Update with context for you all since this post is unexpectedly taking off,
This was a small project I made in 5 hours as just a “huh, this would be neat to make!” and as a first coding project. I mostly shared it expecting a little bit of feedback but nothing too major, clearly I underestimated what to expect from it lol.
There’s been a lot of really good suggestions for how to improve the site and make it better, so thank yall for that! Things I’m planning on doing are:
-Making open source so people can edit. Its just basic HTML and JavaScript so nothing too complex there
-Suggestions box on the site
-Some type of regional variations listed on the site
-If possible, more obscure myths and more tied to the curriculum of schools
-Optimizing the site for mobile
Probably more to come as well, but no estimates on a timeframe since I’m very much so new to this haha
Edit: Additional clarification, yes this site is only viable for Americans right now. Would love to help make it work internationally but I’m sure not the person to try and say what people in other countries were taught in school, so if someone wants to help with that lmk!
It should work better on mobile devices now, but if there’s any repeated issues let me know and I can try to fix them.
It should also be public on Github, check out the description tab on the website for more info. My first time making a project open source (or even having one at all) so lmk if there’s any issues!
My understanding of the Desert Storm digital camo is that it works because they were doing a lot of city fighting. Camouflage works by breaking up your silhouette against the background. Since there aren’t really any straight edges in nature, they use rounded splotches for jungle warfare. Since there are a lot of straight edges in cities, they used straight edges for the splotches. If this camo was intended for jungle use, then it was probably a lot less effective than the traditional camouflage, which is probably why it didn’t replace the organic camouflage.
I think you’re a bit turned around. The only grid pattern camouflage used in Desert Storm in any appreciable amount was Desert-Night. (Which I’m not actually sure was designed with digital aid or not). Desert-Night camouflage was intended to defeat older generation night vision by blending into the grain of older night optics. Essentially to hide people in the static.
Dual Tex was an earlier experiment where the straight shapes were a result of the primitive ways of arranging digitally assisted patterns. It was intended primarily for Europe, but more than that was a proof of concept of the macro/micro patterning technique which did eventually become standard. In the 1970s the ERDL patterns could be considered micro only, and the following “M81” US Woodland being a macro only pattern. Dual Tex had the idea of inserting a micro inside a macro without disrupting the macro’s effectiveness.
The straight edges have proven not to be much of a detriment, as the vast majority of digital personal camo use squares are a base shape. (Digital camo strictly speaking doesn’t need square pixels but for practical reasons usually uses them). Follow up digital pixel camos did try to find a sweet spot for pixel size, as pixels that are large will make the camo less effective up close, but pixels too small can result in “blobbing” which makes the wearer distinct at a distance.
While the US hasn’t adopted digitally aided pattern designs on vehicles, a number of countries or units in them have. Vehicle camo follows the same concept as personal camo, although intended for a longer range.
Just FYI. Thanksgiving is the original blatant Cultural Appropriation. Thanksgiving was one of 13 harvest feast that the Native Americans in the area would hold each year. That’s one of the reasons that Canada and The US celebrate it on different days.
We also stole most of their constitution, except the bit about “no law shall be passed that doesn’t directly benefit all the children of the next 7 generations.”
They had existed relatively stabley for 25,000 years, and we fucked it up, stole what we wanted, and trashed the rest.
This is just more misinformation, actually. Thanksgiving festivals were common in Europe before the colonization of America. See Lammas and Horkey. The settlers just continued their traditions in America. The native Americans had similar traditions, but the idea wasn’t anything new to Europeans. Canada’s Thanksgiving has moved around a lot over the years, but its current day was chosen to separate it from Remembrance Day. Its timing has nothing to do with Native holidays.
I don’t who “they” are to really respond to the rest of your comment. You’re kind of painting the Indians with an extremely broad brush. Almost nothing will be true about all the cultures of an entire continent. The Pilgrims primarily interacted with the Wampanoags, but they didn’t have a written language and there’s certainly no evidence their tribe existed for 25,000 years.
There’s a common belief among the Iroquois that it should be considered how actions will affect the seventh generation, but the idea that that’s in their constitution is a common myth. The Iroquois Confederacy itself was only formed about 1450. If you read the Great Law of Peace, it bears no resemblance to the US Constitution. Calling it plagiarism is ridiculous. There are not even any significant references to the Iroquois by Congress in the 1780s. This is another modern myth which originated in the last hundred years. The Iroquois constitution wasn’t even written for a democracy.
Cool concept but your site really needs some work done. I heard in school that lemmings would kill themselves and i went in the 2010s. This is only one such example, the best thing you could have done is map out which myths are most common where instead of the decade, and it would also be useful to add a important corrections list for the more important facts which you probably were misinformed about.
There’s a good chance when you were younger, you heard classical music in the classroom to try and make you smarter. However, this is a myth - there is no such link between music and intelligence (or that we can measure intelligence for another matter!)
I’ve never heard anyone claim classical music makes you smarter. I have heard people say it makes you focus better, which is true to some extent. This was one of the first things my therapist recommended I try after being diagnosed with adhd. I can’t imagine it isn’t applicable to people without adhd, although probably to varying degrees depending on the person.
The only thing I take issue with is the specification of classical music. Some people have told me this is because classical music doesn’t have words in it, which would distract you instead of help you focus. Not only can classical music have lyrics, but every other genre of music is perfectly capable of not having lyrics. I’m not sure if its even true that the lyrics would distract you in the first place.
Its pretty clear to me that the only reason people play classical music specifically for this purpose is because it makes them feel smart. You could argue that feeling smart might actually help you get things done, but I dislike the perception of classical music as smart people music in general. It’s just a style of music, like every other. There’s nothing that makes it superior or more sophisticated, its just what Europeans liked a few centuries ago.
I guess its more prevelant than I thought, or at least it used to be. Its very confusing to me how people could fall for that. How little do you have to know about music to think a specific type of it will literally increase your intelligence.
I don’t think it’s completely ridiculous on its face. Obviously we have some connection to music (as in, we like rhythms, we like making specific sounds with instruments or our voices, we seem to get into the beat etc.), so why shouldn’t it be possible for music known for its complexity to have an effect on us?
It seems it doesn’t, but I don’t think it’s something where you know so “little” about music if you consider it a possibility.
You were probably taught at some point that people in the time of Christopher Columbus all thought the world was flat. However, this is a myth that pervades history - most people knew the earth was a globe! (Source)
Goddamnit! I’ve heard that so often already.
And then I learned separately that even the Greeks already knew not only that Earth was round, but even its circumference at a pretty good accuracy.
These two ‘facts’ genuinely had me thinking we must have lost a ton of knowledge from the Greeks…
The real truth is that the catholic church purposefully wanted people stupid and uneducated and that’s why people started believing in the flat earth even after the Greeks. but they don’t teach you that in school!
A lot of their knowledge was from the Sumerians and other ancient civilizations anyway. Sumerians were doing trig thousands of years before the Greeks did; the Greeks’ records were just the ones that were preserved.
Huh the Thanksgiving one I was taught that the Indians were nice to the new arrivals, but within a few short years that niceness was exploited and betrayed.
I guess maybe the welcome feast never occurred? But we certainly were taught the pilgrims drove the Indians out
Yeah, that was my big issue with the sites content. I wanted to find a list of obscure things taught wrong by decade, but all I could track down were a few myths that were shared across many different decades, so it led to the current (and imperfect) result.
I want to try and update the site to be more focused on what you mention - things that were taught and later revised, but the only way I can think to do that so far is track down old textbooks and compare them to what’s known now, which I’m not sure the best/most efficient way to do that, or even where to find textbooks by year.
All this to say, hopefully I’ll be able to improve the site in due time to make it better represent different facts and whatnot
Cool, I’ll have a further look at it tomorrow when I’m home.
Open source is defined differently by different people. Some define it by the code being open to see for the public. Some define it by it’s license. In your case both the code is open and an open source license is used.
blank.docxi added this file by accident how do i delete a file in github
I can see you’re a bit new to it 😁. There is a button with … dots with the option to “delete” the file. Keep in mind that it will stay be retained in the history.
Haha yeah, I ended up figuring out how to delete it but kept the original text because I thought it’d be a good bit. And thanks for the info! Glad to know its like that either way
I’ve never understood this obsession. Odds are you’ve never heard of Ceres, but it was once called a planet. It’s now considered a dwarf planet, like Pluto. Pluto is also less massive than Eris, so if you include Pluto you should also include Eris. None of these have cleared their orbit though.
I understand it’s frequently just a joke, but it’s always rubbed me weird because some people actually became science skeptics because “suddenly Pluto isn’t a planet” or whatever. Really the reason is because the list would get really long if we included everything.
Earth like? No. They’re too small to hold any reasonable atmosphere. That doesn’t rule out life, but it’s unlikely. They’re also likely too small to have subsurface oceans or things like that without being tied to a planet and having strong tidal forces squishing it, in which case it’d be a moon not a dwarf planet.
That’s like saying caffeine or aspirin is a gateway drug because you probably try those before harder drugs. That’s not the only qualification for a gateway drug: it has to significantly increase the likelihood of trying additional drugs, which marijuana in the US does not. Elsewhere it varies, but in the US, you’re not more likely to try heroin because you’ve tried marijuana.
In my country (The Netherlands) weed is defacto legal and widespread yet we don’t suffer from a crisis as severe as the US has, if anything it’s probably less likely that people go to harder substances since weed is so safe and widely available. I can even proudly say that I have never seen a junkie on the streets here.
It’s a neat website, but it is very America specific.
For example, I’m Australian and I wasn’t taught about slavery or genocide of our native people in high school. Hell, I was taught that the Stolen generation was a misnomer and children were only taken voluntarily or as an act of mercy… I graduated in 2008 so it wasn’t exactly the dark ages. Referring to the planned exterminations of the natives as “battles” and “conflicts” at best was another one. they didn’t even mention the shit that went down in Tasmania.
it’s not just the dumb stuff like food pyramids and taste zones, even in schools today history is being glossed over
I’m also a 2000s Australian high schooler and we had a notorious lack of Australian history taught to us. My school preferred to teach us the histories of pretty much every other country but our own. We didn’t learn a single thing about indigenous history at all, bad or good.
I had a history teacher in (US) high school who was not afraid at all to tell his students the whole truth about stuff like this. Its too bad he was the only one not allowed to teach government classes.
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