Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” The idea is that you can take an old idea, even a good one, and improve upon it by making something better. That’s a great idea, and the world is full of examples of this happening which we can see in everything from computing to the evolution of pizza. But sometimes we settle on an idea and innovation and even when something new and better comes along, we stick with the old version. Why? Good question!
10. The Richter Scale Has Been Out of Favor for Decades
If you go online on any given day after an earthquake has occurred you can guarantee, beyond a shadow of a doubt, you’ll see news media and social media postings about the power of that earthquake. They’ll tell you if it was a weak earthquake or a strong one based on the Richter scale. Low numbers are not so bad, high numbers are really bad. Most people have a basic understanding of this and what the Richter scale means. What fewer of us are aware of is that the Richter scale is outdated and has been for decades.
The Moment Magnitude Scale is the preferred method of measuring seismic activity and it was first detailed all the way back in 1979. It’s the standard scale used by scientific bodies like the US Geological Survey.
The Richter Scale wasn’t a bad scale, but it had issues. Most notable, it was a relative scale. The Richter Scale measures earthquakes against other earthquakes. Moment Magnitude is able to give an absolute measure by measuring all seismic waves and detailing fault slippage and friction among other things.
Another problem with the Richter Scale was that its creator, Charles Richter, lived in California and was concerned with measuring California quakes. It was never intended to take into account conditions elsewhere in the world. It also wasn’t meant to handle truly massive quakes.
Moment Magnitude is designed to measure any quake in any location under any conditions. It strips Richter’s limitations and does a good job of it but still hasn’t achieved not just acceptance but awareness on a basic level.
9. The Fujita Scale For Tornadoes Has Been Replaced with the Enhanced Fujita Scale
Like earthquakes, tornadoes are explained to most people on a scale known as the F-Scale, or Fujita Scale. Thank the 1996 film Twister for popularizing the concept. The idea is that, as wind speeds increase, the Fujita number increases all the way to the legendary F5, a sort of tornadic boogeyman of ultimate power. These speeds were based on an understanding of the damage the tornado caused. And of course, media stories will let you know the F number of any new tornado even today.
The scale was developed in 1971 and had some notable limitations in how it explained tornados. The biggest issue was how do you rank a tornado that causes no damage? If a tornado formed in the middle of nowhere and destroyed some fields, it could have literally been the most powerful tornado ever but the Fujita Scale has to rank it on the bottom because it didn’t technically do anything.
The scale also based damage on “worst” damage, so if one building is destroyed but 1000 aren’t, it’s still considered destructive for the damage it did cause. Plus it was known to grossly overestimate wind speeds above F3.
The Enhanced Fujita Scale has been stepping in to take up old-school Fujita’s slack. Some media outlets use it, but it’s often not adequately explained. Enhanced Fujita is a wind scale, not just a damage scale. It’s able to look at damage across an area and recognize that if a wooden shack falls over but a brick house doesn’t, then maybe it’s not an F4 after all.
8. The 5 Stages of Grief Is Not Based on Any Science
Even if you’re unfamiliar with the name Kubler-Ross, you’re probably aware of the grief scale to which it refers. Also called the Five Stages of Grief, it purports to explain the five stages of emotion humans go to when experiencing grief. The stages, in order, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Turns out that this model is not particularly science based, however. It doesn’t account for how many or even most people process grief, and it wasn’t supposed to explain how the bereaved deal with loss, either.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross developed the stages after studying terminally ill patients in the 1960s. So the grief she was referencing was an individual’s own in terms of realizing they were dying. It was not related to the grief you might experience over losing a loved one, a pet, experiencing a disaster, or anything else. And, in fairness to Kubler-Ross, she wasn’t presenting it as a universal understanding of all grief, either.
There’s no evidence that most people experience anything like those five stages, however. In fact, there’s no uniform way to express grief because it’s a human emotion and how could it follow established steps from one person to another? That would seem to indicate grief is something that is done to people uniformly from some outside source, which makes no sense.
7. Driving With Hands at 10 and 2 Is Considered Unsafe
“Hands at Ten and Two” is a cliche you’ll run across when learning how to drive, and a trope that will sometimes pop up in comedies now and then when someone is learning to drive. For many years it was the standard rule for where to keep your hands on the wheel, likening the steering wheel to the face of a clock and indicating your hands should align with the ten and two. They even make Smart steering wheel covers that warn you if your hands leave that position.
For some years now, ten and two have been out of favor with driver’s ed. and organizations concerned with driver’s safety. AAA and others have been instructing drivers to hold the wheel at nine and three for over a decade now. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the same.
Part of the reason for the switch has to do with airbag position. If your hands are at ten and two, you’re in prime position for an airbag to go off and launch your hands into your own face at 100 mph.
6. The Idea That You Have 5 Senses is Very Outdated
The idea that humans have five senses – sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste – dates all the way back to ancient Greece when Aristotle assured us that humans had five senses and no more. It’s no wonder that the idea has changed some in the meantime. Even though most people still regard five as the real numbers, others have proposed we have many more, even over a dozen. Google it and you’ll find sites listing as many as 18.
The New York Times ran an article back in 1964 detailing the limitations of the five sense model and included things like a sense of balance among several others. Others mention senses like proprioception which allows you to sense your body in space.
Sense of time, weight, wetness, distance, even the need to urinate have all been mentioned as additional senses that Aristotle’s simple five neglect to account for.
5. The Idea of Repressed Memories Is Not Generally Accepted in Psychology
Repressed memories have been fodder for a lot of dramatic films and talk shows, but the science behind them is dubious at best. While some clinicians still espouse their validity, those who study memory scientifically say they just don’t exist. Repressed memories, as the term is understood, are either things we just forgot, memories that may have been implanted through suggestion, or things someone is consciously repressing.
Repressed memory was at the forefront of the Satanic Panic of the 80s and 90s, where people claimed to have been abused in Satanic cults as children and repressed the memories. The FBI could find no evidence of this ever happening and there is research indicating a number of clinicians use suspect methods to “uncover” would-be repressed memories.
4. Blood Quantum Still Determines Native American Status
In the United States, one’s ability to qualify for status in a Native American tribe depends on Blood Quantum. That’s your percentage of “Native blood” according to certain guidelines. Many tribes, like the Navajo, have set up their own requirements for this and they are still in place today. That said, the original idea for Blood Quantum was basically a way for the government to decide who qualified for Native American status. The Department of the Interior will literally issue you a “Certified Degree of Indian Blood” card for your wallet.
It’s a controversial issue to this day, but it’s still in place. Part of the problems stem from how it was established in the first place. Your blood percentage is based on Census data, but these were often filled out by non-Natives. In some cases they would look at a person and decide they didn’t look Native, so they were not included, even if they were 100% Native American. Likewise, they might list someone as full blood with no evidence to support it.
3. The Tongue Map was Debunked Years Ago
The tongue map is a concept that is over 100 years old, devised by German David Hänig, and proposed that different areas of the tongue are taste specific. Sweet was tasted at the tip, salty at the front sides, sour at the back sides and bitter in the rear. The center was basically useless. This was so accepted they not only taught it in school, they made kids conduct experiments to “prove” it which was not fun for most students since it’s not accurate and therefore not easy to experimentally prove.
In 1974, Virginia Collings showed that Hanig’s map was not accurate. We now understand that taste receptors are far more complicated than a simple region by region map, not to mention the fact that umami is a recognized fifth taste not even accounted for in the old map. Despite that, it’s still widely known and shared about online.
2. The Scoville Scale is Based on Very Arbitrary and Subjective Science
A few years ago the world became obsessed with heat. Hot peppers, hot sauces and even spicy Cheetos became a pop culture phenomena. The popularity of Hot Ones, the talk show in which guests eat hot wings, shows it’s still going strong. And the Scoville heat unit has been our only way of understanding how hot these things are, despite the fact it’s very unscientific and subjective.
Pharmacist Wilbur Scoville developed his scale back in 1912. The way it works is kind of baffling. You need to dry out a pepper and then dissolve it in alcohol. Then dilute that pepper mix with sugar water until 3 of 5 humans, whoever they may be, can’t feel the heat anymore. If one unit of sugar water diluted one unit of pepper mix, then the Scoville would be 1. If it’s 10,000 units of sugar water – whether that’s drops or ml or whatever – to one unit of pepper, then it’s 10,000 Scoville. That’s how they get the ratings and you can see the flaw. Who are the five people? Have they been tasting peppers all day? Do they literally taste the same mix over and over until they can’t sense heat? If so, how do we know their tongue just didn’t go numb?
Chromatography and electrochemical testing is used to get a much more accurate accounting of pepper heat these days, but they still assign a Scoville number, even if the testing method is not the same.
1. The US Still Uses Imperial Measures Despite Converting to Metric Nearly 50 Years Ago
Every so often you’ll run across someone online making fun of the metric system. America is one of three holdouts in the entire world that have avoided widespread acceptance of metric. The other two are Liberia and Myanmar. However, metric actually is the accepted, adopted and legal system of measurement in the United States, at least for trade and commerce, and has been so since 1975. Just don’t tell anyone.
The Metric Conversion Act of 1975, which was amended in 1988, 1996 and 2004, established the metric system as the preferred system of weights and measures. In fact, metric has been authorized for use since 1866. Despite this, nearly every measurement in the US is still conducted using imperial measurements like miles and pounds.