science

I thought every record player would automatically play a record when you start the player. This was a feature of the record player we had. I never thought any player would require a person to manually put the needle on the record. (Yes I remember records, even though I was born in 1977.)

I hate to admit it, but I was scared of the record player we had. It clicked whenever someone started to play a record and the sound frightened me. (By design, it was supposed to click.)

My older brother told me that when you diled '0' for operator on the telephone, that a doctor performing an operation on someon (an 'operator') would have to leave the operating room to answer your call, and his patient could die from being unattended while the doctor was talking to you. He explained that is why you should never dial '0' on the phone - you could kill someone. He would then pick up the phone, dial '0', and make me scream.

As black is the opposite of white, I used to believe that blue was the opposite of red. Also, bannanas were the opposite of apples, and giraffes the opposite of elephants. It's not such a bad analogy, when you think about it.

I used to believe that when people walked, the ground was like a treda-mill for each person. Essentially, I thought each person stayed still, and the earth moved! After some careful thought, I realised that not everyone could be achieving this at the same time...!!

When i was younger and i would talk on the phone, i always thought that there was a little person inside it, and i could never understand how he got in there, or how they could live in the phone...Elayna

I didn't quite get the concept of mechanical printing as a kid. I figured whoever wrote books must have been quite exacting and meticulous with his pencil to make all the little letters perfect and regular.

Way back before I could read, I used to believe that typewriters were telepathic, and people just hit the keys as fast as they could and the typewriter would write out what you were thinking. So one day, my parents were letting me play with the typewriter, and I thought out a bunch of notes to people and pounded out gibberish with the keys. I then gave the notes to my parents and older children I knew, and thought they were just being mean and pretending that they couldn't read them.

As a child, I was travelling by car with my younger cousin. He asked me why there was a flashing red light on top of the radio tower. I told him that was so the radio waves could find the tower at night. Of course, he believed me.

I believed that if you looked reeeeealy close at an LP, you would see the words and music printed in the groove, and that the needle read it and played it as music somehow.

My dad used to get annoyed with me opening the car windows on the motorway, he told me that if we were driving fast and the window was open, the air pressure would make the car lift up of the road and we would flip over. I still have a thing about opening windows in cars.

An older girl in school once told me that electric fuses were actually the most super powered batteries in the world - and if you held them for too long you would float away. Still careful with them.

My older sisters had me believing that electricity was in the ground. I used to go around plugging radios and all sorts of stuff into the ground, and to my surprise, it never worked!

I used to think that if I put small piles of rocks in the road, I could make cars jump through the air like on "The Dukes of Hazzard." Then I tried it and the unsuspecting driver threatened to call the police.

On a very long museum trip through the gem section, my mother told me that the floride in toothpast comes from florite, the purple crystal. I remember running through the gem section pointing out every 'toothpaste rock' to her. I didn't find out this was a trick until I was about 17 or 18

On certain three speed bicycles, the shifter is made by a company called Sturmey Archer. On a particularly long ride one time, my mother told me that Sturmey Archer was the name of the little man who lived inside the hub and changed the gears. He had very large ears, which made the clicking noise as you rode, and changed the gears by sticking his nose in and out of the hub. This last bit isn't too far off from how a three speed hub works (sans extremely small man), so she might have been actually trying to teach me something useful...

When I was 7 or 8, when the internet was still in its infancy, I went over to my cousins house to see his neat new computer, and check out the internet, something I had never seen before. He explained to me something called 'downloading', but didn't do a great job of it.

I was into stamps at the time (quit laughing at me), and I asked him if he could download any stamps for me. He said sure, and I spent the rest of the evening asking where they came out of the computer, while he tried to explain to me how they could possibly be 'in' the computer...I wanted them to come 'out'. I presumed the objects would simply come out of the floppy drive, but then I wondered what would happen if I wanted to download candy...some bars simply wouldn't fit in that small of a drive.

It was not until a few years later, when I started using the internet at my dad's work, that I figured out that when you downloaded things, they didn't come out of the computer.

When my mother called someone, then hung up the phone within a couple of seconds saying "busy signal," I thought that meant the phone company knew the other person was too busy to anwer the phone and was letting my mother know.