I have to admit I would have been one of the ones looking blankly. I was unaware of this convention and wouldn’t have know that (8)(4) was supposed to indicate the product of eight and four.
I probably ate corn chips and melted cheese before your were born, Chacoguy, but only last year did I learn they were called Nachos (I’m not presently living in the US).
I had an older guy say he had a teenage son with valley fever, in a sly tone of voice.
I wondered if he meant his son was dating a valley girl(like you know whatever!) or what he meant.
Turns out there is a disease called valley fever, which his son had.:smack:
You may be more familiar with it in the more common forms like (1+x)(2-y), or 2(x+y). This is, quite literally, the first time I’ve ever seen it used with single numbers, rather than formulae - so I’d have been staring blankly, too…even once I figured out what was meant, I’d have kept it up for a minute as I tried to figure out why they’d used that notation for the problem.
Your brain is quite good at generating a 3d image from hints like shadows as well as its own memory of the scene from when your second eye was open. But more information, such as a second eye, generates a better model. For example, it’s definitely easier to track objects in three dimensional space with two eyes. Try catching a batted baseball with an eyepatch over one eye as a test of this idea.
A friend who is a VP of a large marketing company with double master’s degree never heard of Dalai Lama… and her husband who’s a head of a large management company and this other friend of ours who were having dinner with us didn’t know what “queue” was. Go figure.
I’ve mentioned these on a previous thread.
I was in an elevator in a hotel in Niagara Falls. A couple got on, the doors started to close, then opened again. I saw that the man was pushing a button, and every time he pushed it the doors opened up again. His companion tried it, with the same result. Then I noticed that they were pushing the button for the floor we were on. I had to explain to them that they needed to tell the elevator where they were going, not where they were coming from. The woman commented that elevators shouldn’t be so complicated.
And then there’s my first-cousin-once-removed, who thinks all dogs are male and all cats are female. The dogs impregnate the cats, and the cats give birth do a mixed litter of puppies and kittens. This woman, by the way, is not five years old; she’s in her 50s.
Ummm… Your 50-ish first-cousin-once-removed might know the facts of life better than you think.
When I learned algebra (1966 or so), we got this. The notation ( )( ) was shown, and a few examples of the (8)(4) sort were shown, but thereafter that usage was NEVER used again that I can remember. It was always like (1+x)(2-y), or 2(x+y) like Tengu says. But we did see some (8)(4) sort of examples at the beginning.
Then they bushwhack you with notations like f(x).
ETA: And then when you get into Calculus, they bushwhack you some more with notations like dy/dx
A girl about 18 years old in my teen parents childbirth class was pregnant with her second baby and didn’t know what a C-section was.
A guy I was casually seeing who was in his early 30s asked me which ones were the Democrats and which ones were the Republicans. He knew who our president was, but I seriously had to tell him that Obama (and I and he and everyone else we might agree with) is a Democrat.
Another guy I was seeing (I need to raise my standards, yes) thought people had two sets of baby teeth before getting their adult teeth. He had to call his mom who was a dental assistant before he would believe that we just had one set of baby teeth.
Oh yeah, my mom thinks the same thing. I’ve tried to explain it to her at least twice, and she still doesn’t get it. She still calls to tell me her Internet isn’t working, even though she plugged in her laptop’s power cord. To be fair, as of a couple years ago, I think she does finally realize that you don’t have to be online to play Windows solitaire.
One of my mom’s friends asked me how she could get on the internet without a modem or ISP, she also refused to purchase a wireless adapter to see if she could mooch off someone’s open router. She after much back and forth concluded I was just incompetent at this computer stuff and she would ask around as she was not going to pay for modems or ISPs because she knows there is a way!:smack:
Fred West? Close, but Manson had a coterie of mainly females carrying out murders. I can’t name any of the other victims but Sharon Tate was famous in her own right, beng an actress and married to film director Roman Polanski.
Duh, he’s the owl in The Sword in the Stone. 
An actual conversation that played out during a game of Trivial Pursuit:
“But snails and slugs are the same species!”
“No they’re not.”
“Of course they are!”
“No, they’re the same class, not species. Think about it… not even all snails are the same species!”
“I HAVE A PhD!!!”
“In geology. Let’s move on.”
That’s true. I would have recognized it in that case.
I was shocked to learn that my husband had only the vaguest idea of who Winnie The Pooh and Eeyore are.
I only have the vaguest idea of who Winnie The Pooh and Eeyore are. Winnie is a bear, he likes “hunny,” there’s a kangaroo involved. Eeyore is an anteater or something. (Edit : maybe an Aardvark? I get them mixed up.) The human boy is Christopher Robin. Beyond that, I got nothin’. I presume they go on adventures?
Male, 38, raised in the USA.
Joe
I knew a “technical” guy who wrote date-arithmetic software but didn’t know about the Gregorian calendar. To confirm this I asked “Was 1900 a leap year?” He answered “I don’t know; is 1900 a multiple of 4?” My surprise that he wrote date-arithmetic software without knowing of the Gregorian reform changed to astonishment that he didn’t know multiples of 100 were also multiples of 4.
My 3rd-grade teacher insisted that Greenland should be called a continent since it is much larger than Australia (as she demonstrated by pointing to the Mercator-projection map on her wall).
I nominate this one for Best of Thread.
I concur with that assessment, although the OPs “why aren’t these eggs hatching” example comes in a close second.
While traveling in SE Asia, with a high school teacher, who repeatedly asked me, in earnest, “Will we be taking a train or a bus to Indonesia?” I explained that it was an island nation and we would have to fly or take a boat.
By the end of the week I had answered this question, from the same woman, three times!
… chickens?
Not that fertilized eggs are NEVER eaten (I know because I just got myself curious and googled a bit about intentionally eating fertilized eggs; the wiki on balut almost made me vomit), most of the eggs you buy in the store for your breakfast are unfertilized.