It’s a collaborative site.
I like it, though there wasn’t a single one of the false facts that I was taught in schools.
“Dinosaurs shed their skin all at once like snakes”
“Girls are naturally not as good at math as boys”
I don’t mean to be rude, but If this was taught in your school, everyone around you is probably a moron.
Yeah, the concept is nice, but it tells me that the Big Bang doesn’t explain what happened before it (the leading hypothesis is that the Big Bang started time, so there is no “before”) and sources a Wikipedia article on spiders. Then, it cites the common myth about Daddy Longlegs being highly venomous, says that that wasn’t dispelled until 2020, and then cites a fucking BuzzFeed listicle.
Buzzfeed out here doing the real work
The fucking MythBusters did an episode on that like 20 years ago.
Yeah, the concept is nice, but it tells me that the Big Bang doesn’t explain what happened before it (the leading hypothesis is that the Big Bang started time, so there is no “before”)
Which is entirely correct. Time as we know it is an “inside” parameter of our universe, and therefor any causality only exists inside our universe, too. Because causality always contains a temporal element as in “Event A happened, which caused Event B later”. We cannot make any assumption of “before the big bang” and therefor no assumption of “what caused the big bang” either.
At least not in any way we could relate to.
the common myth about Daddy Longlegs being highly venomous
Quite a childrens tale, even back then. Two reasons for it: First, the “Daddy Longlegs” has no ability to bite us. Even extreme thin parts of the skin, e.g. the lips, are still way to thick for it to penetrate with its teeth. Second, even if it could inject its venom (which really exists!) it would need to inject about half a cup of it into a grown adult (IIRC about the amount, it could be a quarter cup or a whole cup or something, but still in the range of “thousands of total spider weights”).
I remember an episode of Mythbusters where they tested this, and I found a neat website that claims to have the result of that test. ( https://mythbusters.fandom.com/wiki/Daddy_Long_Legs_Myth ). The result was that they could bite humans and pierce the skin, but the bite was not especially problematic.
Searching for Mythbusters Daddy Long legs also brought up some YouTube suggestions from the episode, which was called Buried in Concrete. I haven’t watched any yet but maybe the scene is somewhere.
Yeah I think that the “you have to discharge your batteries entirely before charging them” would be a better fit, even though it wasn’t false at the time, but the technology changed
You still occasionally should, let it go all the way to dead, but for calibration reasons instead of safety reasons
That was the original reason. Ni-cad batteries develop a “memory” if they aren’t fully discharged loose capacity.
With modern Lithium ion batteries its because as their capacity decreases over time the BMS can’t always keep up and recover the 100% point unless you’re occasionally draining it all the way. This can result in someone charging their battery to say 97% and leaving it for hours to reach a 100% it will never reach. This is potentially unsafe as it heats up the battery.
Edit: Autocorrupt beansed up my comment
You’re probably already familiar with this resource, but Battery University has some interesting and useful information about batteries and it’s accessible enough for the layperson.
Yeah I didn’t get taught any of the stuff mentioned for me either.
One thing I did notice that wasn’t mentioned was the tongue map, that I was taught about in the 90’s - you know the one that said that your tongue has different areas for detecting different kinds of tastes - sweet at the front tip, sour at the back, that kind of thing. All bullshit.
I remember even testing that one out as a kid, observing that it obviously wasn’t true, and bringing up my experience to my teacher. “No” was basically the only response I got. How did a myth like that catch on when it was so easily testable by literally anybody?
Ageism, it is always implied that adults are the ones right - because what adult would accept a child to disprove their logic?
It’s also one of those myths which people forget after a year; and even if its encountered again, it is treated as insignificant.
the landing page mentions “your tongue has taste zones”. though on the other hand brontosauruses are real again
“Planet X (Planet 9) exists and explains gravitational pull”
Weird conspiracy theories were not taught at my school.
Also:
In 2017, a photograph appeared to prove that Amelia Earhart survived her plane crash and was taken prisoner by the Japanese. However, it was later proven that the photo was taken two years before her disappearance, leaving the mystery unsolved.
Updated understanding emerged around 2010
The updated understanding emerged 7 years before the photo appeared?
This is why websites need downvotes.
Planet 9 a conspiracy theory? Who’s conspiring against whom there :|
Afaik it was a legit theory since we discovered planet 8 that way and then people tried to use the same method for further planets. Also beyond Mercury there was supposed to be Vulcanus and people reported sightings but nothing added up
Discovery of planet 8 (Wikipedia):
unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led Alexis Bouvard to hypothesise that its orbit was subject to gravitational perturbation by an unknown planet. After Bouvard’s death, the position of Neptune was mathematically predicted from his observations, independently, by John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier. Neptune was subsequently directly observed with a telescope
And then Mr Einstein had a thing or two to say about those gravitational disturbances being actually relativity and most things clicked into place (but you’ll still have a discrepancy between the known spacetime curving and observed orbits because it’s hard to know what mass is exactly where in the Kuiper belt etc.). Or something. I’m probably wrong on the details but that’s the broad strokes as I remember them
We didn’t get planet 9 in school either fwiw but I think it was in magazines or encyclopedia at my grandparents’ place that I heard of it
Where did you go to school? I’ve never heard of either of those before.
Those false facts were on the site. I was never taught that.
Besides every girl in my school were better than any boy at mathematics.
Ah sorry, I totally misread that lol!
I think a lot of those are highly dependent on where a person went to school and who their teacher was, because some of them are pretty far out there.
Cool but flawed website.
Earlier times dont include myths that are on later years.
There is no overlap in myths between 1990 and 1970-80 but there is with the myths of the 60s, so we stopped teaching it for 20 years and then went back to it?
“Sugar causes hyperactivity in children” is mentioned to have been corrected around 1995 but stops making the list from 1980 onward. I have heard it after 95 but not from school.
I wanna recommend it to others but i cant in this state.
Just put in 2010 and most of everything it said is incredibly obvious. Plus some of the dates of updated sources seem really incorrect. For example, one of them is it is a myth that most oxygen comes from trees, but I very distinctly remember my math teacher of all people saying in 2006 or 2007 that when he was in school he corrected people that it’s mostly from plankton. And even if I’m misremembering this, he definitely said something about it being from plankton in those years, but it says the updated sources are from 2020.
It says that it is a myth that the big bang theory explains where the universe came from but in 2020 we found out it doesn’t explain what came before. Like… No? That’s always been what it is. Sure, it’s always been a Christian talking point to sort of say that, but then why say 2020?
But I guess it’s hard to really gauge what should and shouldn’t be included. I remember my 5th grade teacher telling me that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. I don’t really remember exactly what all she said and if she got deeper into Lost Cause rhetoric than that, but she definitely said Lee was a “good man.”
What you were taught
“Mobile phones will never replace desktop computers”
What we know now
Mobile devices became the primary computing platform for billions of people worldwide.
That isn’t a response to the initial statement at all, which is very much an opinion or prediction rather than any claim to be a fact. I’m suddenly feeling pretty sceptical about this website.
I think it’s a neat idea but probably needs more contributors and for people to be a bit more critical with things. For example, an obvious one, I don’t see it mention that Pluto is no longer classified as a planet. That would be a great thing to mention, especially if you talk about things we used to consider planets but don’t any longer. Ceres is another example of this. In 1801 it was discovered and considered a planet until sometime in the 1950s (it seems like it wasn’t an all-at-once shift) when it was considered an asteroid despite its planet like appearance. Now it is considered a dwarf planet like Pluto.
IMO, that site needs more cold war propaganda myths.
For example:
Myth: The US won WWII
Truth: The biggest battles of the last few years of WWII were between Germany and the USSR, and the USSR won, pushing the German army back to Berlin.
–
Myth: Unions are communism, and therefore bad.
Truth: It is thanks to Unions that we work 8 hour days instead of 12 hour days, and that we have a 2 day weekend. They’re an essential part of balancing the power of the rich against the power of the workers.
–
Myth: Unions hold back the most skilled, so if you’re skilled or smart you shouldn’t be in a union.
Truth: The best actors in the world are members of SAG-AFTRA. They negotiate deals where they make tens of millions per movie. The union doesn’t hold them back. It just means that when the film studios try to screw over the less powerful actors and the union votes to strike, the rich and powerful actors need to do their part to help the less powerful actors out.
Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet due to not clearing its orbital path.
Why would they just lie about Pluto like that?
#Pluto4Lyf
Part of the reason Pluto’s classification hit so hard in the US is that it’s the only ‘planet’ ever discovered by an USian astronomer. That national pride made the 2006 decision sting more than elsewhere. Some of the top figures from the AAS even challenged the legitimacy of the decision afterwards.
US pride, again.
Huh. I don’t think national pride that was a factor in my disappointment. I was more sad because 9 is a better number than 8, and Pluto is just a cute little guy.
I care that it is draconian nonsense. It wasn’t created by planetary scientists, or by consulting any. It was primarily created by a highschool teacher in Temecula California. It is temporally incongruent. Saying it is not a planet then calling it a planet in the following name is an oxymoron, or rather just moronic. And it impedes real science and science communication depreciating the era and discoveries that have happened.
The real definition of worlds is by gravitational differentiation and the point at which a body is dominated by geology.
No object is ever defined by external factors. It is a fundamental elementary logic failure to attempt to do so. If you drive your car in a bicycle lane and clear out all the cyclists, what the &%$# object is defined. Absolutely nothing! You may define a condition here, not an object, not a noun! The fact that this definition even exists is an epic embarrassment that makes the entire field look like a bunch of dogmatic clowns.
That definition exists because if you want to include Pluto and be consistent you have to include dozens of other bodies.
So it was basically laziness on the part of the international astronomical community.
Because those other bodies are worlds. In centuries to come, every one of these will be important and uniquely valued.
What kind of argument is “reality too hard to science.” – Dogmatic clown level arguments. Anyone stating this should be purged from academia. This is the culture of the crisis academics talk about. This is the collapse. Fundamental contextual logic has failed. Planet is a verb, by the IAU definition, used incorrectly as a noun, in an oxymoron, with recursion. That is epic 16th century level nonsense. Nouns and verbs are what, 3rd grade level skills?
That’s messed up!
It’s in fact a teenager planet and it doesn’t clean his room. Once it does it will be bumped back to planet.
We’re doing this for his own good.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Years since graduation:
Oh fuck this site!
Goddamn I’m old
Both 1960 and 2020 are showing the same 6 facts, and the facts shown were debunked years before 2020
Was gonna say, I’ve seen this reposted for so many years I figured some one would have made it by now, o/w I was gonna. Thank you not-yet-dead Internet
Cool site but sadly the link for “Learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) determine how you best learn” being debunked is both dead and missing from archive.org
I’d really like to know more since I’ve very recently been learning about very similar processing modalities for ADHD brains
Still, cool site and resource!
‘‘You won’t have a calculator in your pocket all the time!’’
I think the biggest one that was drilled into us constantly, especially about WW2 and Nazis was
“ Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned To Repeat It”
This was a load of shit as evidenced by what is going on in the USA right now and other parts of the world. The real lesson should have been to push back the second a nazi takes an inch as they will take more if you play the nice and tolerate. Not everyone is well intentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
The history list was most interesting in my opinion.
Obligatory “there’s a xkcd for anything, isn’t it?”
1987 Edison was a genius and invented everything, Turns out he was actually the Elon Musk of his time.
When I was in school, we were taught that vaccines work. /s
USA is a democracy
A short list of things you didn’t realize were false, stolen from the most recent episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast (on Intellectual Humility, Sept 14 2025):
- “The original 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds lead to a mass panic.” – It did not. However, rumors of a panic spread via newspaper op-eds about how it was a bad idea to get your news through any other medium besides newspapers. Citation: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html
- “You can boil a frog in a pot by gradually raising the temperature of the water.” – This doesn’t work; frogs just jump out when they get uncomfortable. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- “Lemmings march off cliffs to their deaths because they blindly follow one another.” – They don’t. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions
- “…but I saw it in a Disney documentary!” – Nope. Turns out the filmmakers paid local kids to capture a bunch of lemmings, spin them around to make them dizzy, then manually threw them off cliffs and filmed it. Citation: https://hyperallergic.com/545742/white-wilderness-disney-nature-documentary/
I actually learned the lemmings thing from the windows 95 era PC game “Lemmings”. This is also how I learned that lemmings have green hair!
Yeah I saw lemmings die all the time growing up!!
They are skilled with bricklaying and mining tools too ⛏️
I’m not sure if “skilled” is the word, but they get by
PC game “Lemmings”
Best game of all time IMHO. “I’ll just try one more level” followed by the sunrise.
Let’s go! Door creaks
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I thought everyone knew the lemmings thing was made up. But it’s become a bit of a meme nonetheless.
More extracts from that same podcast:
In each case, right up until the moment I received evidence to the contrary, all this misinformation, these supposed facts, felt true to me. I had believed them for decades and I had accepted them in part because they seemed to confirm all sorts of other ideas and opinions floating around in my mind. Plus they would have been great ways to illustrate complicated concepts, if not for the pesky fact that they were, in fact, not facts.
That’s one of the reasons why common misconceptions and false beliefs like these spread from conversation to conversation and survive from generation to generation and become anecdotal currency in our marketplace of ideas. They confirm our assumptions and validate our opinions and, thus, they raise few skeptical alarms. They make sense and they help us make sense of other things.
The lemmings thing never made sense to me until I found out what the film crew did to them. There’s just no way a species that susceptible to mass suicide could survive long term. They would have gone extinct long before the invention of bored documentarians.
I don’t think there’s a time when everyone knows something
TIL Lemmings are an actual creature and not just from the PC game Lemmings! I’m guessing that’s why it’s named “Lemmy” and then has a logo of a rodent. I just thought it was a random name and a drawing of a mouse this whole time.
The War of the Worlds broadcast didn’t cause mass hysteria, but it did cause some people to go outside and shoot at the nearest water tower.
What about the BBc documentary with the spaghetti trees?
On the lemmings one, have you never seen hexbear?
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Oh I’ve got a good one. Learned in the American south. Supposedly the American Civil War was not fought over slavery, but differing railroad track widths. Slavery was a minor detail that was a scape goat for the north to force the south to use its standard railroad width.
The mitochondria better still be the power house of the cell. Or we are going to flip some tables and burn the place down.
See, I was told that too, but no one bothered to explain what that means. I still have no idea what that actually means. What is a powerhouse?
A mitochondrion (pl. mitochondria) is an organelle found in the cells of most eukaryotes, such as animals, plants and fungi. Mitochondria have a double membrane structure and use aerobic respiration to generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is used throughout the cell as a source of chemical energy.[2] wickerpedia
Cells can’t use the energy from sugar directly. The mitochondrion turns the sugar into another molecule that other organelles can use for energy.
Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is a nucleotide triphosphate[2] that provides energy to drive and support many processes in living cells, such as muscle contraction, nerve impulse propagation, and chemical synthesis. Found in all known forms of life, it is often referred to as the “molecular unit of currency” for intracellular energy transfer.[3] John “Wick” Peta
Friendly neighborhood microbiologist here. You’re right except for one thing: most cells can use sugar directly through anaerobic respiration. Mitochondria facilitate aerobic respiration, which utilizes oxygen and is far more efficient, albeit a bit slower, and produces carbon dioxide as its end product.
Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.
I can get as nerdy as you want if anyone has any questions.
Edit: another cool one! Part of the process that regenerates ATP from ADP is ATP synthase. Look it up! It’s literally a little biological waterwheel that utilizes a chemical gradient, established by the mitochondria, to smoosh ADP (adenosine DIphosphate) and a phosphate back together into ATP (adenosine TRIphosphate).
Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.
Maybe the way you do it. I lost 5 pounds this morning, you wouldn’t want to breathe.
On that (brown) note: most of the solid part of shit is actually (dead) gut bacteria, not food waste
This is why partially why fiber helps with bulking and pooping. Fiber is “fiber” because it’s made of things we can’t digest, but our gut microbes can. One of the byproducts of their utilizing it is SCFAs, short chain fatty acids. These confer various benefits like reduced inflammation and enhanced mucous production, which helps you drop a deuce.
Feeding your microbes also means you grow more of them, which makes your turds bigger and easier for your intestines to push along.
Yet another fun fact: ruminants like cows ferment otherwise indigestible plant matter in their guts, breaking it down and growing absolutely huge quantities of microbes in the process. Then they digest those microbes. That’s how they get enough protein. A cow is a mooing, shitting house of horrors if you’re a microbe.
Well tough guy, this morning was an oatmeal surprise swirl, with carrots, two inches above the waterline. In a Crane Galaxy #3251D701100, you do the math.
Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.
BRB. Hyperventillating to test a theory…
(Going to assume this just results in a smaller quantity of calories processed per breath before anyone get’s all sciencey on me.)
It’s too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you’re breathing heavily. Then you’ll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!
What would happen if I got ATP injected directly in the blood stream? And what about the stomach? Skin?
Depending on the concentration, it would hurt as it’s a bit of an acid, plus ATP outside of the cell is one of the mechanisms that drives inflammation, but it won’t give you extra energy or anything.
ATP is used to transfer energy more than store it, more like a wire than a battery. The average adult has about 250g of ATP in their body (for my fellow Americans: about one rather chunky hamster) but it’s recycled about 200 times a day, so would require 50kg (6 watermelons or two average labradoodles) if it was used and discarded.
ATP has been around since the beginning of life or near enough, and evolution is a deranged, cat-piss-soaked hoarder that makes use of whatever is already lying around, so ATP also does several things beyond energy transfer. This also means where ATP is allowed and in what quantity is fairly controlled. To that end, there’s a class of enzyme called ectonucleotidases that’s found on the outside of cells. One of the things it does is keep the level of circulating ATP and things like it low, so whatever was injected would get chopped up pretty quick.
Cells can’t use the energy from sugar directly.
Well, they can, but it’s not very efficient. They produce 4 atp at the cost of 2 atp. The mitochondrion generates 34 atp from pyruvic acid at the cost of 2 atp.
Keeping in mind those numbers are vibes and not exact
They were a 1980s superband with Robert Palmer, I think.
*Power Station
No that was The Power of Love by Huey Lewis.
It just means it’s the system that turns food molecules and oxygen into energy for the cell. The cell itself doesn’t know how to do this which is quite spectacular when you think about it. So if the mitochondria died the cell would die.
There are human cells without mitochondria, and plenty of energy chains outside of mitochondrial action.
There are, in fact lots of them: your red blood cells, for example.
Mitochondria are more efficient at energy production, not the only source. Red cells use glycolysis.
You as a human organism would die pretty fast because you need that more efficient energy production but a lot of your cells would be fine until the effects of the system collapsing around them go into effect.
Don’t think about that metaphor too deeply.
When cells devide there’s a top cell and a bottom cell, the bottom cell is where the powerhouse is generated
Now Dennis, I hear speed has something to do with it.
No one tell them.
Oil and gas is the powerhouse of the cell - Exxon Mobile
T H R I L L H O
Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell!
Class of 2003.
Food wheel was taught in elementary school. As were the taste bud “zones” and the American Dream.
We had the Food Pyramid here in Canada, which is very similarly a lie pushed by the dairy and grain industries and not linked to any real health benefits.
I now refer to the [https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-eating-pyramid/](Harvard food pyramid) that seems to be meaningful
I don’t care if it’s wrong, Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could blow himself
The United States is a constitutional Republic/democracy with 3 co-equal branches of government…
The very architecture of the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then) made it impossible to take over, and traffic would naturally route around any damaged links or nodes.
Google and CloudFlare have since proven that sonsabitches with enough money can subvert it completely, and it only takes a few dudes dragging an anchor from a boat to disconnect entire countries for weeks and months.
It took them a long time to get there. As corporate ISPs took over from the government and universities, the Internet got built around a few large pipes rather than several smaller ones. It’s cheaper to build and maintain, but more prone to failure.
Some of the redundancy from the old ARPANET is still around in the US. Everywhere else, it mostly got built as above. One ship laying an anchor somewhere they shouldn’t has brought entire countries offline.
It still routes around damage, but if all the roads are closed you can’t get in or out of somewhere.
[…] the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then)
Back then, an internet (lower case “i”) was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.
The World Wide Web, being a massive collection of computers across the globe that are interconnected, quickly earned the title of “THE Internet” (upper-case “i”), to differentiate it from smaller isolated networks.
“World Wide Web” turned out to be a mouthful to say, so we replaced it with “the Internet” instead. Although most websites still start with “www” to represent their global reach.
Nowadays, we’ve stopped using the word “internet” to describe smaller networks, so the word mostly just refers to the global network. And as such, if doesn’t really matter if you capitalize it or not.
However, I was there when the web became accessible to the public and the nomenclature has stuck, so I always capitalize the Internet when referring to it.
Back then, an internet (lower case “i”) was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.
That is an intranet, not internet, and is still applicable as a term. You just hear people say LAN more these days.
“World Wide Web” turned out to be a mouthful to say, so we replaced it with “the Internet” instead. Although most websites still start with “www” to represent their global reach.
The world wide web was always just one part of the internet, specifically the portion supported by http. Ftp, email, etc existed then as well, but was not part of the www.
An internet in theory is a network of other computer networks (not single computers). The Internet is the world wide web.
An intranet is a local and private computer network.
The internet is a network of intranets, or more accurately, a network by which computers of disparate networks can connect.
Intra, meaning inside or within. Inter, meaning between or among.
Interdepartmental communication would be communication between departments, while intradepartmental communication would be within a single department.
The inter vs intra is the difference here.
Is this …mansplaining?
I thought I was clarifying without going into detail on the definition of an extranet, I don’t even know how I’d assume gender?
no, the internet is not the world wide web. www is just one of many services provided on the internet and it can be used on the intranet that is completely cut off from the rest of the world.
there is a terminology question then if it is still really the world wide web or rather small web, but the fact stays that services provided on http protocol and internet are not the synonyms. same as mcdonald is not asynonym for “a restaurant” even if specific person may not have visited any other restaurant in their life.
Well, this is something that felt off indeed. But please explain. So http(s) is the world of http requests, but you can also have other services like ftp, ssh, bittorrent and what not. Is that what you mean? So the WWW is just the global interconnection of web pages strictly, over the Internet? Would this apply to any internet? /genuine
basically, yeah. internet is network of computers spanning all earth. intranet is smaller network of computers. intranet is often more private network under more centralized control of someone, with limited access from outside, that can be operated for example by some corporation or university, accessible only for employers or students (possibly using vpn to remotely connect to the network).
www. is the name of the service - http is a protocol it uses.
e-mail is the name of service - to access it, lot of people use http protocol if you use webmail, or imap or pop3 protocol if you use some dedicated client (like thunderbird, outlook, or others). smtp protocol is used to send the message to another mail server (you may have also been asked to configure it when manually configuring some dedicated e-mail client).
ftp, ssh, bittorrent,VOIP telephony using SIP protocol, IRC are other useful services. all these services can be run on network of any size, internet or intranet.
for example majority of modern doorbell systems are running on sip protocol and they are basically small VOIP phones running primarilly on a limited intranet in one specific building. but if that local network has access to the internet, they can have, due to nature of what they are, an option to forward that “call” to any other telephone number in the world in case no one picks it up at home.
small web-developers routinely run their own web-server of their own desktop, which may only be accessible locally, from that one computer or their small home network, to test the web pages they are developing. whether it is still world WIDE web is funny academical question then, because that web is not very wide in such case.
Back then, an internet (lower case “i”) was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.
That’s what I was told too, but I never once encountered anybody who used the small-i “internet” term. I heard “network”, or “intranet” or often topology-related things like “the token-ring network”. For a network of networks, I’d hear “WAN” or “external network” but never “internet”. Maybe that’s just me, but I suspect that small-i “internet” was never really a term that was widely used, if at all.
Cut cables mostly just slow the internet. Probably very few remaining places without plenty of redundancy.
The book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen goes a long way to accomplish this. At least it did for me.
