Asklemmy

Chemistry, and science in a broader sense. When you hear 'woah a new medicine has been found that could cure cancer' it's most likely 'we have developed a new gadolinium based compound that has shown efficiency in penetrating cancer cells and could be used to deliver drugs to these areas, however it has not been tested in humans because it kills rats faster that it cures cancer"

Almost every science headline was written by someone who never understood science. They just translate some foreign language into words that suits them.

If I see one more article about knitting where the photos are clearly crochet, or vice versa, I swear to god...

Corsets. They were not uncomfortable or restrictive, and they did not make women faint. Only the Victorian equivalent of the Kardashians were into dangerously tight lacing – for regular women, they were just a fitted support garment, no worse than spanx. I’ve worn them for 25 years as a late-Victorian reenactor. They’re actually really nice for back pain.

On the other hand, hoop skirts were immensely dangerous, and women were burned to death when their skirts caught an open flame (of which there were many), were dragged to death when their hoops caught in coach wheels as they disembarked, and fell to their deaths when the wind caught their hoops and sent them flying Mary Poppins style from rooves and balconies.

Corsets were fine; hoop skirts were a death trap.

IT Security

Skinhead culture was originally a mix of Rude boys from Jamaica mixing with British working class dock youths. The aesthetic grew around turning your working class clothing into respectable attire. You'd shine the doc martens you wore because they were slip resistant, turn up the ankles of your jeans to show a clean crisp cuff, tight skinny suspenders as this was the 60's and a Fred perry or Sherman shirt. They would mix with west indie immigrants at dancehalls and listen to Ska, Blue Beat and Rocksteady. There was also a whole scooter/Teddy culture that was a kind of proto subculture. But all that nazi shit came years later as the BNP co-opted what was a tough working class subculture into what most people know today. And don't get me wrong, the original skinheads were as racist as any blue collar British youth in the 60s/70s. But the origin is in my opinion one of unity.

Absolutely. Fucking. Everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Math.

John McCarthy had a saying: He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

And I can confirm, society talks a lot of nonsense.

Computers.

Electronic product development. Apple releases a iPhone every year, so people think you can start developing a new phone in September and ship 100M of them the following September.

Really became a problem with Kickstarter reporting where some bullshit project would ask for a puny $50k to develop and ship a tiny wrist mounted supercomputer phone and promise to ship in six months, and tech blogs would eat that shit up without an ounce of skepticism.

I even wrote a blog about it

Literally anything having to do with Infosec or the Dark Web.

Linguistics.

A stupefying proportion of what mass media and everyday people think they know about linguistics and languages is wrong. Unfortunately, they do not appreciate corrections.

Anything to do with space. I’m so sick of hearing about what newly observed thing has scientists baffled and is definitely absolutely unquestioningly hyper advanced intelligent extraterrestrials.

Probably too closely related to politics, but "guns". "Stand Your Ground" laws. Use-of-force in general.

Too many people mistake corporate policy for law, especially when it comes to responding to armed robbery.

I'm not an expert in airplanes and I'm not even a pilot, but even I know that most airport runways are not made of tarmac. They're made of asphalt, which is a different substance. Even some newer ones are made of concrete. But every time you'll watch a news report about planes at an airport they'll say "on the tarmac." It's not even slang among pilots. It's slang among journalists.

I know I know it's not super important but it annoys the shit out of me every time I hear it.

Solar. You'll see monocrystalline cells called multicrystalline or vice versa.

Villains. They don't admit to being villains in real life.

Honestly, I'd be more curious what topics where the media does nail the nuances of. Are there any at all?

My degree and professional training is all in physics. Biggest one for me is that they use "high temperature" when relating to superconductors like we're going to have superconducting phones next year, when in reality high-T superconductors are still colder than 100 K (-173°C, -280°F). Also they gotta stop flipping out over Water on Mars. That's so passe, there's a literal list on wikipedia on how many times that's happened. On the plus side though, most have just stopped trying to explain anything around physics and instead go for a more "x does y cause physics" approach

I'm not a pilot but it really irritates me when the media reports that a pilot "crash landed".

A crash is an uncontrolled collision with terrain, other aircraft, birds etc.

When a pilot attempts to land in emergency circumstances, it's just that- an emergency landing.

Sully didn't crash the plane on the Hudson river, he performed an emergency ditch manoeuvre which pilots train for.

Saying "crash landing" is an oxymoron. What the reporters usually mean is something along the lines of, "The pilot attempted an emergency landing on rough terrain but was unable to successfully bring the plane to a complete stop before crashing into trees."