MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
I am sometimes surprised by the things my girlfriend says.
A classic one when I mentioned i was going to get some diesel for the van was "oh, I thought diesel was just for taxis"
Today's was talking about being in the engine room of a paddle steamer as a 3yr old "Only I dismissed that as a real memory on the basis it's a paddle steamer and wouldn't have an engine"
What? Turns out it's just the wheels on the side making it move, like an underwater hamsterwheel🙈
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She's got a first class law degree so clearly isn't daft but I do wonder how some people see the world.
Is it just me or...?
There's two sides to every story, are you sure she's not dumbing down conversation to your level?
😉
I talked to a girl with a lurcher the other day.
Me: "What is it, greyhound cross deerhound"
Her: "No, its a Lurcher"
She was really surprised when I explained what a Lurcher is....
To be fair, I'm not sure it was actually her dog
I won't tell you view how Mrs D thought brakes on a car worked but let's just say if she was right tyres would be bald pretty quickly!
She's probably on a law forum right now asking why people can't wrap their minds around simple concepts like....I dunno, power of attorney(?) or ....erm probate? Is that a law thing?
People are not interested in all things. If you had no interest at all in car engines why would you know or even care which cars had a diesel engine. Typically taxi's did always have diesel engines in the past and are strongly associated with them.
My wife probably would not know the differences between bikes (even high level differences) because she has absolutely zero interest in bikes.
Do women still choose bikes/cars etc by colour?
51.89%
Yep, my partner has zero interest in say: Aeroplanes, but will happily school you in 18th C English Literature
Do women still choose bikes/cars etc by colour?
i know I do
I know two educated middle-aged men who have literally never cooked a meal. They never learned how to cook anything beyond making toast. Their wives have to rush home after work every day to cook for them.
I won't go into details about how my friend thought that a photo booth worked, but suffice to say it would need to involve a quite small and not-claustrophobic employee.
My sister, who's no duck egg, stood with me on the banks of the river Dee near West Kirby boating lake.
"Tide's out" says I. "I'd love to make a crossing as far as I can on foot, swim the channel and then get out on the Welsh side".
"You couldn't do that", says she.
"Why not?"
"Tide's in on the other side"...
If you had no interest at all in car engines why would you know or even care which cars had a diesel engine.
In which case, I am not sure they should be allowed to drive.
I was taught that, to be a driver must also include knowing something about the thing I was driving, if only to have more respect for the power of the vehicle.
I am of a mind that we don’t have to be an expert vis-à-vis the tools we use, but we should at least know enough to respect them.
Case in point: I am not a ‘device’ guy, but I use them all the time. My kids may still have to point out to me that I could this or that task more efficiently on my device, but I think it is up to me to at least understand enough to then apply what they are saying to me.
To not know the most basic ideas about cars is, more than likely, to not be able to use them properly either.
I can’t count the number of times I have witnessed people doing damage to their own vehicles because they don’t have the slightest concept of how they work.
I know people who can’t use quote functions on forums.
In which case, I am not sure they should be allowed to drive.
Why would not knowing how car engines work effect someone’s driving?
She’s probably on a law forum right now asking why people can’t wrap their minds around simple concepts like….I dunno, power of attorney(?) or ….erm probate? Is that a law thing?
Theres an entertaining thread on Lawtrackworld at the moment called "things I can convince my partner that I don't understand'
I'm going to encourage the OP on that thread to convince their hubby that they don't know who's job it is to fill cows up with milk. Lets see what happens.
My fiancee has three postgraduate degrees and my favourite quote of hers is "isn't the moon closer than most stars?".
TBF I say some pretty stupid stuff too.
How many people don’t know how things work?
Probably more of a mix of disinterest, not caring or not needing to.
Had a laugh at DOD mother yesterday as she explained how they weren’t used to emails/texting on mobile phones, I may have pointed out that they weren’t exactly a thing when I grew up.
Anyway I was actually thinking on this education thing in a dream this morning and the perception that education == all round smarts probably is vastly overrated.
Do women still choose bikes/cars etc by colour?
i know I do
we get more than enough conversations on here about 'colour ways' and reminiscences about purple anodising to suggest pretty much everyone makes choices based on colours as much and anything else. Guys will have read a whole bunch of stats and convince themselves they've made their choices on more empirical measures but they won't admit to themselves that this is basically a fashion business. The people selling bikes know that it is - they wouldn't change the colours of bikes, components and clothing every year otherwise - but buyers are very uncomfortable in admitting that to themselves.
I had to explain to my 46 Year old girlfriend that only female cows have udders the other day.
I'm right aren't I?
Why would not knowing how car engines work effect someone’s driving?
Clutch abuse 🙂
Unless it’s Tesla land.
I think flying planes are more interesting as they require you to understand how flying works.
She was really surprised when I explained what a Lurcher is…
Why did you not just call it a lurcher? That is after all, what it is. Or were you trying to be clever?
I talked to a girl with a lurcher the other day.
Me: “What is it, greyhound cross deerhound”
You must have to carry round a shitty stick to beat them off with 😊
My fiancee has three postgraduate degrees and my favourite quote of hers is “isn’t the moon closer than most stars?”.
I can't believe she still believes the moon is real
I had to explain to my 46 Year old girlfriend that only female cows have udders the other day.
I’m right aren’t I?
Sounds like bull to me.
Why would not knowing how car engines work effect someone’s driving?
The effect of engine braking, stalling, what happens if you put the wrong fuel in, there are safety issues too like oil leaks. Yes you can get away with knowing nothing but it's not ideal
Why would not knowing how car engines work effect someone’s driving?
Clutch abuse 🙂
Know how to work something and knowing how the thing works are two different things. Theres no need to know how a clutch works to operate it properly.
Being pedantic a deerhound / greyhound cross isn't a lurcher. A lurcher is, classically speaking, a sight hound of any breed crossed with a non-sight hound of any breed.
Both greyhounds and deerhound are sight breeds so fall at the first hurdle
Do women still choose bikes/cars etc by colour?
i know I do
Yeah, I paid an extra £100 for my bike to not have one of the two standard colours offered.
Do women still choose bikes/cars etc by colour?
Wait, am i doing it wrong?
Yep, my partner has zero interest in say: Aeroplanes, but will happily school you in 18th C English Literature
Are you seeing my wife?
A friend borrowed my van this week as his car is dying. He didn't know you should wait for the curly orange symbol to go off on the dashboard or that diesel engines don't have spark plugs.
His dying car is a diesel.
While I know minimal stuff about cars, I found out these things through curiosity - whereas my friend stumbles blindly through life with his head up his arse.
I'm still confused about how the 3 seashells work
I find that if you know how something works, everyone else assumes you know everything about similar things.
For example, I use computer applications for work on Apple Macs and everyone assumes I know everything about Windows though I know very little about Windows.
Same thing with the TDF. People who know I ride bikes think I know everything about the TDF but I've never watched it.
I also assumed a colleague who is really into Formular 1 knew about cars. But when they were looking for a new car they asked me what torque was.
Well I'm an electrical engineer and at (very recently) 52 have only just learned how a turntable works (LPs not loco's).
And its both amazing and fascinating how the stylus converts the "data" in the grooves into a tiny electrical signal (~5 mV) via its moving magnets and two coils in the cartridge. Incredible stuff.
I’m still confused about how the 3 seashells work
You hold two of them like chopsticks and use the third like a melon baller.
That tide one up there reminded me of an overheard snippet on a Cornish beach.
Couple arrive and she says in a very disappointed voice "oh. The sea was much closer last year"
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I worked in a bank years ago. It was announced on the news that there was going to be an eclipse that day. Someone said "I wonder how they know that?" Cue a thirty minute discussion before they all decided that it was probably 'because of science'
Former housemate had never heard of Napoleon and another former housemate didnt know who had won the Falklands war. "It was before I was born!" Turns out they didnt know when it was either... And yes, I know it technically wasnt a war
I had to explain to my 46 Year old girlfriend that only female cows have udders the other day.
I’m right aren’t I?
You could ask her to milk a bull the next time you go past a farm. Might not be the type of thing to video and put on YouTube though!
As with most things there are levels of understanding: do I need to know the algorithms used in the EMS of my car in order to be able to drive it? Not really - day to day useful knowledge is limited to how to manipulate the controls in the correct combinations in order to drive it in accordance with the law (beyond quite a few people it would seem) and to be able to refuel it and top up washer fluid, etc. It's when things go wrong that I'd need a bit more knowledge - changing a wheel, fuse, that sort of thing. If I was a keen mechanic then I'd expect to have yet more knowledge.
Reminds me of a Daily Hate article bemoaning the lowering of education standards because a university had used the exact same question as an O-level, missing the point that it's the depth of answer at the relevant level that's what separates them.
converts the “data” in the grooves
Its not really data (at least not as I'd think of data) - On CD you have data. If you looked at the surface of a CD you'd see data - dots and dashes, zeros and ones - During mastering sound is transposed from a vibration into a code and on playback the CD player interprets that back into vibration and sound but the thing on the disk is not sound - its instructions for making sound in the same what that sheet music is.
The groove on a record is effectively frozen sound - it its a physical cast of the vibration. In modern recording there would have been several steps to get there involving one or more tapes - but those are still vibrations but in its most basic form - Eddison shouting at a wax cylinder - the groove is the sound. A friend of mine once flew a high power microscope through the landscape of a record groove - its definitely not 'data'.
Conversely....
How many folk think they understand how things work....but evidently have very little fact based knowledge on how they work.
Its not really data (at least not as I’d think of data)
it’s not digital, but it’s still data.
Some classic boomer comedy here 😛
I had to explain to my 46 Year old girlfriend that only female cows have udders the other day.
I’m right aren’t I?
Yes, narrowly. *All* cows are female, therefore only cows *can* have udders.
Watch the mind explode when you explain that.
Some cows have only teats for a while.
Everyone has these blind spots though, don't they? My cleverest (and richest) friend is a statistician, but I had an argument with him a while ago as he thought two metres square was the same as two square metres. I had to do a little drawing for him.
My sister is a regular cyclist, and is always embarrassed when she brings her bike round for repair as she knows so little about how it works. I tell her she only needs to know if she's interested, it doesn't affect her cycling. And she can make and repair clothes. And knock up dinner for a family of 6 in half an hour from actual ingredients.
Anyway, all this talk of bulls and cows must mean it's time for this:
Ok, having just poked fun at my girlfriend I'm going to look a bit silly myself now.
I'm a bloke and I have nipples. A male cat has nipples, as does a male dog. They don't do much, but they are there.
Don't bulls have similarly useless 'udders'? I've never seen them so possibly not but then I'm flat chested and if I was as hairy as a bull my own nipples might not be obvious
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Former girlfriend thought Mowameadow was a place, as in the song One Man Went To...
But then I was about 15 before I realised Timbuktu was real
The effect of engine braking, stalling, what happens if you put the wrong fuel in, there are safety issues too like oil leaks. Yes you can get away with knowing nothing but it’s not ideal
That’s vehicle empathy not driving. I’ve a lot of staff who are highly experienced and skilled drivers, they have idea how the engine works.
A family friend left university with a first class Bachelor of Arts and Geography degree.
Until recently she thought the Dalai Lama was a special type of Llama.
To be fair, she also threw away her fake id when she turned 21 and first night out got refused access to a nightclub because she didn't have any actual id, protesting 'But I'm 21 now'. Early bath and a taxi home.
Early bath and a taxi home.
Sounds like she gets basic sequences wrong as well 😂
Sounds like she gets basic sequences wrong as well
Or she at least understands metaphors
Just remembered another one, work colleague though computers were invented in 1991. Oddly specific date.
Ok, having just poked fun at my girlfriend I’m going to look a bit silly myself now.
No you’re not. Bulls have nipples like you do but they don’t have tits (udders).
Everyone has these blind spots though, don’t they? My cleverest (and richest) friend is a statistician, but I had an argument with him a while ago as he thought two metres square was the same as two square metres. I had to do a little drawing for him.
When he worked in reprographics my brother was given a disk of plans by and architect as was asked to 'reduce them by 300%' when printing them out. This lead to a long discussion about how 300% really meant 3 times bigger - so was he really wanting one third the size? or one 300th the size of the original file? scaled at 1:300? He just kept reiterating '300% smaller', then my brother's boss chimed into the conversation and said - 'just do what the mans asking for'. So he printed them out on A3 paper and everyone seemed happy with that 🙂
Yeah, I paid an extra £100 for my bike to not have one of the two standard colours offered.
I would have preferred not to have a black and pink bike but it was 500 pounds cheaper than the black and red one so black and pink won.
My main requirements for my last car were 'not silver' and decent cupholders
I've been watching a few flat-earther takedown youtube videos (as one does).
Having watched these flat earthers, I can now believe that quite a few people are simply utterly clueless, and should not be allowed near anything sharp or important.
I’ve a lot of staff who are highly experienced and skilled drivers, they have idea how the engine works.
In the medical field.... My mum worked nights in ICU and also taught me to drive. Once I passed my test the price for actually using her car for anything was having to drive her to work first and pick her up again before school the next morning.
Growing up I didn't ever really dwell on what it was my mum actually did for a living. One morning when I went to pick her up she wasn't there waiting for me - some sort of drama was going on and she had to work on. A nurse told me to wait in the staff room. Across the corridor I could see anxious, grave-faced families of patients and in front of me on the table was a box of assorted gadgets that looked like they belonged on a nasa mission. And for 15 minutes I just sat there and dwelt on the fact that every night my mum was working in amongst the biggest dramas and tragedies people will face in their lives. Every night. It was a bewildering revelation.
When she finally got of shift I crossed the room to meet her and looking back there was the box of space-age bits and on it was a note in my mum's handwriting - 'does anybody know what these are?'
Yup, imagine you went back in time 100 years.
Would you have much advantage over the rest of civilisation?
I don’t think I would.
I have a basic concept of how a car works and I understand how things like fuel injectors and turbos work.
Could I make one or explain how it’s made? Nope.
Likewise I’m not too bad with computers. But I couldn’t make one!
My gran, bless her. Long-departed of this world now, wife of a dairy farmer and not really up to speed with the modern world as-was.
On wind farms, "I don't know why on earth they're building those bloody things. Isn't it windy enough already?"
Buying me my first MIDI hi-fi, tried vociferously to get the sales guy not to include the speakers as it'd "make it too loud".
And many, many more that I've long since forgotten.
I know two educated middle-aged men who have literally never cooked a meal
I was catching up with some friends last night. One of them's mum is getting forgetful and can't be trusted to cook any more. She was really proud of her dad for 'making his first meal' but I guess that's a generational thing, why would he have had to? But at middle age that's just a bit weird.
A friend of mine once flew a high power microscope through the landscape of a record groove – its definitely not ‘data’.
Data was a thing before computers were. Data is information represented in a way that can be interpreted. The data in a record groove represents very similar information to the data on a CD, just in a different form.
Talking of cars.
My OH's car went in for a service at the local stealers last week. She reported back saying that a wiped blade had split and they'd replace it for £40, to which my reply was 'tell them to piss off'.
Cue a big drama, me going "it's a wiper blade FFS, they're £16 at Halfords for a good one and it's literally a clip" and her going "but it needs to be done, what if you can't do it?" It was perfectly fine before you knew about it, I've probably fitted more wiper blades than they have, Halfords will fit it for £3 instead of £24, do you want them to change the CD in the stereo as well? But, what if, etc.
At which point her daughter helpfully pipes up, "well if you want, we can ask [my boyfriend who is a mechanic at Lexus" to fit it!"
I'm a practical sort, they both know this. They've watched me fixing various stuff around the house for the last three months. And they believe we need to employ the services of a professional mechanic to fit a bloody wiper blade.
Always amazes me how fairly well educated people don't have scoobies about how things actually work. Remember being at a particularly middle class barbque and the level of anti-science drivel being spouted was amazing, can't remember exactly what it was about, some sort of environmental issues but they didn't have a clue about energy use, what energy was etc. As a result they had some very weird ideas about lifestyle choices.
And that's why I put the word data in quotes...
I’m a practical sort, they both know this. They’ve watched me fixing various stuff around the house for the last three months. And they believe we need to employ the services of a professional mechanic to fit a bloody wiper blade.
They have clearly seen the bodge job you have made fixing all that stuff and would rather use someone else given the choice.
Being pedantic a deerhound / greyhound cross isn’t a lurcher. A lurcher is, classically speaking, a sight hound of any breed crossed with a non-sight hound of any breed.
Both greyhounds and deerhound are sight breeds so fall at the first hurdle
what a grim thread but this made it better
When we're born we know very little. Over time, we learn things and end up knowing lots of stuff. For every "I can't believe they didn't know..." statement, there was a time when you didn't know it either.
Cougar sed> Buying me my first MIDI hi-fi, tried vociferously to get the sales guy not to include the speakers as it’d “make it too loud”.
So your gran potentially invented the walkman? Cool.
Ebygomm sed> I would have preferred not to have a black and pink bike but it was 500 pounds cheaper than the black and red one so black and pink won.
My mp3 walkman cost £40, pink in colour. The black version was £250. This was some time ago. It comes to mind as I consider how valuable the thing is for missing out on overhearing peoples' quandries and observations. I know how it works but apparently the battery is no longer made and it is passing into the evening of its life.
I read somewhere not so long ago that nobody can fully explain the physics of how a wheel stays stable when rolling. Probably bull but I certainly don't got the maths.
They have clearly seen the bodge job you have made fixing all that stuff and would rather use someone else given the choice.
Bastard.
🤣
Some people need to be one of
Today’s ten thousand
Though i agree it’s amazing what some people have never picked up
Practical Stuff is genetic in my family but it skips individuals. My grandad on my dad's side was a ship's engineer, my grandad on my mum's was an RAF mechanic during the war, both could macguyver anything. But my dad could barely change a lightbulb. Not from not wanting to, his brain just wasn't that shape. So I taught myself how to fix my bike when I was about 6 because he couldn't fix a puncture. My older brother's an electrical engineer... But my younger brother takes after my dad and literally struggles with stuff like figuring out how to plug in a tv (but is definitely smarter than me)
We have a 3 grand computer and don't know how to send an email on it.
Webmail. It's the future.
I might be wrong but wasn't this point the gist of the classic book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"...and how these different frames of mind extrapolate to differing perceptions of the same stimulus. The author knew the ins and outs of the machine while his comrade had no understanding, yet they still get to ride the same path....must be a metaphor for something or other.
My wife has four degrees. She is a GP and knows an entire medical language alien to most of us. She is awesome. But, I’ve spent 20 years on a project to get her to understand how thermostats control central heating and its a lost cause. God help me if she ever asks about what a TRV is
Two interesting ones here...
Playing a game of online articulate with work colleague, one chap passed one then got stuck on the next one. The first one was understandable and quite tough (can't recall what it was). The second he thought might have been a film but he wasn't sure... turns out it was the artic circle which he'd never heard of before!! mind blown.
The second was a new pub opened locally to me (near Bletchley) called The Turing Key. It was incredible to hear the amount of people that thought they'd misspelt all of the signs. menus etc. These are people that live within 2 miles of Bletchley Park. amazing!
I once worked with a chsp who drove a pimped-out Impreza, all the mapping, big exhaust, would only fill with one type of premium fuel (which meant a 40 mile round trip to fill up) who told me that the distinctive gargally Impreza sound was because they have overhead cams. 🙂
(It, err... It IS because they're horizontally opposed fours, isn't it...?)
Most folk don't know what the first man made object to break the sound barrier was.
Thick I tell ye, couldn't even work it out FFS.
I was that person once, then I became a self righteous arsehole.
his brain just wasn’t that shape.
That's a great way of putting it.
I find myself daily - well, did when I was in an office - going "how can you not know this?" Like, when I was helping out in IT, I'd have Accountants ask me how to do something in Excel. I've no idea, I don't use it, but I'll take a look. Well, OK, that menu looks promising... click, click, oh, there you go, that's it. You're welcome. How can it be that I can use the primary tool of your trade better than you can after literally 30 seconds of looking at it?
Or, "I had an error message." What did it say? "Oh, I don't know, I just hit OK. I don't understand any of this computer shit." Well, point the first, thanks for calling my entire career choice "shit". Point the second, you don't have to understand it, I'll do that bit, you just have to read it. You know how to read, right?
It's like some people are just wilfully ignorant, they wear it like a badge of pride. It amazes me sometimes how people get through their lives. But you've hit the nail on the head, their brains just aren't that shape. They're probably really good at, er, something else.
I think it’s dangerous to understand too much,I believe Alexei Sayle’s theory about our brains having a finite box storage system.
If you reach full capacity and then try to learn something new,a box has to be deleted to make space.
I am terrified that if I absorb too much I will …oah sheeite..&*&%*$£>&£BB%Y$£$$£V$<$V$Vvtvwqc……….
“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.”
Some old bloke once mentioned 🙂