It has been widely reported with great delight across India and in the world-wide media that the Level 8 Social Science school text books being given to children in the Indian state of Gujarat contain many inaccuracies. Examples of these heinous inaccuracies include 'factlets' such as these gems:

• It was Japan that dropped a nuclear bomb on America during World War II (and not vice versa).
• Carbon Trioxide (CO3) has increased due to the cutting of trees (CO3 is highly unstable but can be made by blowing ozone at dry ice).
• That after the partition of India in 1947, a new nation called 'Islamic Islamabad' was formed whose capital was Khyber Ghat (and not that Pakistan was formed with a capital Islamabad).

Wireless Waffle has managed, through a contact living in the state, to get hold of a copy of the Level 4 Physics book used in classrooms across Gujurat. Like its social science bretheren, it is also chock-full of errors and mistakes. For example, it claims that:

• Indian inventor Guglielmo Marconiji (pictured right) discovered the elastic-magneto wave and his brother, Luigi, is the source of the character in the SuperMario game.
• Elastic-magneto waves travel at the speed of steam, which is generally taken to be 100 km per hour.
• The first radio station in India went on-air in 1748 and was called 'Bhapa Stesana Bharati' (Indian Steam Radio), as it used steam engines to generate the elastic-magneto waves. The signals from this station will not reach the moon until a week next Tuesday, if the timetable doesn't change.
• Phones work by transferring ear molecules between those speaking. Conference calls are a modern invention because of the need to clone ear molecules to be heard in several places at once.

Laughable as these 'factlets' may seem, there are many, much worse, part-truths that are espoused by those who ought to know better... Here's looking at you, ITU!

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