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 🙂
In my youth one of the lads had a degree in Mathematics but couldn't operate a phone box.
It was the standing joke at the end of a night out to get him to book a taxi, and we would all give him 20p because he would invariably screw it up.
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've never even considered this before. Was it a whip?
I only recently realised that a sous chef wasn't a special kind of chef who made "sous" whatever that was supposed to be..
pondo
Full Member(It, err… It IS because they’re horizontally opposed fours, isn’t it…?)
Not exactly, it's because of the exhaust header lengths basically- the left hand pipes are much longer than the right. If you fit an EJ with an equal length header or a twinscroll turbo like on mine, you lose the subaru wubwub.
(It's kind of because it's a boxer, because with the turbo on one side of the engine it's way easier to make unequal length headers... But you can put unequal length headers on any engine and likewise you can equal length a boxer)
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.
Bicycles defy explanation a bit - I don't think anyone has really got to the bottom of why a bike, even riderless, tends to stay upright when moving. Theories about gyroscopic effect, trail (and the exchange of atoms with their riders) and so on don't hold up - you can make bikes with tiny wheels and negative trail and they still behave in the same way.
So even though nobody actually knows how bikes work we can all ride them - some people can ride them quite well.
I could be wrong, but I think the OP was hinting at this kind of intelligence:
sure… turns out it was the artic circle which he’d never heard of before!! mind blown.
Is that the turning circle of a lorry...
lol. yes must be
Is that the turning circle of a lorry…
Beat me to it. I wonder if his friend had heard of the arctic circle?
I used to wonder why something which was clearly quite private should be called public hair. In my defence I was quite young.
Is that the turning circle of a lorry…
No, it’s the outer sponge bit.
