Oh, I recall one Intro to Astronomy class, the sort that is actually restricted to non-science majors. Astronomy for Poets, you know? And my friend, who always speaks her mind, could not understand why the moon causes tides. She just didn’t understand the concept. So she stood up, was called upon, and asked: “So what you’re saying is that the water in the ocean actually moves up and down, other than the waves?” Turns out that she was a Minnesotan and had never been exposed to the concept of tides. Ouch.
I don’t believe the * (asterisk) for multiplication is now, or ever was, accepted as proper mathematical notation, anywhere. It came into use for multiplication in programming languages, and is nearly universal now among all the many programming languages.
You’ll see it everywhere in computer programming books, but never in math books that I know of.
It has become somewhat common “colloquially” to use * this way, since so many more people today are at least a little bit computer literate.
Related thing: In algebra, expressions with multiple layers of parentheses are supposed to use (…) and [square brackets] and {curly braces} for the different layers, as in:
a * {b * [c + (d - e) * g] - h} * k
but in computer languages, this is written with parentheses only:
a * (b * (c + (d - e) * g) - h) * k
and it has become more common to see that done in math classes too.
(And yes, they should use the centered dot or no symbol at all for the multiplication too, but I didn’t want to bother looking the magic code to enter a centered dot.)
I’m betting on gooney birds…
Dodos? Loons? Flamingos? Puffins?
I’m going to guess albatrosses, a.k.a. gooney birds, or possibly booby birds
ETA: Oh, I see someone beat me to gooneys.
I only learned fairly recently that there are two major Mediterranean coastal cities named Tripoli. (According to the Wikipedia disambiguarion page, there is also a Tripoli in Greece, and also in Iowa.)
Agreed.
“American” for Eau de Toilette, a weaker version of perfume. Probably for more everyday use.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:197, topic:615416”]
Then I asked them:
What document guarantees us the right to say what we wish and read what we wish?
In two out of the four classes, not one single student could come up with an answer. I would have happily accepted the first amendment, the Bill of Rights, or the Constitution as answers. In the other two classes, there was a pause and some discussion before someone came up with it. That’s mind-blowing to me.
[/QUOTE]
Not a snark, but maybe because they’re smart enough to know that there is no document that does what you say it does. The smarter ones must have conversed and came up with what they thought you must be talking about.
Seems to me that it takes some serious pedantry to say that the bill of rights doesn’t qualify as a document which “guarantees us the right to say what we wish and read what we wish?”
The Straight Dope is fulfilling it’s mission today, because I can’t say I’ve ever heard of St. Petersburg, Florida, or San Jose, Costa Rica. I also never knew that notions means sewing things, that there are two Tripolis, that you could have identical twins with different genders, or that albatrosses were also called Gooney Birds.
its
sorry.
I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I knew all those things except the double tripoli. I know a billion things like those. It hasn’t made me a better person though, except at crossword puzzles.
I thought chickens were invented in Indonesia though.
Hey, the “identical twins of different genders” trope is one of my pet peeves; the Enyd Blyton series and The Iron Mask are almost the only times I can recall seeing twins in a book (much less visual media) where:
- their being twins isn’t used as a source of confusion every three lines,
- and they’re not “identical except for the plumbing”.
That sort of movies doesn’t even qualify for popcorn, popcorn wilts in their presence…
Heh, apparently my American teachers were just too computerized… I’d been thinking about this when I went home last night but forgot to post. We were used to the “different kinds of brackets” notations, but our American teachers used only parenthesis, which is sort of confusing if you’re used to layered brackets. One of the Koreans asked whether it was OK to use different kinds of brackets and had to explain it slowly before the teacher said no.
We didn’t use square brackets, which were reserved for other uses; we used a sort of square braces (like the brackets but with a ‘beak’ like the curly braces have).
OoooOOOOOOooooo. :eek:
Gotta love serendipity!
This is worded oddly but does make sense.
<Did the Mesopotamians domesticate chickens, such that before this the chicken as we know it did not exist?>
I’ve always known what notions are, in the sewing context, as soon as I was old enough to sew, about eight or so. But my mother and grandmother both sewed quite a bit. I do remember being puzzled that the word notions had two meanings.
Toilet water is like perfume, but weaker. There’s definitions of what is perfume and what is cologne and what is toilet water. This is why a scent might cost $10 for a big bottle of it, but $90 for a tiny bottle. The big bottle is toilet water, and is quite weak. The tiny bottle is perfume, and should be used very sparingly. At any rate, “toilet” in this case means “the act of dressing and/or grooming oneself”, not “potty”.
Humans developed domestic animals like chickens but invent may be the wrong word – early breeding was probably mostly inadvertant.
The big problem here, however, is that chickens did not originate in Mesopotomia:
The earliest attested chickens in the West, according to Wikipedia, seem to be in Egypt’s 18th dynasty.
In that case, “toilet” would be pronounced “twa-LAY” I assume. 
<penny drops>
Yeah for some reason we use the french expression in the UK: “eau de toilette”.
Can’t believe I read “toilet water” and didn’t make the association…
After any natural disaster, such as a blizzard, earthquake, etc., a neighbor’s mother would say, “I knew it! Ever since man walked on the moon, things haven’t been right!”
One wonders why she thought they happened prior to 1969.