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Comment by nudpiedo | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure whether the name "Nile" was picked because of the "Amazon" river or because Nile is a symbol of being the only major river flowing from south to north.

The former would be mundane, the later a great metaphor.

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Found your claim astonishing, so googled it.

Looks like this is not true, at least the Ob river (3,650 km) and the Yenisei river (3,438 km) are major rivers flowing from South to North (Both top 10 rivers).

So not sure where you did get that piece about the Nile from.

It's a common misunderstanding. I've heard this "fun fact" mentioned in grade school.

When I was in grade school, my science teacher told the class rivers couldn't flow north because, on a globe, north is up.

Somehow pointing out the Nile wasn't conclusive evidence against it.

Public education in America!

Ooooh is this a subthread for ranting about public education in a America? Cause I come from a family of teachers and I have WORDS!

In a little school district in Texas, we can't use the word "adaptation" in our cellular biology section.

Recent history textbooks use strange language around black slaves that seems to imply they were "workers," rather than, you know, slaves.

Eh. I'll stop. I gave up on teaching ages ago, but my mom still gets drummed up in front of the principal at least monthly for some bullshit. Most recently because the students have a shared box of basic supplies at their little desk pods (scissors and markers), and some mom demanded her son be allowed to use his own supplies because she didn't want him using the "Communist supplies." Verbatim quote. She thought it would teach him the values of communism. Obviously my mom told her to fuck off in no uncertain terms, so stern meeting with the principal for July...

I still remember that in Elementary school in Kentucky the teachers "accidentally" showed an Elementary-focused science series that included a video on plate tectonics and they had to apologize to the class and parents for showing such an "advanced and controversial topic". That left a lasting impression to this curious kid about how such simple science topics could even be so controversial, when the teachers looked pained at every follow up question I had days later. (As someone with a terrible anti-authoritarian streak at that age, this show of weakness in the teachers didn't help.)

In middle school in South Carolina, a public, accredited, full-time teacher saw me reading Harry Potter, walked up, and said "You know that book was written by Satan, right?"

Written by Satan. Not, like, "that book has satanic values" or "was written by a satanist" or "has evil themes," it was literally written by satan.

It's no wonder I was such a shithead little anarcho-atheist growing up.

How can GEDs from these schools possibly be recognized in the rest of the country?

Dude, Texas schools are considered some of the best in the nation. It's horrible in nearly the whole country.

But she doesn’t mind him going to the communist public school?

Hold on a second there, we don't teach basic functional logical deduction skills in our public school system, so let's not have extraordinary expectations of our students' parents ;)

But yea usually interactions with parents are a nightmare. It's become even worse now that special needs children are lumped into regular classes, so special needs parents will be asking questions my teacher family is literally untrained to handle.

I'm gonna steal Communist Supplies, that's brilliant.

You shouldn’t need to steal them. I imagine they will be distributed according to your need.

As someone else just mentioned it seems to be not true, I heard that long, long ago, and I never questioned that again. Perhaps I really heard that when I was in grade school because I cannot even remember the moment I learnt that “fact”

FWIW, the Nile is the longest river that flows northward, but there are quite a few others and some are very long. See https://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/riversno.htm for a list.

> FWIW, the Nile is the longest river that flows northward

I know you're correcting them, I just find that fact hilarious. The Nile is the longest river that is not named Amazon as well, or any other category that doesn't include the Amazon

Maybe it's an acronym for "Nile Is Like Ebay".

¿Por qué no los dos? :-p

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