Human gestation lasts for about 40 weeks, so though her question was poorly phrased, she was correct.
On the contrary, Freemasons are specifically forbidden from inviting anyone to join. To join, you must request information and initiation. Due to this common misunderstanding, some Lodges have recently gone so far as to publish pamphlets stating that you must ask to join, no one can “invite” you, so don’t wait for an invitation! Some really radical Lodges are even allowing their member to drop hints to individual friends that their interest would not be unwelcome, hinthint, nudgenudge. But that’s as far as any sort of recruitment can go.
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And add me to the “ten months is a pregnancy” club. Pregnancy is counted from the last menstrual period, not the conception. 40 weeks/4 weeks average a month = 10 months. If your last menstrual period was January 1, 2007, your due date is October 8, 2007, which means you’re not overdue until October 23. Frankly, I have no idea how the 9 month idea got so prevalent.
I read on a message board that someone said they should kill his family.
But there are not 4 weeks in a month, unless all you’re counting is 75% of Februarys. Months are 30 or 31 days long, whereas 4 weeks is 28 days. Any given grouping of 3 months is very close to 13 weeks. Note that four times that amount is 52 weeks, which is a year. So 9 months is 39 weeks, just shy of 40.
One particular girl in my office is a constant source of jaw-dropping ignorance. All of these examples happened while having luncheons in the conference room.
One day we were discussing kosher food. She had never heard of the term before, so we had to explain it to her. We also had to explain that kosher food had to be blessed by a rabbi. We also had to explain what a rabbi was. “That’s so cool!”, she explained. “How do I get that job?” (She’s about as Catholic as can be, BTW.)
She once expressed that Google Earth made her uncomfortable, as people could watch her coming and going from her house. It took me about 15 minutes to explain it to her, and I think she still doesn’t get it.
The best was when someone opened a fortune cookie. “You have kindness and patience” was what it said. Her response? “Patience? What’s that? Oh, that’s like suck it up, right?”
Okay, but up to 42 weeks is “normal” gestation, so that makes it just shy of 10 months. Either way, we’re a week off.
(52 weeks/year) / (12 months/year) = 4-1/3 weeks per average month.
40 weeks / (4.333 weeks/mo) = 9.23 mos. = 9mos. + 1 week.
The extra third of a week is something to be taken into account when comparing jobs that pay weekly vs. monthly.
Except upto 42 weeks is also considered “normal.” So really, the answer is probably most accurately 9.5 months, but 10 months isn’t an insane number, and some pregnancies could go on that long. So her question/answer was certainly not jaw droppingly stupid. No stupider than asking if it was 9 months anyway.
I don’t have the patience to deal with racists, so I quit and got a new job (technically, I got a new job and then quit, but it sounded better the other way).
If it was just him it wouldn’t have been worth leaving about, but all of the guys in that NOC claimed their kids were gifted and had to go to private schools. Only the one guy openly bashed ESL, but the rest seemed to agree with him.
Freakin’ hypocritical Boulderites.
I didn’t think it’d had been so long since my “Ask a Freemason” thread, but apparently it’s been 6 months. I’d be happy (along with several other Masons on the board, probably) to bring a glimmer of illumination about us if anyone is interested but doesn’t want to further hijack this thread.
I really have to wonder what normal is, anyway. In my experiences, first-time pregnancies tend to top 13 months.
When I was a video store clerk, we had a customer who was in something like her 8th trimester. She was desperate to get that rugrat out of her. Her boyfriend had read somewhere that laughter could induce labor. So they were in the store every night, renting four comedies. This went on for what seemed like months. One day, they stopped coming in.
We didn’t have the heart to charge them late fees.
Huh? 
Whatchoo Takin’ Bout? [/Arnold]
I haven’t heard anything recently to top what I overheard the last big election we had.
First instance was at a restaurant. I was seated behind a group of three senior citiziens, all with hearing problems to judge by the volume. Thier discussion came around to poltics, and one of the ladies said “I never be bothered to learn anything about all the different candidates, so I just vote straight republican.” And the other two agreed with her. One of them said “It’s all just too confusing.” And the third said “But it’s important that you vote.” And they all vehemently agreed.
Second instance occurred as I was walking out of the voting area, having just voted. It was being held in the meeting room of a large apartment building, primarily occupied by seniors. An older lady was talking to the woman at the door, and I hear this:
“Ma’am you have to have some form of identification to vote.”
“I never heard that before. I don’t have anything on me.”
“I need to see a driver’s liscence or state id or something.”
“Well I don’t have anything on me, can I vote?”
“No, ma’am, I need to see some id first.”
“But I’d have to go back up to my room to get it. If I have to go back there, I’m not going to bother coming down. It’s not worth it.”
It irks me as well when people in my office mock foreigners for not speaking perfect English- I tell them that person speaks two languages- how many do you speak?
You should have mentioned that orgasms can do it too. You probably wouldn’t have seen them much after that.
Nah, I liked them. It was always a high point of my night when they came in.
OK, I liked her. She made pregnancy very sexy.
Also on the baby theme - my sister had a coworker who got all excited when she heard about the first successful test-tube baby. She thought it was great - she could have a baby but not worry about losing her figure!
Never did find out if she ever managed to reproduce…
Secret societies deserve to be misunderstood.
The Rosecrucians claim they are not a religion, but when you go their campus and read the study guides, you could not be blamed for thinking they are just kidding themselves.
Then there’s the Salvation Army that isn’t understood by most people to be a religion, but some sort of unaffiliated charity like Goodwill. They don’t seem to play up the church part when dressed in Santa suits.
I once worked for a highly intelligent, educated guy who was considerably more computer-savvy than I was in practical terms – he set up our whole office network by himself. Yet he was astonishingly ignorant about the hardware and physics. He wanted to invest in an inventor’s project to build an optical computer, one that internally communicates/processes through laser beams rather than electronic pathways. While the idea might well have merit, he was convinced it would represent a quantum revolution in computing speed – because its impulses would travel at the speed of light, while in existing electronic computers, impulses travel only at the speed of sound. Actually, he seemed to think electronic-computer impulses are sound. I gave him a contrary explanation several times but he never seemed to get it.
It’s true–people do drugs all the time, and the vast majority of American adults (85% if I remember the number correctly) have gotten high at least once. When I did a drug use survey at my high school for Sociology class I got fairly similar numbers; I seem to recall that 78% of the people surveyed (including some teachers) had specifically used marijuana at least once. If you automatically write off everyone who’s ever done drugs, you’re writing off a lot of people.
Not to mention that alcohol and caffeine are both drugs. I don’t know if that’s what the person in question meant, but I know that I refer to alcohol and caffeine as drugs. That’s what they are. And nearly everyone uses at least one of them on a regular basis.
Yes, but in pregnancy you don’t count a calendar month but a menstrual month, which for most people is around 28 days, which shaves a few days off each calendar month. A pregnancy lasts for 10 menstrual cycles.
I have been told by a doctor (no cite beyond that) that if a woman’s cycle is longer, say 30 or 31 days, their babies tend to be “overdue” and likewise a woman with a short cycle tends to have her babies “early” but that the babies are born on time according to their own schedule of “done”. I am not sure how true that last bit really is but that is what I was told.