Bridge. I don’t play, but sometimes I’ll read the column in the paper. I get lost trying to follow the bidding. South might bid one club, then north might counter with one diamond which for some reason is a clear signal to south that he wants three spades. Sometimes they’ll bid what’s the weakest suit in their hand to somehow signal to their partner. You could explain that bidding system for a million years and I’d never understand it.
Lobsters. They look like the cockroaches of the sea. What person first picked up one of those disgusting creatures and said “I think I’ll kill it, cook it, break it open and then eat the slimy white stuff inside.”?
Fugu fish. I don’t care how good it tastes. You’re taking a calculated risk by eating it. Why???
Body piercing. Triple for anything involving genitalia.
Unfortunately I didn’t get to read all of these so I don’t know if anyone else has mentioned this:
I absolutely cannot understand why e (as in e^x) is such an important constant. I have taken 2 calculus courses, differential equations, physics, etc. and have two engineering degrees and I still have never “gotten” e. It drives me crazy. I just can’t get my head around why that number pops up in SO many places. It just doesn’t make sense!
Drinking cow’s milk. I love milk. I drink a lot of it. But I cannot fathom what would cause someone, thousands of years ago, to see a young calf suckling at its mother’s teat and go, “Yeah, I’d like to get a piece of that action.”
Birds can fly. It creeps the hell out of me if I think about it long enough.
One thing about evolution I just can’t wrap my head around: So, the dinosaurs went extinct, yet there are clearly species around now that evolved from the dinosaurs. How the hell is that possible? Another thing is species transition: Like, was there actually a specific point at which at pre-human creature gave birth to something we would consider a human being? At what point would something actually be considered “human” and not something else?
And how did we end up with so many freaking languages?
Life without electicity. Did people just do absolutely nothing at night? I mean, candles don’t exactly provide a ton of light.
I don’t understand. If two cars are each going at each other at X mph then their closing speed is, in fact 2X mph.
Nitpick but Duke & Duke were comodities (gold, oil, orange juice) traders, not equity (stock) traders. They bought on margin - essentially placing huge bets on whether the value would go up or down.
Stuff I can’t grasp:
Workaholics - I work long hours and it’s an incredible chore to me. I don’t understand how people can devote their entire lives to a job, unless they are doctors or firemen or some such lifestyle job.
Raising childred - Basically spending years raising a small screaming creature that will eventually grow bigger, more destructive and more expensive, suck up all your time and resources and resent your very presence until it turns 35 and has it’s own. And that’s under the best of circumstances
The number of cars on the road/urban sprawl - Stand in any suburban mall parking lot and it’s mindboggling how many cars there are. The fact that there are so many cars that miles of highway can be backed up for hours seems crazy to me.
War - It seems crazy to me that people still think that a good way to resolve differences is to hurl large chunks of exploding metal at each other. Even crazier, the fact that people would be willing to risk having large chunks of hurling metal hurled at them over some cause. Christianity? Paying taxes to the King of England? Having to work our plantations ourselves instead of using slaves? Capitalism? Communism? Islam? Okaaay…so living under which system is more inconvienient than being torn limb from limb by exploding shrapnel? Yeah…that’s why the Nazi’s LOST WWII. If Hitler didn’t go around exterminating people and forcing everyone into it
You drive out of your driveway, hit the freeway, and stand there for 45 minutes stuck in traffic, fuming, before you get to your destination. And then at the end of the day, you do it again in the reverse direction.
I’m not talking about people who use their cars in their jobs either: I’m talking about the ones who go to the same office/factory/whatever every day, park their car, and go inside to work.
Now, driving to work isn’t the problem, so much as the appallingly-inefficient way it’s done, and the jam-ups and the way you do it over and over and over and over and don’t even think about things like flextime and staggered working hours to spread the traffic load out at least.
I take the bus to work. I go through that traffic, too, but I go outwards in the morning and inwards in the evening, against the bulk of the flow. And, because I’m on the bus and someone else is driving, I can read/sleep/chat/listen to music/etc, and I don’t have to get frazzled about anything.
The best example I can think of would be consider drops of water dripping off something. Look at it in slow motion. You start with a nearly uniform sheet of water. Then part of the water bulges down. The bulge grows bigger and further away from the main part of the water. You get a drop connected to the main only by a narrow neck which very quickly gets narrower until it snaps. Then you have a separate drop.
The analogy is to populations of a species. You have a species which have some differences between individuals but otherwise they’re all clearly the same species. Then one small part of that population goes in a new direction. Say, the apes in one small area show a tendency to spend more time on their hind legs. Since that lets them do things that are somewhat unape-like, like spending more time holding stuff in their hands, they tend to go their own way and not remerge into the general population of apes. The further this process goes, the more alienated the proto-humans get from the base population of apes until you reach the point of no return: when either gentically or behaviorally they stop intermingling altogether and form two separate populations, apes and hominids.
I thought this too until I went camping on a moonless overcast night far from the city. I can assure you that one lousy candle is still a vast difference from absolute pitch blackness. Granted we do do a lot more at night now that electric light is available.
With many species having a several-hundred-million year track record and a few with a billion or more behind them, the one I belong to was arguably “not us”, i.e., significantly different, just a million years ago?? Weirder yet, the recorded-history span of only 10,000 measly years?? So, like, all this, this is all our infancy?? Whoa…
And then the universe itself. Having learned that the earth and the solar system is somewhere in the vicinity of 6 billion years old I guess I just unconsciously assumed that this galaxy and its cohort of galaxies of similar age were preceded by long eons of earlier galaxies and their civilizations…but no, the whole works is only around 15 billion years old? Is that really all? No point imagining the galactic empires of 424 octillion years ago. Fooey. 15 billion years sounds like nothing. There are rich folks who own more dollars than that.
You aren’t suppose to be able to understand it. It’s not suppose to be intuitive. There are totally arbitrary rules. You should just accept that there are totally arbitrary rules.
WHY are there totally arbitrary rules? Because the available bridge bids don’t cover the likely and useful hands very well.
Here’s an analogy. Suppose you and a friend play a variation of 20 questions in which some third party picks the answer, shows it to your friend, and then you can ask your friend 20 questions to determine what it is. And suppose that after playing this a few hundred times, you notice that about a third of the answers picked by the third party are celebrities, about a third are types of car, and about a third are everything else.
So, you might come up with a “code”, that when you say “is it animal, vegetable, or mineral”, a response of “animal” means that it’s a celebrity, a response of “mineral” means it’s a car, and a response of “vegetable” means that it’s anything else.
That’s what a bidding convention is.
I admit it’s a bit puzzling. Far more confusing than pi. But I think I can give you some insight into it.
Exponential curves are very useful, and they pop up all over the place. And differentiation is quite useful, and pops up all over the place. One of the neat things about exponential curves is that the derivative of an exponential curve is another exponential curve. This is different than, say, parabolas, where the derivative of a parabola is a straight line. So if you graph y = 2^x, you’ll see that the derivative is another exponential curve, one that is (I think) below the original curve. And if you graph y=10^x, you’ll see that the derivative is another exponential curve, one that is above the original curve. So, if you keep graphing curves between those two, you’ll eventually find one whose derivative is ITSELF. That curve is y=e^x.
I think.
(I haven’t studied Calculus in 10 years, so I hope I’m not totally brainfarting here).
Anyhow, that kind of shows you why it’s a neat number. Why it’s useful in so many different places is just part of the Magic of Math.
MaxTheVool already explained why conventions are popular / necessary (there are only a few bids available to describe masses of different hands).
Let me have a go at explaining one convention, called ‘transfers’.
First we need to estimate the value of a bridge hand. Assume that an Ace is 4 points, a King counts as 3, Queen as 2 and Jack as 1. (The average bridge hand is 10 points.)
Next, a common type of hand is:
between 12 and 14 points
no long suit (say 5 or more)
no short suit (say 1 or none)
Many players open these hands with 1No-Trump (=1NT, meaning I intend our side to take 7 tricks without having a trump suit).
Now the partner of the chap bidding 1NT may have several types of hands:
weak, but with a long suit
average or slightly better, with only one long suit
average or slightly better, with two long suits
Suppose you have a 5 card heart suit. If you bid (in answer to 1NT) 2Hearts (=2H, meaning I intend our side to take 8 tricks with hearts as the trump suit), your partner doesn’t know which of the three above possibilities you have.
So now we agree that in answer to 1NT, when I bid 2Diamonds (=2D, supposedly meaning I intend our side to take 8 tricks with diamonds as the trump suit), I am actually demanding you ‘transfer’ my bid and bid 2H yourself (even if you don’t have a heart suit!).
This allows me to bid on differently with the 3 hand types above. After
1NT - 2D
2H
I pass (with a weak hand, but with a long heart suit)
I bid 2NT (with a average or slightly better hand, with only one long suit, in hearts)
I bid another suit (showing an average or slightly better hand, with two long suits)
That I shared a body with my mother. That I grew inside her. We shared blood! It’s insane. (this is a great arguement-winning tactic for all you mums out there - when you’re fighting with you daughters, yelling out “I shared a body with you!” will usually end the arguement right there. Not necessarily because they respect you more, or are in awe of the miracle of birth, or anything… just that “Wait, yah, what?!” moment from them. I don’t know if it works as well on sons).
Fax machines. Somehow, I’m not bowled over by phones, or e-mail, though I’m impressed. But wow, fax machines! How do they do it?
This is the kind of confusion that arises entirely from abuse of language. The kind of “empty space” that exists between, say, an electron and the nucleus of an atom is not at all the same kind of “empty space” that exists in front of you, through which you can pass your hand without impediment, or even the “empty space” that exists in the vacuum of outer space.
The confusion arises when people apply a term (e.g. “empty space”) in two different circumstances that may be analogous but aren’t the same. Then, because the same words are used, they believe that “solid” is in some sense the same as “empty,” and their minds are boggled because they can’t imagine it.
Well of course you can’t, because you’re trying to believe that X is not X. :smack:
In fact, the “empty space” you you are trying (and failing) to imagine as existing in solid matter is best defined as… “solid matter.” Solid matter is not emptier or less solid than we perceive, it is precisely as solid as it seems.
So stop boggling your own mind. Solid matter is not mostly empty space. It’s solid matter.
For more on this kind of abuse of language, I recommend the writings of 19th century American philosopher Alexander Bryan Johnson.
Discrimination. I learned early on in life that good people and bad came in all shapes and colors. As a human being with eyes, ears, and a working brain, it was impossible to come to any other conclusion. And yet there are a lot of people just like that who judge others based on skin color, or religion, or some other silly thing.
Repressive ideologies. Orthodox religion, prohibitionism, classism, segregation, racial intolerance, sexual intolerance, militarism, arrainged marriage, and a hundred others. They’re all the exact same thing to me: making life a living hell for everybody for absolutely no freakin’ reason. As far as I’m concerned, any society where you cannot wear whatever you want, sleep with whoever you want, worship whatever you want, and buy the video or magazine you have every damn right to buy without repercussions isn’t one I’d ever want to live in.
Monogamy, particularly how it became a global standard. Um, what exactly is the appeal of this? For anybody? And how exactly does loving one person prohibit one from loving anyone else?
I just cannot imagine what beings on another planet must do in their lives. I mean, what kind of jobs do they have? What do they LOOK like? What kind of sports? Food? Animals? Pets? Entertainment? It’s impossible to compare them to humans because they’re probably not even close to anything human.
And there are BILLIONS of them, RIGHT NOW, doing stuff!!! Stuff we have no concept of!! Incredible wars are going on!!! Incredible friendships are going on!!!
And we will NEVER KNOW THEM!!!
That I’ll never be able to see the back of my head without the aid of a mirror. Every day, strangers get to see a part of my body that I’ll never, ever (unless I’m in some horrid accident involving my eyes popping out of my head) see firsthand.
I, for all the tea in China cannot understand what’s the big deal about Radiohead. I just don’t get it. I have nothing against Radiohead mind you, I just don’t get the whole…deal. I know there’s something there, but I just don’t hear it.
I also cannot fathom why people eat oysters, clams and other assorted mucus encased inside of rocks in the ocean. I’m not so sure about the rest of you, but I live in a first world country, and mustn’t resort to eating things that seem to be the bronchitis of nature.
Why is Jaegermeister a party drink? Digestive aids from Europe may contain alcohol, but are not meant to be consumed in ice cold shots. Especially with Red Bull. Why not grain alcohol and Pepto Bismol? What the hell is wrong with people?
I don’t get how suddenly a “Carb” is a unit of measurement. When I look at a package in the store that says “Only 2.3 Net Carbs!!!” I just shake my head and mutter.
Lastly, I cannot understand that instant vision that when in jest you’ve thrown something, say a snowball or a rock, and the absolute second it leaves your hand you know, YOU JUST KNOW how badly you’ve messed up. That old lady over there, at the impossible angle and distance? It’s going to smack her directly in the face. You know it is. You watch in horror as it flys ever closer. The most wonderfully advanced spacial geometry lays it’s secrets bare in an instant.
I’m no engineer or advanced math kind of dude, but my oh my, I turn right into Little Man Tate when my own ass is on the line.
I wouldn’t worry about this too much because, it seems to me, that unless the wheel is slipping, this should never happen. However, the part of the wheel that is touching the ground momentarily comes to a complete stop, which may not be any better.
Quite often I don’t understand what other people are thinking.
Also, I don’t understand what it means to be moving through the time dimension. Shouldn’t there be some standard of reference against which you measure your change in position? What are the units of velocity in the time dimension (sec/what? sec/sec? how could that be?) The whole concept makes me rather confused.
Rights, warrants, sells, buys, calls-- all of them, no problem. Simple as cake and easy as pie.
But puts. . . Why is it so hard for me to wrap my brain around puts? You don’t know how long I sit here thinking “He bought the put so it’s a sell that was assigned now he has to buy the shares from the person he sold it to. . . I think.” Aarrrgh!