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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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A couple of these are interesting, but for my own sanity I have to refuse to accept most are commonly believed at all. Some are myths either way, like Satan ruling Hell or not isn't real so it's kind of a strange thing to include. I think the only one that really surprised me is the banana tree one, which is some interesting trivia but is so pedantic that if someone said that to me in person I'd just want to leave the room.
The banana argument is dumb, too, because there is no taxonomic definition of what a "tree" even is.
I've also commonly heard "Palm trees aren't actually trees, they're grass," which is correct from a taxonomic standpoint but ignores the fact that "tree" isn't an official classification of anything. It's simply a term applied to any tall plant with a woody trunk, which banana definitely counts among.
Mate, I’ll be honest with you here - I grow bananas on my property and I can definitely tell you the last term I’d use to describe their trunks is ‘woody’. They’re so moisture-laden and ultra porous that anyone who’s ever had to cut or cull banana will know for sure that they’re not made of wood. You can easily carve through a 15-20cm trunk of a banana plant with a sharp machete and one strong swing - try that on anything generally considered to be a tree and you’ll be lucky to get a fair chip out of the trunk.
I’ve got no skin in the game as to whether or not they’re trees, or what the fuck a ‘tree’ even is, but anyone who’s dealt with growing bananas is pretty unlikely to consider them in the same group as woody trees. Damn things grow like weeds anyway!
Fair, it's a loose definition of woody, but all wood really is is load-bearing cellulose.
Bamboo, for example, is completely hollow inside, very unlike normal wood either, but we still consider it "woody" even though it's really just a reinforced piece of grass.
Like when people say that spiders aren't bugs. Bug isn't a scientific term, it's just slang for creepy-crawlies. They usually mean that spiders aren't insects.
First one that got me was the black hole. If I dig a hole in the ground, is that not really a hole? If I find a hole in your logic is that not a hole? If I model the flow of charge with positive 'holes' between electrons, are they not holes? And... do people really commonly think a 'black hole' is a traditional sort of hole? 'Hole' seems a perfectly reasonable name for what it really is.
Now what a black hole really is is fascinating stuff, but not in a "see, people are so ignorant to think it's a hole" kind of way.
Even worse, we don't know what black holes really are.
Is there a discontinuity in spacetime? Is the discontinuity point-like or spherical, or even toroidal? Do physics even exists within? Is "within a black hole" even a reasonable concept? We don't know! We're still arguing about wether black holes can delete information from existence.
My favourite black hole fact, coming from the character of the space-time tensor and how it changes, is that as you approach a black hole, time goes sideways.
I don't think my lecturer put it quite that way, but he showed that as you get close, the time dimension comes to look like a space dimension in the tensor, and the space dimension that points into the black hole, looks like a time dimension!
Yeah, time-like paths are mind bending.
I've always though about that as the interior of the black hole has been left behind in the time direction, like a sausage casing.