Are people really this ignorant of science?

[tdn]

@LSLGuy

Her theory was that the extra distance was needed to make up for the fact that ships slip backwards a little each time they climb up the front of a wave. This slippage amounted to about 15%.

blink

blink

I feel dumber having just read that.

Does this woman have a twin in Boston? Nevermind, I know she does.

Not science-related, but we were having lunch a few months back. We were having Chinese food. Someone read a fortune cookie that said something like “You will persevere with sympathy, empathy, and patience.”

Ditz blonde piped up: “Patience? What’s patience? Oh, wait, that’s like suck it up, right?”

Anyway, we had lunch again the other day. The conversation turned to organ donation. Turns out that she’s totally against it. “You mean you’d donate your body to science?”, she asked. Sure why not? “But it’s your BODY”, she exclaimed. “How can you let someone touch your BODY?”

At this point I’m thinking that she must be a real blast in bed. Instead I countered with “What do I care? I’d be dead. And why not benefit someone else with something I’m no longer using?”

“But what if somebody CLONES you?”

“Er, highly doubtful, as the technology doesn’t exist yet.”

“But won’t it bother you if there’s someone running around who looks JUST LIKE YOU?”

“First of all, I’ll be dead. I won’t care about anything. Second of all, do you really think that identical twins care?”

Her final stinging argument was “Wow, when I die, I am SO going to haunt my clone!”

[garygnu]

@LSLGuy

…Her theory was that the extra distance was needed to make up for the fact that ships slip backwards a little each time they climb up the front of a wave. This slippage amounted to about 15%.

She was crestfallen when I pointed out that ships ought to slide ahead the same amount when going down the back side of the same wave.

Aaah, SCIENCE!!..

Even if she was wrong, at least there were some theory-producing wheels turning there, and unlike most of the idiots being referred to in this thread, she accepted your counter-argument.

[Mindfield]

@tdn

Anyway, we had lunch again the other day. The conversation turned to organ donation. Turns out that she’s totally against it. “You mean you’d donate your body to science?”, she asked. Sure why not? “But it’s your BODY”, she exclaimed. “How can you let someone touch your BODY?”

At this point I’m thinking that she must be a real blast in bed. Instead I countered with “What do I care? I’d be dead. And why not benefit someone else with something I’m no longer using?”

“But what if somebody CLONES you?”

“Er, highly doubtful, as the technology doesn’t exist yet.”

“But won’t it bother you if there’s someone running around who looks JUST LIKE YOU?”

“First of all, I’ll be dead. I won’t care about anything. Second of all, do you really think that identical twins care?”

Her final stinging argument was “Wow, when I die, I am SO going to haunt my clone!”

Am I to understand that she was under the impression that donating one’s body to science meant that you were giving your lifeless husk over to medical science to be used in the event that someone needed a body transplant?

Wow.

But y’know, there’s an awesome movie plot in there somewhere.

[The_Weird_One]

@garygnu

It also helps if you don’t know what color something is to begin with, as your brain can add the remembered color by itself (Can someone confirm this?).
I have seen dramaticly lowered saturation levels at night, but never complete desaturation. (I have experienced total loss of all light, but that’s another story)

I used to take walks in the woods at night without a flashlight. At some point, I realized that, although my brain was filling in the correct colors for the trees around me, I was actually seeing in black-and-white. A couple years later, I was at summer camp and a counselor took the campers out beyond the light of the campfire and took out some cards he’d made of colored construction paper. He had us guess which color they were, and then shine a flashlight on them to see if we were right or not. Nobody reliably guessed the right colors, and it was an excellent demonstration of monochrome vision in low-light situations.

[Zyada]

@The Weird One

I used to take walks in the woods at night without a flashlight. At some point, I realized that, although my brain was filling in the correct colors for the trees around me, I was actually seeing in black-and-white. A couple years later, I was at summer camp and a counselor took the campers out beyond the light of the campfire and took out some cards he’d made of colored construction paper. He had us guess which color they were, and then shine a flashlight on them to see if we were right or not. Nobody reliably guessed the right colors, and it was an excellent demonstration of monochrome vision in low-light situations.

That’s about the demo that I was thinking of:

Grab a couple of those paint chip booklets at a paint store - say one for bright colors, one for neutrals, one for pastels. Cut out the chips and mix them up, then try to tell which is which color in a darkened room. The room needs to be dark enough that you have to adjust to the darkness.

[ITR_champion]

I attended a math and science magnet program in high school. This was a very select group, which took the best thirty students each year in a city of roughly 300,000 people. We had one true, dyed-in-the-wool creationist. Before our tenth grade bio class began the unit on evolution, he had already announced that he was going to convince all of us, including the teacher, that the Earth was only 6,000 years old and that all species had originated from the Garden of Eden. His main line of attack was that there is no reliable way of dating fossils, so it’s perfectly possible that all fossils come from within the past 6,000 years. Once introduced to the many reliable ways of dating fossils, he changed his mind and proclaimed that Satan had planted all known fossils. He also alleged that: “If evolution were true, then rabbits would have horns.”

Another creationist (in a different class) was willing to accept that Earth was four billion years old, but he insisted that every creature had originated at the same time, four billion years ago. When asked why we hadn’t found mammal skeletons that dated back four billion years, he responded that we just hadn’t looked hard enough.

My father (who is, in all honestly, one of the smartest people I know) once told me that Windows is such a popular operating system because it’s the only one that allows you to run two programs at once.

Once I was talking to a woman who was recruiting for summer courses at Casper College in Wyoming. The conversation got off topic, and eventually she told me that autism is occuring because evolution wants us to communicate with computers more effectively.

And of course, one would not want to forget Thomas Sowell declaring “Frogs are a species; variants of frogs are not different species.” This man is often praised for being among the more intelligent pundits.

Obviously these annecdotes can’t hold a candle to the more spectacular incidences of total ignorance out there. I singled out these five because they came from people who our society has lifted up to lofty positions because of their high intelligence.

[LSLGuy]

@garygnu

Even if she was wrong, at least there were some theory-producing wheels turning there, and unlike most of the idiots being referred to in this thread, she accepted your counter-argument.

You’re right. One of her best features was that she was totally clueless about the fact that she was totally clueless. She was always thinking stuff up. It was too wacky for Monty Python, but she was convinced she’d discovered some Eternal Truth.

And she was always so sunny when you burst her bubble. She’d say something like "Oh well, I guess it’s something else … ", and by that time her attention span had expired & she’d forgotten whatever theorry she’d just propounded.

In a way I miss her, I truly do. Good entertainment without a bad bone in her body.

[Ms_Macphisto]

@ITR champion

He also alleged that: “If evolution were true, then rabbits would have horns.”

I don’t have any good anecdotes to add to the thread, but that statement intrigues me. Was there any justification for saying that rabbits would have horns if evolution were true, or was that just out of the blue?

Mind you, if you’d been feeling evil, you could have told him about the jackalope, and then sat back to watch his brain explode.

[ITR_champion]

His logic was that horns would be advantageous to a rabbit, because they would help defend against predators.

[Mangetout]

@ITR champion

He also alleged that: “If evolution were true, then rabbits would have horns.”

I occasionally get arguments like this from my boss, who, oddly, is not actually a creationist at all.

My favourite one from him was his assertion that evolution cannot possibly have produced something so impractical and unfit for survival as the giraffe. My answer of course was that if they were so unfit for survival, we wouldn’t have any giraffes.

Trouble is that he accepted this and went straight on to: “Ok then, if giraffes are so fit for survival, why isn’t everything a giraffe? - why don’t sharks have long necks; and hedgehogs, and tortoises?” :smack:

[bump]

@Musicat

MMMmm…love Angel Wings. Just give me some dipping sauce and a beer…

I have a good friend who insists that you can’t see colors under moonlight, as the special moon-white light makes all things monochromatic. If I show him a red object and a green object in the moonlight, and we can certainly tell the difference, he says, “Oh, that’s because it’s BRIGHT moonlight – that only works under a full moon.”

Well… he’s ignorant, but kind of empirically right. Under low-light conditions, people do indeed see more or less monochromatically, but only because there’s enough light to excite the rods in your retinas, but not the cones.

What galls me the most about scientific ignorance is this sort of modern-day Luddism about food.

People talk about that chapter from “Fast Food Nation” and think that this is the way that all foods are that aren’t grown by some dirt-chomping, tree-hugging neo-Druid in a field full of bugs and pig shit.

Let’s face it folks… potatoes fried in vegetable oil don’t taste as good as those fried in beef tallow. Mc Donald’s was known for the unique taste of their fries, but due to other forces, wasn’t using beef tallow anymore. So they determined (or someone did) what aromatic compounds gave the fries the tallow-fried taste, and added a little, tiny bit of those chemicals to the vegetable oil. Now you have fries that are healthier than the old ones, but taste like they used to. In all likelihood, the same aromatic chemicals in the tallow-fried ones are the exact same ones in the flavoring added by Mc Donald’s. The potatoes are the same, the vegetable oil is the same, with a tiny bit of aromatic compounds added.

Claiming that this is somehow evil, adulterated or unhealthy is absurd. Yet people make all sorts of ridiculous claims about ‘processed food’, when the ‘processing’ is something as simple as milling, cooking, dehydrating, etc…

[tdn]

@ITR champion

“If evolution were true, then rabbits would have horns.”

Well, I’ve never met a rabbit that wasn’t horny.

[wolf_meister]

LSL Guy

And she was always so sunny when you burst her bubble. She’d say something like "Oh well, I guess it’s something else … ", and by that time her attention span had expired & she’d forgotten whatever theory she’d just propounded.

Well, it’s easy to see why she’d forget - it’s “just a theory”.

[AHunter3]

The image in the mirror is neither 2-dimensional nor 3-dimensional:

Insofar as it is not instantaneous, the image in the mirror is 4-dimensional.

You don’t need stereoscopic vision or parallax to verify that distances vary. One eye will do. Get up close to the mirror. The lens of your eye will have to change to allow you to focus on its own reflection, and when it does the things behind you will be out of focus, and vice versa.

What’s confusing some of you folks, I think, is that you think you are seeing the mirror. (Actually, to a very minor extent, you are, but that’s not the “image” part). The mirror is flat, but what you are seeing when you see the “image” reflected therein is the world of objects whose light is bouncing off the mirror and into your eyes.

[AHunter3]

Mine:

Ever since I was in elementary school, I’ve bumped into people who were absolutely certain that ancestral humans (aka “cave men”) were contemporaneous with dinosaurs.

[JohnT]

Mine is math related… but it’s too stupid to go into at length here.

But how… how does somebody go through life without actually “getting” the fact that math formulas are universal?

…

“Because you and he got the same answer, something must be wrong!”

“No, it’s not because we’re plugging the same values into the same formula!”

“How do you know that?”

“Because we’re getting the same answer!”

“How do you know it’s the same formula?”

“Because it’s the standard formula for figuring out precisely what you want to know! It’s been fuggin’ standard for 350 years now!”

“Well, you shouldn’t be getting the same answers. It looks suspicious.”

:smack:

[Kitkatcrunchy]

hehehe, nice one.

My problem is when people start to get creative with their stupidity.

One guy I know asked me if girls spilt in half when they open their legs. No kidding, the guy’s a homosexual but I would have thought he’d be able to get a grasp of basic anatomy. Afterall the entire female population don’t pop off to the hospital every time they: ride a horse, do longjump, or have sex (well not for 9 months at anyrate).

[SparrowHawk]

@Kitkatcrunchy

hehehe, nice one.

My problem is when people start to get creative with their stupidity.

One guy I know asked me if girls spilt in half when they open their legs.

So what did you tell him? “Only partway!”?

[Cardinal]

@js_africanus

They got teaching degrees. With a couple of exceptions, the best instructors I’ve had were engrossed in the topic of study, e.g., mathematicians & economists. With a couple of exceptions, the worst instructors I’ve had were teachers.

In California, at least, almost no one gets a degree in teaching. I can’t recall hearing that any of my collegues in different schools had a “teaching degree”. Everyone had a “real” major, and then had taken the credentialing classes. They also had enough units to teach that subject, or had passed the Praxis/SSAT (old tests) or CSET (new test) to prove subject matter competency.

As for being told truly off-target stuff, I think most of it comes from multiple-subject teachers who never had to prove much of anything in knowing a certain subject, or people talking out of their subject area.

[Ranchoth]

@Carlyjay

Also, the mother of my best friend in high school insisted that dinosaurs never existed. She claimed that “dinosaur bones” are really “just big horse bones”. She was dead serious.

Horses with…claws, clubbed tails, and great, pointy, teeth?

What the hell kind of farm did she grow up on? :eek:

@js_africanus

It’s hard for me to imagine how that would qualify as a debate. Regardless, did you try an experiment. I was about seven when, watching from the chairlift as skiers jumped and landed, I noticed that I saw then land before I heard them land. Who knows? That may have been my first advanced discovery. You don’t need that much distance to make the effect apparent, and something that makes a loud noise with an easily visible action should do the trick.

I think I found it out from an old Mr. Wizard episode I saw when I was five. Probably around the same time I saw the Muppet Babies episode where they explained the structure of molecules and atoms.

American kid’s TV has really been going downhill, hasn’t it?