homepage Forums SimHQ Community Community Hall Funny misconceptions you had as a child

There are two which immediately come to my mind and both are related to television.

I thought that color (in the real world) didn’t exist until the 70’s because of so many old shows that I watched that were all in black & white.

I thought that all tv shows were filmed in the same location where they were set. So for example I assumed shows like “Different Strokes” and “Barney Miller” were really shot in NYC instead of LA.

Ah the innocence and ignorance of childhood….

I definitely thought that shows were filmed where they took place when I was a kid.

This is kind of a weird one, but when I was very young, not understanding biology yet, because my Dad's father had passed away and my Mom's mother had passed away, I only had one grandfather and one grandmother, and they lived across the street from each other, so I thought they were the parents of both of my parents.

Ahh, sometimes when I stare out at the trees on a sunny day, beneath the blue skies and cool breeze I contemplate things like this.

To be a child again...

When I was a young lad, I took many things for granted:

That stuff fell to the ground by the force of gravity just because...

That the world around me was life and everything and the entire Universe revolved around that.

The dark in the night was spooky, mysterious, and beyond the pale black lurked sinister things that could cause great harm and pain...



Alas, since then, my worldview has altered, somewhat:

I now question gravity, as Newton said energy cannot be created, nor destroyed, only transferred. So why does gravity function, always, unceasingly, transferring matter from higher elevations into lower ones, without need to refuel. Of course, now I understand the concept of the space-time/slope relationship, relativity, and that objects are falling into a parabolic abyss, yet Newton's statement remains, thus, a paradox: gravity should not operate unceasingly. Thus, I have theorized that gravity can only operate so long as the Universe continues to expand and accelerate in this expansion. Should the Universe's expansion halt, gravity would cease to operate, as this expansion is what gives gravity the means to function. Of course, I now wrestle with the fact that this energy of expansion being transferred into gravity should be parasitic to the expansion itself, as the energy should only be transferred--we cannot have this both ways! Despite this, the velocity differential above and below an object on the space-time/slope curve forces objects inward, similar to how an airfoil works(possibly). But that begs the question--and I refer back to this expansion vs. parasitic drag through gravity--why is the Universe expansion accelerating? This has lead to my theorization that this accelerating expansion(which should otherwise be constant or decreasing from the initial Big Bang) is related to time itself, and perhaps space is serving as in information medium to record every single event, interaction, emission that occurs in time, and as entropy increases, the amount of information being stored does as well, thus allowing the expansion to accelerate. Alas, this latter point is unproven, and the former: the expansion providing the input energy for gravity to operate remains theoretical but somewhat plausible...

I digress.

I now know that the Universe is billions upon billions of light years across, and what I once considered an infinite expanse that mattered little, as the Earth was the center, is likely not infinite after all, but instead, finite in nature--or even worse, a hypersphere--the scariest of all propositions!

That keeps me up at night, sometimes, for a little while.

But the dark does not. Now I accept that the dark is simply absence of light. Nothing more, nothing less. Beyond the dark fold are still the same things I saw during the day, and my eyes simply cannot detect them anymore.

I'm less scared of the dark than I am the questions my former hypotheses brood in my mind.


So yes, I often lament that life was far simpler and comforting as a child, despite my dread that the boogieman may lurk in the closet at night, or that the alligators beneath my bed may have snapped off my feet, should I have to go pee in my sleep...

What we might call a "funny misconception" I'm choosing to think it was forward thinking on my part as a child.

This is probably 1971-72 when I was 4 years old. I was watching Speed Racer on TV and my Mom told me to turn off the TV and come to the kitchen to eat. I turned off the TV in the middle of the episode and thought when I turned it back on it would resume where I left off on the show.

You can imagine my horror when I turned the TV back on and friggin Romper Room was on and Speed Racer was no more. WTF?

So you can say I had the idea for a modern day DVR way back when I was just a wee tot.

When I was very little we visited my grandparents on the Forth of Firth (across the river from Edinburgh) and although it's on the river it's as much sea as it is river and so subject to tides. On the second walk down to the water I noted that the water was closer, and I was told that's because the tide was coming in.

However, they did not explain that the tide would also go out

That night, terrified of the inevitable flooding, I wet the bed.

I had an aunt and uncle take on a camping trip around lake Superior when I was 3 or 4. One of the places we visited on that trip was Sleeping Giant Park in Ontario. Little kid me expected to see a literal sleeping giant. I was let down, but it's funny when I look back on it.

I also recall one time a couple older realatives were talking about something I misheard as a northern explosion at a certain time laer that day. I was horrified to find they were actually excited about it. To my relief it was just a TV show called Northern Exposure.

I guess little kid me had a vivid imagination and didn't actually pay much attention.

I thought that the bees don't sting, it's just a rural legend. The funny thing is it took years before one actually stung me... it was just a thing I did, picking up bees on flowers to prove they don't sting.

PS: I did know how to recognize male bees, I grew up in the country. I'm talking regular working bees

One more misconception that just occurred to me:


Until I was in junior high school I thought "duct tape" was "duck tape". I guess the people I knew growing up didn't enunciate sufficiently.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone enunciate duct tape correctly.

In the military it’s “100 mile an hour” tape.

I am brimming with curiosity to know why it was called that.

We used to call it bodge tape. (UK military)

Legend has it that it was made to do quick repairs on aircraft skin and was guaranteed to at least 100 mph even when wet.


https://www.military.com/kitup/2006/11/they_call_it_10.html


https://5col.com/products/mil-spec-100mph-tape-olive-drab-2-in-x-60-yds-nsn-7510-00-266-5016



Here is a take on how it got the 100 mph name.

https://allabouttape.com/why-they-call-it-100-miles-an-hour-tape/


Like many military jargon the start is sometimes. … murky.

Thanks for the info OG!

When I was young, not quite teenage years or maybe early teens, my grandmother and I were in her truck at an intersection and red light waiting. She thought she saw some bullets in the road up ahead just before the intersection. She wanted to see what it was so when the light turned green, she opened her door and rolled past the curiosity to check it out. She quickly shut her door and powered through the intersection and said to me, "Looks like .22." Not knowing anything about ammunition I thought she said "It looks like twenty two" to which I said, "How did you count them so fast". She got a good kick out of that.

I'm impressed that ANY grandma knows how to recognize .22 caliber rounds!