Author Anthony Burgess told the tale of a college student taking an aptitude test. One of the questions asked to put 20 words into two groups. He noticed that 10 had Latin origins and 10 had Greek origins. Got it very wrong. 10 were nouns and 10 were verbs.
A lot of IQ and such tests are like this. They don’t deal well with people who know more than the test designers.
Well there’s always the “octopus” one. Someone with a little exposure to Latin might assume the plural is “octopi”, but the preferred plural in English is generally “octopuses”. I’m never quite sure if “penii” is supposed to be a joke or not, because it makes no sense. Suffice it to say that’s not the plural of “penis”.
Water really is blue, it’s not just reflection from the sky.
I expect I’ll come back with more later.
I can’t imagine anyone thinking this is true after more than a few seconds of thought. Do you hear it a lot? I’d be tempted to just say “parachute” to them and leave it at that.
There’s the story of Ludwig Wittgenstein beginning an introductory lecture on some basic mathematical principle by saying “Let X be the number of sheep in a flock…” And one of the students unexpectedly interrupted him and asked “But Professor, what if X isn’t the number of sheep?”
Wittgenstein would subsequently tell people this was either the most stupid question or the most profound question he had ever been asked but he couldn’t decide which.
Some young-earth creationists and some credulous watchers of The Flintstones or any number of bad movies will tell you that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Someone with a little more knowledge will tell you that dinosaurs went extinct tens of millions of years before humans evolved. The best informed know that dinosaurs still exist, in a sense, because birds are directly descended from dinosaurs.
Likewise the question “What did dinosaur meat taste like?” Idiot answer: like chicken because every exotic meat tastes like chicken. Normal answer: we can never know because dinosaurs don’t exist any more. Genius answer: like chicken because chickens are dinosaurs.
Bernoulli’s is an absolutely critical component of lift.
The big mistake here is that you are tying the wing shape into the Bernoulli equations.
Wings accelerate air. By doing this they create a force we call “lift”. You can measure lift by measuring the acceleration of the air mass, you can also measure it using the pressure differential around the wing. Both ways of measuring lift account for 100% of it, they are just different ways of measuring the same thing. You can not say it is 90% one and 10% the other, they are both 100% of the lift.
The problem with the “equal transit time” explanation of lift is that it incorrectly attributes the entirety of the pressure differential to the shape of the wing when in fact the shape of the wing just makes the wing more efficient.
The problem with what you’re doing is you are bundling Bernoulli in with the equal transit time explanation and saying “the equal transit time explanation is wrong therefore Bernoulli doesn’t apply to wings”. This is false, the measurement of pressure around a wing accounts for 100% of the lift.
A good page for a breakdown of what is right and what is wrong is, http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/airplane/bernnew.html
There’s quite a few in programming. One off the top of my head is Java/C# references vs C/C++ style pointers.
A naive answer is that Java-style references are different from pointers. A more educated answer says that they’re pretty much the same – after all, they’re both reassignable (a feature not available in actual “pass-by-reference” semantics as available in Fortran or C++), and refer to a bunch of data somewhere else in memory.
When it comes down to it, they’re different. Java references aren’t direct pointers, they’re more like intermediate pointers and the garbage collector can move the actual data around without updating the pointer – in contrast to actual pointers which point to the real data there may be one or more levels of abstraction in Java references.
Of course, this may not be a fair one because I’d still probably say the educated answer is more correct than just saying they’re different, because the difference is really subtle, but when it comes down to it the naive answer is right – they’re different.
You aren’t going to get any argument from me on your well articulated points. However, keep in mind the purpose of this thread. Almost all science textbooks (in the U.S. at least) explain Bernoulli’s Principle using the equal transit idea which is an incorrect translation of the principle in the first place. That is the part that most people with intermediate knowledge remember and the one that is false. It is also the one that causes the smarter students in the class to ask why planes can fly upside down if that is true and irritate their teachers who may not understand the subject enough to clarify it.
That is why I think it is a great example. People with advanced aerodynamics knowledge know how lift truly works and children even have a semi-intuitive grasp of the basic concepts but people at the intermediate levels of knowledge describe it in terms of something that is impossible.
The derivation of the word “pied” is a good one. Few people, other than children, might look at it, along with the definition “vari-colored,” or “splotched,” and guess the derivation is that something looks as though a pie was thrown on it. People with degrees in English, or who do research or something for a living know this, but since word origins are rarely that simple, most adults who don’t actually know would never make that guess.
The “Pied Piper” wore the sort of colorful clothes buskers wore to attract attention, like “court jester” types at Ren fairs.
me/myself/I:
Someone who doesn’t care might say “She invited me and Dave to the wedding”
Someone who thinks they know a little bit would say it must be “She invited Dave and I to the wedding” or “She invited myself and Dave to the wedding”
However, the first one is right.
That is not the origin of the word “pied”. IT comes from “looking like a (mag)pie [the black&white bird]”
Another one is, what comes next in the sequence:
1, 3, 5, 7…
(a) 9, because the sequence is odd numbers
(b) 11, because the sequence is odd primes
© 8, because the sequence is numbers that have the letter “e” in their English spelling.
With “octupus,” the problem arises when someone knows enough to recognize that “-us” often indicates a Latin noun, but not enough to realize that this time, it’s Greek. Even if you wanted to use the original-language plural, it would be octopodes.
And, with “penis,” the person gets the language right, but fails to understand that it’s in a different declension – the Latin plural would be penes.
Deja vu all over again. I actually found that thread by looking for my earlier response on pandas:
A favourite amongst pub bores is the quiz question “How many lakes are there in the (English) Lake District?” The “educated” answer is only one, though as the name of the region suggests there is actually rather a lot of them. It is true that only one has the word “Lake” in its name but many include “Water” or “mere” which are vernacular terms for, you guessed it, lakes.
I don’t think there was ever a consensus among scientists that giant pandas were closer to raccoons. There may have been some uncertainty, but there have always been scientists who classified them as bears. Am I wrong about that?
(b) would be shaky because mathematicians don’t generally consider 1 to be prime.
And the origin of magpie…
Seriously, the word is applied to not just black & white, but tri-colored items.
Also, the “Me and So-&-So,” should really be “So-&-So and me.” You put yourself second. But when to use me at all is something a child is more likely to get right than an adult, in my experience. Almost no one can use the reflexive pronoun correctly.
What, you think it means “bird what had a pie chucked at it”?
Seriously, etymology research isn’t that hard. The “pie” in magpie means…magpie/woodpecker. The etymology of “pie”, the foodstuff, might possibly in fact come from the bird.
…and because it’s applied like that today, that must have been how it was always applied…:dubious:
With “penis” and “penii” I suspect people are thinking of things like radius/radii, but fail to notice that the first “i” in “radii” is already in “radius”, and that it’s “-us” in “radius” that has been replaced, not “-is”.
