Half of this article will prove to be non-factual in a few years.
This is depressing. Not only is my schooling outdated and wrong but at my age my memory decay is on the order of the half-life of the radioactive isotope strontium-90. I’m screwed.
And the other half you didn't know are probably right.
Old truths decay
Kind of like "old tooths decay." Like the root canal I just had today. Life is becoming more like one long root canal appointment...
Every day 100 tons of bs is dumped on our heads.
Did the bill passed on News Year day raise or lower spending?
You're too late.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC_VAfFozeg
Only half? Major win!
“...and everything you know is wrong.” (The Firesign Theater)
(But I knew that already.)
IMO, one of the biggest problems is - scientists are people too. While they will extoll the virtues of the scientific method...doing research and going where the evidence takes them...as a rule they all have egos and are more interested in proving their own preconceived notions (theories).
I’ve followed the Neaderthal question out of curiosity. It’s amazing how many highly regarded anthrpologists simply disregard the DNA evidence that has come out in the last few years. It simply doesn’t fit their model.
I bet the author never got over having to memorizing his multiplication tables as a child.
Facts can change over time truth doesn’t. But then low information voter create their own truth. Then there are factoids.Also how can one know anything if by the time it’s published it is out dated.
"Although the mistake was known since the early 20th century, the name Brontosaurus was still used in popular culture and the media, and even on museum displays."
The 50% is 100% of what the libs tell you!!!
Knowledge and facts actually shrink for the individual. When I was younger I knew much more than I do now and was much more certain of it than I am now.
However I like to think experience has somewhat offset this retreat in knowledge. And like collecting valuables I now concentrate on quality of knowledge rather than quantity.
Second, and one disturbing to me (as one who was called 'baby killer" on my way home from overseas in the San Francisco airport in 1966) , is that returning veterans from the Vietnam weren't actually treated so badly after all. Last night on C-Span the current CEO of Slate was reviewing his new book about the glory and wonder of San Francisco, and told of how all the returning vets he knew there in the '60's and 70's (who by the way were all drug users and probably shared the SF values) were treated very well by his friends - it was a pack of conservative lies that they had been disrespected and even spit on. Then remarkably tonight on the C-Span history channel, there was coverage of a class session by a Meredith Lair of the history department at George Mason University, of all places, who seemed intent on proving essentially the same point, in particular that returning vets were never spat on - meticulously she questioned all possible proof that such incidents ever took place, her primary evidence seeming to be that because this class of twenty year olds, two generations removed from Vietnam, knew no one who first-hand had been treated with disrespec as a returning vet from that war, it never happened. She pointed out that there seemed to be no actual photos of soldiers being spit on, although there were she claimed pictures of anti-war protesters being spit on and she later produced a picture which she maintained had been photoshopped to show Code Pink protesters in 2005 urging the murder of US troops - so you see, it turns out by her implication that our returning soldiers have always been treated kindly, while it's the anti-war types who have been disrespected and lied about - facts are indeed ephemeral things......
a good reason to never give absolute trust over anything of your to any “expert”. lok’at all the stuff docs used to tell people and require god-like obedience to their superior intellect. hell i still have the ads of doctors pushing smoking. doctors saying the appendix or tailbones have no useful purpose.
Since knowledge is still growing at an impressively rapid pace, it should not be surprising that many facts people learned in school have been overturned and are now out of date.
Well some "facts" change not because of increased knowledge but because the "facts" have changed...such as the population of a city. While those "facts" which are shown to be wrong by increase in human knowledge were wrong before the knowledge increased (or perhaps they are still right, and further increases in knowledge will favor them). For myself, I think in terms of "working models" when it comes to describing nature, rather than facts. No such model being complete. All being less than entirely accurate or entirely precise, and except for those things noted by Pascal (ie the existence of one's own soul) the truth or falsehood of all things being less than absolutely certain no matter what the date.
Quantum gas goes below absolute zero - Ultracold atoms pave way for negative-Kelvin materials
To paraphrase Yogi Berra’s dictum: fifty percent of life is ninety percent mental. So there.
Facts do no change. The definition of a fact is that it is a true statement, thus it cannot change. Our apprehension of truth, our perception of what is, in fact, a fact, can change but the fact itself cannot change. Those facts that “changed” as described in the opening paragraph were not facts but merely mistaken opinions about facts.