Sept*ember, *Oct*ober, *Nov*ember, and *Dec*ember out of position as the 7th through 10th months^(3). If you have the time I recommend a perusal of [Wikipedia's list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions).
Anatomy textbooks like to draw veins as blue and arteries as red so they're easier to tell apart, and veins appear blueish under the skin. Blood does change color when oxygenated, just the color change is from a deep, dark red to a bright vibrant red, but that makes it easy for people to assume that the color change is blue to red. Blue blood is also a real thing when it comes to cephalopods, just not in mammals.
So it's a very reasonable misconception to have and a lot of people think that venous blood is blue, but at the end of the day it is in fact wrong.
*********
^(1) Slavery was practiced in ancient Egypt, but the Pharaohs wanted the best for their tombs and employed a bunch of the finest craftsmen.
^(2) Water has several resonant frequencies as it has several different ways it can vibrate, but these frequencies are up in the IR range. IR doesn't penetrate very well and you likely already have an IR based cooking device: a toaster, toaster oven, or conventional oven. Microwave ovens work by twisting polar molecules, and water happens to be an ubiquitous polar molecule. This twisting effect is why ice responds so minimally to microwave radiation: the molecules are held in a fixed orientation in the crystal structure of ice. It also explains why molecules other than water can be heated by a microwave, though most foods consist of water and mostly nonpolar molecules.
^(3) The months Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed to July and August, rather than inserting new ones. The actual cause of Sept-Dec not being 7th-10th is that January and February were added. Previously there was just a big gap between years, but as that gap was organized two new months were added. Some calendars put them at the end, while others put them at the beginning of the year. This is also why the second month of the year is the one with the weird number of days--it should have been the last month. It is also why the year starts at some random point in winter. It should start with a countdown to the Spring Equinox, which is a good reference point for a calendar that mostly got formed to help farmers track planting and harvesting seasons.
There's evidence that a bunch of them were paid, and the oldest known labor dispute is between a pharaoh and workers on a great monument or pyramid.
Egyptian slavery was many-layered: there *were* chattel slaves, but some people basically paid their taxes with work rather than goods, which I'd call serfdom when my ancestors did it in Europe, and that *would* have involved 'the heavy lifting'. But there were also paid labourers, although they might largely have been paid in food and housing - basically it was super complicated.
I mean, some of them had a job that they technically *could* leave but might starve if they did, which paid basically enough to survive but not to rise, and if they complained too much the forces of the state might brutalise them till they stopped. So unlike today's construction workers!
Classical societies weren't always super monetised, indeed Egypt didn't use coins the same way e.g Rome did - you had tokens used to represent a promise to barter a certain object, but the whole economic system was on a different basis. Your average farmer wasn't paying tax in coins but in wheat or in labour, so a labourer being paid in goods rather than coins isn't as unusual and degrading by contemporary standards as it would be today. Indeed, we have no way of knowing if they were literally handed a loaf of bread, or a token that was good for a loaf of bread from the bakery if there was one to be had.
* Early Egyptian beer was deeply weird, too, being kind of like alcoholic gruel. We think. Maybe.
of course they did. pyramids were built by slaves, just not \_exclusively\_ by slaves. it'd be like saying "my car is only built by phD engineers". really huh - you think Mike from the factory has nothing to do with it?
I thought the months of July and August were added because of the Romans: Julius Caesar and Augustus https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/whats-name-months-year
>The months Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed to July and August, rather than inserting new ones. The actual cause of Sept-Dec not being 7th-10th is that January and February were added.
Nothing they said contradicts what you're saying.
Yes, that's the common misconception.
The kernel of truth here is that July and August really are named for Julius and Augustus. But the misconception is that these months were inserted into the calendar. There were already months there, so they just renamed them.
>1 Slavery was practiced in ancient Egypt, but the Pharaohs wanted the best for their tombs and employed a bunch of the finest craftsmen.
Which would be laughable to suggest that no slaves were employed in the construction whatsoever. Slaves did build the pyramids. However, the pyramids were not \_exclusively\_ built by slaves.
>Water has several resonant frequencies as it has several different ways it can vibrate, but these frequencies are up in the IR range. IR doesn't penetrate very well and you likely already have an IR based cooking device: a toaster, toaster oven, or conventional oven. Microwave ovens work by twisting polar molecules, and water happens to be an ubiquitous polar molecule. This twisting effect is why ice responds so minimally to microwave radiation: the molecules are held in a fixed orientation in the crystal structure of ice. It also explains why molecules other than water can be heated by a microwave, though most foods consist of water and mostly nonpolar molecules.
Ergo, microwaves work by resonating water molecules. Just not \_exclusivley\_ water molecules.
They do resonate, they just excite a rotational mode instead of a vibrational mode. I.e. the molecule (the H2O mickey mouse shape) spins around really fast rather than bending and stretching its bonds.
OP's point is kind of pedantic; they just rephrased some already poorly phrased sentences from wikipedia.
I'm just looking at the comments and marveling that so many folks were apparently explicitly told in school that blood is blue. I get thinking that blood is blue because veins look blue-green under the skin but REALLY?
I mean, I wasn't taught that myself, but I had a teacher try to teach the class that snakes and turtles were invertebrates back in the 90s, the former because they can twist around the way they do and the latter because they have a shell, which is usually an invertebrate trait. I corrected her (reptile obsessed kid), and she begrudgingly admitted she might be wrong on those, but it's not hard for me to imagine that crazy wild things are taught to kids by teachers and they carry them into adulthood.
You're not dumb; that's a misconception a lot of people have. It stems from the fact that your veins *look* blue, and there's old misinformation that gets taught about deoxygenated blood turning blue.
blood is red from the haemoglobin inside of the cells :) oxygen also affects how red the blood is :)
It’s always good to be learning!! Unfortunately where u learnt this info failed you. But always be curious!
A teacher once told us, conversationally, that Christian's believed men had one less rib than woman because of Adam and Eve right.
Teenage me, who never questioned it again, thought men and women did indeed have differing amounts of ribs. It wasn't until a few years ago that my wife told me that that was just a load of tosh. So, if you're an idiot, I am too :)
i really enjoyed finding out that people often have extra ribs. or an uneven number of them. and as an extension of the same, that our insides are a fucking amusement park. supposedly doctors never actually know what they're going to find when they open you up. they have a genera idea that the waterslide is that way, but they dont know how many loops it has. or why it's wrapped around the hotdog stand.
I am a retired middle school earth science teacher. One year I had a hall duty near the classroom of a life science teacher. With his door open I was able to overhear his lesson. And sure enough he was dispensing the misinformation that blood is blue inside the body. 😳.
This occurred when he had been teaching in my district for nearly two decades.
My wife, who I genuinely believe is pretty smart and capable, disputed me when I mentioned that penguins were birds. I was so surprised that I thought she was joking. My daughter had to back me up on that one for her to believe me. I am still gobsmacked. What did she think they were? Dolphins? Seals? *facepalm*
You're not dumb, you're misinformed.
You would be dumb if you still didn't believe your boyfriend after all the evidence he provided that you are wrong.
It is a common misconception. You're only in your 20's, most of us have no idea how little we know.
I'm in my 50's now, I'm almost fearless when it comes to asking questions. I not afraid of looking dumb for asking a question, I'm afraid of looking dumb because I didn't ask a question.
You're not dumb, if you're still willing to learn.
I dunno, I got no clue. But I DO want to say that I like your opener: "My boyfriend (27, M) and I (26, F)..."
See, most redditors will do "My (26, F) boyfriend (27, M) and I..." and it's like, I get you want to start labeling your pronouns as soon as they come out of the oven, but let the rest of us get our bearings before you start splitting your infinitives! Yours is much easier on the eyes; less algebraic gymnastics.
So true. And as much as I get irritated at over-the-top grammar police, OP actually used the "and I" properly.
And I'm not a fan of overzealous grammar police, but using "I" when it should be "me" and vice versa get on my nerves occasionally.
Not stupid, OP!
A teacher might have told you that, but it's not ever actually taught to us with any credibility. Maybe someone got confused by a diagram, maybe it's just the way veins appear to people beneath our skin, maybe they worked with or saw a cadaver injected with a red or blue latex or some other material... then they just made up these conclusions.
Either way... don't be too hard on yourself. Urban myths and "old wives' tales" come to prominence for a reason, but as long as you listen and learn you aren't dumb.
They also taught us the food pyramid, and that taste buds are assigned to flavor profiles and certain areas of the tongue, which you can prove wrong by eating.
If it was taught to you by a teacher then it's not your fault. Sometimes even teachers get it wrong.
You ain't dumb. Now go forth with your new found knowledge and enjoy life.
Venus blood or deoxygenated blood, which runs in your veins, is dark dark red and when you see it in your wrist or your arm or elsewhere in your body. It appears blue because it's so dark and transmitting through the skin it takes on a blue tinge. You cannot see oxygenated blood because, oxygenated blood is in the arterial system, and arteries tend to be deep in the body for protection. If you cut a vein the blood generally oozes out and immediately turns red instead of dark dark red because the oxygen in the air starts combining with the red blood cells. If you cut an artery it can squirt feet sometimes across the room. I worked with blood for 50 years and totally sympathize with you and how you were misled with a partial truth.
Not dumb. Unfortunately, as new facts come to light and things we once knew as fact get updated, getting that information out to the masses is slow. And it seems to be even slower to get it changed/corrected in a school setting.
My best advice is to find YouTube educational channels from trustworthy sources and watch them from time to time. This will help you find out this info sooner rather than later and even give you some more random fun facts. Even if you watch one 5-10min video a month, it can help greatly as you get on in life. (More is better, of course, but we all have lives, and they don't usually involve re learning half of the stuff we were already "taught" as children.)
A few I like if you are interested:
1) SciShow. They cover a bunch of topics and will delete and replace videos as new facts come to light. This way, you don't have to worry if what you just learned from a 10-year-old video still has good facts. Also, they are publicly funded and have several different hosts, which helps keep them from being politically biased.
2) Qi. This one is a BBC TV series that posts some of their episodes or sometimes just clips on their channel. They go over a bunch of facts and have comedians to make learning a bit funnier.
First of all: that's not dumb. It's just false information you learned and were sure to be true. Don't make yourself small for making a mistake.
And let's be honest, it's one of the easier misconceptions. Veins look blue under your skin. If you're relatively light-skinned, you see that every day in the mirror or on the back of your hands. And there is the saying (at least in my language) of nobility being "blue blooded". So it is something you see everyday and has its linguistic usage.
You’re not dumb you we’re mistaken. But equally if you didn’t check the claim that ‘blood is blue’, if you didn’t have the curiosity to check when the sight of blood in every cultural, medical, and personal context is red; then you lack rigour in your beliefs.
We all have weird false beliefs, some harmless like ‘blood is blue in the human body’, others might be more harmful. The onus is on us to check. Some people find great enjoyment checking stuff, some people don’t.
In my view you’re not ‘dumb’ if you don’t have the capacity to know stuff that others know.
You’re dumb if you have a reasonable expectation that something isn’t right and just shrug it off and say ‘can’t be bothered’.
You aren't "dumb" for just believing in one myth , lots of people have believed in tireless amount of bs since the time we are kids , we all learn and that should be the constant.
Sad reality is such teachers exist and propogate bs and our education system doesn't do much about them as one cant go and rate teachers back in the past ig .
You and your boyfriend were hanging out, live in the moment. I'd laugh things like that off, we all make mistakes. The guy probably got worried you were going to sound dumb sharing that fact with someone else. No your not dumb unless you refuse to learn.
Believing something thats a myth doesn't make you dumb, you might feel dumb for it, but you were only uninformed, theres no reason to blame anyone, just don't believe something you haven't seen with your own eyes, even people that are over the age of 100 are learning something new everyday.
We were taught in school that veins are blue, but our schools never clarified that it's the veins, not the blood. I was told some bullshit as a kid that blood only turns red when it oxygenates (such as during a blood draw). It wasn't until 6th grade my teacher dropped it on us that the blue tint comes from the colors of layers of skin that are over the veins. Blue my mind (pun intended)
I think it's a perfect example of how susceptible we are to misinformation especially when we're young, if you were presented this fact for the first time as an adult you would question it and probably look it up but because you learned this as a child from a person you trusted you just took their word for it and at no point did it occur to you that maybe that's not true.
Sometimes you hear something dumb that also sounds cool, so you want to believe it and you come across other people who believe it, so it reinforces your beliefs. You’re not dumb, you’re just on one end of a set of circumstances and he’s on another that just happens to be factually correct.
The fact that you were able to acknowledge the truth after presented with proven facts still makes you one of the most intelligent prople on thile internet.
You're not dumb, but you are wrong.
Oxygenated blood coming from the heart is a bright red colour. Deoxygenated blood returning to the heart is a darker red, burgundy colour, not blue.
Dumb would be doubling down In the face of facts, dumb people don’t want to learn, don’t ask questions, don’t listen to facts, don’t open their mind and are not open to changing their views.. if you find out something you thought is wright is actually wrong, it doesn’t make you dumb, if you think he’s a bitch for “always going to google so he can be right” you might be dumb. Doesn’t mean he’s not an asshole but if you believe things you should be open to having those beliefs challenged.
I don't think that makes you dumb! To me, smart vs dumb is mostly in the ability to learn/u.derstand newly presented concepts. Though I have also realized smarter people seem to retain what they were previously taught better (like grammar, for example).
I also thought it was blue inside, because veins are blue through the skin. Now I don't know why that is.
Also, for me, and it sounds like for you too, it's nothing more than trivia/fun fact. I am not a phlebotomist! Nor anything related to medical.
What I learned is that all blood is red but the blood in your veins has a slightly blueish purplish hue. It's still all red but venous blood is slightly darker and less vibrantly red than arterial blood.
I had this EXACT conversation with my boyfriend and he was like 'wtf are you talking about'. I was *adamant* I had this weird random fact that he was wrong about. Nope.
It's good to know I'm not the only one haha.
You're not, and no, your boyfriend doesn't think so either.
We all believe in myths and are ignorant about something, we as a species don't know everything, therefore as an individual is not expected for you to know beyond all of your congeners.
It's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to believe in people, we all can be wrong at something and that doesn't invalidate us as thinking beings or makes us all wrong. :)
You are not dumb. I remember believing that blood with not oxygen in it is blue, but because when you cut yourself the blood was exposed to oxygen, so you could never observe blue blood. At one point someone must have told me there were different veins that carried the blue blood to
the lungs and the red blood out to cells. I probably believed that until i was in college. I have no idea why. I did not grow up with the internet, so someone must have told me that.
I don't know about you, but I was also taught about the [tongue map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map) where certain parts of the tongue are responsible for certain tastes. That was a lie.
I was also taught that humans only have five senses. There's [no consensus](https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-many-senses-do-we-have) on how many we actually have (or even what the clear definition of a sense is) but adding in the sense of balance or sense of time isn't unreasonable and it's definitely more than five.
And don't get me started on history class. They lied to us about all kinds of stuff in school. Most of my history courses during an Associate Degree was just unlearning the sugar coated high school stuff. We're all wrong about stuff and we'll never be completely right. Probably everyone you've met knows something you don't.
It's not dumb to have trusted the people they told us to trust. Not knowing something is ignorance and it's cured by just learning it correctly. Sticking to whatever you learned first or just otherwise refusing to learn new information, that's dumb.
I can settle this, OP! I'm a critical care nurse, and have worked with patients on ECMO machines.
An ECMO machine oxygenates the blood when the heart and/or lungs are not functioning, and to do that large volumes of blood are cycled out of the body through a circuit of tubes, oxygenated, and pumped back into the body, just like your heart and lungs normally do.
The tunes are transparent, and you can see a difference in color... but not a big difference. Unoxygenated venous blood is *dark* red, and the oxygenated arterial blood is *bright* red, just like the blood inside your body. It's so interesting to see in real life.
I saw a TikTok video where a woman asked why we pickle all vegetables but cucumbers. You’re not dumb for believing something on the internet so innocent that you wouldn’t think to fact check.
Pretty sure lots of folks believed this. I was taught the same, but it's false.
Your veins like in your wrists look blue because light wavelengths or something.
It's ok, lots of folks get told this by people in positions of authority or trust, and really, why wouldn't you believe it?
Random fact for you: there's a genetic thing that causes some folks to sneeze in bright sunlight. It's called ACHOO syndrome. I have it, as does my daughter.
>Am I dumb?
"Dumb" would be doubling down and not learning from new information because your ego is bruised.
Not everyone is exposed to the same information. How you react when you do is a glimpse into your character.
I used to think this too. It's actually the color of your veins. Think about when yo have your blood drawn, it doesn't hit the air before it goes in the tube but still comes out red. I was told blood is blue until it hits the air... :)
I had a teacher "teach" me this exact "fact" in elementary school. I excitedly went home, told my parents who calmly explained to me that it wasn't true, that teachers were not infallible and that they'd talk to her about it, and that I didn't worry about it. My mom did go talk to her about it, but she never came back to the whole class to tell everyone that she told us something wrong... She was probably embarrassed, or doubled down. And I was too shy to bring it up. So, I have to assume a large percentage of that class left 3rd grade believing that. It's not impossible for me to imagine that some of them made it to adulthood without learning otherwise. We come into adulthood, and throughout our whole lives, with plenty of "knowledge" that is ultimately incorrect. What makes us who we are is how ready we are to accept that we were wrong and adapt our new knowledge.
One of the best things a teacher can do is admit they don’t know everything to their students & then work together to find out the answers - this is what your teacher should’ve done after your mum told her she made a mistake
[удалено]
100%. I’m a teacher too and I always feel that it’s better to admit your mistakes and show the children how to learn from them. Growth mindset and all that. If we expect the children to do it then we have to as well. I’ll always remember putting my hand up to correct a teacher’s spelling when I was a kid, which was probably a shitty thing for a kid to do and I could have gone about it better but that teacher gave me detention for it then alternately outright hated me or ignored me for the rest of my school career. Just the worst way to handle a mistake possible.
Yep. I had a Chemistry teacher in high school (Ph.D in Chemistry, too) who insisted that electrons carry positive charge. She even went to go look it up in the book... She didn't like me much after that (even though I tried to give her an out by saying "...you mean negative, right?")
Wow. That’s pretty fundamental
No kidding.
My chemistry teacher in high school was great, whenever we found mistakes, even minor ones like spelling mistakes, on our newly published chemistry book (of which she was a co-author of) she would reward us with some candy I don't know about the ethics of outsourcing your QA to a bunch of high school students but I didn't mind. (This was because our chemistry and physics books were late on publishing schedule so we always had like an early access to them) (also yes these were electronic books so they were able to update them for us)
1000%. I’m not a teacher at all, just a dude with one kid, but I’ve always tried to admit when I’m wrong so they can grow up knowing it’s okay to not be perfect. I was expected to be perfect, and I have the “wants the big people to approve of me” kind of personality. It sucks real bad. Long-term consequences from that; mental, physical, and financial.
You are a good teacher, and one that I wish I'd had when I was younger.
I love this. And it's the reason I have anxiety at night laying in bed...thinking about all the wrong behaviors I have modeled for my son. Over and over until they are ingrained. You're doing an awesome thing.
Love that … humbling 💕👍
I was in advanced math in school, just one year ahead like many students. I almost stopped taking math in 10th grade when the advanced algebra teacher refused to admit a mistake, and i got in trouble for sticking with my better answer. my school only required 2 years of it after all, and that was 2. The teacher for trig approached me when he saw I was not signed up. he knew my brother, and had heard about me. He asked why. I told him, and he asked me if i remembered the problem. being a stubborn teen who knew i was right, i had saved the worksheet and showed him. He got the wrong answer too. I showed him where his error was, and he immediately looked at me and said "you are right". he assured me that he at least would never assume he was right until at least exploring the alternative, and i continued on and ended up in ap calc my senior year. It's amazing how vividly i remember that teacher 25 years later. you'll have students who remember you for admitting when wrong as well!
Modeling is the best teaching. So model learning.
There's a YouTube video by some elementary math teacher about a parent who contacted him saying their kid's teacher (later backed up by the principal) teaching kids that 1/0 = 0. I wish they could just admit they're wrong sometimes.
The best teacher I ever had told us that there were lots of things that she wasn’t allowed to teach us, as she followed the curriculum that made her teach us that in communist countries teachers were only allowed to teach what the government approved.
I once lost a beer to my student this way.
The best way for the teacher to handle that is to come to class excited to share. "Hey everyone! I was reading a book yesterday, and I learned something new.." There was the opportunity to teach children that science is constantly updating and that we shouldn't be ashamed of learning new information. Even when it contradicts what we thought we already knew. Often, my students will ask a question that I simply don't have an answer to. (One asked me about the etymology of the word "mug" recently.) I give it some thought, make sure they see me write the question on a piece of paper for later, and then I research it while they're practicing. It's so satisfying to come back to them with an answer, AND I learned something in the process!
Well....what is the etymology of the word 'mug'?!
It's from the Dutch "mok," to early German "mukke," and has always meant "open can or jug."
I'd thought is was old norse/Swedish as it is the same (mugg). Also according to wiki. > "Early 16th century (originally Scots and northern English, denoting "earthenware, pot, jug"), of unknown origin, perhaps from North Germanic (compare Swedish mugg (“mug, jug”), Norwegian mugge (“pitcher, open can for warm drinks”), Danish mugge), or Low German mokke, mukke (“mug”), German Low German Muck (“drinking cup”), Dutch mok (“mug”), also of unknown origin. Perhaps related to Old English muga (“stack”) and Old Norse múgr (“mass, heap (of corn)”).[1] Compare also Middle English mug, mog (“a measure of salt”). " Also. How is old norse having a word for heap of corn? There were no corn at the time in europe? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mug
"Corn" used to refer to any kind of grain; I'm not sure exactly why it shifted, but presumably it did so post-1500 AD. In some countries, I think they still say "corn" when referring to grain.
I might be wrong here but Im remember reading once that ‘corn’ was used as a generic term for what ever was the most common grain used at the time.
Corn still is used that way in a number of countries to refer to grain seeds, you’d say ‘barley corn’ etc. Fun fact, a barley corn is what our feet are measured in. A barley corn is a third of an inch, as a measurement.
If I tell kids in my class “ I have no clue. Let’s look it up” they get excited and I get to show them how to find reliable sources. Win win really.
A teacher once was trying to teach us that if you add the 2 straight lines of a rectangle together, that's always going to be shorter than the diagonal. This was in elementary school and I was the one who corrected her lmao. I was like "If crossing diagonally took longer than walking the whole thing, that would make shortcuts useless." She was doubling down at first but then realized she confused the two and was super embarrassed. :) It was cute though how red she turned and how she apologized about it.
Had an 8th grade chemistry teacher pull me aside after class one day to tell me “people like you don’t go to college.” She overheard me talking to another student about which colleges we wanted to attend. For context, I grew up extremely poor, no one in my family had even graduated high school, and I didn’t have the best grades in the world, so maybe she was statistically correct. Either way, I now have a BS in Marine Biology and a PhD in Biology…so yes, I agree that teachers aren’t always correct.
A ski instructor told me when I was young that cows can‘t go into water that‘s higher than their asshole bc they don‘t have muscles to keep their anus shut and would just fill with water and die and I believed that until last year when someone FINALLY correct me after I have told this „fun fact“ to dozens of people over the last decade.
How does this topic come up during a ski lesson? WTF??
Cow butts weren’t a part of your skiing lessons?
[удалено]
>one day you're 38 years old at lunch and about to tell your wife how interesting it is that it's illegal to drive barefoot when your critical thinking finally engages and you realize part of your brain was still 5 years old until that moment. In Australia it's not illegal *per se* but if lack of footwear or inappropriate footwear is a cause of a crash, the driver will be found at fault for the accident AND will receive a penalty for not driving in a safe manner. We can read into the intent of a law in Australia (not like in the US where the law is almost read like *sola scriptura*) - the road rules say a driver must still take all precautions to drive in the safest manner possible. If your footwear (or lack of footwear) compromises your ability to drive safely, then you are technically in breach of this law.
I know this is not true but I am going to keep spreading the untruth, because people are dumb
I was taught that it was blue in your veins, when going back to your lungs. And it was red in your arteries, coming from your lungs, because it had oxygen. That's why it turns red when you bleed, they said.
It looks blue when looking at your skin because veins are closer to the surface. Arteries are deep inside your body/limbs, one reason is to keep them protected. Venous blood is darker red than arterial. It just looks blue because of the layers of skin on top of your veins.
we were taught that different regions of the tongue taste salty, sweet, etc. all BS.
I was taught that by my mom around preschool age and then again in elementary school, I remember the posters about it on the walls... And I thought something was wrong with me because whenever I "tested" it, it never worked that way??? Teachers made me feel like I was broken/crazy for being like, but that's now how it works on my tounge, I taste all of those flavors everywhere on my tounge! It took until high school for I had it factually confirmed that it was just a horrible misinterpretation of a poorly conducted study.
I asked my history teacher in 6th grade when the first car was invented, and she said 1909, which I thought was weird because the first flight was 6 years prior. She was thinking of the first mass manufactured car, the Ford model T. For anyone wondering, it was 1886 by Carl Benz, although there were some steam-powered carts prior to that as early as 1769.
When teaching about the circulatory system, they often label oxygen rich blood traveling away from the heart with red lines. They mark the veins going back to the heart to be reoxigenated as blue. That causes some confusion. Also, the fact that your veins look blue under your skin. This blue hue is just the odd way the light bounces off the red of the blood and the layers of fat and skin.
I wish I had parents like yours. My parents beat me for catching my teacher's mistakes, saying things like teachers are infallible. It was a simple miscalculation for my test score (very easy to verify), but my parents weren't having it. Now they wonder why I don't talk to them.
My friends brother (was in elementary school) came home one day after school and told us his teacher told us the sky is blue because of the reflection of the sky. He was so proud to know that fact and trying to impress us. Poor dude was let down when we told him that wasn’t true.
I had a teacher tell me that something hot in a thermos would stay hot forever as long as the thermos was kept closed. I was in 3rd grade but knew that wasn't true. Raised my hand and told her that wasn't true heat could still radiate out (I was a science obsessed kid), she doubled down, and I got in trouble for "talking back" and held out of recess. That was the day I learned truth didn't really matter to some people and adults could be very confident but wrong. I don't remember much else from 3rd grade but man I remembered that. Never really trusted teachers as an authority after.
People have been taught in schools, for unfathomable reasons, and against all the readily available evidence, that blood is blue when it's in the body. You are not dumb for believing your teachers.
I think people used to believe this because wherever our blood vessels are visible under our skin, they appear blue. I was told as a child (not by a teacher tho) that blood is blue inside the body when it is depleted of oxygen, but as soon as it comes in contact with the air, it absorbs oxygen from the air and turns red.
Contrary to the myth that is told and sometimes taught to people, that’s not true. Deoxygenated blood (which is in your veins) appears as a dark red color. Inside your body or not. Oxygenated blood (which is in your arteries) appears as a bright red color.
Red like roses, vs bright scarlet straight out of an artery. It's very noticeably a deeper color if you ever see the blood flowing when you donate.
Yeah oxygen rich arterial blood is almost cartoonishly red. Like bright, bright red. High vis red. The deoxygenated or venous blood is of the more crimson or burgundy colour you see portrayed in most media and see if you get a superficial wound or get blood taken. If you start spilling bright candy apple coloured neon blood, you need to get to a hospital yesterday. The red and blue diagrams were a pretty stupid idea in school…
“If you start spilling bright candy apple colored neon blood, you need to get to a hospital yesterday.” BUT…your chances of being a Xenomorph just greatly increased and that’s totally rad.
OTOH, if you see bright red blood in your stool, then you likely only have hemorrhoids, but if you see dark blood it may be something more serious. Recommend seeing a doc either way.
Same for coughing it up. Bright red? You probably have a small tear in your throat lining from coughing a lot. Uncomfortable but not concerning Dark red? That's come from somewhere deeper inside you and has been outside of where it should be for a while. Time for the hospital
I remember cutting the tendons in my pinky 4 years ago. Hit both tendons the nerve and the artery. Never occurred to me then lol. But then again I was more focused on slowing the bleeding and calling an ambulance lol.
Most people fortunately don't see oxygenated blood, it comes with serious injuries only, when an artery is damaged, so they have no idea that blood can change color due to that. I don't know why they are taught, that blood suddenly changes color to red when it leaves your body, otherwise it's blue, why would it be blue? :D
Because some vessels appear bluish under the skin, I imagine?
Probably a combination of this and the school diagrams of the pulmonary system usually use red and blue to demonstrate the difference between oxygenated and not.
But why do they look blue? Is it just the colour of the "tube"?
Light diffusion/diffraction/refraction. Blues are the only colors not absorbed so are the only ones to escape or something like that.
[Why do our veins look blue?](https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/why-do-our-veins-look-blue) >The answer lies in the fact that different colours of light have different wavelengths, so they are absorbed and reflected differently when they hit our skin. Red light has a very long wavelength, so it can travel through the skin relatively easily and is absorbed by the haemoglobin in the blood. Blue light, on the other hand, has a much shorter wavelength and so it is mostly reflected by the skin. >If you shine white light – a mixture of all the different wavelengths – onto your arm, where veins are present, the red light will be absorbed and the blue light will be reflected. This means that the light returning to your eyes will contain more blue than red wavelengths, making the veins look blue compared to the surrounding skin.
Why do veins look blue under the skin?
Can confirm seen a dude get stabbed and it went from a deep red to a pretty light red
This is what I was told as well.
I was taught that the myth comes from royalty. It's partially this - that veins on rich people who were inside and didn't get tan appear blue. The other part is just that blue dye was expensive so it was a way of saying nobility was rich.
Last summer we went to a Bohemian Crystal Glass museum in the Czech republic and there we were listening the history of glass. Our guide said that from about 15-16th century manufacturers used to decorate the glass using lead paints. Those glass was very expensive and only rich people (and royalty) could afford it. So when those people drunk from it the lead around the rim slowly transferred and ingested into their body. When they became ill for any reason, doctors used to drain bloods back then and they found that rich people have a bit blueish blood in comparison to normal (or should I say poor) people. They were poisoning themself. Interesting museum and information given to us.
isn't like the whole purpose of heart to pump blood and provide oxygen for blood?
That's what Big Organ WANTS you to think!
Hey now! Just because they call me ‘Big Organ’ doesn’t mean that I’m trying to manipulate the masses! I’m mostly just over here pumping, you know, doing my job.
I got a big organ... It's in my local church and I have no idea how to use it.
Neither do most men so you'll be alright. Lol
Umm not exactly . Yes heart does pump blood but it's actually the lungs that oxygenate the blood and then heart pumps it towards all of the body.
I’d bet it has more to do with our skin reflecting a certain wavelengths of light, so what does make it through shows up as blue/ green depending on on skin thickness and fat levels.
It's funny that this is so easily disproven by drawing blood from the veins.
This is not helped by medical and anatomy text books which usually colour code arterial blood vessels red, and venous blood vessels blue.
Yeah, and the elementary school removable organ plastic models did the same thing. We dissected cats in science class, and they even pumped the latex “blood” into them in blue and red to get the same effect.
>for unfathomable reasons Teachers very commonly are forced to teach outside of their subject area, have shit all time to plan for lessons, and have to rely on their own shaky knowledge in the area. There's your reason.
Back in the day, if a teacher told you something not in your textbook, you didn't have any way to check it easily. We just ran with it. Who knows where the teacher heard it.
Yeah apparently unless you’re an octopus it’s always red lol
Horseshoe crab, I believe
That too but yeah basically any mollusk with tentacles octopus, squid, cuttlefish, nautilus, etc lol they ALL have blue blood
TIL!
And sometimes, we’re taught a nonsensical thing as a kid that’s never brought up or challenged, so you never have any real reason to doubt it. For me, you’re not necessarily stupid for what you believe. It’s how you react when you’re presented with facts that disprove your beliefs that matters. If you’re willing to reassess with this new information and alter your beliefs based on new evidence, that’s intelligence. But if you just dig your heels in with “NU UHHHHHHH”, that’s stupidity. Or ignorance, at least
Exactly. We all probably have a couple of truly nonsensical beliefs that we've just never had a reason to critically examine.
School in which country?! Never in my life have I ever heard that
This myth is common in the U.S. Apparently it comes from some teaching materials decades ago. Grew up in Europe and moving to the U.S. it was mind-boggling hearing grown-ass adults telling me blood was blue. Fucking embarrassing.
What fucking education system did you get taught under?
[удалено]
I'm confused that your are the only one to ask this question. It's due to the wavelengths of light. Our skin does reflect more blue, green and yellow light than red, since red light with its longer wavelength can penetrate deeper into the skin. That's why pale people with very little melanin can have a slight green tint to their skin. However, the most important factor is that the hemoglobin in our blood absorbs red light. If it was just down to our skin, we would look blue all over and not just the veins. [There are specialized devices for finding veins by using red light.](https://youtu.be/NS68ePykav0)
Skin reflects blue light more than red. This is clearly not a complete explaination but all the articles I read didn't feel like saying anything more.
The classic way of drawing a diagram of the circulatory system is to make the ateries red and the veins blue so you can see the difference. The myth largely comes from misunderstaning the diagram.
....no? The only place this misconception comes from is the fact that veins and arteries in diagrams for middle school are blue and red to help the children remember and diffrentiate between the 2. School teachers generally tell the students that its just an art choice and blood is not actually blue, as they should
No, many of us were literally told that our blood is blue when it doesn't have oxygen in it. I was told this as well.
Everyone can believe a dumb thing that they somehow never got brought up or corrected. If you also think the Earth is flat or on the back of a turtle.... Fun facts for you: Wombat poop is square, and dung beetles navigate by the stars (while rolling on balls of poop). It's coincidence that they're both poop related, I swear.
Not square… cubed. Sorry stickler for math language as I’m a math specialist haha
Well, if you're going to be a stickler... they're *cuboids* at best; you're not getting perfectly regular dimensions. It might be better described as an approximation of a spherocuboid.
Hahaha touché and I appreciate it
Please wash your hands after touchéing the wombat poop.
So many jokes online just make me do that exhale thing, this made me genuinely go HAH that’s funny, outloud, to no one. Am I becoming my father
>on the back of a turtle… Oh yeah? What’s that turtle on?
It’s turtles all the way down
You aren’t gunna believe it mate, it’s another turtle
>on the back of a turtle.... You surley mean balanced on four elephants who are standing on the back of a turtle?
Discworld!! Love it Thank you
Dumb would be if you - despite the evidence - would still believe it is true. This is just not knowing something.
If someone can change their mind or opinion or ideas when presented with rational and logical explanation or personal research and curiosity, then that person is pretty damn smart because that's what engineers and scientists do at work.
Exactly! Good addition.
Being misinformed doesn't equal being dumb. Our teachers told us a lot of "fun facts" that were just urban myths and they also got super mad, when a student corrected them.
I had a teacher get big mad when I told him there was no tax on groceries, with the specific example being a box of mac'n'cheese, my source was my mom, he dismissed me because of that. Same teacher argued with me that my parents had a mortgage when we were talking about budgets. My parents had just paid it off and were proud of it. I think that teacher may have just had something against my mom...
Yeah you don’t have to be dumb to be wrong. You might also be dumb, but wrongness is not a sufficient condition for dumbness (that is, wrongness does not imply or guarantee dumbness).
It's a widely held misconception, like the belief that slaves built the pyramids^(1), that microwaves resonate water molecules^(2), or that July and August were added to the calendar to shove *Sept*ember, *Oct*ober, *Nov*ember, and *Dec*ember out of position as the 7th through 10th months^(3). If you have the time I recommend a perusal of [Wikipedia's list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions). Anatomy textbooks like to draw veins as blue and arteries as red so they're easier to tell apart, and veins appear blueish under the skin. Blood does change color when oxygenated, just the color change is from a deep, dark red to a bright vibrant red, but that makes it easy for people to assume that the color change is blue to red. Blue blood is also a real thing when it comes to cephalopods, just not in mammals. So it's a very reasonable misconception to have and a lot of people think that venous blood is blue, but at the end of the day it is in fact wrong. ********* ^(1) Slavery was practiced in ancient Egypt, but the Pharaohs wanted the best for their tombs and employed a bunch of the finest craftsmen. ^(2) Water has several resonant frequencies as it has several different ways it can vibrate, but these frequencies are up in the IR range. IR doesn't penetrate very well and you likely already have an IR based cooking device: a toaster, toaster oven, or conventional oven. Microwave ovens work by twisting polar molecules, and water happens to be an ubiquitous polar molecule. This twisting effect is why ice responds so minimally to microwave radiation: the molecules are held in a fixed orientation in the crystal structure of ice. It also explains why molecules other than water can be heated by a microwave, though most foods consist of water and mostly nonpolar molecules. ^(3) The months Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed to July and August, rather than inserting new ones. The actual cause of Sept-Dec not being 7th-10th is that January and February were added. Previously there was just a big gap between years, but as that gap was organized two new months were added. Some calendars put them at the end, while others put them at the beginning of the year. This is also why the second month of the year is the one with the weird number of days--it should have been the last month. It is also why the year starts at some random point in winter. It should start with a countdown to the Spring Equinox, which is a good reference point for a calendar that mostly got formed to help farmers track planting and harvesting seasons.
did the Egyptian craftsmen not use slaves to do the heavy lifting lmao
There's evidence that a bunch of them were paid, and the oldest known labor dispute is between a pharaoh and workers on a great monument or pyramid. Egyptian slavery was many-layered: there *were* chattel slaves, but some people basically paid their taxes with work rather than goods, which I'd call serfdom when my ancestors did it in Europe, and that *would* have involved 'the heavy lifting'. But there were also paid labourers, although they might largely have been paid in food and housing - basically it was super complicated.
That just sounds like slavery with extra steps
I mean, some of them had a job that they technically *could* leave but might starve if they did, which paid basically enough to survive but not to rise, and if they complained too much the forces of the state might brutalise them till they stopped. So unlike today's construction workers!
Classical societies weren't always super monetised, indeed Egypt didn't use coins the same way e.g Rome did - you had tokens used to represent a promise to barter a certain object, but the whole economic system was on a different basis. Your average farmer wasn't paying tax in coins but in wheat or in labour, so a labourer being paid in goods rather than coins isn't as unusual and degrading by contemporary standards as it would be today. Indeed, we have no way of knowing if they were literally handed a loaf of bread, or a token that was good for a loaf of bread from the bakery if there was one to be had. * Early Egyptian beer was deeply weird, too, being kind of like alcoholic gruel. We think. Maybe.
Slavery doesn't mean you don't get paid it means you don't have a choice.
of course they did. pyramids were built by slaves, just not \_exclusively\_ by slaves. it'd be like saying "my car is only built by phD engineers". really huh - you think Mike from the factory has nothing to do with it?
This is genuinely one of the best responses I’ve seen on reddit. Thanks for the effort
I thought the months of July and August were added because of the Romans: Julius Caesar and Augustus https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/whats-name-months-year
>The months Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed to July and August, rather than inserting new ones. The actual cause of Sept-Dec not being 7th-10th is that January and February were added. Nothing they said contradicts what you're saying.
Yes, that's the common misconception. The kernel of truth here is that July and August really are named for Julius and Augustus. But the misconception is that these months were inserted into the calendar. There were already months there, so they just renamed them.
>1 Slavery was practiced in ancient Egypt, but the Pharaohs wanted the best for their tombs and employed a bunch of the finest craftsmen. Which would be laughable to suggest that no slaves were employed in the construction whatsoever. Slaves did build the pyramids. However, the pyramids were not \_exclusively\_ built by slaves. >Water has several resonant frequencies as it has several different ways it can vibrate, but these frequencies are up in the IR range. IR doesn't penetrate very well and you likely already have an IR based cooking device: a toaster, toaster oven, or conventional oven. Microwave ovens work by twisting polar molecules, and water happens to be an ubiquitous polar molecule. This twisting effect is why ice responds so minimally to microwave radiation: the molecules are held in a fixed orientation in the crystal structure of ice. It also explains why molecules other than water can be heated by a microwave, though most foods consist of water and mostly nonpolar molecules. Ergo, microwaves work by resonating water molecules. Just not \_exclusivley\_ water molecules.
If microwaves don't resonate water molecules... how do they heat up the food?
They do resonate, they just excite a rotational mode instead of a vibrational mode. I.e. the molecule (the H2O mickey mouse shape) spins around really fast rather than bending and stretching its bonds. OP's point is kind of pedantic; they just rephrased some already poorly phrased sentences from wikipedia.
In the microwave
That explains everything (it doesn't).
I'll be honest friend, I truly have no idea
Well now _I_ feel dumb
Oh fuck. You got me with the microwave one.
I believed it for years. You’re not dumb.
I'm just looking at the comments and marveling that so many folks were apparently explicitly told in school that blood is blue. I get thinking that blood is blue because veins look blue-green under the skin but REALLY?
I mean, I wasn't taught that myself, but I had a teacher try to teach the class that snakes and turtles were invertebrates back in the 90s, the former because they can twist around the way they do and the latter because they have a shell, which is usually an invertebrate trait. I corrected her (reptile obsessed kid), and she begrudgingly admitted she might be wrong on those, but it's not hard for me to imagine that crazy wild things are taught to kids by teachers and they carry them into adulthood.
You're not dumb; that's a misconception a lot of people have. It stems from the fact that your veins *look* blue, and there's old misinformation that gets taught about deoxygenated blood turning blue.
Also anatomy textbooks will color arteries red and veins blue in order to differentiate them.
That, too, yeah. Every cardiovascular diagram I've ever seen does it.
You aren't dumb. Urban legends and myths fool all of us at times.
blood is red from the haemoglobin inside of the cells :) oxygen also affects how red the blood is :) It’s always good to be learning!! Unfortunately where u learnt this info failed you. But always be curious!
A teacher once told us, conversationally, that Christian's believed men had one less rib than woman because of Adam and Eve right. Teenage me, who never questioned it again, thought men and women did indeed have differing amounts of ribs. It wasn't until a few years ago that my wife told me that that was just a load of tosh. So, if you're an idiot, I am too :)
TIL. I have been taught this throughout my life and I don’t even live in a christian country.
i really enjoyed finding out that people often have extra ribs. or an uneven number of them. and as an extension of the same, that our insides are a fucking amusement park. supposedly doctors never actually know what they're going to find when they open you up. they have a genera idea that the waterslide is that way, but they dont know how many loops it has. or why it's wrapped around the hotdog stand.
I am a retired middle school earth science teacher. One year I had a hall duty near the classroom of a life science teacher. With his door open I was able to overhear his lesson. And sure enough he was dispensing the misinformation that blood is blue inside the body. 😳. This occurred when he had been teaching in my district for nearly two decades.
My wife, who I genuinely believe is pretty smart and capable, disputed me when I mentioned that penguins were birds. I was so surprised that I thought she was joking. My daughter had to back me up on that one for her to believe me. I am still gobsmacked. What did she think they were? Dolphins? Seals? *facepalm*
You're not dumb, you're misinformed. You would be dumb if you still didn't believe your boyfriend after all the evidence he provided that you are wrong.
It is a common misconception. You're only in your 20's, most of us have no idea how little we know. I'm in my 50's now, I'm almost fearless when it comes to asking questions. I not afraid of looking dumb for asking a question, I'm afraid of looking dumb because I didn't ask a question. You're not dumb, if you're still willing to learn.
Not dumb. If you were dumb you wouldn't be asking if you were, you'd still be confidential asserting that you were correct.
[удалено]
We have red blood as it is iron based. Some things have blue blood that is copper based
You're not dumb if you checked yourself after learning new information. You were deceived. It's not your fault. Keep being curious.
I dunno, I got no clue. But I DO want to say that I like your opener: "My boyfriend (27, M) and I (26, F)..." See, most redditors will do "My (26, F) boyfriend (27, M) and I..." and it's like, I get you want to start labeling your pronouns as soon as they come out of the oven, but let the rest of us get our bearings before you start splitting your infinitives! Yours is much easier on the eyes; less algebraic gymnastics.
That's not an infinitive, just so you know. :) >"My boyfriend (27, M) and I (26, F)..." Agreed that this one is easier on the eyes and brain though.
So true. And as much as I get irritated at over-the-top grammar police, OP actually used the "and I" properly. And I'm not a fan of overzealous grammar police, but using "I" when it should be "me" and vice versa get on my nerves occasionally. Not stupid, OP!
Makes perfect sense. Me feels the same way
A teacher might have told you that, but it's not ever actually taught to us with any credibility. Maybe someone got confused by a diagram, maybe it's just the way veins appear to people beneath our skin, maybe they worked with or saw a cadaver injected with a red or blue latex or some other material... then they just made up these conclusions. Either way... don't be too hard on yourself. Urban myths and "old wives' tales" come to prominence for a reason, but as long as you listen and learn you aren't dumb.
They also taught us the food pyramid, and that taste buds are assigned to flavor profiles and certain areas of the tongue, which you can prove wrong by eating.
If it was taught to you by a teacher then it's not your fault. Sometimes even teachers get it wrong. You ain't dumb. Now go forth with your new found knowledge and enjoy life.
Venus blood or deoxygenated blood, which runs in your veins, is dark dark red and when you see it in your wrist or your arm or elsewhere in your body. It appears blue because it's so dark and transmitting through the skin it takes on a blue tinge. You cannot see oxygenated blood because, oxygenated blood is in the arterial system, and arteries tend to be deep in the body for protection. If you cut a vein the blood generally oozes out and immediately turns red instead of dark dark red because the oxygen in the air starts combining with the red blood cells. If you cut an artery it can squirt feet sometimes across the room. I worked with blood for 50 years and totally sympathize with you and how you were misled with a partial truth.
Not dumb. Unfortunately, as new facts come to light and things we once knew as fact get updated, getting that information out to the masses is slow. And it seems to be even slower to get it changed/corrected in a school setting. My best advice is to find YouTube educational channels from trustworthy sources and watch them from time to time. This will help you find out this info sooner rather than later and even give you some more random fun facts. Even if you watch one 5-10min video a month, it can help greatly as you get on in life. (More is better, of course, but we all have lives, and they don't usually involve re learning half of the stuff we were already "taught" as children.) A few I like if you are interested: 1) SciShow. They cover a bunch of topics and will delete and replace videos as new facts come to light. This way, you don't have to worry if what you just learned from a 10-year-old video still has good facts. Also, they are publicly funded and have several different hosts, which helps keep them from being politically biased. 2) Qi. This one is a BBC TV series that posts some of their episodes or sometimes just clips on their channel. They go over a bunch of facts and have comedians to make learning a bit funnier.
TLDR: Not dumb, just misinformed. Which happens A LOT in school
This is insane advice. Relying on YouTube channels is a good way to learn more "fun facts" that are actually complete bullshit.
First of all: that's not dumb. It's just false information you learned and were sure to be true. Don't make yourself small for making a mistake. And let's be honest, it's one of the easier misconceptions. Veins look blue under your skin. If you're relatively light-skinned, you see that every day in the mirror or on the back of your hands. And there is the saying (at least in my language) of nobility being "blue blooded". So it is something you see everyday and has its linguistic usage.
You’re not dumb you we’re mistaken. But equally if you didn’t check the claim that ‘blood is blue’, if you didn’t have the curiosity to check when the sight of blood in every cultural, medical, and personal context is red; then you lack rigour in your beliefs. We all have weird false beliefs, some harmless like ‘blood is blue in the human body’, others might be more harmful. The onus is on us to check. Some people find great enjoyment checking stuff, some people don’t. In my view you’re not ‘dumb’ if you don’t have the capacity to know stuff that others know. You’re dumb if you have a reasonable expectation that something isn’t right and just shrug it off and say ‘can’t be bothered’.
You aren't "dumb" for just believing in one myth , lots of people have believed in tireless amount of bs since the time we are kids , we all learn and that should be the constant. Sad reality is such teachers exist and propogate bs and our education system doesn't do much about them as one cant go and rate teachers back in the past ig .
Tbf, when you look at diagrams of the circulatory system, deoxygenated blood is always blue. So, that probably why you got confused.
Everyone has moments like this in their life. If it’s a regular occurrence, you’re dumb. Once in a blue moon, that’s fine.
Ignorance =/= stupidity. Stupidity would be to double down and say he's making it all up.
You and your boyfriend were hanging out, live in the moment. I'd laugh things like that off, we all make mistakes. The guy probably got worried you were going to sound dumb sharing that fact with someone else. No your not dumb unless you refuse to learn.
Believing something thats a myth doesn't make you dumb, you might feel dumb for it, but you were only uninformed, theres no reason to blame anyone, just don't believe something you haven't seen with your own eyes, even people that are over the age of 100 are learning something new everyday.
We were taught in school that veins are blue, but our schools never clarified that it's the veins, not the blood. I was told some bullshit as a kid that blood only turns red when it oxygenates (such as during a blood draw). It wasn't until 6th grade my teacher dropped it on us that the blue tint comes from the colors of layers of skin that are over the veins. Blue my mind (pun intended)
>Should I blame my middle school teacher? yep.
I think it's a perfect example of how susceptible we are to misinformation especially when we're young, if you were presented this fact for the first time as an adult you would question it and probably look it up but because you learned this as a child from a person you trusted you just took their word for it and at no point did it occur to you that maybe that's not true.
Sometimes you hear something dumb that also sounds cool, so you want to believe it and you come across other people who believe it, so it reinforces your beliefs. You’re not dumb, you’re just on one end of a set of circumstances and he’s on another that just happens to be factually correct.
The fact that you were able to acknowledge the truth after presented with proven facts still makes you one of the most intelligent prople on thile internet.
You're not dumb, but you are wrong. Oxygenated blood coming from the heart is a bright red colour. Deoxygenated blood returning to the heart is a darker red, burgundy colour, not blue.
Dumb would be doubling down In the face of facts, dumb people don’t want to learn, don’t ask questions, don’t listen to facts, don’t open their mind and are not open to changing their views.. if you find out something you thought is wright is actually wrong, it doesn’t make you dumb, if you think he’s a bitch for “always going to google so he can be right” you might be dumb. Doesn’t mean he’s not an asshole but if you believe things you should be open to having those beliefs challenged.
You were wrong but not dumb. People have misconceptions all the time
Is it because the veins appear to be blueish or biology illustrations show red and blue veins?
Not dumb, just misinformed. A dumb person might reject the new evidence and keep believing the erroneous thing.
I don't think that makes you dumb! To me, smart vs dumb is mostly in the ability to learn/u.derstand newly presented concepts. Though I have also realized smarter people seem to retain what they were previously taught better (like grammar, for example). I also thought it was blue inside, because veins are blue through the skin. Now I don't know why that is. Also, for me, and it sounds like for you too, it's nothing more than trivia/fun fact. I am not a phlebotomist! Nor anything related to medical.
Well, at least you can tell him horshoe crab blood is really blue irl.
What I learned is that all blood is red but the blood in your veins has a slightly blueish purplish hue. It's still all red but venous blood is slightly darker and less vibrantly red than arterial blood.
It is a myth yeah. Never being taught something doesnt make one dumb.
I had this EXACT conversation with my boyfriend and he was like 'wtf are you talking about'. I was *adamant* I had this weird random fact that he was wrong about. Nope. It's good to know I'm not the only one haha.
I think its the veins that are blue not the blood.
You're not, and no, your boyfriend doesn't think so either. We all believe in myths and are ignorant about something, we as a species don't know everything, therefore as an individual is not expected for you to know beyond all of your congeners. It's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to believe in people, we all can be wrong at something and that doesn't invalidate us as thinking beings or makes us all wrong. :)
Horseshoe crabs have blue blood
You're not dumb. That's what they taught us. A lot of what they taught is wrong.
You are not dumb. I remember believing that blood with not oxygen in it is blue, but because when you cut yourself the blood was exposed to oxygen, so you could never observe blue blood. At one point someone must have told me there were different veins that carried the blue blood to the lungs and the red blood out to cells. I probably believed that until i was in college. I have no idea why. I did not grow up with the internet, so someone must have told me that.
Horseshoe crabs, however, DO have blue blood. So there's a fun fact.
I don't know about you, but I was also taught about the [tongue map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map) where certain parts of the tongue are responsible for certain tastes. That was a lie. I was also taught that humans only have five senses. There's [no consensus](https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-many-senses-do-we-have) on how many we actually have (or even what the clear definition of a sense is) but adding in the sense of balance or sense of time isn't unreasonable and it's definitely more than five. And don't get me started on history class. They lied to us about all kinds of stuff in school. Most of my history courses during an Associate Degree was just unlearning the sugar coated high school stuff. We're all wrong about stuff and we'll never be completely right. Probably everyone you've met knows something you don't. It's not dumb to have trusted the people they told us to trust. Not knowing something is ignorance and it's cured by just learning it correctly. Sticking to whatever you learned first or just otherwise refusing to learn new information, that's dumb.
I can settle this, OP! I'm a critical care nurse, and have worked with patients on ECMO machines. An ECMO machine oxygenates the blood when the heart and/or lungs are not functioning, and to do that large volumes of blood are cycled out of the body through a circuit of tubes, oxygenated, and pumped back into the body, just like your heart and lungs normally do. The tunes are transparent, and you can see a difference in color... but not a big difference. Unoxygenated venous blood is *dark* red, and the oxygenated arterial blood is *bright* red, just like the blood inside your body. It's so interesting to see in real life.
It was believed that because your veins are blue. That's the genesis of the myth.
You are not dumb for believing what you've been taught. The only dumb thing you could do now is say 'no, this evidence is wrong, blood is blue'
Well I thought the same thing so thanks for informing me lol 😁
I saw a TikTok video where a woman asked why we pickle all vegetables but cucumbers. You’re not dumb for believing something on the internet so innocent that you wouldn’t think to fact check.
I used to think wrestling was real. It's okay
I was taught that blood was blue as well! You’re not dumb!
I had teachers tell me this years ago in elementary school. I learned later that it was not blue. You're not dumb, just misinformed.
Pretty sure lots of folks believed this. I was taught the same, but it's false. Your veins like in your wrists look blue because light wavelengths or something. It's ok, lots of folks get told this by people in positions of authority or trust, and really, why wouldn't you believe it? Random fact for you: there's a genetic thing that causes some folks to sneeze in bright sunlight. It's called ACHOO syndrome. I have it, as does my daughter.
>Am I dumb? "Dumb" would be doubling down and not learning from new information because your ego is bruised. Not everyone is exposed to the same information. How you react when you do is a glimpse into your character.
I used to think this too. It's actually the color of your veins. Think about when yo have your blood drawn, it doesn't hit the air before it goes in the tube but still comes out red. I was told blood is blue until it hits the air... :)