science

i used to believe that you could collect email without connecting to the internet

when i was a kid i thought the needle on the compass should point direction i was going,
but it always pointed the wrong way!
- couldn't figure that out.

I used to think that every time you broke something, you risked splitting an atom and causing an explosion.

My friend and I used to play with sticks. We would break them and throw them to try to get them to explode.

When I was eight, I first heard about computer viruses and I thought that a virus on a computer was a disease like a common cold in humans. It was the early nineties and we owned an Amiga Commodore; probably the best computer available in those days where the computer programs came on 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. My dad then told me that if you put a floppy disk on write-protected, you will prevent any viruses from getting on the disk, but I did not realize that write-protecting a disk prevents you from saving any files on it. I then thought that if you had a cold and you coughed or sneezed onto a floppy disk that is on write-enabled, you might give the disk a virus. The fact that I saw two Captain Planet episodes where Dr Blight's computer Mal caught a computer virus on the end of two episodes and was sneezing and coughing made me more firmly believe that computer viruses were like diseases in humans. It wasn't until I was sixteen that I realized that computer viruses are programs that are capable of reproducing themselves, deleting files and making unwanted copies of files on a computer to really slow it down.

I used to think what heated the food in the pan was the boiling water, not the heat under it.

When I was four or five I recall my dad telling me that it was possible to stop time. He's an amatuer physicist, so I'm sure he was just trying to explain some principle that I was too young to understand. The thing is, I have a very distinct memory of him demonstrating this ability. I was able to pluck a "frozen" bumblebee right out of the air and put it in a jar.

when i was little, i liked to watch my dad get ready in the mornings because he always prickled me with his day's growth of stubble. one morning while he was shaving, he "plugged" the electric plug into my upper arm, and pressed the battery button. the shaver worked, and i thought i was getting electrified. later that day at the grocery store, my mom noticed my anxious face and asked me what was wrong. i cried, and told her that my arm had been feeling numb all day.

my dad got yelled at after they laughed at me, but i needed a few more demonstrations before i tearfully agreed that my arm was in no serious danger of falling off.

I used to believe that your social security number because your phone number when you grew up - understandable, because the first three digits of my own social security number happened to have been the same as the first three in my phone number! :)

I used to think that a "photocopier", was a machine that made duplicates of photographs as good as the originals, glossy paper and all. Ordinary Xerox machines were just plain "copiers".

I used to believe…

not my belief but other kids wrong ideas. When I was in first year of high school I noticed the school library computer had crashed so I shouted to the librarian "the computer's crashed !" A few of my classmates laughed and scoffed at me; "did it crash into a wall?" I guess they were just not into computers exept for playing games.

When I was quite young I believed that if you left glass in the sun long enough, that it would turn into diamonds and crystals (depending on the colour of the glass obviously). I had quite a collection of glass sitting on my bedroom windowsill until one day, my mum threw them all out and told me the horrible truth. I believed for years after that, that they had finally 'turned' and she had taken them for herself and every time she 'bought' new diamond earrings or a sapphire necklace I'd look at them suspiciously.

The Fast Forward button on a cassette recorder is often marked simply “F.F.” for Fast Forward. I used to think that was the button you pressed to make it go “F-F-F-F-F-F” (which it is, of course, but that’s not what it means!).

I'm old enough that when I was a kid I listened to music mostly on vinyl.

When I heard on a sports report that Wayne Gretzky had had a good year in hockey and had "broken several of his own records", I pictured him snapping LPs in half. It seemed like a very strange and destructive way to celebrate a successful athletic career, but I probably figured he was rich enough to buy himself some more records.

Record spins. the outside edge went round at the same speed as the inside edge but the outside edge had further to go so the record had to go round at different speeds to keep up with one another, i just couldn't stop thinking about this.

Remember vinyl records and turntables? I used to believe that a tiny band with tiny instruments lived inside the middle of the record and would run up through the grooves and into the arm of the turntable then into the speakers to play their music.

My dear old Grandmother has a little computer with which she only sends and receives emails. Every night, she places a blanket over the monitor to make sure the government can't see into her house.